Captain Aggravated

Well…

Microcomputers had joysticks before they had Microsoft. On the PC platform with the 15 pin game port, a 4 axis (XYZ + throttle) and 8 button plus hat switch form factor arose by the late 90’s such as the Microsoft Sidewinder and Logitech Wingman series. Later models made the transition to USB, there were a couple attempts at force feedback about the time the game industry shifted.

In the early 2000s, flight sims like the Janes series, Microsoft Flight Simulator etc. and other vehicle sim games like Descent and Mechwarrior faded away in favor of first person shooters like Half Life 2 and MMORPGs like World of Warcraft which are best controlled by mouse and keybaord. Interestingly enough, PC games designed for joysticks like Mechwarrior and Crimson Skies moved to consoles to be played with controllers; both saw their final entries on Xbox 360.

Microsoft discontinued the Sidewinder series in 2003. In late 2005 they released a Windows driver for the Xbox 360 controller along with Xinput, making the Xbox 360 controller the de facto standard for a PC game pad. This arrangement has remained more or less intact to the present day, with Microsoft adding support for the Xbox One controller to Windows 10 in 2015, though 360 controller support remains.

tl;dr: The standard issue Xbox controller has been the first party supported gamepad on PC for 20 years.

Logitech produces the cheap Player Two ones you use to pilot billionaire crushing submarines. Valve tried with their original Steam Controller, which was kinda weird and had niche appeal. More recently the likes of Gravis have tried? But the average unwashed mass is going to walk into Best Buy and pick up an Xbox controller, or use the one that he already owns for his Xbox.

As a man, that’s been my experience.

I live in the American Southeast. We generally turn on the air conditioning.

I mean, valid.

Too late. [email protected]

The same people who named the B-52 the Big Ugly Fat Fucker: The USAF.

Many of our GAU-8s have A-10s installed on them. One fewer now, apparently.

I do love how they did Bohemian Rhapsody, and got around having muppets sing “mama, just killed a man. Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger now he’s dead” by having Animal repeatedly yell “MAMA!”

Nyet, is called three-day special military operation.

It is my understanding that iOS does not support Syncthing.

Yeah, where’s that hosted again?

Windows 11’s TPM requirements.

I recently built a brand new computer for my uncle. He was running a 3rd gen Core i7 machine running Windows 7. I get a call that it won’t boot. I do manage to get it booted, the SMART data shows the hard drive is on its last eyebrows, and anyway he’s running an OS that’s three generations out of date.

I’m a big Linux user, I’ve got my aunt running Linux Mint. My uncle is such a dunce at computers I don’t think I can do that, because he lacks the vocabulary to tell me what he wants his computer to do. “I might use it for business.” In his line of work that could mean anything from going to quickbooks.com to needing some piece of Windows-only shitware. So “Get a .exe from somewhere” had to remain intact.

For everything he actually does with that computer, that old 3rd gen i7 was fine. Replace the hard disk with a SATA SSD, maybe replace the weird 2-4-2-4 some but not all of it is dual channel 12GB of RAM with two 8 GB sticks of DDR3 and let it roll…except no currently supported version of WIndows runs on this computer.

For a large number of people, computers became objectively fast enough in 2015. That’s about when SSDs became standard equipment, fixing any hardware reason for “damn this thing is slow” even out of midrange consumer hardware. Gamers, home labbers and AI startups need more power, the rest of the world doesn’t. And that was a problem for Microsoft.

In fact, Indiana Jones clumsily aided the nazis until he defeated them by literally doing nothing and looking the other way.

The oldest single player game I keep going back to is Super Mario World on the SNES, Copyright 1990.

I will occasionally play games older than that, but the SNES is where my actual nostalgia begins.

I’ve had a few creatures put down. My grandmother’s dog was in such bad heart health she couldn’t really move around anymore. When the creature shakes and whimpers under the strain of standing up, and sometimes just randomly screams in pain, it’s about time to make that difficult trip to the vet.

My old cat Spice lived to the ripe old age of 18, and then she had a saddle thrombus. Essentially a blood clot blocked her aorta where it forks to her back legs. Her back beans turned cold and blue, she couldn’t walk right, she was obviously in distress, so we rushed her to the emergency vet where we were told at her age she probably wasn’t going to survive any treatment, and that she probably had about 3 more horribly painful hours to live. She was actively dying, it was a question of how long do we let her lay there gasping?

I let it get about that grim before it becomes an option.

I think you’ll find that community is exactly that. I forget which it is, I’ve long since blocked it.

They’re imagining the community (the subreddit) as a space one enters by navigating to the community’s main page, and “leaving” it is going to do other things.

A major difference I noticed with Lemmy from my time on Reddit is communities aren’t quite as rabid about strict adherence to their topic or gimmick. r/whatisthisthing banned me for seven days once for elaborating what an E6B flight computer is for. Because “This community is for IDENTIFYING the thing, not DISCUSSING the thing!” Not…so much of that around here.

I suspect getting pissed off is the point.

One of the rules of that community is “post before you leave.” People put “rule” in the post to indicate they’re complying with that rule.