Outlaws. An early Spaghetti Western themed FPS from LucasArts. After Dark Forces (Retconned by Rogue One) and before DF2:Jedi Knight (the one with the amazibad FMV cut scenes and the best expansion pack ever), it leveraged the 2.5d engine for all it was worth and did a hand-animated slightly Don-Bluth-esque aesthetic that worked perfectly.

Level design was good. Multiplayer was fun, even though if you tried to LAN with an unswitched hub (it was 1998!) player 3 would lag like motherfucker and be relegated to throwing dynamite and praying. Story was straight out of a Tropes-R-Us, but well executed and with good voice acting (including John de Lancie IIRC). The coup de grace was the soundtrack, Clint Bajakian seemed to inhabit Ennio Morricone’s soul, but with leitmotifs to make John Williams proud. It absolutely elevated the game.

Ahh, yeah, I stand corrected. Sleeves were gone from the Thinkpads earlier than I thought.

This is a good suggestion. That generation of ThinkPad keyboards wasn’t the No-travel scissor switch nonsense that most laptop keyboards now anyway. It was IBM buckling sleeve technology, and a low profile tactile switch with similarly low-pro keys would probably be about the closest thing to its feel.

it would make a good excuse to skip the trip and stay home like I wanted to do in the first place.

This, LOL. My credulity is inversely proportional to how badly I want to go on this trip.

maybe a bead from a dessicant packet? They’re usually more clear, but can sometimes drift towards brown.

One of my friends had one and they always did the same. I don’t think any computer has ever seen its power intentionally turned off as often as the Commodore 128.

First one I used was an Apple II at school. First I used outside of school was my buddy’s Laser Apple II clone. First one I owned was an Atari XEGS, with the caveat that we didn’t get the disk drive, so all programs had to be typed in when I wasn’t playing Bug Zapper or Missile Command or failing to learn how to play Flight Simulator 2. Still learned a lot of Atari BASIC.

Eventually we got a Tandy RSX with DOS 5.0 and “Tandy Deskmate”

If you traveled to the 800s England, you wouldn’t understand the English they would speak.

Yup. You could probably go back to the late 1300s and get a grasp within weeks instead of months, at least in the southern half of England, and it would get easier with each passing decade, but you’d probably have to drop in a couple of generations after Shakespeare to be sure of being mostly functional on Day One.

No, that’s beta.

‘Butter’ is hitting something a lot.

this tendency in the past decade to base entire shows on tense anxiety.

Yup. I call it the “drama of paranoia,” and it’s exhausting after a while. It also gives you a veneer of “prestige” without having to make characters I give a shit about or plots that fit together at all. As a good example of a show that realized this, Mad Men always struggled with a certain early-season plotline until they finally just ripped off the band-aid and said,

What worked about that show had nothing to do with “ONE BIG SECRET.”

Same. I was adopted as an infant, and I actually used all the DNA sites to triangulate my birth family (some nice folks, some asses). I did it over ten years ago, but it would have been a lot easier today. I think it hits a lot of people, especially on a platform like Lemmy, in their Sci-Fi dystopia feels in an inchoate kind of way that makes them recoil, and it’s not that there isn’t any potential for abuse, just that this is a genie that’s very much out of the bottle. Frankly, if anything truly awful is going to be done with autosomal DNA, the people who want to do it will simply mandate it.

Records-wise, it’s a large universe and impressively interconnected. I’ve learned a lot about all of my families (birth, adopted, marriage), and I was able to track down the documentation necessary to support a successful application get an EU passport for my wife (her company paid for it once she told them it was plausible), and therefore our daughter. I gather that I’ll be eligible for one myself in the near future, as she was legally always a citizen, and therefore she will soon have been married for twenty years.

If my paternal side were more forthcoming, I might have been able to work something out with them for a couple of other countries, as my great-grandfather was an illegal immigrant from Germany who jumped ship from a freighter in the 1920s and married a girl whose family fled the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire after WWI. Then their kid married a Canadian nurse who was actually born in the “Dominion of Newfoundland” before confederation. Somehow this ended up creating Floridians… 🤷

Also, there’s a good chance your goony-ass yearbook photos are on Ancestry (among other places).

I honestly forget who at this point, but I think a few people still believe that I met my wife during a brief educational stay in her home state, when in fact it was online and years later.

While not quite as passionate as you, I agree. Nuts don’t help cake.

Advanced coursework in this subject: consider brownies.

Psycholinguisitics understands this effect. The “wrong” word is increasing cognitive load and slowing down the listener’s comprehension. The exact same thing happens when pronoun use is unclear and a person has to parse the most likely referent from context.

Language, especially English, is not computer code but leveraging the existing “libraries” of meaning and declaring variables carefully is usually very useful.

For anyone with a sewer system built for TP, this is an ideal workflow. Poops and poopers are not identical, and bidets are not magical. Trust but verify, friends.