In the not too distant past this was a thing
dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️ @ dual_sport_dork @lemmy.world Posts 31Comments 2,661Joined 2 yr. ago
dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️ @ dual_sport_dork @lemmy.world
Posts
31
Comments
2,661
Joined
2 yr. ago
If we're doing watches today, here's what I'm rocking lately.
I stopped using my Garmin smartwatch because they finally fell into the enshittification trap and recently tried adding AI slop and a subscription scheme into their watch app. That's a big old nope from me, dawg.
Marbles are too inconsistent in diameter and most of them are too small for paintball guns, and certainly wouldn't chamber or feed right. What's more likely is that these punks were using one of the myriad crop of nylon or aluminum "jawbreaker" ammo sold online these days specifically for use in paintball guns.
In addition to the dubious legality of this sort of thing if you actually did light somebody up with a hopper full of them, for anyone considering these for deterrence of ne'er-do-wells in the night, I'd give it a second think only because mostly what you'll accomplish is holes in your drywall and denting up your own stuff.
Some dude named Tyrone apparently had my phone number at some point before I did. For a couple of years at first I got a sporadic but persistent litany of calls before I managed to finally convince all of his debt collectors, parole officers, and/or babymommas that this was no longer his number.
It sounds stereotypical, but it's true. I thought somebody was pulling my leg the first time.
Anyway, I don't answer my phone for anyone who isn't on my contacts list anymore. If I don't know you, you don't need to be calling me.
I've posted this story in various guises before, but back in the '90s a friend of mine had a dedicated phone line for his modem (yes, this was before residential broadband of any stripe was readily accessible) which was the inverse of the local Dominos Pizza. Like, ###-###-0101 vs ###-###-1010.
Tons of calls from a wide cross section confused, stupid, angry, and belligerent would-be pizza seekers arrived at the telephone he had plugged into that line, and many many more must have gone into the black hole of the perpetual busy signal.
Christ.
You reminded me that I had to waste like an entire hour of my day a couple of weeks ago convincing my boss that yes, we absolutely can eBay off the four or five unopened toner cartridges we have lying around here for a printer we no longer have. It's fine. Just let them go. We can use the money for some other operational expense. "But already paid for them and that means we'll take a loss on them."
Sure, genius. Versus what, exactly? Leaving them mouldering on the supply room shelf until the day the sun burns out? An 80% return is better than 0% return.
It's not even a contest how easy it is to determine an incoming text message is marketing bullshit and ignore/blocklist it versus the time sunk into getting to the bottom of a phone call.
I essentially have no reason to own a telephone anymore, for any reason whatsoever, including at my work except for the fact that dimwits incessantly keep calling me on the damn thing. And for added bonus points, they insist on getting salty any time we can't instantly answer their phone call. Which for the record is because I already have all four other lines lit up and staff on all of them, wasting 15+ minutes each on some inane query or complaint that could have been a 10 second email.
Everything could easily be conducted over SMS or email, and in fact I prefer it to be because this leaves a paper trail. I'd much rather send one of my vendors a nasty email than have to call and yell at them, because when I need to refer back to that previous communication I have an exact date and time and I have what was said right there in black and white. If I give a client everything in writing they can't conveniently "misremember" what they were promised to try to scam more out of us. What I wrote is what I wrote. It's all right there. If somebody tries to ask me to do something stupid and demands I do it anyway even after I told them it was stupid, I automatically have documentation of that order and my objection for when it all inevitably goes pear shaped.
Etc., etc.
Bury the telephone. Its time has passed.
𝚈𝙾𝚄 𝙰𝚁𝙴 𝚂𝙴𝙶𝙵𝙰𝚄𝙻𝚃
We had to constantly remind people not to leave their disks on top of the monitors in those days, because on some models the degaussing pulse was enough to erase a floppy disk.
I was also proud of my ownership of a large speaker magnet which had a highly directional magnetic field, and could cause tube monitors and TV's go all paisley from about 20 feet away. I kept it stuck to the back of my steel garage door when not in use to keep it well away from all monitors, disks, and tapes.
It's the only way to be sure.
It's a great trio of games (Legends 1 and 2, and the Misadventures of Tron Bonne) with quite a bit of depth and if you ask me a fantastic art direction for their time. The one thing I will say is that the controls did not age very well. You get used to it after a while. These games predate modern dual-stick movement and aiming and use the shoulder buttons for strafing. I think the Playstation versions are superior due to the increased number of buttons available on the controller.
It is now. It wasn't at first.
It was part of the Valve Orange Box and that was a big deal at the time. There was also a huge deal of whining from people who paid for it when Valve announced they were changing it to a free to play model.
They can go ahead and keep adding buttons until we get back to my full physical keyboard that was on my old Galaxy S Relay. Then I'll buy a new one. But until then, no deal.
Modern minds can't even conceive of the shenanigans I could get up to with an SSH terminal on that sucker. It's got arrows and a dedicated number row. How about them apples?
Sure. But even if I were the pigs, I think I'd find $80/5000 more palatable than $400/500.
I think most of their simunition crap is .43 or .40 caliber anyway. I'd doubt too many serious operators are doing force-on-force training with hobbyist .68 caliber markers.
Lately (no doubt due to getting back into prosumer photography stuff) I've been using B&H Photo and Video. I kinda-sorta forgot I bought my drone from them several years ago and at the time they were cheaper than Amazon and also offered next day shipping for free for an order of that magnitude. Since I'm not using Amazon anymore I've been getting my stuff from there again.
Everything I've been interested in has been the same price as on Amazon or cheaper. I think they're hamstrung by their name by this point since they seem to have a pretty wide swath of general electronics and not just camera gear.
Just don't try to order on the Shabbat (i.e. Saturday), because you can't. Their web site literally disables its checkout during that time.
If you specifically need yum-cha generic Chinese garbage (for instance, if you have a particular brand related to bizarre knockoff knives you need to maintain) I find going straight to the source and just getting that crap from Aliexpress is the best plan. It's the same bullshit that litters most of Amazon and sure, maybe you don't get it quite as fast. But at least they're broadly honest about the inherent crappiness of what you're getting, and the same stuff is significantly less expensive.
You're Ramirez.
I find MCS' comment about "for applications where you can't afford case after case of paint" to be especially hilarious here, given that these are consistently damn near a buck a shot even in their bulk 500 round pack, (80 cents a shot in that case) but you can nab a 5000 round crate of top flight Valken Grafittis for $80.
Anyway, I use reballs for testing markers or fucking around in my garage since they don't mark anything unless you put a dent in it, and they can... often... be located again afterwards, washed, and reused.
As others have stated, this is indeed already something that exists.
I'm here to go on record to point out something that most people seem not to know about paintballs, which is that their "mess" is intentionally made of materials that are washable and readily water soluble, for obvious reasons. I've seen a lot of hyperventilating coming from certain individuals over the years about youths supposedly being able to permanently vandalize things at a distance with paintball guns and therefore they should all be banned. This is fiction. Rest assured that anything paintballs will do to your stuff can be cured by simply rinsing it down with your garden hose.
(This is obviously notwithstanding suitably motivated individuals from rolling their own ammo out of whatever-the-hell. A paintball gun will dutifully send downrange anything round and roughly .68" in diameter, with varying degrees of success depending on the density and/or fragility of the object in question.)
To be fair, they haven't managed to put out a whole hell of a lot that's actually compelling in the intervening years that weren't rereleases. "Hey guys, DAE remember Resident Evil 4? The good one? We just re-re-re-released it. And some old Megaman games you already have. Full price!"
Megaman Legends 3.
"We cancelled it because the fans didn't show enough interest or act like they wanted it badly enough!"
I think a sizable fraction of the world's population is still salty about that, and it's been 14 years.
It's also approachably yet suspiciously cheap. I think I paid $20 for this close to 15 years ago, and Sinobi is apparently still at it making mechanical watches in the $30 range.
This one does two things: Tells you the time, and does so while not needing batteries.