web analytics

Git offa my land!

The latest howling controversy in gaming has been over a consultancy firm hired onto gaming projects to make them more woke. It turns out their fingerprints are all over several recent big-budget flops.

I won’t go into it. Gamers make up a tiny number of my readers. It just made me think what a tiny, underrepresented identity group I belong to: old lady gamers.

As far as I know, it’s just me and Shirley Curry. (Seriously, check Shirley out. She’s an 87 year old grandma from Ohio who plays Skyrim. She’s a hoot).

And I was thinking how *I* wasn’t bitching about my identity group not being represented in video games. And then I thought hang on, that would be kind of awesome.

I can see a crabby old lady NPC with a sniper rifle who shouts at you and plinks you from a great distance. Kind of like Bette Davis in Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte. Which, if you’ve never seen it, is the most fantastic old horror film featuring an enormous cast of famous scene-chewing old hams. It’s all Oscar-winners and low-budget gore.

Only in 1964.

It was originally supposed to star Joan Crawford against Bette Davis. Check out the making of for some hilarious behind-the-scenes drama.

When I was a kid, we watched it strictly for the “head rolling down the stairs” scene.

March 27, 2024 — 8:49 pm
Comments: 3

O fabulous world!

If you guessed this was an hour-long video of an Amana washing machine doing a complete cycle taken from a channel about washing machines, you’d be completely correct.

The comments. Lordy.

If you click on the link, fair warning, you are apt to find other appliance channels appearing in your sidebar.

That’s the thing that chaps my hide: this video just appeared in my timeline. Surrounded by game demos and cat videos, up pops this Amana Direct Drive Washer – Full Casual Cycle + Extra Rinse out of the blue.

The algorithm – it knows too much.

I was promised flying cars and robot servants, but I suppose this will have to do.

March 26, 2024 — 6:48 pm
Comments: 9

Trust me.

This is a lime Uncle B grew in his own greenhouse. It is – and you’ll have to take my word for it – bright yellow.

That’s perfectly normal. It takes a hit of cooler weather to make limes turn yellow and fall off, a thing they don’t get in the warm places they’re grown commercially.

I also imagine it’s easier to store and sell if lemons and limes look different. Fully matured, yellow limes are supposedly sweeter, too – although there are also varietal differences in color.

When I start poaching gardening photos from Uncle B’s Google, it’s a sure sign I have nothing to say for myself. That cold I had a few weeks back is still kicking my ass.

March 25, 2024 — 7:58 pm
Comments: 8

Stop making me learn stuff, dammit!

Still struggling with VR technology. Specifically, UEVR – a mod that supposedly lets you play existing games made with the Unreal engine in VR. Which is lots of games, including lots I own and like. So it’s really, really worth it.

Most VR games suck, because they count on the VR wow! factor to distract you from shitty graphics. (I’m lookin’ at you, Gorilla Tag).

All the cool YouTubers say it – just plug it in and WHEEEEE!…it doesn’t work.

The mod operates by injecting itself into the running code. That is also what viruses do. So Windows Defender slapped it out of my hands as soon as I tried to download it, and at every step along the way.

Anyhoo, that was Obstacle One. I won’t bore you with the rest. I’ll get there in the end, but’s it’s all so tiresome and it’s Booze O’Clock. I wish they’d stop making me learn stuff. I’m too old for it.

Have a good weekend!

March 22, 2024 — 9:02 pm
Comments: 2

Cursed, I tell you

Last night’s post has vanished without a trace. It was just a boring thing about trying to get the Hogwarts game to run in VR, but that’s not the point. It’s not in the database; it’s not in drafts. It’s just…gone. Uncle B saw it, so I’m not nuts.

This afternoon, I was Googling around, trying to find out how to draw a page border in Google Docs, and I clicked on a popup I really shouldn’t’a. My ‘cookie warning’ reflexes took over and I batted it away carelessly.

Sure enough, I caught a dose of the “You’ve visited illegal infected website” scam.

It’s fairly harmless. It just makes that or a similar message pop up every few minutes in hope you’ll click on the link (where the real mischief would happen).

To my surprise, Malwarebytes couldn’t find it. I gather it acts like some kind of…fake browser plug-in? I deleted the most recently installed program and rebooted, but no. In the end, I had to reset the browser. Which closed all my tabs. Which really bummed me out because I keep, like, thirty open tabs as reminders of things I need to do.

I wonder if the missing post will ever float back in…?

March 21, 2024 — 7:51 pm
Comments: 8

Where will I get my conspiracy theories *now*?

Looks like my Twitter is borked. No idea why. If I were suspended, I would expect it to tell me so. My work account seems okay. Is yours working?

I’ve had a technology day, whether I liked it or not. I bought the Hogwarts game in the Steam Spring Sale and I’ve spent my day trying to mod it to work in VR.

Just a couple of clicks! say the YouTubers enthusiastically.

Feh. There was a time in my life when I loved figuring out a new piece of software. Now I just want it to shut up and work.

March 20, 2024 — 6:55 pm
Comments: 8

Welp, he just lost the British vote

(They don’t want Harry back).

Could he do this? He could. Harry admitted to illegal drug use in his autobiography, which is disqualifying.

I used to hang out in a forum for Americans immigrating to the UK, and (more rarely) vice versa. People think marriage is an automatic in. It ain’t.

I remember one case of a couple who married abroad – she was British and he was American – and he wasn’t allowed into the UK because he’d done time for a felony.

Sufficient lawyering can eventually overcome a case like that. In extremis, the European Human Rights lot will probably step in if appealed to (yes, sadly, the UK is still signed up to that madness). But they don’t half put you through years of courts and hearings and long distance relationships. Earning that British passport was a very scary and expensive process.

Going the other way – UK to US – is famously even tougher.

Trump probably wouldn’t really deport Harry, though. Sad.

Still no official Royal announcement.

March 19, 2024 — 8:01 pm
Comments: 5

Making me crazy

I’m not much of a royal watcher, but shit is just weird. This was supposed to happen last night, then any minute now all day long.

The Russkies put it out there that King Chuck was dead. Kate hasn’t been seen since Christmas, or maybe she was seen at the farm shop this afternoon looking fine.

And what is Barack Obama doing at Downing Street? Politicians this side of the pond didn’t think much of him when he was president. Has he become Klaus Schwab’s representative on earth or something?

Baffled.

March 18, 2024 — 6:43 pm
Comments: 9

GAH!

I’ve spent my whole evening trying to get my Chromecast to talk to my phone. It all started when I wanted to show a clip off Xwitter to Uncle B and ended an hour and a half later in tears. Metaphorical ones, but still.

Why is technology such shit?

We have a new wifi router, which was the start of the problems. I put in the new password, no soap. Then I thought maybe the Chromecast was trying to connect at 5GhZ when it’s an original and can only do 2.5GhZ. So I tried going into the router and renaming the two connections so I could tell which one it was trying to open. And that broke everything.

I know just enough to fuck everything up completely.

Anyway, I’m going to add alcohol to this mix. That always helps. Good weekend!

March 15, 2024 — 8:44 pm
Comments: 3

I was really confused for two seconds

I was looking for a date for local elections and found some really confusing results – until I worked out there’s a town in Wisconsin called Sussex. It was founded in 1843 by a bricklayer from Beckley, a tiny town up the road from me. It must not have been incorporated until 1924, though – see the anniversary celebration.

It looks like a charming little town, with a leprechaun hunt and a village softball team. It’s probably a hotbed of neighborly intrigues and burning resentments, but heigh-ho.

They’ve ruined my theory that American small towns never call themselves villages unironically, though.

No elections in my village this year.

March 14, 2024 — 7:42 pm
Comments: 9