I ripped my DVD collection a couple years ago, and I watched that change over time happen.

The earlier DVDs in my collection came in bespoke packaging designed specifically for the film, they had properly interactive menus complete with easter eggs, commentary tracks, alternate angles, remember when DVD player remotes had an “Angle” button? DVD was a prestige format, it was actually as cool as LaserDisc was supposed to be.

There was the early mass market phase when older movies, or lower budget current releases were put out on double sided discs that had widescreen on one side and “fullscreen” 4:3 on the other, in those half plastic half cardboard cases, remember those? Higher end stuff would be released in what I think of as the standard plastic DVD case. How much plastic was wasted selling them in packaging other than CD jewel cases?

Later on, you got the cases that had the recycling logo cut out of them, the discs got cheaper, features started disappearing, because it was now the budget option. “It’s just on DVD.” DVDs were cheap to make, everybody had a player for them, Blu-Ray now had the prestige releases. The Direct To Bargain Bin releases weren’t exactly the high point of the format but there’s still fun to be had there.

DVD still staggers on, they’re not dead the way VHS is, but it didn’t make it as long. DVDs could do things VHS couldn’t, like TV shows. The advent of binge watching happened on DVD; complete TV series on VHS wasn’t feasible but it works great on DVD. On the other hand, because VHS was the only widely adopted vdieo format for most of its run, you can find weird stuff on VHS that never got pressed onto DVD.

I could argue that VHS was a superior format to both Beta and Laserdisc because it offered a better blend of features.

Laserdisc offered cinemaphile farkles like perfect pause and frame by frame, additional audio tracks etc. but a movie required at least three sides of a disc, and thus two discs with at least two changes. Laserdisc was read-only and thus useless for timeshifting and camcorders. The tape-based formats were slightly worse in quality but could hold an entire movie in one go.

VHS was superior for timeshift and camcorder use than Beta because of the longer run time. There was a mini cassette for miniature VHS camcorders which could be played back on a standard deck with an adapter, Beta never got there AFAIK and insetad Sony went to Hi 8, which never really took off as a home video format the way it frankly should have. VHS was better than Beta at movie distribution because a longer film could fit on an SP VHS cassette, often with room to spare for some commercials at the beginning which helped subsidize the cost.

VHS was at least capable of everything.

DVD didn’t fully kill VHS; It unceremoniously killed LaserDisc and shouldered VHS aside a little. Through most of the 2000s VHS was still going strong, DVD-RAM is surprisingly old but wasn’t adopted that widely. Hard drive based DVRs and smart phone based video recording finally did VHS in.

I don’t think we even need to go that far. They were almost constantly making those direct to VHS movies and such they churned out in huge numbers, and I don’t think it was easy on them. I’m convinced they were overworked as children.

Too late. !conservative@sh.itjust.works

It narrows it down to a delivery truck at least.

The blue Marble was also photographed “upside down.” We tend to rotate it because the shape of Africa is apparent and familiar. The new shot is taken further West and I think closer to the planet so not as much of its surface is visible.

I’ve been gaming on Linux for over ten years now: It has gotten to the point where the only major hurdle is kernel-level anti-cheat. Which does work in Linux, but the developer has to enable it to work in Linux, and most don’t. This is only a factor in competitive multiplayer games. I’m not into those so basically I haven’t noticed, I want to run a game, it runs.

What the FUCK was that first paragraph?

sauce?

Yep. Izzy sleeps next to my pillow. Sometimes I wake up with a handful of furry face. Cats are goofy.

On a human, we have shoulders, upper back, middle back, lower back and ass. On a cow, these are called Chuck, Rib, Top Loin, Loin and Round.

Both critters have muscles that run parallel to the spine. Ribeyes come from the rib primal, and are more tender and have a richer more buttery flavor. Go assward past the top loin primal where T-bones come from and you arrive at the Loin primal where we get among other things sirloin steaks, which compared to ribeyes are chewier but bring a more meaty, beefy flavor.

If I understand it correctly, the ship’s built-in systems run a Linux-based RTOS, the dumbfuckery is happening on an off the shelf Surface tablet.

They’re still making Microsoft look like a million monkeys fucking a million footballs.

The AGC had 2048 words of erasable core storage, what we’d now call RAM, and 36,864 words of read only core rope memory. So a total of 38,912 words. Each word is 15 bits plus a parity bit, so that’d work out to 75,776 bytes or 72,168 bytes depending on whether you count parity or not, and then kilobytes, kibibytes…it’s closer to 64k than 32 or 128.

Miss Chiff is 8 pounds and 9 years old. She’s got her favorite toy in that shot.

I thank you kindly, the night stand is for my father, actually. He had a tray table next to the bed so I built him this pillar stand in cherry.

“Let’s get out of here before one of those things kills Guy!”

So yeah if “not a car guy” you might bounce off of the first couple of seasons. Here’s a sample from the shenanigan era: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf7q8lWEd-o

Early mods didn’t have the luxury of engine hooks and data separation designed for the purpose of third-party modding.

Yes they did. id Software, Valve and 3D Realms included their SDKs on the disk. All the way back in the 90’s they gave players the same tools they used to build the game. Any game that descends from Doom, all the way into the Source engine, store their assets in .wad files. We were replacing imps with Simpsons characters and titty chicks back when Clinton was president.

Now, the distinction between a game and a mod, I don’t buy the standard to be it’s own game as “started from scratch.”

Valve licensed the Quake engine from id Software. They changed it so much that the GoldSrc engine is considered it’s own thing; anything from skeletal animations to weapon reloading. They hired a novelist to write the story, they generated a ton of their own textures, models, sound effects and music.

Compare that to the original Counter Strike which was a pack of maps and some logic layered over Half-Life’s deathmatch mode.

Standalone product? Buy and run with no other dependencies? Game.

Officially released product from the same developer and/or publisher and/or rights holder that requires owning the original to function? Expansion pack.

Officially released product from the same publisher/developer/rights holder that does not require owning the original to function? Sequel.

Unofficially released product often a fan work that requires a copy of the original game to function? Mod.

I didn’t have to buy Quake to run my copy of Half-Life GOTY edition back in 1999. Though it came with a copy of TFC, which I think is technically an expansion pack as it required Half-Life to function but was officially released as a showcase of those modding tools I talked about in the beginning.

Is it worth it? I think so, I enjoyed it. Does it hold up? Complicated question.

The Clarkson-Hammond-May show ran for a couple decades and went through three major phases: journalism, shenanigan and adventure.

In earlier seasons they were more of a typical car show, they did more journalism relevant to the average driver…in early 2000s Britain. Top Gear isn’t looked back on fondly for Richard Hammond reporting on viewer polls for new car reliability in 2002. They still made an entertaining show, the cool wall and things like that are entertaining, but I would start you out with later episodes and let you watch these later if you like it. Series staples like taking sports cars for a fast lap around their track to compare their times, and doing celebrity interviews complete with a racing lap around the same track in a compact car, the “Star In A Reasonably Priced Car” segment, begin here.

5 or 6 years in they started the shenanigan era, which is probably what peopel mean when they say “This reminds me of Top Gear.” They’d buy three used cars and go do ridiculous things, like turn them into camper vans, or outfit them for racing, or make sports cars into ambulances. In the words of Richard Hammond, “What this was, was fun. And I think we’re quite good at fun.” If I can point to an episode to introduce new viewers to the series, it’d be the British Leyland challenge episode. The show really starts to shine in this era; the three hosts have great chemistry together and the shenanigans give them more opportunity to play off one another.

That gradually transitioned into the adventure era, as “three guys drive some old cars to the other side of London” becomes racing Veyron against a Cessna 182 across the length of Europe, or driving three old four-by-fours across South America or three ordinary RWD cars across Botswana. The show gradually abandoned the studio segments and became just, the three guys go somewhere in the world and drive some cars in interesting or spectacular locations. There’s great stuff here, their Botswana trip is amazing, their Korea trip is amazing, their Nile trip is wonderful, their North Pole trip is NUTS. But I’d watch earlier cheap car challenge episodes first.

No, that’s too much of a stretch. Half-Life is it’s own game, they licensed and then modified Quake’s engine. That’d be like calling Satisfactory a mod of Fortnite.

After about a decade on Mint I ended up on Fedora.