A new Flight Sim is out already? God dammit, I barely had time to play FS2020… Less than 10 hours.

If you were raised by Christian fundamentalists (the kind who believed that church was evil), then you also heard it in 1994, and twice in 2011. Two straight years of world-ending predictions. It was fatiguing.

Fallout: London is pretty decent. It may be a mod, but it plays like a proper Fallout title. Enjoy that in the meantime. It won’t completely fill the void but it’s better than nothing.

APUs obviously weren’t a thing yet, and it was common knowledge back then that contemporary iGPUs were complete and utter trash. I mean they were so weak that you couldn’t even play HD video or even enable some of XP’s very basic graphical effects with most integrated graphics.

Everyone knew that you needed a dedicated graphics card back then, so you can and should in fact put some blame on the consumer for being dumb enough to buy a PC without one, regardless of what the sticker said. I mean I was a teenager back then and even still I knew better. The blame goes both ways.

TweakUAC solved that problem.

Meh, you just needed a discrete GPU, and not even a good one either. Just a basic, bare-bones card with 128MB of VRAM and pixel shader 2.0 support would have sufficed, but sadly most users didn’t even have that back in 06-08.

It was mostly the consumer’s fault for buying cheap garbage laptops with trash-tier iGPUs in them, and the manufacturer’s for slapping a “compatible with Vista” sticker on them and pushing those shitboxes on consumers. If you had a half-decent $700-800 PC then, Vista ran like a dream.

Like the others have said, use Voyager to filter out the instances and communities you don’t want to see.

Imgur if you want memes, cats, and politics, but keep in mind that they’re not much better than reddit. No 3rd party apps, and the official app has ads & sells your data to Facebook. You can block it by using the DDG app and enabling App Tracking Protection, however. Also setting your phone’s DNS server to dns.adguard-dns.com. You should be doing those two things anyway, regardless of what apps you do or don’t use.

Besides this place, I also use Imgur and YouTube to help fill in the void after leaving reddit. I’m considering joining Bluesky and Mastodon as well but I’ve never used a Twitter-like interface before so it’s intimidating.

Unfortunately I still haven’t found a suitable replacement for niche communities. There’s always forums, but I got too used to points-based communities, and because comments are sorted chronologically, it’s hard to know what’s crap and what’s actual useful information. Which can suck if you need a good opinion on something. 20-30 years ago that wouldn’t have even bothered me, cause forums were the only social media I knew then. But times have changed.

The other user is wrong. I clearly remember the BSoD in Windows 3.1. You can find it easily with a simple web search. Here it is:

Hell, there were even memes of it:

Windows 3.1 absolutely did have a BSoD, and as the other person mentioned, sometimes you could press a key and the OS would recover. More often than not you needed to reboot, though. Our family PC would BSoD all the damn time, and I had to put up with it throughout a good portion of my early childhood until my dad finally bought a Windows 98 SE PC. But that OS also had its fair share of instability issues. The “illegal operation” error message was a near-daily occurance.

It wasn’t until we got our first NT-based machine (XP) that we stopped having constant issues with Windows. The DOS-based Windows OSes were notoriously unstable.

Thanks dad.

I miss you. Is hell as bad as you said it was?

Ring is not a cheap camera. The $20 Chinese cloud cameras sold on Amazon are extremely common and they all have MicroSD card slots as a backup option.

Stremio is easier and paying is optional

Nobody but the most hardcore AMD enthusiasts used Bulldozer. The 2010s was a tough decade for AMD, to say the least. It wasn’t until AM5 came out that I finally switched back to Team Red. Got too used to LGA sockets.

Streaming sites? My brother in Christ, you need to ditch those unreliable websites that hardly work and go down all the time, and get a proper media center setup. Here are some terms to look up to get you started:

• Stremio
• Stremio addons: Torrentio, Streaming Catalogs, Trakt.tv
• Real-Debrid

That’s the basic setup you’ll want for a proper good time. Instantly stream any show or movie from any provider for free (Netflix, Disney, Prime Video, HBO, Apple TV, etc.). Get recommendations based on your viewing habits. Compatible with all your devices, including smart TVs. Torrent-based so it won’t get taken offline (at least not anytime soon). Torrents are already stored on a server so there’s no waiting on seeds (which is what Real-Debrid does. Optional and $3/mo but it makes the experience much smoother, especially if you want to watch something older/more obscure. And it eliminates the need for a VPN. Plus it works for any torrent, not just media).

Trust me, this is the way to go. Once you get everything set up, it’s so easy and straightforward to use that my grandmother could navigate Stremio and not even know that it’s a pirate service. Good luck and happy sailing. 🏴‍☠️

Yeah but 14th Gen Intel CPUs are still failing regardless of your OS.

Man, even when I try to be diplomatic I still get berated.

Should have just said fuck you and called it a day. (kidding)

By “zip file”, I meant a compressed archive. I’m not as nerdy as you guys are so I see now that there is a difference. I appreciate the correction.

That said, you have to admit that it’s still cool that these different file formats are nothing more than archives. Maybe not to you but it blew my mind when I first learned this.

Well fair enough. You clearly have more knowledge on the subject than I do.

FWIW, by “zip file”, I meant that the file is a compressed archive. Apologies for implying a specific file format. That wasn’t my intention.