MelodiousFunk @ MelodiousFunk @slrpnk.net

Posts

254

Comments

2,597

Joined

1 yr. ago

Saaaame oooooold schloooooonnng...

You're not gonna believe this...

No clue, haven't seen it.

I strongly dislike cop shows. Never been a fan of the gangster aesthetic. Can sometimes tolerate superhero stuff but it's not really my thing.

I was shocked at how much I enjoyed Gotham.

"Your inferiority complex."

Road trip! To Altoona!

The Walkman is long gone, like 30+ years ago. Still have Optimus's foot, though.

"It only works once, sadly."

Me, being 45 minutes late for my dentist after they caught me out by scheduling the prior visit to accommodate my lateness ☹️

Thanks for the replacement tip. I'm not sure much is going to change moving forward though. Nonstandard screw heads are used to keep bored people (especially kids) out. Only the invisible sky wizard knows how much stuff was saved from my preteen curiosity by not being a Philips or flathead. (RIP my old Walkman, sorry I never figured out how to put you back together properly.) Do you know how tempting those clips on the top of NES carts were to me as a kid? I poked at them even knowing the security screws were there. Had those been anything I could undo with my dad's tools, you bet your ass I'd have them disassembled, inspected, running back and forth across the carpeted floor (which also served as the work table) to get more carts, seeing if game boards could fit in another case to prank my brother, the whole nine yards.

If one of those $50 games ended up not working (whether by carpet-fueled ESD or a literal misstep or whatever), best case scenario is that I would have been out of a game if my parents didn't find out. (Worst case, my mom wouldn't be able to play Tetris anymore and I may not have survived third grade.) Because they certainly weren't going to buy "it just stopped working" from the kid that disassembled Optimus Prime. I can see other parents buying the sob story though, making a big scene at the store or on the phone (and these days, online), demanding a refund/replacement regardless of warranty status.

Of course none of that impacts hobbyists - we just get the right tool and go to town. But nonstandard screw heads work well enough at keeping out kids (and idiots) that they're likely here to stay.

And we both know the answer to the fastener quality issue: if you can shave a penny off of a part that'll be used hundreds of millions of times, well, that's what you're gonna do. There's precious little in the way of (regular) user-serviceable parts in anything anymore. The manufacturers don't want us in there. Is that going to stop us? No.

We can hope for better, but IMO "this makes a great replacement part" is awesome info on its own.

Thanks for reading my very long-winded "thank you." ;

This comm has an absurd amount of downvote fairies. I'm not sure which is more pathetic: setting up a downvote bot, or being terminally online enough to constantly refresh all/new and reflexively downvote anything you don't like.

I dunno, I just get a feeling...

but I suffer from left-right confusion and it's just not intuitive for me

Same, but clockwise/counterclockwise doesn't help for me. And if I'm un/screwing something in a different orientation (like reaching behind the back of a cabinet) I'm extra-boned.

Finding out that the right-hand rule applies to screws was game-changing. Make a thumbs up and align your right thumb with the direction you want the screw to go. Now turn in the direction your fingers are curling. Done.

More for me then.

makes eye contact while folding

point droops

moment ruined

That's really the only downside.

You ever seen a pizza joint from Jersey? Half of them double as laundromats or vape shops.

I've been getting pizza from NJ for 45 years. I have never seen this crossover.

Folded pizza is real, and it's delicious.

May I interest you in some apple cider vinegar? Or perhaps colloidal silver?

Complete removal seems extreme. Maybe just disconnect some of it, as a treat.

I'm pretty sure anyone who's ever worked with punch cards has a story about dropping them lol. The old heads I trained under had no shortage of said stories.

So far as my tales, they're not so ancient. Imagine, if you will, old Uncle Funk, still relatively fresh-faced after getting laid off from his first professional gig in the aftermath of the dot com bubble bursting. He lands on his feet in a mid-sized company, working entry level data clerk crap because he's had enough of PC repair and Y2K patches in a year and a half to last a lifetime. And one afternoon in walks a gentleman with a small box, who the person training him introduces as the courier from a business partner. They exchange pleasantries and get down to the heart of the matter: the logging of several reel to reel tapes coming in and going out. Considering we just started the 21st century, he finds this a bit odd. But lo! We deliver the tapes to the computer room operators, who take them over to tape drives straight out of the set of Superman 3. Mind blown.

Fast forward a year or so and Uncle Funk has joined the grizzled vets in the data center, learning the ins and outs of OS/390, print queues, and batch processing. And those reel to reels are still in daily use for a handful of jobs (with the vast majority of tape functions being handled by vast stacks of 3490s). By the time he left for greener pastures, those tapes for inter-company use had been superseded by 3.5" floppies (briefly) and then ultra-modern FTP transfer. Ah, progress.

MG and HG are totally different beasts. The MG Zaku II 2.0 frame is 15 years old at this point and still holds up. The old HGUC Zaku from 2003, not so much. The revive versions from 2020 and pretty much anything from The Origin line are great for HGs.

In that order, or is there some flexibility here?