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The point at which even I stop playing: crashes of no continue.

When I originally tried playing Deadly Premonition, I stopped because it was impossible to get out of the hospital without crashing.

Revisiting the game with the current brew of fixes posted in Steam Guides, I found that less of a pickle. So much as it seems the game fires off an exit after x time, almost as if it keeps leaking resources or something. Faster while driving and mapping than wondering around the shadow world.

And then, I save at the community center, go walk the dog, come back, and find the game silently crashes to desktop the moment it is done loading my save file :'(.

This reminds me that the ‘360 version is like $15 in the used game bin. I’d like to hope the backwards compatibility and old release, suck less than the PC port that was pushed to Steam and GOG.

Thoughts over cornbread prep

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Psuedo-Random passing thoughts from mixing cornbread batter:

When you’ve got the cornmeal, flour, eggs, etc right there; or as close as a supermarket, making cornbread is really low effort. Like really, the biggest effort is to get the stuff out and ready before you start mixing. It also helps if you remember to start preheating the oven and the skillet before getting all the stuff ready.

Now if you had to grind your own corn, churn your own butter, or deal with your own chickens, and so on: maybe not so much.

The closest most people in the first world will likely ever experience to that is playing games like Minecraft.

Hmm, I wonder what our ancestors who lived off farms and mills, would think of Minecraft. Would they think it absurd given how much of that hunter-gathering-building their society was, or be equally addicted as us squishy happy go lucky descendants from the age of the supermarket be?

Yeah, I’m not inventing a time machine to find out.

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Human: “Donut!”
Dogs: “Give me!”

It goes without saying, how this exchange worked out. Omnimnom!

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Given the difference between how willing Misty is taking her pain tablet, versus the dropper of antibotics, I can only assume the key is flavor. Surely someone making medicines for dogs will have figured out a way to make the taste non-horribad.

Much like how the Flintstone’s vitamins my mother gave me as a young child, had a taste much closer to candy than shoe leather.

Which is also kind of a relief. I remember Coco, when she was alive, was a nightmare to give a pill. For a while she had been on a med, and we quickly came to the conclusion that if there was a way for her to spit it out twenty minutes later, she would, so you basically had to pry her jaws open and shove it down her throat. By contrast getting Misty to take her pain med, a little pressure towards the tongue and she crunches it almost like a treat.

I’m also left wondering if dogs have less pain reception in their mouths, or if I’m just more easily disturbed. Misty’s definitely recovering better than I did, from a similar bout of dental fun times nearly a decade ago.

Progress, probably

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Passing thought on browsing the World Wide Web:

In the ‘90s my greatest bane was pop up ads and file transfers.

In the ‘00s my greatest bane was browser plugins and crashes.

In the ‘10s my greatest bane was cookie notices and on boarding.

As the ‘20s begin, I would like to think this is progress as far as getting pissed off at surfing the web goes. It’s abnormal to have to close a half dozen (or over a dozen) windows when leaving a website, and file transfers tend to complete instead of hoping no one messes with the phone line. Browsers rarely crash, and plugins from hell are mostly a relic today. But pretty much every freaking website puts up a hey pal, we’ve gotta mention these cookies notice, and far too many put up a near full screen pop up asking you to sign up for something.

I honestly have no idea why Don’t Copy That Floppy just started playing in my head.

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A Decade of iPad
https://flip.it/bBeP6L

Personally, I think that netbooks worked out far better than anyone should have expected; and I feel that the rise of the iPad and Chromebook is due to realizing that you don’t need to make a netbook that is a piece of crap. Nor do you necessarily need to spend several grand of laptop just to update Twitter.

Tablets are a remarkable option that is mostly hamstrung by software and accessories. As a docked machine, it’s just a matter of software. My iPad Pro runs circles around my aging Core i5, but docking an iPad doesn’t change the software into a Windows desktop, nor should it.

I find that tablets tend to serve best when you are doing general computery things rather than highly focused tasks. If you’re a heavy user of keys other than alphanumerical, such as modifier based keyboard shortcuts then you’re not going to like typing on tablets. The more efficient you must be at manipulating text: the more you will require a full sized physical keyboard, regardless of your device’s form factor. Likewise if you need pixel precise interaction, you’re probably going to make a middle finger gesture if anyone tries to replace your mouse or track ball with a touchscreen, lol.

In many cases, throwing a keyboard and mouse, or even an external monitor works far better with tablet or phone like software than desktop like software. Don’t believe me? Try using Windows 95 with only your fingers, and then try using your phone with only a keyboard and mouse.

The whole windows desktop paradigm and software designed around a desktop PC does not adapt to a tablet as well as it did to notebooks. But software that doesn’t suck on a tablet, does not necessarily suck on a delete desktop. Software is what you make of it but hardware determines how you physically interact with it.

Most of the negative aspects of my relationship with desktop oriented software is mired in antiquity. I’m sure we would all have done things differently if you landed an Intrepid class star ship on earth in the 1960s than if you tried to grow CP/M into NT, and a host of other histories.

Most of the negative aspects of my relationship with tablet oriented software is mired in quality. I’m sure bug free software does not exist, and will never be the result of Google or Apple, lol. Typically my groan at my iPad is the buggy operating system, much as with Android my problem tends to be Google’s additional  software.

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Convenience in race conditions: when the power blips in and out, after you save the game–not before.

On the flip side, most serious file system’s developed since circa 2000 tend to handle “Opps, power pull” pretty well, or had already grown things like journaling support by the end of the ’90s.

Which is why I expect my game save to actually load instead of shouting crap, crap, crashola.

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Somedays, I feel inclined to ride, boldy ride in search of El Dorado and get things done.
Somedays, I feel inclined as much as a sea slug feels to get up and dance the the hula on the beach.

Today is definitely one of the latter.