the-sleepy-archivist

[the-sleepy-archivist]

Heads up: apparently, "Sega Classics" listings are getting pulled from several distribution platforms. They will be discontinued for sale on December 6th, 2024 at 11:59 PM PST. You can still download them after this time if you have purchased them in the past, but...well, that'll be it.

Considering a third of my Steam wish list was Sega Classics titles, I find this to be a huge bummer. Most of them were $0.99 USD, so they were super affordable alternatives to digging around the retro market. I don't see a reason why they're getting pulled. Can't say I'm optimistic any replacement will be as affordable, either...

So. Uh. Guess if you want some "Phantasy Star" titles, "Alien Soldier," or "Shining Force II" on Steam, you'd better haul ass on your purchases.

[the-sleepy-archivist]

The only acceptable ads should be shit like "groceries on sale" and "free event at the local library"

[the-sleepy-archivist]

[the-sleepy-archivist]

Andrew Garfield on consent and privacy

[the-sleepy-archivist]

[the-sleepy-archivist]

OpenAI are scumbags.

[the-sleepy-archivist]

There are plenty of reasons not to use twitter any more but for artists, handing over the rights to twitter to train AI with it should be the final straw. So here is another solution.

Also, tools like glaze which poison images against AI are really helpful but they take a long time to process each image so consider just doing a cropped section of the image if you want to share it to twitter.

[the-sleepy-archivist]

NASA's Lunar Orbiter pics from 1967/8 were deliberately fuzzed and downsampled to hide US spying capabilities

In 1967, the Lunar Orbiter missions sent back exciting – but grainy and low-rez – photos of the moon’s surface.

But it turns out that the Orbiters’ photos were actually super-high-rez, shot on 70mm film and robotically developed inside the orbiters, with the negs raster-scanned at 200 lines/mm and transmitted to ground stations using an undisclosed lossless analog image-compression technology. These were stored on tapes read by fridge-sized $300,000 Ampex FR-900 drives. These images were printed out at 40’ x 54’ so the Apollo astronauts could stroll over them and look for a landing spot.

But these images were not revealed to the public because NASA feared that doing so would also reveal the US’s spy satellite capabilities. Instead, NASA deliberately downrezzed and fuzzed the images that the public got to see.

Ryan Smith tells the amazing story of the preservationists who rescued the images off of disintegrating FR-900 magnetic tapes starting in 2007, under JPL’s Nancy Evans, who set up her team in an abandoned McDonald’s building and dubbed the project “McMoon.”

The McMoon team refurbished salvaged FR-900 drives, homebrewed a digitizer system, and painstaking recovered the 2GB/image files that the system generated. Evans’s team has recovered 2,000 images from 1,500 tapes, all in the public domain and available for download on Moonviews.com.

https://boingboing.net/2018/06/16/ampex-fr-900-drives.html

[the-sleepy-archivist]

[the-sleepy-archivist]

Discord is officially blocked in Russia

anti-DPI programs can handle Discord here's Goodbye DPI w/ GUI here's ByeDPI, possibly nicest solution for Android other variants can be found here

regarding VPNs - Windscribe is still the real one, w/ non-standard protocols and special "hostile network" switch, one problem though - limited traffic, so you most likely have to juggle it w/ some noname VPN apps or proxy add-ons

note that it's illegal in Russia to talk about blocks circumvention, so if you don't live in Russia, please share this post, so your followers, who live there could see it and use it

[the-sleepy-archivist]

I don't want my cellphone to have AI I want it to have 3 days of battery time. I don't want my computer to have AI preinstalled I want it to have seven usb ports and high ram at affordable price. I don't want my games to have AI built levels I want them to be so optimized I could run them on a nokia.

[the-sleepy-archivist]

10/10/24

[the-sleepy-archivist]

[the-sleepy-archivist]

Man I know emulators are technically considered piracy I guess, and I can see why it would be an issue with newer games (not that most emulators are advanced enough for that anyway), but I just… hhhhhh the way the video game industry operates in regards to old games is so fucking stupid. It’s like

Gamers: Hey, I’m really interested in this game you made a long time ago! Can I play it? Game companies: No.  Gamers: But I’ll give you money! Game companies: We no longer manufacture, support, or distribute that game or the console it’s available on. There’s no way for you to buy it. Gamers: Well, what about this slightly-newer-but-still-outdated game that was never released in my region? Can I play that? I’ll give you money. Game companies: No. You’re only allowed to play games from your region. You can’t buy it from us. Gamers: So, you don’t provide any way for me to purchase these games from you, or to play them in any form? Game companies: Correct. We don’t care about these games anymore. They might as well not exist. Some guy on the internet: Hey, I found some old and foreign games that aren’t sold or available to play anywhere, so I fixed them up so everyone can play them now for free! Here you go! :) Game companies: ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT. HOW DARE YOU STEAL OUR PROFITS. PLAY THE GAMES LEGALLY OR DIE. Gamers: But you just said there’s no way to play them- Game companies: FUCK YOU

[the-sleepy-archivist]

(a) No it won't. (b) Alas for the other humans who work for/with them; now they know they're next on the list.

…Why can't these idiots just let creatives be creatives? It's not like we overcharge. (Back of brain: "It's that we make them feel insufficient. Like that's somehow our fault.") :/

[the-sleepy-archivist]

[the-sleepy-archivist]

Said it a year ago and I’ll say it again.

Pirate all your favorite shows, movies and games while you still have the chance.

Oh, and never stop supporting physical media.