I fucking love AI.

I’ll qualify that with a small personal story on it: I have a colleague in a nearby office the other side of the city, who steps into supervise his team when the actual manager isn’t there. Nice bloke, not much banter, but pleasant enough.

You can fucking guarantee though that when a division-wide email has gone out, or a change of plan comes in… he’s right on the phone to me asking what to do.

The first few times it was cute. A guy must really love his job or hate himself to go into junior management, so walking him through routine tasks he may not have been exposed to may be beneficial to him in the long run.

The problem is, it’s near constant. Every single time something changes, he calls - not for advice, not for opinion, but “can you do this for my team too?”. What really pulls a hair out of my arse is that there’s a 50/50 chance of it being something I’ve already showed him. I’ve spoken to his actual manager at exasperated length but it’s just a can kicked down the road with a “well he’s still learning, isn’t he?”

I suppose he is, and I’m no teacher. When he phones now, I just tell him “mate our org has access to that fancy new Microsoft Copilot, it’s fuckin’ mint bro, solves all your problems”, knowing fine well the disaster that’s about to happen - partly to expose him to new technologies, but mainly to be a smug cunt.

Invariably, he gets solutions that don’t quite work, or ideas that don’t quite fit the brief… and it’s satisfying as fuck getting the follow-up call and saying “sorry bruv, Copilot is smarter than me, which isn’t hard” or “nah sorry dude, it gives you a personalised response so that’ll be outside of my domain, making my suggestions worthless”.

Fucking love it. It has reduced my workload immensely.

Mouse look was revolutionary.

I tried to play Half-Life Uplink with the right directions of looking mapped to 789, 4 and 6, 123. It wasn’t very intuitive.

That said, I played Quake 1 with lookup and lookdown bound to PgUp and PgDown, and Quake II on PlayStation with lookup and lookdown mapped to L1 and R1.

Looking back, that was a wild few years.

The HAMBOTVER of the 2000s!

My job is half field based, half desk based. That, and I study part time too, so the simple unhelpful answer is the same: I don’t.

Recently I’ve taken to building a list of five or six games I’m interested in, booking a week or two off work in the summer, buying a month of Game Pass and just hooning through the games, and if I’ve got any time left then I’ll smash through some Doom WADs and that’s me.

Otherwise, I try and stay away from screens and try to read or run more.

Or worse, the US telecom franchise 😭

e: obligatory Sinclaaaaaaaiiiirrrr

Would it make a difference though? I’ve only got a passing interest, but I thought top end speedruns were measured per frame rather than RTA?

something something bus something something 0.35 seconds

e: perhaps the answer is already there, RTA would likely be the only ones with significant differences.

Particularly the rifle-like properties of the standard Halo CE handgun. That weapon was broken at distance.

Yeah I’ve still got my headsets from boxes with Skype For Business branding that have “Compatible with Microsoft Lync” stickers on them.

It’s probably closer in UI to Skype from the 2000s that the “real” Skype never really recaptured. Not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.

My org used Skype For Business and it worked remarkably well. Much more lightweight, though somehow still a little less responsive than it should have been.

It has that “it just works” factor for video calling, whereas Teams almost needs a fucking checklist to rattle through if someone’s audio or video feed isn’t working.

I’m not sure if you’re taking the piss or not but I’m going to choose to believe you’re asking in good faith!

The code just feels… messy, unfamiliar, almost chaotic - but the semicolons and curly brackets in a neat little row, formatted in a satisfying way, is like an island of calm and order in the middle of a formatting clusterfuck.

A moment of serenity in the middle of a riot, one may think.

I hate it with every fibre of my being but also secretly calmed by that column of statement terminators and brackets.

It’s like the code representation of the Vancouver riots kiss photo.

Taking the issue at face value, I wonder what Johnny Null’s workaround would be for his (or their) name?

N’ull? Nul-l? \Null? Null? JohnnyN ull?

“maybe if I hit ‘compile’ really fast, then the bug might not have time to manifest itself this time”

Oh I don’t know, he’s already in Newport hiyoooooooooooo

Well done friend. Getting a squad together for four straight sessions is hard work, let alone four years. Rest well.

32-bit FIFA 98, best FIFA.

I never did beat Lode Runner on my Atari 800. What an absolute banger of a game though. Speaking of which, I remember playing Encounter on the Atari 800 and Mercenary III on the Atari ST, and realising “this is the direction of video games”. Incredible stuff.

Eurogamer as a website is just stuck in a tailspin now. I used to really like the site but now it’s in resale hell - thrown like a rugby ball to conglomerate after conglomerate where the only noticeable difference is more adverts on screen, and more pieces based on Twitter posts masquerading as journalism.

Thankfully, spinoffs like as Digital Foundry are still doing very very well and largely immune to whatever the fuck is going on at EG.

I don’t even know where to look for decent gaming news now if I’m honest.

Taking the #1 (or whatever number) ranked word would make for a good alternative to AskOuija or something.

I wondered why “die” was so common, until I realised we have a lot of Deutsch compadres too!

Yeah, a bit of sense is all you need. I’ve not used spoofing tools but a few of my friends have - we live rural too and it revolutionises the game. Even our local small city centre isn’t really raid friendly - it’s not like you can hang a out Times Square and literally walk into a full raid whenever you like.

That said, the weekly Pokémon Club in rural areas is a great social, and mons tend to stay in gyms for more than twelve seconds making it a bit easier to get pokecoins. The game is still heavily skewed towards city centres though.

The modern day spoofing apps are really quite impressive. Teleportation or time travelling generally gets you an account strike fairly quickly, but some of the cleverer automatic walking functions are really quite cool.