AtomicPurple

This post makes me want grilled cheese, but I don’t have any bread right now and all the stores are closed because Thanksgiving.

Define “late”

I have an autism diagnosis, and I’m pretty sure I have ADHD as well. Literally almost everything on that chart applies to me in a substantial capacity. I’ve never sought a clinical diagnosis as an adult, but if I were to I’m fairly certain I would get one.

The ADHD assessments I had in school were all the stare at a screen and hit a button when a dot appears kind. I think they were expecting me to get bored and mess up, but that’s the kind of task I’m good a hyper-focusing on short periods of time. One time the assessor told me I couldn’t have ADHD because my average reaction time was one of the best she’d ever seen. I think that type of assessment is fundamentally flawed.

Like 90% of these apply to me, though I’ve somehow failed every ADHD assessment I’ve ever taken.

It’s a fundamental limitation of the technology. Anything wireless, when it comes to audio, requires a certain amount of fidelity loss in order maintain real-time transmission without using an astronomical amount of bandwidth. With landline telephones, you have an exclusive, end-to-end physical connection, so you’re free to fully saturate the line with as much information as it can carry. It’s possible to fit multiple analog audio transmissions onto a single copper line, but the signals need a hard frequency cutoff for it to work. This is why long distance and international calls used to sound worse than local ones. In a similar vein, terrestrial radio has to split airspace between multiple stations, which is why it sounds worse than records or reel-to-reel tape, despite each station using a massive amount of bandwidth by modern standards.

Moving into the digital realm, the same principles still apply, but you can push bandwidth requirements way down thanks to the inherent efficiency of digital encoding, plus the magic of digital compression algorithms and error correction. As a result, wireless digital audio transmissions can maintain a much higher level of fidelity than analog ones, compare Bluetooth audio to FM, for example. Quality still needs to be sacrificed somewhere when transmitting wirelessly though, which is why audiophiles bitch about Bluetooth headphones and wireless mics. Even the best digital audio compression can’t compare to a copper cable carrying an unfiltered analog signal.

Digital audio compression is what makes it even remotely possible to have hundreds of real-time audio streams transmitting wirelessly to a cell tower, unfortunately you have to reduce the audio quality down to the absolute limits of usability in order to pull it off. Even if you still have a copper land line, the audio is always going to sound like crap if you talk to someone on a cellphone, it’s just not possible to operate a large cell network with the same level of fidelity.

I’m using a 12 year old Xeon based Dell workstation as a file server and PiHole. It’s quiet, reliable, and has a RAID controller built into the motherboard. Before I got my current server I was using a couple Raspberry Pis, which was more work to maintain and less reliable.

The only reason I’m using this machine at all though is because I got it for free. I definitely recommend taking the path of least resistance in terms of cost and availability if you’re not going to be putting super heavy loads on your server.

Not that Picross isn’t a game, but there are speedruns of Microsoft Excel. I’m not convinced something having a speedrun proves it’s status as a game.

or know the screwdriver twist technique.

I’m actually against the idea of a reboot / remake for most of the games listed here. They’re already good games, a modern update would only serve to render them obsolete in the minds of many and reduce the lasting cultural impact of the original titles. Re releases of the original versions, sure, but full on reboots / remakes, absolutely not.

I believe that, like film, game remakes should be reserved for titles that had potential they never lived up to, or where a developer has a fresh interpretation of a title that doesn’t supplant the original, such as the case with Final Fantasy VII.
To that end, some games I personally would like to see remade or rebooted are Whiplash, Jurassic Park Trespasser, Sonic 06, Enter The Matrix, and Nightmare Creatures.