It’s Hobby Lobby so there are Halloween and Christmas decorations up right now even if it’s June. It’s like they always start holiday decor 6 months in advance of the actual holiday.

Ubisoft has released many games that require constant Internet access the past decade and then just shutting off the servers making the game completely unplayable. This just happened to The Crew last month. This will happen to:

1. The Crew 2
2. The Crew Motorfest
3. Steep
4. Riders Republic
5. Star Trek Bridge Crew
6. Skull & Bones (A AAAA game)
7. Newer versions of Just Dance
8. Newer versions of Rocksmith

And more…

Pirating doesn’t solve the game being completely unplayable when UbiSoft decides to shut down the servers.

The Crew could be played all the way through as a single player game. It made no sense for a constant Internet connection. The Crew’s credit screen for the final version of the game lasts over 45 minutes. Thousands of employees across the entire world worked on that game and now it is just gone with only gameplay videos being the only record of existence.

They don’t want you to spend time in the restaurant. Less and less McDonalds PlayCenters are surviving. The seats in the restaurant purposely get uncomfortable after 20 minutes of sitting. Harsh lighting. Drab surfaces. They want you to get your food and go. Even better if you use the drive thru or mobile app. Any modern fast food restaurant like McDonald’s, but especially Starbucks, does not want to be your “third place”.

I’m assuming US?

One thing to note is that the US started requiring back up cameras in all cars manufactured after May 1, 2018. Your best bet to find a dumb car would be to look at base trims of some cheap 2015, 2016, and 2017 cars. Cars like the Elantra, Forte, Sonata, Altima, Versa, and Sentra did not have touchscreen displays in their base trim. I know because I basically lived in rental cars during those years and am very familiar with all of them.

Now, definitely watch out on the Korean ones though due their cheapening out of security equipment…but the Kia Boyz have probably salvaged titled all of them by now. I would also be hesitant on buying a used car with a CVT because it’s a crapshoot if the previous owners actually kept up with the mandatory maintenance on them.

I think the Mazda 3 or Toyota iA are good used car choices to keep on your radar. There is a “screen” in both cars, but they are dialed controlled when the car is in motion. They both have a REAL automatic transmission too. No CVT stuff to worry about.

Yeah, back in the late 90s, Circuit City exclusively sold PlayStation and didn’t even offer Nintendo products until closer to the GBA / GameCube era.

CompUSA did the same too.

Everyone forgets the old retailers, but one big argument to PlayStation beating the N64 was that the games were cheaper and available in a lot more retailers than Nintendo’s products.

When Interplay decided that Sim City needed goofy, over-the-top FMVs on a CD-ROM…I think that was peak Sim City. As a kid, I was disappointed 2k and 3k didn’t have professional, career-oriented adults yelling at you for your incompetence in FMV.

The parity of environmental impact of a physical disc versus streaming a movie is 4 play throughs. So, if you play your blu-ray / 4K disc 5 times, it is more environmentally conscious than streaming the movie from a data server.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/discs-vs-data-are-we-helping-the-environment-by-streaming/

Such bullshit since most of the recordings sound like shit. That’s the idea though. These 78 records are made of lac bug crap called shellac. The shellac degrades over time so the purpose is to retain the sound off of the recording of a format that is physically deteriorating and will not be around in the future. The project is to capture a unique sound experience that will not be available for future generations.

No streaming platform offers this. No streaming platform offers the ability to hear music ripped from vinyl, cassette, 4-track, or 8-track. Sony and Universal will never offer this. The user is only given one option usually for a song and who knows what master was used and how the audio engineer felt that day to master the track.

Also, we all know how Universal treats their masters…pathetic. So many of them are gone now thanks to their careless warehouse fire. If people don’t create offsite archives, who will? We can’t trust the record companies to do it!

Definitely an unusual intersection where one street looks like a diagonal merge into another, but the stoplight placement is bizarre as the driver can see two different light directions at the same time coming up on the approach.

Should be a variable charge like a gas tax placed on public EV chargers and not a one time yearly fee. There is a big consumption difference between a Hummer EV and a Smart EV.

EDIT: Not every state has thought clearly about additional EV fees. Starting later this year, Texans who drive electric cars will pay significantly more in registration fees than an average gas car driver pays in gas taxes each year…because it’s fucking Texas.