RoabeArt [he/him]

I need to get back into OSM. Pokemon Go was the reason I initially started contributing. The game uses (used?) OSM map data, and certain Pokemons will spawn near certain biomes (water, woods, etc).

My little cousin played the hell out of PG around 2017-2018, and they mostly played it around the big park in our town. At the time, the park appeared on OSM (and by extension PG) as a featureless green polygon with a few roads and footpaths. In reality it has a bunch of woods, streams, a pond, playground, public pool etc. So I did a quick readup on how to add stuff to OSM and I gave the park a digital makeover. I even walked around the footpaths with my phone and marked them out with the GPS so that they would appear in the map more accurately.

Unfortunately it was quite a while before Pokemon Go updated its OSM database, and my cousin lost interest in the game by then. But I kept at contributing for quite a few years, adding random stuff in spurts and stopping for a month or two

They did this in a park by my house. It used to have a long paved path that meandered through some woods. Engineers with the city noticed the shortcut that people were cutting through, and realized that most people didn’t care for the long path. Apparently some anonymous person or several had been dumping gravel along the shortcut for traction and to make it less muddy. So the city paved the shortcut, and removed the long path so that nature would reclaim it.

Democracy in action.

It was kind of sad though to lose the long path because I liked walking through there, especially during the fall, but if it means having less maintenance machines going in there every week to pollute the place (lawnmowers, asphalt patching, etc) then so be it.

I have Batocera (Linux-based emulator platform) on a 2011 Mac Mini.

The only caveat is its weak integrated graphics chip that struggles to emulate fifth generation (PSX, N64, etc) and newer consoles, but since I pretty much only play 16 bit and older it’s been a solid machine.

I remember when Apple first switched to using Intel processors, people talked about being able to install Linux and other operating systems easily. I guess Apple didn’t like that.

There are still cars that come with incandescent bulbs. I own a 3 year old base model Civic and it still has regular light bulbs in the headlights and tail lights.

My city has a rail station right in front of the stadium and barely anyone uses it, not even during big games/events.

Any time I talk about my hobbies, I get told that I have too much free time on my hands, and/or that I should turn said hobbies into a job/business.

It’s like people are so capitalism-brained that they can’t fathom someone having a passion for the sake of the passion itself, and not making a commodity out of it.

Also the phrase “you have too much free time on your hands” as a backhanded insult. People seem to abhor the idea of someone spending their time doing things for themselves instead of working. Or am I reading too much into that?

I still remember the way my science teacher explained a hypothetical warp drive (like how it is in Star Trek). He took a black towel, representing space, and laid it flat on a table. He set down a miniature model of the Enterprise on one end of the towel, then accordion-folded the towel up so that the other end was close to the ship. He moved the Enterprise over to that end of the towel, and unfolded it so that it was flat again. The Enterprise was now on the other end of the table.

An overly simplified visualization, but it really illustrated the idea to my ten year old brain how space-time could hypothetically be bent to make fast interstellar travel a possibility. Also it made me realize that warp speed on the Enterprise wasn’t just a super powerful rocket or something.

This is in a lot of shows and not just sitcoms, but I hate contrived argumentative dialogue that’s set up so that the protagonist always gets the last word with “witty” responses/comebacks. It’s like watching a “I’m the attractive Chad and you are the ugly NPC” meme in real time.

Before Louis Pasteur’s disproving of spontaneous generation, most people believed that bacteria and putrefactive organisms like maggots etc. spontaneously poofed into existence, like a video game character spawning. Pasteur suggested that maggots came from flies laying their eggs on rotting meat etc, and that bacteria were everywhere and will multiply quickly under the right conditions. A lot of people at the time thought these were crackpot ideas.

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I wouldn’t say “completely fucked”, but for a few years I noticed YouTube on Firefox has this occasional quirk where videos will quit playing and infinitely buffer at the exact same timestamp. Like there’s no way around it except skipping about 30 seconds ahead with the seek bar, or doing a Ctrl-F5 (hard refresh) and starting the whole video over. Opera GX doesn’t seem to have this problem at all.

But it’s still not a big enough deal to make me give up Firefox completely.

“You can drink it and not get sick.”

“OK, drink some.”

“You’re a jerk!” leaves

While I wouldn’t argue it saves the planet, sequestering garbage in far off, centralized, contained locations is a little better for public health than simply tossing it in the streets like we used to do. Cholera outbreaks happened on the regular before organized waste collection became a thing.

Are we talking first computer in your household, or first computer you ever bought yourself?

Our first family PC was a hand me down from my uncle that we got when I was 12 or 13. 486DX2 66MHz processor, a couple MBs of RAM, 700-ish megabyte hard drive, Windows 3.1 and DOS. AOL install disks didn’t work on it because they needed at least Windows 95, and I was still clueless on how to set up a modem connection in 3.1. So it was entirely for games installed via disc only. We ended up getting a Windows 98 machine a year or two down the line.

First PC I bought for myself was a custom built machine from a computer shop that has long since gone out of business. I think I paid around $200 for it, so it was a fairly basic PC for 2004. Athlon 1.5 GHz CPU (with a loud as fuck cooler fan), 512 MB RAM, a video card that I forgot the make and model of, Windows XP. Lasted me about 3 years until I built one myself.

“Owning a car = freedom”

Unfortunately in a country where the infrastructure is so hostile to public transit or even pedestrian/biking amenities that it’s nearly impossible to live, work or function without a car unless you’re lucky enough to live in a dense urban community, I can see how people might believe this.

Same with coconuts. They are associated with Hawaiian and Caribbean cultures when in fact they’re native to South Asia and the Austronesian islands.

never gonna give you up never gonna let you down?

Scotty also does this in Star Trek III…

Scotty: “If you don’t have eight weeks, I can do it for you in two.”

Kirk: “Mr. Scott, have you always multiplied your repair estimates by a factor of four?”

Scotty: “Certainly, sir. How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?”