@ChateauErin@mastodon.social cover
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

ChateauErin

@ChateauErin@mastodon.social

Games writer (Hack n' Slash), used to be an aerospace engineer at JSC, first queen of RPOP. Demon-frog apologist. Trans woman. Avatar: Shia the Cat.

I star posts very inconsistently and have disabled notifications about being starred. Please don't infer anything from me not using the star.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

vampiress , to random
@vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

Today's tiny rant while my coffee machine kicks into gear:

Saw a post complaining that [specific subcategory of computers] aren't "exciting" any more.

I don't want my computers to be exciting. I don't want a million new features in the OS updates each year.

I just want the bloody thing to work as expected.

ChateauErin ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress I'd settle for "not terrifying"

vampiress , to random
@vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

Just started a sentence with "what is it with kids wearing X these days” so yeah that happened and it made me feel old.

ChateauErin ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress parents, are your kids chat jeepities? you may be "rizz." more at 11 on WOLD

vampiress , (edited ) to random
@vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

Despite people often not realising or presuming I -am- Australian, that is a technical fact. Here is a list of the there most insanely Australian things about me. Guess which one is the lie?

  1. I once got charged by a wild wombat.
  2. I once drove a WW2 jeep around some random guy's property.
  3. I was once next to someone who got hit by a boomerang, blood going all over my face.
ChateauErin ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress choosing 1) because I am terrified by the concept of wombats generating invoices

vampiress , to random
@vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

Ironic punishment idea: the board members of any tech company involved with LLMs are put in submersibles and left at the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean, their only way to save themselves a terminal with ChatGPT to help guide them through incredibly specific technical challenges.

ChateauErin ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress oh no that actually sounds kind of like a fun game

ChateauErin , to random
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

interacted with an Aussie friend about prices of things and was once again struck by how we both have dollars but the USD obviously isn't the dollarydoo, so what even

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar#Etymology
Turns out "dollar" is a foreign pronunciation of Thaler, short for Joachismthaler, the town (Joachim's Valley) where some coins were minted. The name got popular, and was used for more than one kind of coinage, notably Spanish pieces of eight that the Americans copied for their coinage once they existed

ChateauErin OP ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_dollar
The Australians had pounds and tried and tried and tried to decimalize and eventually managed it in the 1960s and wanted to call the new currency "royals" but nobody liked that so they went with "dollars" instead. lol

Wikipedia doesn't mention the term "dollarydoo" but Wiktionary claims it was minted by The Simpsons in 1995, which tracks. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dollarydoo

ChateauErin OP ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress one of the only things I remember from that episode (aside from the things I couldn't place) is the toilet apparatus in the US Embassy that has misled people about the significance of coriolis force to this very day

ChateauErin OP ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress I assume most USians have toilets with basins the size of the Hoover Dam that use the entire discharge of the Mississippi River to flush, and that they/we heap disdain on any toilet that economizes on water usage

ChateauErin OP ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress oh yeah, I'd heard about the poop shelf toilets before. It's always the little things that seem the weirdest, I guess.

vampiress , to random
@vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

Good Morning.

Today is bug fixing and grumpily musing on the truly massive number of games of pool I lost last night.

ChateauErin ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress truly in pool the only losing move is not to play

i miss playing pool so much

vampiress , to random
@vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

I watched Love Lies Bleeding (2024).

I don't think I've so rapidly vacillated between loving and hating a film through its whole runtime ever.

I think I really liked it? Maybe loved it? Or maybe hated it.

But it was amazingly done, if nothing else.

As to how I feel about it... well, ask me three times in a week and my answer will probably just... depend on my mood.

ChateauErin ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress I just watched it and wow. More than I expected. Every time I thought I had a box around it, it tunneled out. Definitely more "god this could be from a Wes Anderson film" than I expected, juxtaposed against...well, the rest of it.

ChateauErin ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress perfect way to put it.

vampiress , to random
@vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

Given “Netflix and Chill" is a euphemism for sex, I'm surprised "Netflix Special" isn't a euphemism for a specific sex act.

ChateauErin ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress a "Netflix Exclusive" is any sex act that's already popular on the BBC

ChateauErin , to random
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

Fallout is a pretty enjoyable show. If you don't mind a little hyperviolence now and again I think you will like it just fine.

vampiress , to random
@vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

It's been a while BUT... I got a few more big box games! Though, 'big' is subjective here. The first and most exciting one I've wanted for a while - the original 688 Attack Sub, which is one of those 1980s style 'mid sized' boxes. Slight, and a bit smaller than what'd become the boxed size standard later.

I love the design - a 'classified' document containing orders.

The back cover, advertising: “THE TARGET THINKS. THE TARGET FEELS. THE TARGET WANTS YOU DEAD.” and "This is the simulation that resets the standards in color, realism and 3D graphics: that puts you in command of a top secret billion dollar Los Angeles class U.S. attack sub: that pits you and your crew against deadly fleets of submerged, surface and airborne targets around the globe, that unfolds the dangers of espionage, evasion and destruction.”
The box has one of my favourite things - a fold-out front cover. But unlike other boxes where that’s for additional marketing material selling you on buying the game, in this case it actually opens up the box - so you can extract the manual and floppy disks without fully unpacking the box (which I have nonetheless done here).

ChateauErin ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress I loved 688 Attack Sub (to the point of writing my own accounts of its various adventures) and we had it in that box when I was a tot.

ChateauErin ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress I played multiplayer 688i all of once, by finding a forum where people still played it. Won PvP by shotgunning all four tubes into the distance and hoping the ADCAPs would do the work for me. They did.

Multiplayer Dangerous Waters was super fun when it worked. Very crashy these days

vampiress , to random
@vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

FWIW with the currently ongoing search engine Discourse… I did use Kagi, paid for it, for a while, but it's a REAL suss company and its heavily AI focused.

These days I use a combo of DuckDuckGo and Stract.

ChateauErin ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress I hadn't heard of Stract. I've been using DDG but I find that I have the same problem with it these days that I do with other searches--it seems to pivot into a more common search than what I'm actually searching for and I don't know how to get it to look for the thing I actually want. Like, recently, I don't want to use VRChat as a webcam, I want to know if I can display a webcam in VRChat (which seems to need a third-party service)

vampiress , to random
@vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

It's kind of a shame that Sugar has begun "airing" (or whatever we're calling things becoming streamable) at the same time as Andrew Scott playing Tom Ripley over on Netflix.

The latter will certainly eat up all the media conversation airspace over the former.

I mean, I 100% believe Ripley is great and can't wait to see it, but Sugar is such a weird, fun, noir beast that I hope it gets some solid viewership.

ChateauErin ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress do streaming execs have the brainworms that they need to have the best ratings in their "timeslot"? have we regressed to that?

vampiress , to random
@vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

Like Discord needed to get any worse.

ChateauErin ,
@ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress my friends and I are already talking about how we expect to need to move off of Discord. I've yet to check to see if the one obvious alternative I know of, Matrix, is worth trying to spin up.

vampiress , to random
@vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress every story needs a villain; hopefully after some time the amazon logo is augmented with the post-nationalization USPS Amazon logo

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress I have a quote from a dev friend that goes something like "we're using [name of game] boxes in the office as a kind of currency, like cigarettes in prison"

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress yeah. I'm....on the verge. I might just try Indeed alone first? I'm running out of job listings I can easily find on my own

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress i mean, if it had the doors it'd be easy I guess

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress a term from back when random-word association with "bank" might be "trustworthy" and "safe"

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress Not to discourage you from reading it, but the Internet Archive has the author reading a slightly-abridged version. It's an interesting way to re-experience the book at some point
    https://archive.org/details/NeuromancerReadByWilliamGibson

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress the reaction to this game has been truly mind-boggling to me. I played the first one, and it was neat. I was stoked to play this. and then everybody I've ever seen on Steam showed up too. People I thought I'd never hear from again just started turning up in game.

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress ME, thinking hard: ...yes, Madam Prime Minister, I think it's been long enough since I've had Tex Mex

    ALSO ME, attempting to remove an anti-burrito from the burrito-storage warehouse: vanishes in a flash of gamma rays

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress I think I'd only ever seen the last part when it aired on TV; seeing the whole thing made me appreciate it so much more. It's a pretty epic story arc for a movie; it feels like all the good parts of an abridged TTRPG mini-campaign.

    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress they knew the GM really liked snakes when they started the campaign. Or they thought they knew

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress I love both itch.io and Bandcamp in part because I can and do pay someone more than they ask for if I like the thing and think they've underpriced it

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress wow yeah. I've just finished it and...yeah. What a build up to a glorious finale. I agree with your other, later post that they got the length right too.

    This is a surprisingly good age for storytelling, no matter how bad so many other things are

    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress Lost's greatest sin was teaching people that you don't need to have an ending ready to make a load of money making a TV show

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress @linuxfiend I think I'm unusual, but even entry-level headtracking like Opentrack + a phone app like Smoothtrack is sooooo transformative for flight sims. I do almost all my sim flying with a gamepad because incredibly lazy but the head tracking helps so much

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress I don't think about the names of programming languages very much, but Python does have the small advantage that "pythonic" for idiomatic/conventional Python isn't overloaded the way "coding Swiftly" or "Swiffer code" would be

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress I feel like I should know what to expect of an Apex Gamer Chick, but I don't. Branding? Good twitch reflexes? Potty mouth? Competitive? Severe agoraphobia and RSI?

    ChateauErin , to random
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    speaking of minefields
    Amazon Prime Video has been garbage for as long as I've been aware of it. But now like 95% of it has ads. You can tell if it will have ads or not by hovering over it, or get rid of the ads for an extra $3/mo or something, but they've been playing the "oopsie poopsie you'll need an extra subscription to see that" game for so long that it was enough to get me to drop prime altogether. Something I should've done forever ago

    ChateauErin OP ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress yeah. I ended up letting that lapse because the only thing that I wanted to watch was Severance, which I watched like five times, but it did seem much better overall. My next video service will probably be Nebula

    ChateauErin OP ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress a ton of stuff seems to be on Paramount+, but I refuse to go there because I was happily paying somebody else (Netflix) to watch Star Trek and then Paramount had to roll their own.

    ChateauErin OP ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress yeah, no kidding. Nothing else makes sense anymore

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress game dev teams that could have yearbooks

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress one of the best games ever. I should probably dig my Switch back out and get that; it'll be easier than hooking my N64 up to my monitor

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress it's PS/2 devices all the way down

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress Olivia Williams didn't get cast in enough stuff imo

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress just a glance into life at the Ebert home

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress any tips for doing that make up? I've been tempted many times to try but have always chickened out

    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress ooooooo that's a hell of a date. very cool

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress I've stopped having alerts for unrecognized numbers for texts now. There's just too much; it's particularly bad in the US because of the election now. You have no idea how badly Joe Biden wants to have coffee with me or how many phone numbers he will use to inform me of this

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ChateauErin ,
    @ChateauErin@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress if it can tell me which edges connect two arbitrary nodes in a graph, it's AI

    bonus points if it can tell me if there is no connection

    even more bonus points if it can find good or optimal paths in a weighted graph

    after that I don't care

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • test
  • worldmews
  • mews
  • All magazines
    •