caleb gamman: toy movies for adults forever

U.S. Department of Agriculture (1917). Corn Saved the Pilgrims and Fed Our Pioneers / Corn Will Help Us Feed the World / EAT MORE CORN / Corn Meal ‒ Hominy Grits ‒ Samp.

i have a tiny scale to weigh all of my illegal drugs that i make, package, and sell, illegally. i live on the edge. i certainly don’t use it to make sure i don’t go ham with the kofi creamer. anyway.

when i am done w/the scale, i like to turn it off. i don’t know why, it has an automatic shutoff. it has become a ritual. you have to press the button once to zero out the display, then again to turn it off.

so if there’s any subtle weight variance (and it’s very touchy) while you’re trying to do this, the procedure looks like this. you press the button once to zero it, but then the weight changes, and then you press the button to turn it off, but that is now your first press, because the display is not at zero. rinse, repeat.

six feet to the left, if you open the microwave a few seconds before it beeps, you got the food but -you’re not done yet-. you need to shut the door and press the “stop” button. then it can finally beep at you, and you may now leave with your crappy food.

my logitech mouse has an rgb light that you can “control” through the incredibly poorly designed “app,” and even turn it off. it’s randomly turned back on three times now, which means i have to re-install the horrible app, turn it off, and then un-install the app. i will drill it out at some point. i could break down the mouse and then re-assemble it, but using a drill on it will satisfy a deep-seated need.

these are extremely trivial annoyances, but they get under the skin because actual people created these things. death by a million micro-cuts.

uhhh wtf becky

is this a me thing or a firefox thing. opera & vivaldi:

dunno, too tired. ignoring problem.

The entry below is from Macros, a murdery-mystery mass-market paperback originally made available to members of my patron sponsoring account two years ago. Ran into it today looking for something else, but it reminded me that I still need to convert the actual video surfing from VHS to digital and chuck the tapes. The machine is three feet from my head and the tapes are on the floor behind me, but yeah, I apparently need more reminders.

OBS is converting the video properly, it just doesn’t have audio. Audio works on the machine and I’ve read way too much about this problem on The Internet, a hot electromic community commodity popular with the jet-set.

Not Just Bikes: Designing Urban Places that Don’t Suck.

Japanese Noodles Udon Soba Hiroshima Okayama: Assemble the stall by yourself! Japanese ramen made by a man who works until midnight.

Type Revival for Film & TV which includes a section on automats. Additional reading: The Automat: The History, Recipes, and Allure of Horn & Hardart’s Masterpiece.

Automat June 1974. MODEL RACING / di Marina di Montemarciano (Ancona) ‒ ITALY / DUCK SHOOTING “IL MOMENTO MAGICO” / SHOT NOW “ENTUSIASMANTE!”

Neo: The Densest City on Earth.

Sinead O’Connor ‒ The Last Day of our Acquaintance ‒ NYC ‒ City Winery ‒ 11/8/2013.

Gachapon.

The blobs are happy in their new, hand-built wizzinator and that’s all that’s important to me right now. Build your own whatever, generate one, hundreds of blobs at The Blob Toy. I call it Blob Blob.

String Phone Sculpture. “What started as only one phone reaching across the square, ended in an invitation to all neighbours to connect via a string phone. We installed 16 phones criss crossing the square spanning up to 60 meters.”

昔から変わらぬ味『ペヤングソースやきそば』を刺繍しました【ほぼ糸暮らし#２３】(Peyoung Sauce Yakisoba / a taste that has remained unchanged for a long time.) [Almost Thread Life #23]

Tom Scott: I thought this rotating house was impossible.

I am familiar with slip rings through the guise of art, but this slip ring is next-next-level. All hail Queen/King Slip Ring. [thanks to steve]

School Equipment an Supplies Catalog for 1930-1931 ‒ The J. K. Gill Co. Portland Oregon.

The right-hand page features No 500 MERRY WHIRL, GIANT STRIDE, and MITCHELL SWING BOB NO. 600, all very “safe.” The MERRY WHIRL “sways in and out from the post” but “the seat always remains parallel to the ground.” Not seeing it, but I just quit coffee again today so I’m not awake yet. Seventy-five kids at a time? No thanks, just going to use GIANT STRIDE to launch myself into a brick wall.

Also, SPORTBALL. So it was a thing before it was a thing. Go team.

Sneakers (1992). Navigating by Sound.

Think of this scene at least twice a year.

The honeymoon window has passed wrt Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate (light spoilers ahead) such that a mixed bag of odd decisions and whatnot has made itself known. It’s fun “playing” with the algorithms for your followers. If you traverse the city roping from rooftop to rooftop and have a crew, they’ll follow as best they can w/o ropes. This means that they either climb the face of the building, or pop in and out of roof access ports. It’s just fun to watch. They’re all my new best pals and we go out for ice cream every day and everyone is smiling. Sometimes they get hung up on a rooftop, never to return to ground; once one of them went rogue and started shooting at everyone including me. Doubling the ice cream ration for the remaining crew.

The “repeat the same phrase endlessly when triggered” thing needs to just end. For the henchers, it’s always some sort of biting comment (selected from a short list of about six) when you’re anywhere near an enemy’s body (“serves you right,” etc). You have five followers, say, and you’re all standing in basically a fresh pile of bodies ... and everyone is repeating the same phrases over and over. I get the repeating loop thing when there’s a large selection of phrases to loop, but if you’re close to an npc and they don’t have much to loop ... they can shut up after delivering their lines, it’s okay. Additionally, way too many bystanders making sanity judgments while I’m skulking around factories and whatnot trying to save their NPC asses (“What’s her problem,” etc). It’s like people nattering about drone riding in Watchdogs: Legion: gets really old really quickly. NPCs also see dead bodies and start loop-shouting “murder!” etc but you can wave a weapon in the air and everyone scatters.

There are some screwy missions with screwy requirements. I’ve run into two so far wherein you have to follow someone [FX: everyone groans here] to protect them from snipers and whatnot. Yes, the person walks slower than your fast walk, that’s game design law, apparently. You get bonus points if you can meet some additional conditionals, and of course the conditionals are ridiculous. So far my favorite mission fail was when I was supposed to protect Karl Marx (there are a few famous people, at least two for which the writers have stapled on new bits of personality that I am sternly doubting). Hustled into a bar, took out the assailant, the cops inside saw me, I’m all “I’ll just run outside and rope up to a roof, it’s like breathing to me"; as I’m running out Marx is coming in and blocks the way; I die to coppers copping. “Oh Marx, you malignant minx.”

The game is a little too obsessed about hanging barrels. There are these barrels, on a hanging platform. You can shoot the rope, then the barrels comically miss an enemy just out of reach. This is one of the conditionals you can fail. They did the same thing in the Watchdogs series: “oh boy oh boy he just has to take three more steps” [FX: enemy turns around].

Occasionally I run into a cascading series of errors and annoying situations. A recent example. First, at your “base,” there is someone that occasionally drops a side mission. I was avoiding them but there’s a ledge nearby and the command to drop off the ledge is the same as accepting the mission, so now I’m in the mission. Second, you can’t fast travel when you’re in the middle of a mission, so I need to finish the mission. Third, the mission has the conditional: “Knock out policeman.” Nothing of the sort described in the tutorials. Everything is searchable online of course, but in the words of one random train station NPC, “put a stick about.” The documentation is a bit sparse, and the layout is a bit tatty. Fourth: “Destroy the evidence.” Oops, you were spotted almost finishing destroying the evidence. You cannot finish destroying the evidence. You will have to run away (because if you kill it’s mission fail, for this particular one) and wait until no one sees you to re-start trying to destroy the evidence. Yes. Of course. All very logical. Maybe I’ll just give up, go everywhere by foot/carriage, have this mission hanging over me forever.

The occasional mis-jump/stuck-in-a-place etc will very occasionally be the catalyst for failing a mission. The loss is a little you, a little the game. Great time to put it down for awhile.

There’s one road that is on the edge of the map, it’s very narrow with tall buildings on either side. I was on a carriage mission (some of these turn into insane chaos, it’s wonderful) with a bulky delivery. If I strayed just a foot to the right, I would get a warning (it’s the meta-story veneer to explain away things like map edges etc). I originally thought the warning was that the road itself was going to end, so I tried to turn around and it was impossible. I figured it out after awhile, but there shouldn’t have been a warning at all, with the hard line of buildings to the right creating an impassable border. There are “emergent” behaviors that don’t seem to be documented which are fun to discover ‒ like hiding in a double-decker carriage “omnibus” when you have a crew, one of them will immediately take over the reins and race through the city randomly, it’s very amusing and chaos in this game is delightful (you can also turn on your Eagle-O-Vision to reveal hidden collectibles on the map while you’re afk doing laundry, say). But the driver also triggers the edge-of-map warning, which is doubly funny. “Tell yourself, program, I’m just a passenger here.”

There are missions that are utter horseshit. “Kidnap this person with enemies all around that can break your hold on the kidnappee immediately. It’s really fun! Try it over and over. Hit E to tackle, but that doesn’t work if the tacklee is stationary because: bugs.” Oh he’s getting away in a carriage. You can’t derail the carriage: mission over. You can’t otherwise stop the carriage. I tried to jump on the carriage, but wacky physics bounced me off at a weird angle. He rides his carriage into the far corners of the map for about 30 minutes (!; I spent the time mucking about with other missions) then it reset him back to the start. Cascading errors, I don’t know how this was ever greenlit. Why is he in a carriage that cannot be stopped, only destroyed, failing the mission? Why isn’t there a maximum distance mission fail check given the previous problem? And etc. I had a few ideas about how to cheat-pass the mission. They all failed. Finally, I started blocking all exits, intending to kill everyone trapped inside except the idiot because game ire was red hot. Blocked the first one with a giant double-decker carriage “omnibus” and suddenly idiot’s icon teleported to the edge of the “escape this area” area ... so I hustled over there, kidnapped him, walked him 10 feet, mission pass w/no kill bonus. [rolls eyes for about 30 minutes]

There are follow missions. I do not understand how anyone can derive even the tiniest mote of entertainment from the videogame-follow template in general. In this game, sometimes a large mission has been broken into several sub-missions and one will exclusively be “tail this guy/cart for a good long while.” You’re too close! Now you can’t see the object, you have 24 seconds to re-see it, not like that other asshole that ran all the way across the map for thirty minutes. As usual w/following missions, ridiculous constraints. I am not a goo-goo baby. Do I have to post the video by Nakeyjakey. [pause] I’m posting the video by Nakeyjakey. It’s about hand-holding in open-world games.

There is a sub-set of missions in which you free the childrens from brutal factory conditions. So, not set in present-day Arkansas. Got it. The first time I did it, I “cleared” the mission, the children ran away, everything is great, here’s your money/XP. Returning to free roam, this was right outside the factory:

Hrm. Must have missed that one. Eh, he’s not operating a scary giant loom machine, gonna just call this a big win and exit stage right. Actually working kids are scattered all over the map. The ones that stick out, they’re shovelling coal, or actual horseshit. Always the classics with the kids. You can get children to “scrap” for you (Harpo Marx mentions doing this for a NYC tradition, once-a-year street-by-street bonfires, in his book), you can run into them anywhere on the map but they also re-spawn in particular spots. Don’t work for that guy, work for me.

You can’t sit anywhere except the carriages. Not even in the base, by the fireplace or on the cozy couch. Most everyone else sits in the base. They had a sit animation for the carriages they could have used.

The UI for upgrades/inventory is a hot mess. Quick example. The weapons “inventory” screen shows every weapon in the game. What is your equipped weapon? The weapon that is highlighted when you go to the page. Once you select another weapon, your equipped weapon is no longer marked. Putting a little arrow in or the word “equipped” above/below the weapon: not in the budget. It’s a scrolling screen, because those are fun and every time someone uses a scrolling screen in this manner it turns out that half the screen is taking up by a useless graphic. “We don’t like clutter.” I don’t like labor/delays.

I’ve read that the combat is a bit lacking compared to other releases from the franchise. I am not a good combatter, I bowed out of arcading when Street Fighter showed up, a breakthrough videogame in which two people fight in the street. My M.O. in Syndicate is to generously give away my free steak knives very quickly to as many enemies as possible, from maximal distance, to minimize potential combat. “One for you, you you you [runs across roof] you, also you two way over there. You’re all so welcome! Mission pass.”

One of the DLCs I bought “features” boy detective, Arthur Conan Doyle, famed author, gullible sort. If you have a chance, read up on his interactions with Houdini. In the game, Doyle is your annoying bloodthirsty sidekick jr. as you “solve” mysteries. The methodology they use is annoying, and that goes doubly for Doyle. Wotta creepy drip. The DLC was a dollar and change.

There’s another DLC that centers around Jack the Ripper and a review indicated that you play as him for a brief bit, so no, and definitely fucking no. Hard pass.

Process X: The process of making tea cups, plates and kettles. A Japanese porcelain maker used by world VIPs.

I just buy random unmatched cups and plates at garage sales. Ask me how.