I think it depends on the movie

If, after 30 years it still has a lot of cultural relevance, I’d think of it as a “classic” movie.

If it doesn’t, if it hasn’t aged well and/or faded into obscurity, I think it’s fair to think of it as an old movie.

Probably around '95, I would have been watching Star Wars for the first time. It didn’t feel like an old movie to me then and it still doesn’t to this day. Other movies from that same era haven’t aged quite as well and felt “old” to me.

Looking at some of the top movies from '95, some of them are just as enjoyable or relevant today as they were when they released, others feel dated and not relevant to me today.

It’s going to depend on your personal tastes and experiences of course. I can also sprinkle in a lot of platitudes like “you’re only as old as you feel” and “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”

I think there’s also room for some overlap. There’s classic movies that also feel dated. I think some movies can be both old and classics. You’d be pretty hard-pressed to find someone who wouldn’t agree that, for example, Casablanca, isn’t old, but I think that just about everyone agrees that it’s also a classic. Where the line is is pretty murky.

Not immediately relevant to your issue, but fun fact I wanted to share regarding the term “flashing” your BIOS

The term originates from a time when BIOS was stored on an EPROM (Eraseable, Programmable Read-Only Memory) chip (not EEPROM, which later became the norm and stands for Electronically Eraseable, Programmable Read-Only Memory)

So if you think about those terms for a minute, if EPROM was erasable, but not electronically erasable, how did you erase it?

The answer is, you exposed it to UV light, ideally a strong one like a mercury vapor lamp, but other sources could work they’d just take longer.

So you literally were flashing light at the chip.

The chips had a little window built into them to expose the memory array, and they were usually covered with a sticker you would peel off if you needed to erase it.

I don’t exactly keep up with the latest in emulation, and who knows how Nintendo is going to do things, but my understanding that in a lot of ways GameCube (and WII for that matter) emulation has been in a better place than N64 for a while now, so I’m not too concerned about the switch being able to run it.

While the console itself was less powerful, the N64 is kind of a monster to emulate, it basically speaks a totally different language than any computer (or phone, console, etc) you might try to emulate it on, and there’s a lot of weird special code in individual games that the console needs to deal with, so there’s a lot more for the emulator to do and so you kind of need a comparatively beefy device for the emulation to run well.

GameCube and later consoles work a lot more similarly to how your computer and other devices work, so it’s a lot easier to emulate them.

I’ve seen it explained sort of like if the N64 spoke Chinese, the GameCube spoke Spanish, and your computer speaks Portuguese.

If a Spanish speaker slows down and throws in some hand gestures, a Portuguese speaker will probably more-or-less get the gist of what they’re saying, and Google translate can pretty much fill in the rest. That’s your computer emulating a GameCube game. There’s not too much the emulator actually needs to do, just some minor corrections here and there but mostly things translate pretty cleanly 1:1 between the two languages.

Spanish and Portuguese are wildly different languages though, almost no shared vocabulary, different languages families, even some of the hand gestures may have different meanings, and Google translate is probably going to spit out some weird garbled nonsense if you try to translate anything too complicated through it. It takes a lot more to facilitate communication between the two languages.

Few more ingredients but my carnitas have always been a crowd pleaser

• Pork shoulder
• Coke
• Orange juice
• Chicken stock
• Canned Chipotles in adobo
• Onions
• Garlic
• Spices - I mix it up a bit, but salt, pepper, cumin, cayenne, and oregano will usually get you there. Packet or two of taco seasoning would probably do the trick as well

I tend to eyeball everything, but usually about a 12oz can of coke, oj and stock until it looks right, one onion chopped up, however many cloves of garlic I feel like peeling and chopping

If the pork shoulder fits I do it in a pressure cooker on high about 2 hours, if it doesn’t I do it significantly longer in a slow cooker

When it’s falling apart, pull the bones out, shred (I like to use a mixer)

Then like you, crisp it up under the broiler, and maybe mix in some of the cooking liquid

For the record, the butterball boneless turkey roasts also include a gravy starter.

I buy a fair number of them when I find a good deal, I have a meat slicer and make most of my own lunch meats and they’re really convenient for that. Even with the added weight from the gravy which I also don’t use, they’d probably still be a money saver if I could keep myself from loading the sandwich up with extra meat.

I’ve been trying to figure out a good alternative, I may try at some point just cramming some turkey breasts into some meat netting and seeing how well it holds together.

A lot of men’s fashion, especially formal wear, takes styling cues from military uniforms, the modern necktie descends from the cravats by some military unit (I want to say it was some mercenaries involved in some French war, but I don’t feel like looking up the specifics right now)

There’s not really a single robin hood canon, some versions of him are quite violent, others he avoids killing. All depends on who was telling the story and when.

I also don’t like fish

I find that sushi is less offensive to me than cooked most of the time, so that’s one place to start. Still not something I’d actively seek out but if it’s what’s offered to me I can deal with it.

I also overall find freshwater fish to be more palatable, I enjoy fishing so if I catch some decent sized trout worth keeping I’ll eat them (it’s more for my wife, but if we’re already cooking it I’ll eat it)

My mom’s also not a fish eater, but can stomach flounder.

And the n-word is synonymous with “black person,” doesn’t make it any more ok or less hurtful to use it.

I don’t have many gen z people in my immediate circles, but something I’ve noticed online re-emerging in the last couple of years is the use of “retarded” as an insult.

I can’t definitively point to gen z as the culprits, I can’t really know who’s behind a username in most cases, it could just be that older generations have found their way to the parts of the internet that I inhabit, or may I’ve migrated to theirs as I’ve gotten older, or that overall attitudes have shifted, but it does sort of coincide with when I figured the younger half of gen z would be hitting the sort of “grown-up” internet.

Maybe I was in some sort of bubble, but for around a decade it felt like that was something we managed to mostly scrub from our vocabulary. It was honestly a little jarring to see it again, like I’d suddenly been transported 20 years back in time surrounded by assholes from my middle or high school.

Just kind of spitballing

For starters, you design a robot whose design is to take, for example, 100 steps forward, then take 100 steps back. Then you could:

Have it take a scoop of soil before it turns back, you now have a sample to test

Put some kind of chemical test strips (litmus paper, water quality, etc.) on it and send it towards a puddle of water you want to test. It splashed into the water and comes back, now you can see what the results on those test strips say

Not all electronics are so sensitive to radiation, and to some extent they can be shielded. Building a whole digital robot that’s hardened against radiation would be difficult and expensive. Sticking a couple radiation hardened sensors on an otherwise dumb pneumatic robot that doesn’t need to be hardened would be much cheaper.

Send the robot in with analog measuring tools- thermometers, barometers, film cameras (radiation can expose film, so picture quality may not be great, but it’s better than nothing, and just seeing how exposed the film is could be used to get a rough idea of the radiation level) etc.

Say there’s a big rock, and you need to know what’s behind it. Nowhere in the safety zone has a good viewing angle, and it’s either unsafe to fly over the area or there’s too much tree cover so you can do aerial photography. So you stick a mirror on the robot and send it out somewhere behind the rock off to the side o bit. Now you can look at the mirror through some binoculars or a telephoto lens and see what’s behind the rock in the reflection.

These are just a couple off the top of my head ideas as a layperson, I’m sure that a scientist or engineer actually doing this kind of work whose entire job is to think about this could come up with plenty of other good ways to use this sort of thing.

Electronics definitely make things easier, but we’ve had people doing science for millennia before we figured out how to do anything particularly useful with electricity.

I work in 911 dispatch, I had a call once upon a time, just an open line from a cell phone. Couldn’t make any contact, just heard what sounded like a male and female arguing, it was hard to make out, sounded a little muffled. It didn’t sound super heated but just enough enough that for liability reasons I felt like it should be checked out as a possible disturbance/domestic.

The cellular location was decent but not pinpoint accurate, and it dropped in the middle of a fairly densely populated area, so it could have been any of potentially a few dozen or so houses, apartments, or businesses. No answer when I called them back.

Entered the call with whatever information I had, and checked where the location was dropping on Google maps.

It was dropping at a small local playhouse. Out of curiosity I checked what shows they were doing.

It was Gaslight.

Police checked the area and didn’t find anything. So I’m pretty sure I was just listening to them rehearsing from inside of an actor’s pocket or something.

My friends family has a shore house we’ve gone to a few times. It’s an old house, built before a/c was a thing, and still doesn’t have any. We throw open some windows and the house stays pretty comfortable, it’s warm but not at all unbearable even when the temps are in the 80s, 90s, occasionally even over 100 (fahrenheit of course)

It does help that it’s at the shore so there’s basically always a nice breeze.

TL;DR

From my end of things, none of these companies are much better or worse than any other. If I had to pick one of the big names I’d say maybe ADT/Everon, but the difference is miniscule. If you can find a smaller local company, that’s probably your best bet, especially if they somehow have a local call center (most of them seem to outsource to central call centers that handle probably dozens of alarm companies)

If you’re in a rich, less-dense town where you can’t count on neighbors being around to see a break in happening to call it in, sure, go ahead and get an alarm. If you’re stuck living in the ghetto, and can somehow afford it, go for it. If you have some sort of fucked up domestic situation where your ex is stalking you or something, it’s probably worth it (but change your code and locks.) If none of that applies to you, just lock your doors and maybe put some lights on timers and motion sensors, and just have a little situational awareness and you’re probably going to be fine. Like I said above, most of the calls I get are false alarms, and of the legitimate ones, most of them get called in faster and more efficiently by the homeowner, a neighbor, an employee, or a random passerby before we ever get the call from the alarm co.

And if you do get one, make sure they’re setting it up right, make sure you’re providing them with correct information and keeping it up to date, and make sure the sensors are labeled in some sort of sensible manner. “Zone 2” means absolutely nothing to anyone.

If I ever personally get an alarm system, it will probably be for fire alarms. Currently though, I have some smart smoke detectors that will send me a notification on my phone if they go off. I think that’s pretty adequate, as long as I have cell service, I can call it in myself if I’m not home, and if I don’t have cell service, that probably means I’m out camping and so my dog is either with me or staying with my parents, everything else in my house is just stuff, and that’s what insurance is for.

I apologize, this became a long rant, too long for a single comment. This comment is mostly rant, I’m going to reply to it with sort of a TL;DR in a 2nd comment, but it’s still probably going to be kind of long, I have a lot of thoughts about alarm companies.

I work in 911 dispatch. What happens when your alarm gets activated is the alarm company receives the signal and then they call someone like me to send police/fire/EMS.

I’m pretty sure that everyone in my profession has a pretty low opinion of alarm companies. In theory the services are a fine idea. In practice, they’re kind of a shit show. I’m not too sure where the biggest issue is with them- corporate decision making, lazy installation techs, incompetent account managers, terrible phone operators (some of them like to call them dispatchers, they don’t dispatch shit) or the customers are all just idiots, but it’s probably all of the above and more.

Starting from the bottom, a whole lot of these places seem to use the same sort of call centers we’ve all come to know and hate from having to call tech support. Most of them have thick accents, and most of the ones who don’t seem to be borderline illiterate. Think back to grade school when the teacher would go around the room having you read a paragraph or two from a book out loud then pass it onto the next person to continue reading, it eventually would come around to the kid who probably had undiagnosed dyslexia and a fear of public speaking, and he’d struggle through it having to sound out each word syllable by syllable while you all just went ahead and read the paragraph on your own. That’s what talking to some of these operators is like. And if you deviate from their script even the tiniest bit they get totally flustered and don’t know what to say.

That’s all well and good in your high school English class when you’re reading through Romeo and Juliet, but when I’m trying to send the fire department out to see if a house is burning down or not it’s maddening when I can’t tell if the address they’re giving me is “7 main Street” so “11 maple Street” either because of their accent, they’re mumbling into the phone with a screaming baby in the background (I’m pretty sure some of them are working from home now) or they just can’t fucking read.

On my call here are the questions I’m asking.

What is the address- house number, street name, apartment/suite number if applicable, municipality (not necessarily the same thing as the town/city on the mailing address, they’re different sometimes, I’m sending your towns police, not delivering your mail)

What is the nearest cross street- to verify I have the right location, damn near every town has a Maple Street, and because I can’t necessarily count on getting the correct town from the caller, this helps me make sure I’m sending help to the right Maple Street and not the one in the next town over.

If it’s a business, and the name of the business. I’ve had alarms called in as residential alarms but the name of the resident is listed as something like “Anderson Construction LLC” so a commercial alarm under just some schmuck’s name. Or it will be the name of some property management company and not the actual business at that location.

For security alarms- is it audible or silent

The area of activation - half of them are just labeled as something like “zone 2” which is useless. I don’t know where zone 2 is, the alarm co doesn’t know, the homeowner doesn’t know, our police and fire sure don’t, so we don’t know where we need to be looking for the issue. Is it a motion sensor? A window alarm? The garage? Your guess is as good as mine. Or sometimes zone 2 is kitchen windows, bathroom door, side room motion, and basement stairs all on the same zone.

Also once in a while they’ll tell me something like it’s a security alarm but it’s coming from the smoke detector.

If it’s residential - what is the resident’s name?

Some sort of contact phone number. Ideally a premise phone number, but at least a residents cell phone, or a keyholder for the business. Some way to get ahold of someone to make sure everything is ok, see if they know why the alarm is going off, confirm if anyone is supposed to be there, figure out how to re-secure the house if they find an unlocked door, get authorization to force entry if needed, etc.

Will you notify- will you be calling the resident, an emergency contact, keyholder, etc. to let them know about this alarm

That’s a lot of ranting on my part, but it’s not much information I’m looking for. On the rare occasion they have all the information and the operator is competent, it takes me just over 1 minute to get everything I need

My entire call ideally boils down to something like:

123 MAIN ST, TOWNSVILLE NY, APT 4
X-STREET: MAPLE ST
AUD, BEDROOM MOTION
JOE SCHMO - 555-555-5555
W/N

There’s not a single one of those fields that they haven’t messed up- wrong or incomplete addresses, no x streets, no name/wrong name, wrong or no phone number, no list of emergency contacts, or the contacts are all outdated and haven’t worked at a company for 10 years. Sometimes all on the same call. I sometimes wonder how they manage to get paid for their service because I don’t know how they’re able to send their customers a bill or call them to ask for money because they don’t seem to have any of that information.

And sometimes they call the wrong jurisdiction, I’ve occasionally had to transfer alarm calls to other dispatch centers around the country.

We had one once where all the information they had was an “address” that was something like “¼ mile past the motor pool” and the zone. Literally nothing else. Somehow our supervisor managed to track that down to an Indian reservation on the other side of the country. I have no idea why it came to us, but we got that call a couple times before they were able to finally update the account information.

Some of that is lazy installation techs not setting things up properly, or customer service and account managers and such not properly verifying information. Sometimes though I think it’s customers providing them with garbage information from the get go.

Also most of these companies have some sort of verification protocol where they try to reach the homeowner to confirm if help is needed and they ask for a password. I get a lot of false alarm calls where they spoke with the homeowner but they didn’t know their password, so they had to call it in. Maybe write that down and stick it in your wallet or something if you can’t remember it.

They’ll call in 3 hours later with an “update” to a previous alarm that our responders have already been out to and cleared from for 2½ hours. And sometimes they’ll call in 2 minutes later with a new request for dispatch and are shocked to learn that we already have help on the way because I literally just hung up with another operator for an alarm at the same location.

And when a sensor is malfunctioning and giving false alarms, no one ever seems to do anything about it. There are houses and businesses that we legitimately have police or fire at almost every night and sometimes multiple times a night because the alarm keeps going off for no reason and it sometimes goes on for months or years because no one can be bothered to get a tech out fix it or at least take that sensor offline.

We had one alarm we kept getting for about a year. The business it was for had been closed for years and the property vacant, even our police couldn’t track down a property owner or anything. Who the hell was paying that alarm bill? I think it only stopped when the building was demolished.

This all pretty much applies to medical alarms like life alert and such too. Missing or incorrect information across the board there. Same address verification, name and phone number, we also want medical history and access information like a hidden key or garage code. We’d rather not have to break down your grandmother’s door to help her up after she’s fallen and can’t get up if there’s a spare key hidden under a flower pot we could use instead.

And the icing on the cake, of the probably thousands of alarm calls I’ve handled in almost 6 years I’ve been here, maybe a few hundred of them have been legitimate, the rest were false alarms or accidental activations. Most of the legit ones have been fire alarms.

And of those legitimate calls, all but maybe a few dozen of them have been called in faster and more efficiently by the homeowner, employees, or random bystanders/passersby who either noticed something suspicious or heard the alarm going off and called it into us before we ever got a call from the alarm company. Hell, sometimes the alarm never even goes off until the police are there clearing the interior of a building after a break-in.

I live and work in what I’d overall consider to be a very safe area. Break-ins are almost vanishingly rare, and when they do happen it’s more likely to be some sort of a domestic thing where your ex wants to steal back the TV they bought you and remembers your alarm code or something like that than the sort of burglary you probably imagine. And when the more legitimate break-ins happen, it’s either in the super rich neighborhoods when the homeowner is out of town, or it’s in the poorer, more urban (this is the suburbs, none of it is really urban, but a couple towns come pretty close) parts of my county, where most of the people probably don’t have the extra money for an alarm system anyway. For everyone else in the middle, I think security alarms aren’t really worth it.

Yeah, steam has definitely done a lot to improve the situation and I’m very impressed with the current state of things.

I just have a bit of a mental block from the last time I seriously tried to use Linux (circa 2009 probably) that I need to get over. A lot has changed since then

Lol, I’ll keep that in mind, internet stranger. I do have a lot of techy friends who I’ll probably offer it up to first, and I haven’t quite ruled out running Linux myself either to keep as my main PC or to use as a media server or something, but I’ll keep you in mind if I’m looking to get rid of it in a few months.

If it does come to that, pay for shipping (or pick it up if you happen to be local) and it’s yours. Feel free to hit me up to ask about it come november-ish if I don’t reach out first. No guarantees it will be available, but I’d rather it go to someone who’s going to use it than be waste

My PC isn’t compatible with Windows 11.

I cobbled it together from spare parts as my wife has upgraded over the years. It was a pretty beefy computer when she first built it, and it’s gotten a couple upgrades along the way, but the CPU and MoBo are probably about 10 years old if not older (it’s an AMD FX-something, I’m unsure of the exact specs, it’s whatever parts were in her bin of cast-offs stuck with a new case and hard drive)

And I’m happily gaming on it. I may not be maxing out the latest AAA titles in glorious 8k epic quality 120hz HDR VR yadda yadda yadda, but I can still run pretty much any game out there on some acceptable mid-to-high quality settings and decent performance.

I’m probably going to have to either upgrade the MoBo and processor come October, or make the jump to Linux (which I’m not exactly opposed to, but I do like not having to fuck with wine and proton to run my games)

It’s a perfectly serviceable board, still doing just fine by me, and there’s no reason it can’t give someone at least a few more good years of use, even as a gaming computer if you’re not a graphics snob.

But if I decide to upgrade, unless I find someone who wants to run Linux on it, or understands the risk of running win10 with no security updates, it’s probably going to become e waste.

My sister went to school in NEPA, so I’ll throw you a couple bones

Weather sure is nice today, heyna?

Wanna go grab a couple-two-tree beers?

The several competing pronunciations of Wilkes-Barre

Throop (pronounced “troop”)

Philadelphia English

I root for the iggles, phils, flyers, and sixers. I eat beggles with cream cheese, and in the summer I’ll get some wooder ice. I go fishing in the crick. If I fall in I’ll dry myself off with a tal, and maybe I’ll hang it on the ratty-ator to dry afterwards. I’ll warsh the mud off my boots at the spicket outside. On vacation I’ll go down the shore. If I need cash I’ll tap mac, perhaps so I can order a cheesesteak (wiz wit) or hoagie. Maybe I’ll see if my friends want to join me, and I’ll ask them "jeet? And they’ll answer “no, jew?” And at the end of the night, after a few citywides, I’ll tell them “I’ll see youse guys later”

You can also replace most of those nouns with “jawn”