evilstevie @evilstevie@mastod1.ddns.net

Baby Pacman is a 42-year-old cantankerous mess of hot moving parts combined with early 80's computer, a bizarre experiment of a pinball/videogame hybrid made by a pinball company that doesn't know how to make videogames and doesn't particularly want to learn, but who has enough money at this moment in history to fling mud at the wall and see what sticks.

It works by wiring together three completely different computers who hate each other. Their communication is utterly dysfunctional. When pacman eats a dot, the videogame computer tells the pinball computer that a ball just hit a slingshot, and that's how 100 points is scored. The computer that keeps track of the scores and credits has no idea that Pacman exists, the computer that plays Pacman doesn't know how many lives or points you have (lives are BALLS), and the computer plugged into the monitor retrieves the scores for display through wires that are intended to be connected to 7-segment gas-discharge displays.

None of these computers are capable of crashing. Crashing hadn't been invented yet. If the computer does something that the programmer didn't intend then there's nothing to tell the computer to stop, it just keeps on going until something sets on fire. The game is full of high-current components that can set on fire if the computer tells them to set on fire, and it will.

There were seven thousand of these things made and very few remain because they all broke down so hard that techs specializing in EITHER videogames OR pinball couldn't fix them, to keep one of these running you need a tech that specializes in videogames AND pinball AND bad decisions.

So if I'm to route this game - in a pub, mark you, not in a place where there'll be a tech waiting in the back ready to have a good cry - then y'all are gonna have to up your fedi meta game, sincerely, it's gonna have to be against the backdrop of the most rancid ridiculous shit that's ever hit these cursed webbed sites, I hear quote-retweets are coming maybe y'all can do something with that

The beautiful scenery of North Wales inspired me to create art. Unfortunately the only supplies available was the kiddy toy box and also I'm really fucking shit at drawing. Mixed media: crayola, felt tips, pencil, the world's shittiest rubber, spit.

Damn fedi will literally necroboost anything lmao

Today I saw “Meta glasses are the cybertruck for your face” and OMG that’s accurate.

Exactly 3 billion devices run Java. Every time you install Java on your computer some old DVR or something explodes to maintain the balance

We knew full well we were not "too good" to do the boring, tedious boilerplate that good code needs as its skeleton. We did it because that's how good code happens.

We used to handle code the way a furniture maker handled woodworking. Precision, planning, exacting execution.

We had knowledge, skill, and most importantly discipline. We didn't need hand-holding. We were the hand that people called to hold.

We built complex opaque types from structures and enumerations and unions, with clearly specified APIs to manage them. We structured our code for maintainability. We built to last.

We understood how to write good code in C. When we didn't feel like managing memory manually, we called up the Boehm garbage collector and punted, and that worked just fine.

What the fuck happened to us? We used to be the sharpest knives in the drawer. We didn't need an ocean of fresh water and an entire nuclear power plant to pretend to do our jobs, we just did them.

PSA.

An AI threat report accused a startup of Chinese espionage. Security vendors globally blocked them based on hallucinated findings. The startup is now suing. This is what happens when you treat machine-generated correlations as intelligence.

https://www.theregister.com/legal/2026/07/02/startup-sues-palo-alto-networks-koi-security-saying-an-ai-hallucinated-report-falsely-linked-it-to-chinese-espionage/5266201

Onion ads are killing it rn

@sundogplanets have NZ folks already shared Brendan Larsen’s picture of Mt Taranaki with you?

Shared on FB. His website is here: https://www.blarsenphoto.com

Harry Update: I told him he was orange

#CatsOfMastodon