Jon Stewart On How Tech Companies Are Changing Entertainment / Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend.

Bike ride #3X-4X. I haven’t been riding as much, the novelty has worn off and just getting “out” of this area to places that are “nice” to ride is a pain. A freeway cuts off access to the bay in a horrible, insistent manner. Miles of Not Getting Across Me. Traffic continues to traffic. Today got almost-brushed by a school bus. Two weeks ago, was riding along a generous two-lane parking lot service drive next to a fast food dump and the person following slowly behind. No one else on the road. I stopped, they stopped. In a parking lot. No one is around. The car is twenty feet behind me. I have my foot on the curb. I’m not going anywhere. Let’s see how long this lasts. Waiting ... waiting. After a minute I got bored and pulled into the fast food place so they could continue on their way unimpeded by my arrogance. Have the bicyclists coined a term for this? Over-courtesy? Cars, in general, usually pull some sort of boner around three times per each biking trip. Which is about the same as when I was driving. Difference now is the sometimes the boner is that the driver has to SLAM on the brakes to avoid hitting me (there’s only been one time I didn’t have the situation under control, it was that asshole who gunned it through the Seabreeze dirt parking lot because his small penis needed an off-road workout [PENIS: “It’s dirt, dumbass, HIT THE GAS” CLOWNASS: “You got it, junior-junior YEEEEEHAWWWWWOH SHITTT”]). Though, as mentioned before, my favorite people are the oblivious ones, who either go the distance not even realizing I’m right next to them, or are startled after they’ve passed me. My post-glow go-to these days is to yell out that I love them. Because I do. I love all people. Did that sound convincing? Hold on, let me warm up a bit. I lOvEEEEE all pEoPLLE Anyway, a novel about a bicyclist who kills errant drivers would be a best-seller, I think. The bicyclist would not have to go to prison, just like all the drivers that kill pedestrians/bicyclists. “Golly, I killed a family! Hrm, what’s for lunch.” Laws: sensical, fair.

My bike lights and reflectors arrived, so I happily pitched the old light. It’s not going to serve anyone any function whatsoever. The new front bike light arrived with a rusted port and died w/in a week or two. The two rear lights are still happy and bright. I had to make a wooden mount for one of them, the second fit right into the slot of the old bike light.

Got a bunch of valves and adapters, though that’s pretty pointless until I have some sort of road bike pump that I can use. The hand pump I have is not going to pump to 80psi, pretty sure.

The bell is ringing w/the littlest of bumps now. I pulled it off to take it apart and there’s no clear way to open it up. Another vote for buying a new bell with a good ringy-dingy. Let me just order my dream bell, I pointed to it earlier in the year. Bell USD13, shipping USD54. Hrm no, I’m allergic to spending more on shipping than product. My dream bell is just a dream. [later] Now the bell doesn’t ring randomly. Dunno.

The city of El Cerrito has a restroom key thing wherein you give them $25 and they give you a restroom key. There are ~12 or so keyed restrooms in city buildings, scattered about, like a poopin’ treasure hunt. So I bought a key. You get your money back, apparently. They didn’t give me a receipt; having the key is good enough for them. I have paid attention to “government” for decades now and I posit that they will somehow “fuck this up” when I try to get my money back years from now.

In GTA news, Rockstar is enduring DDOS attacks from whiny modders who can’t cheat in the game any more for the most part and/or whiny mod sellers who can’t profit from selling mods any more. Again, for the most part. It’s not a single event, more like an argument over weeks/months. I need to find/make a crew before I decide to chuck it again for a year or so. Occasionally going up to the roof of “my” “office” to snipe at griefers is entertaining, but it’s not game sustenance.

Rockstar still hasn’t taken ONE damn step to block messages from people advertising level-unlocks/modded billionaire accounts etc. You’d think that would be high on their list, because those accounts are taking morsels off of Rockstar’s HEAPING plate of cash. I don’t know, they move in a bizarre fashion and basically don’t have a PR division. The one thing to always remember is that they farm out DLCs and etc to different countries/divisions, so every damn time the UI is inconsistent, the game objectives are inconsistent, everything is different. Each division is reluctant to touch any other division’s code. Additionally, they have no clue what future-proofing is. “We made a gun locker that stores all your guns!” [FX: months later new guns are added to the game] Gun locker: “I don’t know what those guns are” Ten years of this.

Now that modders are ~90% gone, hanging out in public lobbies is again a thing. So I’m being re-introduced to GTA Player Mental Acuity. I was talking with a crew member, one of the only ones that shows up on the regular, and we were hashing out the frequency of players who would kill you, then you’d kill them back and they’d say “why?” and you’d say “well, considering everything, I think it has a lot to do with when you killed me first unprovoked, five minutes ago” and they’d say “What? Whut? I didn’t kill you.” This happens a lot. Is there something in the young child’s brain that suppresses memories? It happens so much I don’t think it’s just kids telling porkies. You’re young, you can’t remember anything, you’re old, you can’t remember anything. The sweet spot is 25-39, I think. 25, you can rent cars and crash them into buildings and you’re also good at fuckin’, if you (you personally, not “you” as in “people”) actually have the ability to get good at fuckin’.. You hit 40, your ranking on any dating profile auto-nosedives and the memory starts going. Find a steady someone by age 39.99973 at most.

SuperfastMatt: It’s Finally Time To Put A 3D Printer In Your Garage. If you need to catch up to speed on the state of the state of 3D printing, this is a pretty good place to start. “This video is sponsored by Bambu but it’s not because they reached out to me it’s because I reached out to them ... I bought this printer with my money about six months ago [...]” Matt is using the machine to (among other things) create printed prototypes for machine parts that will be made out of metal, after clearances/alignment/etc is all sorted out with this quick prototyping. The last chunk of video has Matt creating a functioning adapter for “the intake,” a car part that you are all familiar with and need no introduction to. “I actually already made this part out of aluminum and I kind of hate it.”

Additionally, as a side note, Youtube needs to develop a futuristic technology I’m going to go ahead and call a “button” labeled “SPONSORED” or some such. It needs to be uniform, in your face, obvious. Perhaps even sassy.

Rockstar Games recently announced the inclusion of the anti-cheat BATTLEyE system to Grand Theft Auto Online. I quit GTA over two years ago but came back in August because reasons. Back in the day (since 2015), I was part of a three-crew “alliance” that totaled over 100 members. We could usually fill a lobby (30 people maximum), which made the lobby safe from modders and/or cargo griefers. The “objective” of GTA can vary from player to player, but most would agree that acquiring new toys/businesses/apartments/etc is somewhat high on the list. This requires cash. Cash is earned from jobs. Most well-paying jobs have you delivering cargo. Other players are awarded a piddly sum and some fireworks to destroy cargo. It’s ridiculously easy to do this ‒ some delivery vehicles blow up with one RPG, which is pocket change. Everyone is equipped with RPGs. Grenades, grenade launchers, sticky bombs, proximity mines, etc etc. GTA is actually, now, an urban war simulator. I cannot remember the amount, but someone totalled up all the guns/ammo you can carry on your person at one time ... it was something ridiculous like two tons.

Modders are fond of crashing sessions, either intentionally through a simple menu selection or accidentally through asset accretion (“I’ll spawn 100 cargo planes ha ha funny oh no what happened to the game”) etc. Avoiding sessions with modders/griefers was essential if you wanted to deliver your cargo safely or just fucking be able to play the game for more than a few minutes.

For awhile, Rockstar was actively fighting modders by scrambling and re-scrambling their own in-house anti-cheat system. So that gave you about three days of no one being able to use their mods. The problem was the p2p architecture of GTAV ‒ just a bunch of PCs talking to each other. Most other high-tier games, they have dedicated servers that “administer” the game, so one PC can’t falsely say to another PC, “your character dies” etc. After awhile, Rockstar started adding servers into the mix, but these servers were specifically for low-bandwidth players who were lagging in the game. If your connection was too slow, Rockstar would assign you a server and become your data transfer buddy to keep things moving along. [Update] A long clarification here. For all that I know, the servers that Rockstar added to help low-bandwidth players could be just repeaters. Just because those players were now being processed by a server instead of interacting with all the other players’ PCs, doesn’t mean that there was any additional processing to keep that player safer from modding than a normal-bandwidth player. Which is what you want in a large-scale properly-server-based game, but Rockstar doesn’t care about what you want. The only other good unintentional side effect from this is that it kept low-bandwidth player’s IP address hidden from modders/griefers/potential DDOSers. I was going to do tests to see if I could spoof Rockstar into thinking I was a low-bandwidth player, and also do tests with our tri-crew modder folks (see next paragraph) to see if it was just a straight repeater, but that was about the time our group started pulling rip cords in earnest to get away from the increasingly toxic/unstable sessions.

Despite Rockstar’s active attempts to flush modding, You could pretty much guarantee that in a full lobby, you had three or four modders. Some of them were “good” modders that were patrolling the lobby, looking for other modders to kick out of the session. We had two of these types of modders in our crew mix; our ability to take over a whole session was waning. People were quitting the game because of the endless modding. There were two random jackhole modders that became obsessed with our crew and would DDOS some of us, follow us around sessions messing up our games. More people quit. I started a side hobby of chatting with/at VPNs about who was harassing me that week.

I wrote my own modding programs. These were modding “lite” ‒ our crew modders were running off-the-shelf software that actually decrypted GTAV packets as they whizzed by so they could get player names/actions and also send spoofed encrypted code to the other pcs. I just played with IP addresses. One feature was a whitelist/blacklist (there were/are a few free white/blacklist programs available; I didn’t trust them). Press a button, keep my friends in the session, kick everyone else. Another feature was “flush” ‒ I could press a button, and everyone else in the lobby was “kicked” ‒ really in effect just a self-kick to my own lobby if a modder was trying to screw with me/crash the session (sometimes you would get various warnings that things were going awry and could jump before it took you down as well). But this also was handy for another problem ‒ the black screen. My understanding ‒ from reading other people’s writing about this ‒ is that Rockstar’s network code is sub-par. That other games don’t have the down time, and problems getting/keeping you connected to a session. How much of that is modding? Don’t know. But it would still happen when you were in a lobby, by yourself, trying to enter a building. No modders. Boom, black screen. So I could either sit and wait to see if it was just a delay or it was actually locked (and then go through the long exit/restart process), or I could hit my self-kick and get in a fresh solo session much quicker.

Then, in 2018 or so, Rockstar announced it was removing the anti-cheat system. This really helped almost all of my crew alliance to run for the exits. I finally gave up as well, modders were able to drill into solo sessions around this time. If only Rockstar had some walking around money to throw at the problem. Hold on, I’m getting word from hq ‒ GTAV is the highest grossing entertainment property ... ever.

If was just the greed, I might be okay with it. But in addition to this, Rockstar is butt-draggingly slow on improving aspects of the game that are just dead-drop boring or repetitive. Additionally, they’re very trollish, I mean, in a systematic way. I don’t want to go on and on about this but they seem to think that random annoying bullshit is a crucial, core part of the gaming experience. Sure, it’s frustrating to get calls from every goddamn character all the time telling you to buy a submarine or an auto shop or a casino penthouse or an office that you can not block/turn off, but what if those calls were timed to come when you were pre-occupied ‒ in a firefight, or parachuting to the ground ‒ and what if when the phone pops out with the 29th call from an idiot character pushing their business/vehicle/whatever you couldn’t pull your chute or shoot your gun because of the shit UI? Oh you died. Ha ha, funny! Multiple times funny. Hundreds of times funny! They took their troll call and pushed it through the shit UI to double-troll you to death! It’s like a layered sandwich, made of excrement. I call it Rockstar Jollies. What if cars exactly matched your speed to create the perfect T-bone, over and over and over and over? Ha ha funny! What about that bug w/NPCs dumping all the bullets of their gun immediately? Isn’t that a day zero bug? Oops you died. Ten-year bug! Funny! [put royalty-free image of harmonica pistol here]

I’m not explaining this well. Breaking it down. Rockstar programmers wrote code that detected when you were falling through the sky/in a firefight, and right around the time you were nearing the last moment you could pull your chute and actually live/were near death after being shot repeatedly, they’d have Random Jagoff call about a pretend agreement you made to buy an auto shop, let’s say. It would auto-pull up the phone so it was on the screen and ringing, maybe even auto-answer it so Jagoff could start talking. When the phone is on-screen you can’t pull your chute/shoot your gun because Rockstar logic. You die. Rockstar Jollies. It’s not gameplay, it’s “how can we fuck with the player.”

And on, and on, and on. It’s Rockstar’s trollish choice that cargo griefing means you lose all of your product. When you quit a session in the middle of a delivery, you lose ~5-10% of your product. They could make it the same small percentage for someone blowing up your cargo. They could beef/speed up vehicles, give you alternate ways of delivering, let you select delivery mission type, etc. There’s a whole laundry list of solutions, you (Rockstar) can easily access these helpful suggestions just by watching videos of GTA veterans getting pissed about this for the last decade. [side note: again, this is Rockstar system trolling. “Make them make a delivery with a really underpowered moped/boat of a van up a hill so steep to the point that they’re not sure it’s going to crest ... that’s tight gameplay right there”] People play this game despite all the poor decisions and broken UI and lackadaisical coding.

Why all the phone calls? Because Rockstar wants you to spend fake money. Why? Because you probably don’t have enough time to grind, so instead you can buy “Shark Cards,” spend real money to get some fake money. So those calls are basically ads. Ads ads ads ads. Unless you want to grind some boring-ass delivery missions in slow-ass trucks (several different types of delivery missions feature underpowered vehicles) for the nth time w/the griefers and modders, or by yourself in a solo session.

And on the other side of the fence, you can actual-pay various modders for fake cash as well. A large number of modders have created bots that join a session, spam text on how to give them money for an account with millions or billions of dollars etc, then bounce to a new session, rinse, repeat. Text messages that are impossible to minimize/stop in any manner, except if you had a “computer programmer” on your staff. I mean, here’s something that would ease 90% of the pain associated with these bots. Get your pencils ready, Rockstar.

IF (there’s a text message from someone that is the exact same as the text message they sent w/in 60 seconds ago)
THEN (maybe don’t send that same text message to everyone again)

I’m having a sale, that bit of code only costs $199.99. I accept checks drawn on real, actual banks IRL. No cryptocurrency, thank you. [added sidenote: yes, it will end up being an escalating war, but since all the bots are going to join multiple sessions just to advertise the exact same url/discord links, you can focus on that. A session-hopping url-dropper is 100% going to be taking money out of your mind-boggingly immense vault I mean back pocket, Rockstar]

Okay, so now we’re all caught up. Battleye is apparently a kernel-resident anti-cheat system, so it can do essentially anything with your data. Every time you run GTAV, you give it the keys to your system. If it finds anything that’s playing hinky with GTAV, ding, you get a system-id ban.

I don’t know if my programs will trigger Battleye. At this point, I’d be fine with a GTAV ban. But that will probably also apply to GTAVI w/a system ban. I could get a low-end PC and another copy of GTAV to do a test run, but that’s not worth my time/money. Just writing the code, that was already a ridiculous notion. It was like a game within a game, dude ... trippy, right? [FX: brushes your face with a giant pair of emu feathers]

You’ll be completely surprised to know that within 24hrs of the Battleye announcement, modders crashed my game twice, and also screwed with my inventory. Also, there’s a new type of crash that Rockstar will probably fix, in that (it appears) if Battleye removes the “host” of the session (one PC is given this designation, it’s coordinating the session in some small manner), GTAV flips out and throws everyone into the campaign/single-player mode. Fun.

[update] I got the bad host message while in a private session, when I was the “host” of said session. Wasn’t doing anything of note. This is (apparently) a new type of error that is just randomly happening to people, either individually or everyone grouped in a session. I am assuming here it’s not modders trying to tunnel into private sessions again, I think they have enough on their plate trying to navigate around Battleye at the moment. [end update]

This whole Battleye thing, people with more brainses have indicated that it’s either/both because they’re not making enough money on their subscription-based monthly GTA+ additional-cash-cow, and a pre-cursor to the way they want to run GTAVI. We’ve already “taught” them that they can earn an Uncle Scrooge-sized vault of money by avoiding the game industry standard of acquiring actual servers, so what’s stopping them from doing that for VI? Additionally, various sources I’ve run into over the years indicate that their earnings from the PC version are only ~10-20% of their whole GTA pie. The rest is console-based, and those are locked down, very little modding happening. So I don’t know, just be glad that they’ve made chirps that GTAVI is actually coming to the PC at all. Have they made chirps? I thought they made chirps. That’s another thing, they’re incredibly tight-lipped about everything. “Saving a bundle on PR, I hired my nephew! He’s the whole team!” It’s ... exhausting.

Looking at my own personal scorecard, Battleye has both taken away my ability to compensate for Rockstar’s black screen/modding/etc problems with my own programs, and in return is not adequately stopping modders from fucking shit up. Perhaps the contract with Battleye is dynamic ‒ the Battleyers will be continually hunting down the types of modding problems that escaped their original coding and will be diligent enough that constantly creating new/modifying extant mod menus will no longer be lucrative enough to bother. That still doesn’t fix the network problems GTAV has, hanging when trying to get in a new session, buildings, or even a solo session. That, I suspect everyone gets to live with until they grow up and get away from broken-ass p2p architecture. Never going to happen, glad to be future-wrong. Let’s check back in in 2026.

Trading card. Ringo Starr places empty milk bottles on stoop (Back text: “No. 38 in a series of 60 photos / Photos with the courtesy of Nems Enterprises Ltd (C) A. & B. C. Chewing Gum Ltd”).

An early entry in the catching-celebs-off-guard photo category (staged or not). What was the first one? Discuss amongst yourselves.

We haven’t gachaponned in awhile so let’s gachapon gachapon.

I don’t know why the guy is naked. Don’t be naked in a gachaponnery.

On occasion I like to go back to listen to bands that I’ve followed for years/decades, catch up, etc. I went to Spotify’s Stereolab page and in the top 5 track listing, there was a song “Gabriel” that was shown as their most-played track.

“Huh. Never heard of it.” [FX: listens] Uhhhhhhh. Yeah no. This is not Stereolab. The Spotify listing for the associated album, the 2003 ABC Music ‒ The Radio 1 Sessions, has 47 tracks. But both Wikipedia and Discogs show that the album has 32 tracks.

It is some sort of data problem, in that some of the tracks from the 2001 album What Sound by the band Lamb have been deftly woven into the track listing of ABC Music ‒ The Radio 1 Sessions, including their #1 track, “Gabriel.” Now you can enjoy the sounds of two different bands in one listening session without changing the dial.

Sears Wishbook, 1946, pg 137. Make Lead Soldiers.

I remember very little of childing but I do recall being stymied by various “kits” that were above my mental pay grade. Chemical, electrical. But this, it’s just lead. Just pour the molten lead in. What a delight.

saddlebag ripped, dropped below tire axle

two tomatoes tried to make a break for it but are still scheduled to be salad

i had intended to sew up the saddlebag with leather needle/thread but i have a lot of intentions

i did take a photo of some street art though

[FX: STARTS TO DO AN ELECTRONIC WIZARD THING]

[FX: SPILLS COFFEE ON IMPORTANT DOCUMENT, SIPS IT OFF WITH WARM, LOVING MOUTHPARTS]

this is black heart or blackheart, i believe

i saw just one of these hearts on two blank yellow road signs during construction and my poor, undernourished brain thought for a second that it was some new official icon

also someone forgot to tell the road construction crew about “bikes” oh well maybe by 2097

someone dig me up, put my skeleton on a bike, push it into traffic

awoooo i’m a ghost skeleton

Safecracker was this strange little 1996 pinball machine by Midway. It’s like they took the Addam’s Family pinball table and squeezed the hell out of it, made the flippers a tad shorter, etc. The machine also barfs out a token that rolls down the playing field glass if you Do A Thing which I never figured out what the thing was back in the day. Today, at the Pacific Pinball Museum, I also did not figure out the thing.

now that i no longer drive a car around ... it’s time to build my bart bag.

1) white sunglasses. these are sunglasses that are spray-painted white. entirely.

2) headphones w/cable that leads to backpack, which is not plugged into anything. this is to keep people from talking to me which never happens, and to insulate my ears against shitty bart engineer disease noise. “we can RE-INVENT TRAIN TRACKS!” [SFX: insane screeching noise for 50 years]

3) lozenges.

4) trick can of peanuts which releases multiple springy snakes. “would you like some peanuts? it’s not a trick.”

went to apple ring hq visitor center

they had these neat stair railings perfect for Hot Wheels®

didn’t have advance warning so didn’t have any on me

alert the childrens

the apple ring hq visitor center is three sections:

1) cafe

2) store w/a few “exclusive” items like logo’d t-shirts

3) large model of ring because you really can’t see the ring, even from the roof. you can see into one room in the ring, but that’s probably the room that has a door with a sign: “The Randos At The Visitor Center Can See Into This Room Conference Room”

and everything is precisely engineered/laid out (except the parking lot, which was way too tight for USA America’s Big Ass Cars and Truck Walls but then maybe that was a flex, who can say, really)

i got the impression someone kept shouting MORE GLASS over and over during the build phase

but the funny thing is that words/print are/is kept to strict minimum

and as my friend pointed out, there was a giant phrase painstakingly laid out in large letters both on the inside/outside of the building, lookin’ sort of permanent

so it (a) gave off this weird vibe that it was the MOST IMPORTANT THING and (b) it was such a dunk

[FX: goes absolutely BUG NUTS on design] “this could be better”

there also was this air of trying too hard

the flush button for the toilet was a 1.5" metal disc placed to the right of the toilet

just sitting on the wall like it was hiding a screw

“i guess it’s this” [FX: PRESS] [FX: WAITS] [SFX: flushing noise] “It was that”

the “dispense water” mechanic for a faucet was a ~4" vertical handle that you pulled toward you

me: “see that guy getting a cup of water ... guess what i did first”

friend: “you pushed it straight down”

me: “yep”

but at least i figured out the hot wheels railing immediately

[SFX: makes car noises with mouth]

THE NEXT DAY: i have slept on my visit to apple ring hq

and even w/o coffee i figured it out, i solved the apple puzzle

it now occurs to me that the giant panel that said “pardon our horribleness” was there because -that entire panel was originally glass but was cracked/smashed-

maybe by a visitor, maybe because buildings that are 99% glass are just gonna do that

so have a giant blank panel in storage, jic

don’t trust glass

never use glass horizontally, for example as a desk/coffee table/breathtaking your-weight-supporting view box high above the city

glass will let you down

it’s just glass don’t make it pretend it’s stronger

some days, glass doesn’t have enough spoons

Introvertedmadness: Surviving the Bay Area.

Travel Man: Richard Ayoade & Joe Lycett being AMAZING in Amsterdam (including a quick bit at FEBO).

Not Just Bikes: How American Fire Departments are Getting People Killed.

just doing a quick fly-by of the shooting events for the 2024 olympics

not familiar with this sport at all, have cheerfully ignored it for decades

they’re all lined up at the range taking turns pew pew

and the crowd is ... clapping?

wtf is this

all of the specific equipment they use to weigh themselves down and dial in super concentration just to get that 0.000001% boost and you let fucking yahoos sit behind them and cheer/clap/hoot?

don’t know why i’m surprised, given the ghastly uninformed/dangerous relaxed attitude toward preventing covid during the games

it’s just entertainment, fuck the contestants, we need money

jes’ doin’ a little brain surgery: LIVE!

who’s lighting up randomly every other month now

who’s re-installing/un-installing the mouse control software with the insanely horrific ui every other month just to turn off the god damned light

no one, that’s who

(yes i pressed all the buttons repeatedly, thanks though)

logitech: never again

Bike ride #24-31. Total 307mi. / The Kryptonite lock I found in the dirt a year ago has given up the ghost. It locks, but it also happily unlocks with any combination. I’d like to use it as a “pseudolock” to create the appearance of a slightly-more secure bicycle, but I don’t trust it. It could flip the other way and decide to stay fully locked no matter what. In my mind, at least, I don’t know that technically that’s possible. Not worth the tiny bit of security theatre. This is bad timing for Reasons but then there’s never a good time to buy anything, really. Not into it. “Nothing? I’ll take as much as you got.”

I mentioned wanting to create some sort of half-cart device to carry 2x4s. “Well,” I thought with what purports to be a brain, “I could just slap ’em on the side instead.” Which ... could have worked for say, one board.

Let’s do some math. 10lbs per board, plus a 40lb Dutch bicycle. ~80lbs. Pretend I only had to wheel it a few feet, not like pfffft miles or something.

goddamn ai is in everything

2girls1bottl3: #intellectuals