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Cake day: March 20th, 2025

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  • Not really; The emulator doesn’t use any copyrighted code, but the ROM is copyrighted. That’s just basic IP law.

    What is fucked up logic is Nintendo encrypting their ROMs, then providing decryption keys on the console. So the emulator itself is legal, but actually booting a ROM requires decrypting it, which requires keys from a legitimate console. Nintendo has argued that those keys are illegal to use in an emulator, even if the user rips them directly from the console that they own. So you have the keys. You own the console they’re stored on. But it’s illegal to use those keys anywhere except on the console they came on, because Nintendo said so.





  • It’s the whole “couponing is only trashy if you’re poor” mentality.

    For the rich, couponing is a game. See how much you can get, for as little as possible. You have the storage space for it, so you’re not worried about excess or waste. All you care about is gaming the system to see what you can get. You had to buy 18 months worth of laundry detergent to get the discount? That’s fine, cuz you have space for it at home. And your basic necessities are already covered, so the coupons don’t need to be for staples that you’ll use quickly or regularly.

    For the poor, couponing is a necessary evil. You’re eating chicken every day this week; Not because you really like chicken, but because it’s what you had a coupon for. And now you need to eat it before it goes bad, because you need the space in the fridge for this week’s coupons and you can’t afford to simply toss it out.


  • Yeah, lots of people don’t realize that the public education system was designed to prepare kids for factories. It goes all the way back to the Industrial Revolution, when parents were working 16 hour days in the factories. They needed some way to keep their kids occupied while dad was stamping steel and mom was weaving fabric. The factory workers lived in corporate-owned towns, and all of their needs were (hopefully) covered by the factory owners. And along this line of thinking, the factory owners started public schools, both to keep the kids occupied during the day, and to prep them to work in the factories once they were old enough to know how.

    Basically everything about modern education is run like a factory. Everything is standardized to the median 85% of the population; students who deviate too far from that are punished or segregated via special education. You work (study) when the bell tells you, eat when the bell tells you, shit when the bell tells you. You’re expected to sit quietly and do your work, no socializing except when the bell tells you. Et cetera… The entire idea was to give students a baseline level of education that they would need to work in the factory, and prep children to work in factories under the same grueling conditions.





  • This is largely because people misuse WD-40. It’s a solvent. It was made to displace water, which is why it’s slick; It slips into wet joints, and sticks to everything it can so the water is repelled. But the chemical properties of this make it amazing at dissolving things that water won’t. It dissolves rust, which allows it to bust up seized joints. It dissolves oils, which makes it good for cleaning machine parts. It dissolves adhesives, which is why it’s so good at helping scrape them up.

    It’s not a good lubricant, because that’s not what it’s made to do. After you dissolve all of the rust, you need to apply a fresh coat of oil, or else the part will just seize up again after the WD-40 evaporates. Because the WD-40 didn’t just dissolve the rust; It also dissolved the oil that was lubricating it and protecting it from further oxidation.

    Oddly enough, some people swear by it as an arthritis treatment. Have some stubborn arthritis pain that painkillers or meds won’t touch? Try rubbing some WD-40 on the joint like lotion. Apparently it works when nothing else will.


  • It definitely hasn’t aged well, but that’s largely because the humor was based on pop culture references. Talking about Jessica Simpson isn’t really cool anymore. But that the time, it was a sort of revolutionary thing to have games reference current pop culture. It made the games feel fresh, especially if you played them right at launch.

    Were they great games? No. But from a gaming culture standpoint, they had a surprisingly large impact. Game devs learned what did and didn’t work in regards to the references and gameplay, and that alone makes them culturally important.

    Also, games deserve to be preserved even if they didn’t have a massive impact on gaming. Even old Flash games have massive preservation efforts, because every single game was someone’s pet project. Imagine saying the same thing about a bad film. Sure, a modern 4k re-release may not need to exist, but that keeps it in modern formats and makes preservation easier.