It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero

It’s me, hi! I’m the problem, it’s me!

Price sticker had me amused - I never thought of that!

Another suggestion is to buy a card in a different language. Or if it says Mother’s Day where you don’t even bother replacing “Mother” with “Father”, but that might be a bit too intentionally mean so I would only send this depending on what kind of relationship and trauma that OP has.

And an option for me to swipe my credit card, for a reasonable fee, that will allow me to unlock a sense of pride and accomplishment.

Happy cake day @ruud@lemmy.world ! Appreciate you hosting all us Reddit Refugees when the Reddit Third-Party API Exodus happened one year ago! And big shout out to you and the other volunteer mods and admins, across multiple instances, that put in their free time to stabilize Lemmy World during the massive uptick in user registration, handling the codebase, the upgrade challenges, the creepy CSAM bad actors last year, and saw us through all the intermittent downtimes we had periodically. Lemmy World has been super stable and reliable since then.

Reminder to all reading this: if you can, chip in and help with server costs for this valuable service. Decentralization FTW

If you pirate from a company worth billions, it’s stealing and you should be ashamed of yourself you greedy thief degenerate leech.

If a company steals from you, well… uh, I guess you deserved it. Why are you so entitled, that thing you bought you should be grateful for what little time you had with it. Even though you paid for it, it’s not yours it’s theirs. What’s wrong with you?

I bought one of these masks for the novelty, as well as the influence to buy it during the Great Lockdown when not much was known about Covid and we were wiping down our groceries. By the time the product launched, we already knew how Covid spread and had a vaccine. Despite the advertising saying that it has N95 filters, it was clear that this was not an N95 product. Razer generically stated that it is not a certified N95 mask, but the advertising and product pages were certainly misleading and the FTC’s fine is valid and justified to protect the health and safety of consumers. I would not have used the Zephyr in place of my actual certified N95 masks.

The Zephyr was heavy, but overall quite comfortable, but I never took it outside and wore it for something like a grocery trip (since I knew it was not an N95 mask, and masks were very divisive where I live in a Red State. The last thing I wanted was to potentially be attacked by an anti-vax/mask Freedom Lover). It was heavy, and the fans were loud - very loud. What was disappointing was that the production version did not come with the two features I wanted that were initially advertised: the sanitising case, and the voice amplifier. Imagine how much more fines Razer would face if they advertised an included UV case that came with blue lights rather than UV lights!

I didn’t end up keeping the Zephyr, although I wish I did just to keep a small, unique memory of an uncertain and dangerous time. I do wonder if they could have launched this product sooner and certified it as an N95 mask, if gaming culture could make wearing masks when you’re sick popular. Selfish people might put aside their “freedoms” if they could look cool with gamer RGB and get attention from others (the motivation for selfishness). Of course the Zephyr would need to go through several years of revisions until it became culture.

Whoa there, fella. How did you know this person’s first name? Are you a hacker? You must be one of them!

Adding some inspiration from well-developed 90s sites via the Wayback Machine.

These will take a while to load and will appear broken. The Wayback Machine is a free service hosted on the Internet Archive and bandwidth isn’t cheap!

• Game Spot in 1996: https://web.archive.org/web/19961222024924/http://www.gamespot.com/
• America Online (AOL) in 1996: https://web.archive.org/web/19961220154856/aol.com
• Alta Vista in 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19970509000911/http://www.altavista.com/
• Discovery in 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19970330143007/discovery.com
• Nintendo in 1998: https://web.archive.org/web/19990125101631/http://www.nintendo.com/
• Tripod (web host like Geocities) in 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/19990428013840/tripod.com

This list of sites is, of course, from the frame of view of a kid growing up in the United States in the 1990s. I visited a lot of other sites but I can’t remember them - I only remember the ones I visited in the early 2000s that didn’t exist in the 90s.

deleted by creator

I forgot to add - I believe Kirby was popular as ASCII art in the 90s.

Get this Kirby dance on that web site somewhere ASAP:

<(^_^<)
<(^_^)>
(>^_^)>

Nice start, this is very nostalgic! If you ever had an old Geocities, Tripod, or even MySpace back in the day, check out the Way Back Machine and look for that old URL for some inspiration.

I recommend the following suggestions to build upon this better:

• Good if you can make this an HTTP site rather than HTTPS, although I’m not sure if that’s possible on Neocities.
• Fix the font choice - back then in CSS you would list a series of fonts that would render - Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, Verdana, Times New Roman. It’s too legible, so switch it to a color pink that is a bit harder to discern from the background. You need black rectangle backgrounds for some of the text.
• The framerate on the GIFs is too high. More pixels and less frames - preferably no more than 15 FPS if possible. I used Macromedia Fireworks back in the day and some other Macromedia animation program, good if you could have terrible color profiles on some of the GIFs).
• Affiliates sidebar linking some sites. It may be good to link to other retro 90s-inspired sites. They’re out there, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head.
• Include some fake banner ads and sidebar ads - not pop up ads as those were the bane of existence. Maybe old banner ads for Rack Nine web hosting, or something similar (and of course they shouldn’t link anywhere).
• “Jump to Top” anchor hyperlinks.
• You need a low quality midi that plays in the background automatically - no user choice.
• Add a Favicon.
• Plenty of links on the page that don’t go anywhere. And more under construction signs.
• Adjust the resolution of the background tile - it’s too big and too high quality. Get it to something like 128x128 or 250x250.
• Add a Shoutbox. Remember those? Although I’m not sure how to keep it secure.
• A link to “Bookmark this site”.
• You need a fan art page that only has 4 fan arts, says “under construction”, and possibly steal other people’s fan art and credits them so it looks like there is actually content on the page while hiding the fact that you have no time to work on this web site but you’re hoping a million visitors will one day come here.
• I already see marquees which is great. Good if you can another marquee that has text moving in a wave/ripple pattern as it slowly (and keyword: very, very slowly) moves across the screen. I don’t remember if you could have alternating color text as part of it, my old HTML, PHP, and CSS knowledge escapes me from 20 years ago.
• A link to your PHPBB or Invision Power forum that, when clicked, only takes you to a blank white screen with the typical MySQL error. The hyperlink should have a badly inserted text next to it that says “This is currently down, we will fix it with a new Forum software after Finals Week!”, the more ASCII art the better. I recommend something like the below.

General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]

Table './that90ssite/phpbb_sessions' is marked as crashed and should be repaired [145]

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.

May I suggest the humble Four Seasons? Would be great if we could Rudy Giuliani to serve refreshments to the audience.

This is something I’ve thought about too. I have some rare items on old DVDs that should be preserved. I’d love to upload it to Archive.org, but I’m hesitant because I don’t know if personal identifiers get attached to the media.

If I use a program like MakeMKV to rip my DVD to a computer, how do I check the file if there’s any personal identifiers? I’m aware I can right click and pick “Remover Personal Information” or whatever in Windows, but is there anything else that would attach any hardware identifiers to it? I want to preserve some of these discs since they’re long out of print and the company that distributed it is no more and you can’t buy this anywhere. I just don’t want my uploads to be linked back to me.

Ubisoft and EA: Mmmm fresh meat.

The first 3-D gaming consoles. What an era. I had the N64 in the late 90s and was lucky enough to get a used PS1 in the early 2000s.

Mario 64 was the best for me. That opening title screen where you could stretch Mario’s face was hysterical. And then the opening cinematic was so breathtaking, just having that 3-D camera navigate around, with a musical crescendo ending with Mario Yahooing out of the warp pipe. I’ve never been so blown away seeing 3-D gaming. Then came Star Fox, and Ocarina of Time - Magical experiences that I’m getting goosebumps just reminiscing about them.

And of course PS1 when I got to play FF7. Wow. While I hated the graphics (apart from cinematic) since I got this console late into the end of the N64 generation, this was a formative game.

Getting all nostalgic here for simpler times. Having the magic of extremely senior and experienced devs bumping out amazing 2D masterpiece games on SNES, only to immediately shift into 3-D was great. Great time for gaming… before the dark times… before Horse Armor, live service, pay to play, “cut-and-paste-apology-letter-we-promise-to-do-better” broken games, and FOMO battle passes.

What a fantastic console. I played the hell out of GCN. My favorite games on there: Tales of Symphonia, The Wind Waker, and Smash Bros.

Shout out to the 3DS. What an amazing portable! I have so many memories with it, and it was the only gaming device I carried with me EVERYWHERE because of street pass and spot pass. I bought all the bundle games for StreetPass because it was so much fun having iterative improvement with visitors to your 3DS. Integration into other mainline games was pretty great too.

Not everything took advantage of the 3D aspect, but the games I played creatively innovated with it and provided new perspectives to solving puzzles.

I freaking love my 3DS. Right now Steam Deck has surpassed it, but man what an era of gaming.

Note: If you’re nostalgic for StreetPass, look up “Street Pass 2”. Despite Nintendo shuttering all the services, you can still work your way around and get StreetPasses to your console, but you’ll have to homebrew it.

Other runner ups: SNES (I was a kid that wasted away on that console), Wii, Wii U. I used to throw Wii Guitar Hero parties with friends. Great times.

Congrats my friend! Happy for your success!

If I can pass along some advice, be careful with your newfound money. Try to live at or below your current means, and get more into saving and investing your extra income. Your future self will be extremely grateful.

Good luck bud!

Check your local library. I used to visit my local library a lot before the pandemic when I lived closer to one. I borrowed audiobooks all the time and ripped them to my PC.