Everyone played Quake with arrow keys at first because its controls were still archaic and mimicked Doom. Mouselook had to be enabled with the +mlook console command, and otherwise holding / would allow you to “mouse look” but only up and down, and only as long as you held it, and it would spring back when you let go and moved. Thus nobody was likely to figure out mouse aiming by accident just by messing with the mouse, or even by exploring the available in-game options.

Quake’s controls did not define the standard FPS layout going forward, rather the modifications people made to their setups for deathmatch did.

You could fiddle with the key bindings in OG doom using the setup program, albeit not in game, which is the fate that may have befallen you. OG Doom’s default controls have the arrow keys for moving backwards and turning, and you strafe by holding down Alt and using the arrows or via the undocumented at the time period and comma keys (or < and >, if you care to think of it that way).

It was pretty common for deathmatch nerds to make left and right or possibly A and D the strafe keys, and use the mouse for turning. Pushing the mouse fore and aft also moved you forwards and backwards which was nonsensical in hindsight, but vaguely understandable for a game that has no vertical aiming. A popular hack at the time was a mouse driver patch which essentially nullified your mouse forward and back movements to near-zero while leaving left and right intact, so mouse users wouldn’t be always be backpedaling off of ledges or mashing their faces into walls inadvertently.

Isn’t that because the arrow key layout on the Apple II/GS was, like many 8 bit home computers, famously awful and also batshit insane?

IBM had the lock on the inverted T layout for a long time, and others had to find creative ways to follow suit.

Well, to be fair you still want to do that to remove/disable some of the other bullshit aspects. Don’t worry, you’ll still have regedit on speed dial if you want to retain any type of sanity.

You can mount your drives on boot in fstab (/etc/fstab). This is only a low-key pain in the ass, and it’s probably a good thing your internally installed drives won’t change very often.

If whatever method you use to mount them outright requires using the full mount command, possibly with a shitload of parameters attached, you can also do it on boot as a cron job that fires on boot (crontab -e) by prefacing the command with @reboot rather than the usual set of time parameters. This is how I handle e.g. mounting complicated network shares on my servers. This will fire before you even get to your login screen, so the drives ought to be accessible by the time Steam has to do whatever it does.

At the moment if you create your installation media with Rufus it can just do it. A simple checkbox before you write to your USB drive overrides the Microsoft account requirement and even allows you to create a local account with a specific name in advance. Yes, even for the current versions of Windows which are full of the latest bullshit, and in which Microsoft claim they have “removed” the workarounds. It’s always been the easiest way.

It’s already trivial to track the president’s approximate location if you’re a drone operator or hobbyist pilot because he has a 50 mile diameter no-fly zone centered on him at all times, which is plainly visible on the FAA maps.

Ha. I still have my Pokéwalker in my box of random Game Boy shit that’s on the shelf over there. Its battery is very, very dead. I imagine I left somebody in it before losing interest but I have no idea who.

I see these things sell for $50 to $80 on eBay now? Damn.

I’m positive that’s verboten as well. The constitution is quite clear that this requires the approval of Congress.

Too bad, Lincoln’s post-Civil-War supreme court preemptively torpedoed this one. It’s been ruled that you need permission from the rest of the union to secede and can’t do it unilaterally, even through the union was formed in the first place via unilaterally seceding from the British empire.

…Because that makes sense.

Anyhoo, even if these dingbats succeed according to their own metrics the federal government won’t let them go. So have fun with that. Not that I trust any of said dingbats to have actually studied any history on the matter whatsoever, or on any other matter while we’re at it.

I imagine they’re using the eMMC data bus standard, but it’s pants-on-head moronic to use flash chips for what’s supposed to be permanently nonvolatile storage. Flash media is not storage stable if it’s not powered regularly; ask anybody with an old Windows install USB drive that’s more than a couple of years old and they’ll tell you all about it.

If this is so, that also opens up the inevitability of the data in cartridge games decaying and eventually becoming lost forever. Your cartridges would literally rot on the shelf.

Actually come to think of it, I wouldn’t put it past Nintendo to do that deliberately and be salivating at the very thought.

These are ROM, not flash memory. Unless Nintendo is even more unhinged than we give them credit for.

I take the opposite approach. I use the puffer bulb that came with my camera cleaning kit. Then I can vacuum the floor.

The danger with vacuuming things off of your desk (or at least my desk, which is inevitably strewn with tiny screws, 3D printed parts, bits of fountain pens, etc.) is that you’ll suck up something that you’d really rather you hadn’t. And then you have to get it back.

I can recommend you avoid those sub-$10 USB mini vacuums from China you see everywhere. I have one. It’s practically worthless.

This is true in a certain nonspecialized sense but thanks to thermoclines, pynoclines, haloclines, and various other physical phenomena that basically amount to scientific voodoo, there are parts of the ocean don’t actually intermingle with each other despite being ostensibly physically connected. Thus the ocean naturally divides itself into various separated regions regardless of what we think about it.

I was obviously being deliberately facetious. Relax.

Even before then. They’re originally listed in Exodus. Fun fact, after the tablet smashing incident when Moses goes back up the mountain to get a new set carved in Exodus 32, several of those listed by god in the process of creating the replacements are different from the first ten. Depending on where you split the clauses, there are as many as 18 commandments between the first and the second sets.

Deuteronomy is a recap, including only the first ten, but also manages get the explanation for the sabbath wrong as compared to previous chapters. Then it goes on to claim “these are the ten commandments and god added no more” which as we just saw is an untruth.

Even in Ye Olde Testament Times, an effort was afoot to deliberately mutate the terms and conditions in order to suit the current authority.

Because it made that noise.

External USB ones are free in boxes of Frosted Flakes these days.

I have a genuine honest to goodness 5.25" bay mounted Blu Ray burner in my tower right now. Hey, you never friggin’ know. It comes in handy every once in a while. There’s a machine in my basement with an LS-120, a Zip drive, and a 5.25" floppy drive in it that all still work. Occasionally I still find myself needing to get some monumentally important ancient file off of some kind of floppy disk or other for somebody.