Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@Anti-Matter ive built a whole loft bed with a desk underneath it with wardrobe and that took me 2 hours. @NEStalgia the thing is it’s budget furniture and after a while you don’t even need the instructions. If you do, your doing it wrong. There has been times I’ve followed the instruction with the picture s and it was all backwards in forwards out. 😉

@NEStalgia Pah! Swedish isn't complicated at all. The only Scandinavian language that's actually very difficult, is Finnish, because the words just don't make any sense, and are influenced by and combined from SO many other influences, that it isn't even funny anymore.

I speak Danish, and Swedish is alike in many ways. People coming from the two countries can also largely understand each other, there's just some different words, pronunciation and intonation, but other than that, quite similar. I'd say it's similar to the difference between Spanish and Portuguese, or Dutch and Belgian or German.

We do have IKEA jokes (or rather: jabs at IKEA) over here. Such as that, even when following the building schedule/manual, you still might end up having a screw or two left after you've finished building the piece of furniture, always making you doubt if you've done it correctly...

Or, that if you order from IKEA via the internet, chances are you're brand new kitchen will be missing a cabinet door, and the waiting period for it to finally be sent to you, will be at least 3 weeks.

And there's several more. Most of them actually happened as well, and are now a part of the collective memory...

@ThanosReXXX This is all I can see and hear in my head right now:

Edit: Darg gammit NL! Fix the forums to properly resize images!! I'm not removing this one. It's too priceless!

@NEStalgia I wonder how many US residents actually believe that this puppet, uh... excuse me: Muppet,
was ACTUALLY speaking Swedish, instead of just nondescript gibberish...

Isn't his name "the swedish chef"? That's kinda descriptive.

@Delibheel The name is, what he "speaks" isn't...

@ThanosReXXX Where and when did you learn how to speak Danish? You don't see that very often. It's a funny language; if you read it out loud it's pretty easy to understand, but it looks completely gibberish.

From what I read it's actually mixing swedish words, swidsh-ish words, and english words. So yeah. He kinda is... Sometimes, hah.

Anyway, I misread your other comment. I thought you were saying he was speaking swedish and people mistook it for gibberish.

I've never actually heard him talk... As far as I remember...

@ThanosReXXX, @ReaderRagfihs: You'll be happy to know that I went ahead and binged all four of those webcam roulette Seaman videos before heading to bed. Definitely worth the watch! X3

...Though I do wonder what the game's initial rating was back then with some of the responses.

@Octane Where did I learn Danish? Well, in Denmark of course!
But all kidding aside, my family on my mother's side is Dutch, and nearly all of us are globetrotters.
My mom's sister married a Portuguese guy, and my mother's brother, who used to be a sailor, ended up in Kopenhagen on one of his trips, and there he found love...

So, we used to visit there every other year or so, and besides my uncle, nobody spoke Dutch or English, so I slowly began to learn the language, from my teens until my thirties. Funny thing is that my cousins over there began to learn English in the same space of time, which also made it easier. At some point, I requested they'd only speak Danish to me, and would only help me out in English if I truly got stuck, and that was a pretty good way to learn the language. I am by no means fluent in Danish, but I can get by pretty comfortably with the vocabulary that
I picked up from that period.

@Delibheel Well, in all honesty, I've never been able to extract any actual Swedish from it. Only gibberish and pseudo-comical English, like "chicken in basket".

@Ralizah BTW, I discovered that the whole volume limiter thing on electronic devices started with some absurd European maximum volume laws for portable electronics to save the ears of the children now that they blast music and have the ears of 80 year olds by 18. As one can predict, the law is useless and absurd since maximum volume isn't purely a factor of output voltage but the efficiency of the transducer, output impedance, load impedance, etc. So you can still drive hyper efficient 1ohm earbuds to eardrum shattering volumes, meanwhile it prevents you from driving a 250ohm moderately inefficient set of large transducer low magnetism headphones to even usable output. Meanwhile I can plug my crazy inefficient planars into an 800w speaker amp and get studio reference volume at about 52% on the knob........

Politicians and electrical engineering don't mix. "Big number bad, right?" isn't a valid design mandate. But now the world is stuck with it.

@Blitzenexx PG+

Honestly, I don't know.
I was a VERY late adopter of the Dreamcast, so for me, it was actually my first "retro" console.

Glad you had fun with the Seaman webcam clips. Did you also watch the actual gameplay videos that I sent you? They're both relatively short, so combined, they're probably around the same running time as the four webcam videos.

@NEStalgia Good thing that I read your entire comment, otherwise I would have thought that you were an advocate for louder headphones...

@NEStalgia Clearly the worst European export since fascism.

I'm curious to see what effect constant cellphone use has on people over the course of decades. I get the sense that many of the people living today will provide fascinating statistical data for future researchers.

There was a Virtual Parrot petting game on NDS.

Oh, god. Another cutesy game. Seaman is rolling over in his grave...

@ThanosReXXX lol, when I'm going full audiophile and critically listening, i listen at what i consider to be very loud. "Reference" (what recording engineers use as the true full level of the recording where all details at the noise floor are audible) to me is hard to listen to for more than s few minutes. Then i hear people complaining that that given amplifier is too underpowered to power given headphones.... They listen near the top of the dial and it's still not loud enough. Or that open back headphones aren't suitable for use near others as the leaking sound will bother them. At my Max volume if i put them down i can't hear them more than 5 inches away, and that's without a head in them. I really can't imagine these people listening as loud as they must. And those are still golden eared audiophiles with great hearing! Wtf are kids cranking it to???

@ReaderRagfihs I remember this horribly annoying "talking shrink" program that I had on the Commodore Amiga. I believe it was called (or nicknamed) Eliza or something like that. And yes, it was a female A.I. shrink. Started out on various Commodore systems with just being a text program, but later versions on PC also had speech. She'd ask you about your day, and what your problem was, and then the conversation began. Was rather clumsy programming, though, because at some point, it kept going round in circles, with the same stupid questions, that made no sense whatsoever, in regard to your answers.

EDIT:
Found it! It was indeed called Eliza, the psychotherapist chat bot. Here's an example, perhaps even more ridiculous than the program itself already was, because the maker of the clip clearly isn't a native English speaker...
(Oh, and you might want to switch off or turn down the sound, unless you like techno beats)

@Ralizah just wait for 5g where we will be bathing if triple the radiation at higher frequencies whether you're using it or not. We may return to medieval levels of life expectancy.... Well be dead by 50. All for the grand experiment if seeing how far and how fast we can push connected technology.

@NEStalgia Beats me, or perhaps Beats by Dre...
Anyway, they'll all be stone cold deaf long before I reach my pension plan, so I'm laughing all the way to the bank... I absolutely HATE it when I come across these individuals that have their music so loud, that even other people can join in the fun, regardless of whether they want to or not.

No manners whatsoever. Earplugs and headphones were always specifically meant to isolate you and let you enjoy whatever you like without bothering others, but most of today's younger users never got that memo, apparently...

And here's another clip of Seaman. A review by Classic Game Room this time. One of the best, if not THE best game review channels that ever landed on YouTube. And because Seaman deserves some more love...