Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@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...

@ReaderRagfihs Haha, yeah... The guy's got a great radio voice, though. I now follow him on his new channel,
Tome Of Infinity, since the Classic Game Room is no more. His voice over videos are much better than the ones that he actually appears in, but in general, the quality has improved by leaps and bounds, since that Seaman video, which still looks kinda clumsy in certain areas.

Good call on that parrot game, by the way. It's just not a game for real men...

Just read an article on our sister site and oh my god the wiener waving contest is strong.

Like how much of an ego and fanboyism do you need to say "The game our platform had in development hell for 10 years that came out clunky and highly divisive is better than your game in hell for 6 years that came out average and that proves you're playing catch up".

Christ, faith in humanity plummeting.

@Knuckles-Fajita So, which games exactly is this d*** measuring contest about?
I'll take a guess on the Microsoft game, which will probably be Crackdown 3?

@ThanosReXXX Crackdown 3 vs Last Guardian. And how apparently the state TLG released in, divisive, is better than Crackdown 3's average and how that shows Xbox cant keep up.

Like alright, keep it in ya pants kids. XD

@ReaderRagfihs Agreed. We must be getting old or something...
As for Tome Of Infinity: just click on the YouTube logo in the Seaman video to go there. Mark has transferred all of his CGR videos to his new channel, so you've basically already found it.
EDIT:
Just in case you weren't aware of this either: after the closing of CGR, Mark went on alone under his YouTube name Lord Karnage and kept making videos, but all of these videos are now also under the banner of Tome Of Infinity, so might just have to do some catching up where watching his videos is concerned...

@Knuckles-Fajita Indeed. And then they say that Sony has no nasty fanboys...
When will the kids ever learn, huh?

@ThanosReXXX When they move out of their parents basements, end up in the real world, and realise, oh crap, my walled garden approach to what I like and dismissing everything else doesn't get me far.

You know, like the rest of us.

@Knuckles-Fajita Walled garden? Well, that's a very nice way of saying "blinders"...

@ReaderRagfihs Well, there you go: you're all up to speed again...

@ReaderRagfihs No, me neither. That guy had anything BUT a good voice...
Did watch the final video, though, as part of the whole farewell to CGR series of videos.
It was appropriately weird...