Notices by The VHS Wizard 🦝📼🧙 (thevhswizard@retro.pizza)

@skinnylatte Given that it was at a baseball game, $50k seems reasonable, I'm guessing they also got a couple of beers.

I don't really know much about this particular sphere of the world, but if there's anybody who has a hyperfixation with educational software from the 1980s, it would be here on Mastodon.

Friend of mine is clearing out her parent's house and has found several old 5¼" floppy educational games for the Apple II. They've still got their original boxes, but have definitely been "loved".

I am always paranoid about lost media and software preservation... are these something anybody would... want? Is it worth trying to find people who are into this?

#RetroComputing #RetroGaming #AppleII #SoftwearPreservation

This is some peak cat entertainment

@selzero

Pokemon Pokopia

From what I've read, it's going to be a spiritual successor to one of my favorite game series of all time, Dragon Quest Builders, only swapping out the DQ IP for Pokemon.

Story Idea

Demons are real and very dangerous, but can be captured and contained through complicated magic circles, mandalas, or sigils that let mages bind them and tap into their power.

For a long time, everybody assumed that the bigger the circle, the more powerful it was... but a math nerd, who is not actually a mage, figures out that it's not the AREA of the magic circle that determines the power, it's the BOUNDARY - the length of the outside-most edge.

Using this knowledge, he captures one of the most powerful demons in the world... using the Mandelbrot Set, since the boundary for one of those is technically infinite.

Now, he has accidentally become a mage because he has an incredibly powerful demon bound to him, and he's going to go wreck the magic world by using maths and logic to decode and modernize their whole bullshit.

It's like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but without the TERF lady being involved and hopefully no AI Death Cults either.

May this find you in your time of need

Generic Movie Golem Thaum Spriggan

#PixelArt #BakaChibiMon

Stole this from Reddit, but someone fucking with the shaders for Cyberpunk 2077 figured out the sweet spot for chromatic abberation and blur to make it look like a VHS tape, and it suddenly makes the game look incredibly... real.

Original post here - https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1ptmnb3/uncanny_vhsstyle_reshade_preset_for_cyberpunk_2077/

@GossiTheDog

It's that old thing, the "if you're not paying for the product, it's because you ARE the product."

We pay for Mastodon. Maybe not you, individually, but someone does. Owners pay for hosting and bandwidth and storage and the domain and all that other fun stuff. And I've seen the numbers for some of these instances, they can be very... not cheap to run.

So, if you're on Mastodon and have a few bucks to chip in, see if your instance owner has a patreon or a kofi or something, maybe chip in and do your part.

I have a theory about why all the companies are working so hard right now on their AI "full court press", trying to shove AI into every nook and cranny of digital (and non-digital) lives.

I think the AI companies are all suffering what I call the "MPAA Delusion"... so let's start there. And full warning, this IS going to be a thread, but I'll save y'all with a CW after this first post.

See, movie piracy has been around since the dawn of camcorders, with shady guys on street corners and at flea markets selling bootleg copies of movies for pennies on the dollar as long (as you don't mind the guy loudly coughing the entire time next to the camera).

And while it *was* a crime, the MPAA (the legislative arm of the US movie industry) didn't really start freaking out about it until the internet got big enough and fast enough for movie piracy to move online, where it could spread exponentially without the need of material cost or the obviousness of a card table and low quality copies of DVD inserts.

1/?

#AI

@selzero (angrily rips up my 2025 Bingo card) This is goddamn bullshit is what it is.

@cyberpunklibrarian I am a complete linux novice and know almost nothing, and I successfully installed Mint on a laptop and have been using it with no issues for a long time now.

It's not that hard, there are guides and videos and instructions and if you still can't get something to work all you have to do is ask here and a million Linux nerds will descend upon you like very helpful wolves.