You should listen to this podcast, it's made by people I know, and it's funny and informative.
Description from their Spotify landing page:
"Twin Films (noun) Films with the same, or very similar, plot produced or released at the same time by two different film studios. Doubled Feature is a movie podcast dedicated to exploring and documenting this strange phenomenon. Host's Dan and Max discuss the film's plots, casts, and any striking similarities there in. We aren't here to tell you which one is better, though one often is, we are just here to share a love for film and maybe have a few laughs along the way.
Dune for DOS holds a special place in my gamers heart. It's one of the very first DOS games I was introduced to, being a tried and true Macintosh user. It has DOS demo-scene quality graphics and sound, animations, and awesome call backs to the movie. It has lots of relatability and paved the way for games like Warcraft, Command and Conquer and more. The fully voiced cut scenes, changes in gameplay types and modes were way ahead of their time.
I spent 3.25 minutes adding text with a lens flare in photoshop to this snipped image of my battle.net screen, because that's 2.7 minutes more than the developers put in to this game to run.
My wife surprised me by buying this game for me as a gift knowing that I love the original so much, and we played it when we just young whippersnappers after we got married in 2004. I did want to play and it told her as much, so I was pretty excited when it was time to play. Yes, I have seen the memes on reddit, and heard from a few friends it had issues, but typically I did not have some of the same issues, being that I use pretty good hardware and know what I'm doing.
Diablo 2 Resurrected crashes, does not start, has performance issues, and it generally sucks. I started it up, made a character and right away it looked exactly as I remembered, except some updated visuals and resolution. I have played many iterations and fan-made upgrades of this game, so I'm not sure I was going to be impressed, but either way, I looked at this like a good time dump, and something I could play besides Overwatch for a few weeks and catch up to some of my friends. Well, I'm sorry to say guys, i was wrong.
Every 15 minutes the game just quits to the desktop. There is no error screen or anything that prompts this, it just acts like I was done playing and quits back to the battle.net prompt. I looked online and saw a few errors and such, tons of people dealing with the same thing. Potential fixes like changing the permission to Administrator, disabling certain features, disabling overlays, underclocking and removing overclocks.. I've tried them all. I'm using the newest firmware and software driver updates on everything I own. I have installed this game on two other computers and get the same result. I've tried every variation of different settings in the video and sound options.
I requested the refund and it was denied. I have requested an appeal to their denial and attached the graphic I made in photoshop above. More to come!
Update: 1/16/22 - They denied my refund for the second time, so I wrote them back and told them I would charge back the purchase on the Discover card I used, and show them that the crashes are not part of the programmed game experience. I also mentioned that if they are calling one-two hours of play time over four days a significant amount of playtime 10-15 minutes at a time, they need to check the logs a little better. I also asked them to check those logs, or show me a way to find them. Their response is below with the feedback for of the closed ticket that they sent me:
They have denied the appeal for a third time, and now they are no longer willing to help me find a way to play the game, even thought I have sent them all the information they require. I wanted to document everything, so I started a twitch stream to document the crash. It crashed on opening the game, and again when I was playing after a few minutes. I sent them the response and youtube video below:
Last update of the night 1/16/22 6:29PM - I posted the thread above to reddit to see if anyone had any ideas of how to help. Of course it's Reddit, so 97% of the comments are trash saying I'm using a potato PC, I don't know how to trouble shoot PC's, to even someone recommending me taking the CMOS battery and ram out of the computer to reformat and disable XMP. The guy called me out for being rude in my reply, but if anyone listens to his IT advice, there could be a bigger problem. Imagine taking your PC apart not knowing what to do because random dude on reddit said so to fix my $40 game, and accidentally fuck something up. Jesus.
The two people genuinely interested to see what happened are the real bros and asked some good questions which gave me pause for thought. Overall, the posts were downvoted in to non existence and left me bullied in the very forums I like to frequent. Thanks for the help guys!
Meanwhile, blizzard replied to their own closed ticket request with a specialist asking me to disable my wallpaper background and close all background processes. That's exactly what I have been doing. My wallpaper engine is set to close when games open as it is, but I killed it anyways, killed everything including razer apps and such, and it still happened. Another dead end. See attached for the latest crash I sent to blizzard:
Update 9:51pm - An example of the people on Reddit:
I've listed a few sources in my original post of all the widespread issues that plague this game and cause it to crash. This dude says.. hey listen man, you are poor, just get upgrade or stop your bitching. My specs are posted in the original post and 10+ times in the thread for people that asked. I linked to my blog where I review mid-high end PC parts, monitors, and other setups that I own that rival the one I'm currently using. People just want to talk shit to hear themselves talk. I can almost imagine the response, saying something like.. "Yeah right, you don't have that computer." or something similar. No apologies on Reddit!
Spoiler alert: It was the PC/Amiga/C64 Demo Scene guys.
Have you ever heard of the Demo Scene? I'll give you the "Major Version". Basically, technologically curious people (hackers) would get together, create original music and rendered animation in to a video collage that seemed like it was way beyond the capabilities of the PC's of the time. They would create and code new software, MIDI and MOD trackers, custom UI graphical engines, all from the base assembly code. If they liked something from another platform or program, they would hack all those components together in their own amalgamation of what they would need to get the job done. Some of the best well known sound editing software today is based on their ideas of the time. See below for a few great examples of the Demo Scene from the artists from Future Crew:
Before the demo scene was even considered a thing, hackers were looking in to ways at pushing the limits of their home computers. Game developers and Software Engineers took notice of these kids in their bedrooms creating the unthinkable, and hired from these small groups of guys, creating some of the founding programs considered essential to software engineering: Futuremark, ID, Remedy, Bugbear Entertainment, Bitboys, Epic Megagames.. the list goes on. Innovations we take for granted today, like full motion video, 60 FPS rendering, and sound samples in music and games, were not implemented at the time and changed the way we think about PC as multimedia engines in our day-to-day lives.
Picture of me taken by my wife at a keg tapping of Hop Silo 16 beer by Tampa Bay Brewing Company last night at Craft Street.
Very recently I moved yet again to another spot in Florida, this time leaving my job of 5 years with an Anheuser Busch distributor. They sold their brands and distribution in Florida to other beer distributors, which left me empty and losing faith in the business that brought me up in this state.. Beer. Low on energy to do this all over again, I knew I had to change things up.
As outlined in some other posts from long ago, I've worked in Distribution for almost 20 years in one way or another. Sales, marketing, events, administration, operations, finance, and national accounts most recently. I've managed brands and developed programs for breweries for the last 11 years of that 20. I had the urge to work with the people that have always been great to me and been the most fun to work with; the local guys, the ones who made really good beer and fought the good fight in the market to do different and interesting things. I wanted to make the change over to the Supplier side of the industry for the first time since I worked for Molson/Coors in 2010.
You have to have a job right? I applied for any and everything to get an idea of what people would be interested in as far as employment. I don't know if you have been looking lately, but there are a ton of jobs out there. I started in distribution and started applying for supplier and local level positions right out of the gate before the other 190 employees being laid off would get there first. I secured some decent references and worked in for a week straight, at one point keep a spreadsheet of all my applications and interview processes. I had two and a half months to make something happen.
Offers started coming in first from distributors from people that know me or I have worked with in the past, which kind of surprised me at first. The company that sold offered me a transfer out of state, and the new regime that took over offered me a position as well. I was waiting for one company in particular to call me back, so I told everyone else to hold the line, as I have severance coming and they would need to wait. Eventually that call did come, and my dream job in the supplier world presented itself. A local legend in the industry, someone known to make things happen, take risks, and well known to be very good to his employees reached out to me and I couldn't say YES fast enough. I said goodbye to the severance, moved to Tampa and started my new job the very next week.
The rest is history! I'm settled in my new place, already love the people I work for and with, and made some friends with some really talented people in the industry. I've already started my book blog back up and made my first post, and there I've outlined the timeline of my 5 moves in 4 years.
This is everyone's level of frustration with Microsoft at the moment.
The above screen shot I took today, when just going through my computer and catching up some updates. I did not want to update to Windows 11, but When I saw the popup prompting me to download Windows PC Health, I was a little worried. Is my PC too old? When googling for PC Health Check, some Windows insider program and some garbage clickbait links showed up, nothing you could click on to get this program needed to see if I pass the fabled Windows 11 test. Spoiler: It's in the Windows Update Tab, or you can just click this. Already I'm more annoyed than when my wife asks me to get her something when she is physically closer at least 13 times a day.
Circled in yellow, TPM 2.0 is some mystery bullshit no one cares about.
I'll admit, it's been a while since I just went thought and cleaned things up and installed some new drivers, and did the required Windows Updates. In a future post I'll go over some of the personal stuff that lead up to that, and why I've been so lazy with it. For example, I updated my RTX 2080 video card drivers today, and I was 20 versions behind. Oops! I did turn on the GPU Hardware Scheduling (HAGS) for the first time, but I haven't played anything to see the difference. Anyways, I followed their instructions, downloaded the PC Health Check, and low and behold, I actually do have the system requirements to download and install Windows 11. Hmmmm.
The game is afoot Windows!
I figured since I have all the other requirements as outlined on my manufacturers website, It must be this TPM 2.0 garbage that is holding me back. What is TPM do you ask? It stands for Trusted Platform Module, and it's really just a security protocol that Windows 11 and some hardware requires. Do you really need it? No. Some older mother boards made you buy an external module that plugs on to your board to handle the security it provides. There is no actual standard of what it's called, what it actually does, and how it's enabled. It's so badly described, that even Microsoft's own website describing it, does not even try. They mention it could be called by all these different things, and when you click the external links, they go to unhelpful click-fucks that just make you go back to the way in which you started. On it's own site to guide you how to fix this issue, they don't actually tell you how to fix the issue. "Vague idea" is more accurate.
Literally their page is full of spelling errors and misinformation. I just can't.
I'm going to try to end this on a good note, but I can't. The problem is still there, I have TPM 2.0 enabled by default, and in the security settings in my BIOS it's enabled. Windows simultaneously says I can and cannot install Windows 11, and their own company hates that we are asking. Of course, my mind goes to the hacking part of it, of someway you can bypass the TPM check that is not needed anyways.
I just finished watching Dune on Plex for the first time. Yes, the first time.. as there will be several viewings of this film in the near future. I saw this video with Denis describing his thought process in to his favorite scene, and it got me so fucking hyped:
Most people know if they have been on any of my blogs, I'm a huge Dune fan. From the original movie, the books, and so on. I spend night after night watching Dune lore videos on youtube. To see a director this much into the movie, and his vision.. really got me excited for this. I don't have the time right now for a proper review and links like normal, but you can bet your ass there will be one in the future. I give this movie 5 out of 5 Zardoz heads.
Anyways, go get your free month of HBO Max and check it out for yourself.
**Post-Script Life Update** - I've finished moving, and just completed unpacking 99% of the boxes today. It's been a rough 5ish days to be honest, and I'm feeling my age. I'll be back to my regular posting schedule by the end of the week at this rate, and I start my new job on Monday. More on that later, and pictures of my gaming setup then. I'm just physically exhausted, and today was the first time I let myself enjoy something and take a break from packing, running, calling...in at least 2 weeks. Moving and starting a new job is always hard, but this time it seems have take a lot out of me. Knowing how difficult this could be, I used my last week of vacation from my previous job to take this week off and relax. I'm very excited for my personal future, and that of the rejuvenated blog.
We have been getting closer and closer to creating and manipulating synthetic muscles in prosthetics for years, and this video absolutely blew me away. I grew up reading I, Robot, Foundation, and Apprentice Adept. I'm no stranger to science fiction-fact, the progression of technology, and the concept of emulation singularity in mimicking human physiology.
In 1795, the London Times published an article outlining the definition of what an Android actually is:
Phillip K. Dick explored in great detail the mental, physical, and phycological makeup of synthetic humanoids in very minute detail, down to the very things they dream about.
Robot, Cyborg, Automaton, Android, AI.. call it what you want. This video brought to life all the things I look forward to in technology... and fear the most.
It's no secret I'm a huge fan of The Club Dumas and The 9th Gate. See previous unconnected thoughts here, and a couple of other random posts. Some quick history with the book and the movie; I read the book first, it was a gift from a girlfriend and she thought I would like it. The movie came out in 1999, and because news and internet was slow and shitty and I was disconnected from the world, I had no clue the movie and the book were connected in any way. I didn't see a trailer on the E! Channel like I normally would after Talk Soup to clue me in, and that was almost exclusively the way I would have known or seen it.
One to two packs of Pall Malls a day.
I identified with Lucas Corso ('Dean' in Movie); I smoked a pack a day, collected rare books of different types and had a similar cavalier attitude about life in general. Before the movie existed, I was obsessed with reading anything from Arturo Perez-Reverte's catalog, and though I thought they were all great books, I never liked them as much as Dumas. It was not the first book to really grab me, but it was of the few. I was at a time in my life when 18 year old me was exclusively reading Science Fiction, and this was a huge change for me which led me down the path of the likes of Dan Brown and Umberto Eco. It was a.. witty person's summer reading, and you didn't have to get all the literary references to enjoy it.
There were... some changes.
I finally watched the movie after I realized what it was, and rented it from Blockbuster. Initially I was thrilled, until I realized right away that there was some really extreme changes from the book, and why they could not call the movie The Club Dumas. The Dumas connection was removed from the movie, and the roles of several characters have been swapped and moved around to the point where I had to unlearn the book and just enjoy the movie for what it was. The opening of the movie, it shows a young-ish Depp buying some early Three Musketeers books, and scamming them, being quite the con-artist as in the book. Seeing a Dumas reference, I thought.. Oh shit! This is going to be super faithful. If I squinted hard enough, Depp looked the part of a 40's Lucas Corso.
This is not the worst of endings.
All doubts cast aside, I found myself really enjoying the movie. I did miss the Dumas connection, but even in the book, it turned out that Dumas manuscript had nothing to do with the central plot, and was just a bundle of crazy coincidences and distractions. The book ends in a very serene yet grotesque way, with "Irene" or "The Girl" listening to Borja burning alive inside the building, leaving you to believe that summoning the devil didn't work after all. Corso thinks to himself, it didn't work because the Ceniza brothers most likely forged the book plates after all, and off he goes. No devil, no doors, no gates. I very much like the liberties taken in the movie to visualize the woodcuts from the book, that it's the girl in the final correct cut, and going a step further, finding the page at the Ceniza brothers business and entering the gate himself. Admittedly, I would have like it better if he left with the girl, but that was explained as she left the clue on his windshield. I digress.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, watch the movie, read the book, post some comments. It would make me happy.
As you can imagine, when I found out I could play BBS/DOOR games in a browser, I was so excited and forgot about work for the rest of the day. It's no secret I'm old and use to get on BBS's a long time ago on my Tandy 1000, and was always limited to a few minutes on each BBS per day, with a very limited amount of things you could do on each one. It was rare for the places I lived to have more than two or three nodes, so running in to other players was rare. Well not anymore! A quick signup which was required no verification by email, and we were off to the races.
I quickly made a character. Oh god the memories came flowing in. The green text! I always go thief so I can get first strike in the forest and when other players are sleeping.
A few forest fights in, and I left my mark in the flowers... Comment below if you saw it.
Awesome random event with ANSI graphics. Creepy event!
A floating head visited me.
...and of course I died a horrible death. Perfect!
Super awesome site. No advertisements and totally free. Can't wait to die again tomorrow. For those who are familiar with the game, it looks like lots of aftermarket and supported add-ons that were sold originally with the program have been loaded. In the recent news scrolling at the beginning it appeared that people were getting married, robbing banks, and visiting places I had not heard of when I played as a kid.
If you wanted to download the game yourself to run in DOSbox and try out different IGM's, click here!
