Famous example… a man spent $44b to push his memes.
I play the sims sometimes. A few years ago I realized that I only really enjoy it when I have a fully fleshed out story of every sim in the game, their relationships to each other, their personalities, etc. So I began the extensively tedious task of making a save like that. I have an excel file with hundreds of lines of text and several sheets detailing every personality trait, every relationship, their hopes and dreams, their ages so I can age them all up appropriately, and more. I also use it to make sure that I have a balanced amount of traits/goals, since the NPCs as EA made them are almost all identical with very small differences (~60% of them had the “family oriented” trait, and if they had that there was a very high likelihood they had the cheerful trait). I will work on it obsessively for a few weeks at a time then stop for months, repeat 1-3 times a year.
By ‘repeat’ you mean continue from last save, right?
Right?Yes lol. I actually don’t really get to play when I do this, but my goal is to have one save that is 100% designed by me (well, except the architecture, that I leave to the people on the gallery)
I learned just enough coding and firefox framework to compile my own version of firefox with middle mouse closing tabs disabled
There’s an
about:configoption for that… (kidding)It was weird man, i was in the dev forums and there were previous requests for this feature. And they wouldnt put it on the config page because users might not find it there. So cant have it at all.
lol why not just not use the middle mouse button? Did you remap it to something else?
Yes i have it mapped to a thumb mouse button for other applications. And then im browsing firefox, i wanna switch to a tab on the left, the button bumps against the keyboard, tab gets closed.
Makes sense, thanks for the explanation
Sounds like your desk/mouse isn’t set up right if accidentally triggering mouse keys by knocking into your keyboard is a common concern. Have you considered switching to a smaller keyboard?
Can feel you right there. I once bought a new computer just to bring compile time of Firefox core from 1h to 15m. To fix a bug which was on my nerves.
This may not be at the top of my “excessive” list, but it’s the most recent. I bought a pair of ex-enterprise HP servers and a 32RU rack to hold them, so I could cancel my Netflix subscription.
You got them from the my pillow guy, didn’t you?
I did the same thing, but didn’t get around to actually using them… so I just sold them after a year of running an FTP server for no reason.
I used the opportunity to get into Proxmox for my self-hosting (instead of docker on RasPis) and it’s safe to say I’m now deeper into the rabbit hole than ever before. Lol.
I wanted to do a small tray icon plugin showing me weather alerts but the European weather alert system (whatever it’s called) was using shitty API that would only return all alerts at the same time which was quite heavy. So I wrote a small server that would pull those twice a day, save in a DB and expose API with location param. Then I wrote lua plugin in awesome WM to get this and display info. After couple of months they changed the API and allowed filtering alerts by location…
When I was 19 I tried an IRC Vampire the Requiem game. I got banned after arguing with the admins about the rules (in retrospect I was right about how things worked but they’d already house ruled it and I should’ve just gone with it). In response I wrote a whole website for managing character sheets, and a connected IRC bot to handle dice rolls, and pull things from character sheets.
I did all of that, and then proceeded to run a terrible vampire game on IRC for a couple months. The code was all in PHPNuke so it’s useless now. But it taught me a lot about coding for the web. During that time I showed my work at a job interview as a software dev, and I got a job while still in college. But as part of the coding questions, I learned that you can use sql to join tables. I went home and started rewriting a lot of stuff, but the game died before I was finished.
I ended a relationship to prove I was right.
Worth it.You can’t just say that and not share the story
Edit - I corrected a few errors here and there: If you are willing to read until the end, you deserve proper structure and grammar
Director’s Cut:
I was dating this girl back in university. It was the sort of relationship that, looking backwards now, we were more friends than partners. But I liked her, she liked me and we both wanted the best for one another. And at the time we were invested in making the relationship last, more by stubbornness than by commitment.
Back then she had this friend that was really close to her, they had a nice chemistry going on and those sort of things. I did not worry about it since he was also in a relationship and jealousy has never been my thing.
But I liked to joke about it, saying to my girlfriend things like “if we ever leave each other, I know you’ll end up with him” or “you two will marry for sure one day”.
And she always got mad when I did that.
But a weird kind of mad. A “whoa dude, take it down a few pegs” kind of mad. A “what are you not telling yourself?” kind of mad.
And she always stressed how I could be not wrong, how my whole judgment system was wrong and my whole brain was WRONG.
This was taken to an extent where she started to get mad at me every time she got out with him.
One night we were in a fight and she brought this thing up just to say again how I was wrong. That time I just calmly said “at this point I know I’m not”.
She left without saying a word more, shoes still untied and crying in frustration.
She called me the next day saying that she was sorry, she apologized for how she overreacted and such, just like she apologized a million times before that.
I was numb at this point, I had rough months with my studies, quite a few familiar issues and I didn’t want to be in a relationship anymore. So I just told her “I feel like taking a break” and hung up.
Seconds later I messaged him “Dude, this is your chance”. He didn’t answer.
He broke up with his girl the week later and the month after that they were together publicly. Rumors say that he even broke his engagement to do so, but I’m not 100% sure it’s true.
She never really talked to me again because she is a really prideful person and I get really snarky when I’m right.Fast forward a whole year, one day I’m back home from work, I switch on my laptop and start scrolling through social media: I see a picture of them.
He’s in a really elegant tuxedo, she’s in a white dress, people throwing grains of rice at them. Everyone’s happy.
I open the fridge and crack a beer, thinking “feels good to be right”. I try to smile but I can’t.That’s a great story, dude. Someone should make a film out of it.
A romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. 🤔 🤔
And probably Margot Robbie because she has to be in every cast of every movie everPerfect cast. Margot would take your role.
I wanted physical books out of something that was only available as PDFs. So instead of going the sensible route I bought a color laser printer, learnt how to bind books, bought tools and materials, made a simple book binding press and made my own books.
Genius. Perfect answer.
Purchasing a self-hosted server to avoid having to pay a truckload of money in storage space. Well, not only did I have to rent a smaller VPS anyways to bypass my ISP restrictions on incoming traffic (curse you CG-NAT!) but I also managed to brick two $100-ish microservers in two different attempts to patch them against BIOS vulnerabilities. If I ever manage to get the circuitry to save those devices though, they might work as a nice TV box each
Are you me? That’s the reason my basement looks like a storage locker from a tv show with a huge metal box in it which makes funny noises.
And the part about the isp is true as well. 3.95 a month just to circumvent some bullshit restrictions and to prevent having to switch to a ridiculously overpriced business plan just to get a static IP.
But it was a great learning experience and I now know my way around wire guard and basic iptables V4 and V6.
I once decommissioned a hard drive with shotgun slugs. Yes, this was in Texas.
As a hobby I make maps for a game mode in csgo called “KZ.” In short, it’s a parkour type time trial mode. You go from the start to the end and see how fast you can go. Some maps are so hard that theyre more about who can finish rather than how fast you go, but I digress.
I got into a lengthy and heated argument about how not all maps need to be about forcing the player to move and think fast to be fun. So I went and made a map that caps your speed at 180 units/second. Normal speed is 250. Lots of people had fun playing that map and a lot of people told me it was my best work. Go figure. Took me probably 6 months to make it, but I am a slow mapper so it might have taken another person 2 or 3 months.
It’s not unspeakably excessive but I bought a laser printer just to print out the „manual“ of Shenzhen I/O. Played the game for a week or so.
I do use the printer about once every two months though.
Perfect usage pattern for laser printers. Inkjets would dry up doing nothing. Laserjets work for years even when mostly idling.
Exactly why I did not want an ink printer.
When I was a coop a fellow coop found a second gen ryzen CPU (top of the line for the time) loose in a box that got shook around, pretty much every pin was bent. We were going to ewaste it but the coop asked our boss if he could keep it if he fixed it. Took him months of fiddling with it with pliers, and I think he broke off and replaced a couple pins but he eventually got it to work
One of my tenants once was causing me a lot of issues (cooking stinky spicy food in the unit after I told him to stop), so I sprinkled some drugs around his apartment and then alerted the police. It was much easier to evict the problematic tenant that way and I was able to keep the security deposit as well.
Freeze in hell, landlord.
No it’s quite comfy in my home, thank you very much
It is evil to drag other people into your drug addiction. Get help, enemy.
Excellent bait, thank you for your work
Bought a Synology NAS to do self hosting in a world where cloud privacy isn’t a thing. Lots of setting up, much to learn, but so fucking worth it.