I’ve revisited his channel off and on over the years. Most vids are, as the channel name implies, reviews of regular cars. I think it’s the first long form video of his I’ve seen tackling a brand and what has become of its image. The humor and dry delivery is up my alley, and I figured it was worth sharing here.

I’ve also got family in rural PA and his basement bar could be any one of theirs. Those small towns and their old houses are frozen in time.

How did Jeep lose the plot? It became a rolling fortress for tin soldiers.

• Regular Cars

“Just Empty Every Pocket,” or “Just Expect Every Problem.”

Eh, Windows still needs PowerToys (mainly FancyZones) for a better experience. I like around a 30/70 split between Windows Terminal (for PowerShell and WSL) on the left and some primary application like a browser on the right. It does have keybinds for shuffling through a stack of windows but only on the side that has focus. It still really needs a way to swap focus between zones that isn’t Alt-Tab’ing until you’re on the desired one or grabbing a mouse to click a program in another stack.

“You are not acting like the person Mr. Rogers knew you could be.”

Guaranteed to slug the inner child of, at least, three or four generations. Might have diminishing returns at the extremes (brainwashed boomers and brainrot zoomers) but should still hit pretty hard on those who grew up watching Fred Rogers and are capable of some amount of introspection.

The means of distribution was direct, internet connectivity (for most) was slow, and some technical ability was required but the warez scene was absolutely jumping in the 90s. Granting computers were still niche, of course. I was just a kid but my understanding is lots of Russia was mob run following the CCCP’s collapse. There was a lot of craving for outside media there (games, music, film… everything, really) so lots of FTP servers and fserv bots on IRC were based in former Soviet Union states. It wasn’t like any central authority was left to crack down it or cave to pressure from international authorities that were still very tech illiterate. And those authorities were not yet under pressure themselves by the movie and recording industries. Napster eventually changed that in about a year’s time.

Like a GameShark, there was also “Game Enhancer” for the PSX. I still have mine somewhere. It plugged into the same port and came with a little button/spring to keep the lid detector button depressed. You could boot with a legit game disc (I think a black disc was either preferred or required) then open the lid and swap to your copied game. On top of that I believe it also had the same memory editing/cheat functions that GameShark provided.

Dreamcast had a software exploit that was found pretty quickly. Something to do with Windows CE, if I recall. Wasn’t long before a boot disc came out, no extra hardware required. That evolved into a patcher so copied games could be burned as directly bootable, skipping the boot disc. Also various homebrew from a devoted fanbase.

Before any of the above and before my time, people had been dumping arcade boards and cartridges to ROMs for quite a while. Programmable carts and flash tools were coming out for various systems. I remember a buddy in high school, early 00’s, had something akin to a dev kit for his old Gameboy and was working on writing his own games. Another friend actually had a Game Doctor for the SNES which let you play backups off a 3.5" floppy. Precursor to modern flash carts, before bigger storage started coming in smaller form factors. Neat stuff mostly lost to time now.

Opposite here. My uncle’s girlfriend, at the time, saw me asking for “soda” at some event. Might’ve been somebody’s company picnic. She convinced my mother to let me have a sip, hoping and expecting a giggle at the “bitter face” reaction. That didn’t happen and Mom had to keep an eye on her “sodas” the rest of the day.