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It really does have a fucking SCART hole
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Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
@ifixcoinops@retro.social
mastodon 4.2.20
Hello! I fix #pinball machines and #arcade games, and tell you all about it! I fix lots of other things too, and occasionally tell you about that. I also run one of the web's longest-surviving #textAdventure games, called Improbable Island, and I often write here on Fedi about decade-scale online community management stuff. Husband, dad, professional Thing Fixer and amateur woodworker in my early 40's, an #immigrant from the UK to the USA. Gun enthusiasts pls do not follow/interact. Pronoun He
7115 Followers
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Joined June 19, 2023
old account 2017-2022:
old account 2022-2023:
My big old text adventure:
After Dark account (18+):
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Today was my birthday, we did a walk along Chester city walls soaking in the history beneath our feet and looking at the beautiful mossy stone and Roman columns and then we met up with some mates and went to the pub and then an Indian restaurant afterwards that was very delicious and I took some pictures but they all had my kid in so here you go
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anyway time to eat more English food
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Dad asked me to stick a Linux on his computer while I was here
The computer has a SCART hole
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English rollercoaster called Wicker Man, its thing is that it's on fire
It's not just the first wooden coaster built in a long time, it's not just that it's got awesome themeing and it's on fire, it's genuinely an awesome comptetently-made novel wooden coaster in its own right
We didn't get to do this one last time, 'cause it Actually went on fire a bit
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The Smiler takes the piss tbh
Y'know how most rollercoasters, they come out the station and go up a hill right? This bastard drops you down a pitch black tunnel and does a corkscrew and then you arrive at the lift hill
Would you believe me if I told you this rollercoaster does SEVEN inversions before it finally stops
Well it does, and then there's a sign saying HALFWAY DONE! and you go up another lift hill, this time VERTICAL, you climb STRAIGHT UP on your BACK, and then it does seven MORE inversions
It's the sort of ride you make in Rollercoaster Tycoon when you're twelve, and it somehow exists in the real world
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🐰 Where shall we build the new kids' playground?
🐺 Right next to the circle of standing stones of course
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Nemesis is an excellent rollercoaster, and it's excellent because they're not allowed to build above the tree line, so a lot of budget went into making a very deep hole, so the ride is COMPRESSED, it's squeezed into a small space, making it very intense and with lots of being really near to things
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Alton Towers does excellent themeing, every ride has a buncha lore that you pick up from little hints in the queue line. Brilliant music too. It's a very special place.
My local amusement park is Kennywood where the rides are just rides and don't try to give you a whole story and emotions and a full album of music in the queue line and a comic you can buy
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Best part about those standing stones, as you're walking up you see this wee plaque thing at the foot of one of them so you'll be like "Oh neat, that'll explain what people think this was for and when it was made," and it's just a name of someone who was buried there in 1989 and no further information
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So Alton Towers fucken slapped today
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With my Ventoy flash drive in this thing won't even POST never mind boot 😑
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further Important Gumball Capitalism Toots over at https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops/114908537600214630
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If you missed the maths in the replies, my maths was fucked, every COMBINATION is not every ORDER is not every TASTE, and we're after TASTEs here, example:
First penny: Pineapple, raspberry, orange, lemon and watermelon
Second penny: Raspberry, watermelon, orange, pineapple and lemon
That's the same combination in a different order that results in the same taste, and it's the tastes that are important to this machine's thesis, all we did there was flick the same five beans around until they got jumbled up but the taste is identical
So the maths is off by orders of magnitude, alright, so how much does that change the outcome?
It doesn't change it in the slightest because you will STILL DIE
you will encounter more fleeting tastes than you can remember and then DIE of Too Much Jellybeans
this is what this machine offers for just one penny
another reason I can't let it out of the house
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Fedi is when a new friend comes with you on a trip and they wind the car window down all the way and then you have to stop and take the door apart
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🐹 it works on my machine
🦝 I feel quite confident, since you're On Here y'know, that your machine is so utterly bizarre and molded to the particular contours of your specific brainwrinkles that not a single other person in the world would be able to operate it
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All these mathematicians and I still had to figure out for myself that this machine sells jellybeans at pretty much exactly a tenth of their wholesale price, which means that its whimsy must remain in my basement
I can get a ten-cent coin mech for about forty bucks, which is about forty bucks more than I paid for this thing, and given a good location and assuming jellybeans don't get any more expensive it would pay for itself in under one human generation
Some machines are pets and not livestock
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Alright example, my solar thread at https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops/116371043987387118
If I open that in my usual mobile browser, which is logged in, I see the whole thread. If I open mobile Firefox, where I'm not logged in, it stops 12 posts in, at "I did look into newer panels, you can get them for a great price but you've typically gotta buy ten at a time and shipping would be like $400" without even so much as a "read more" link
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It's the gratuitous genital trauma thread again (KDE edition)
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Anyway bulk vending machines like this can be set up a couple different ways, gumballs and toy capsules and generally round things use a particular wheel with round holes and for m&m's, smarties etc you're supposed to use a different sort of wheel with triangular holes (you can adjust their width and hence the amount of candy per coin by loosening a set screw), I've got a quite shallow round-holed gumball wheel in this one so it's quite inconsistent for jellybeans
Maybe one penny out of a dollar will get you six
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I call it my Regret Machine because for a penny it gives usually 5, sometimes 4 or very occasionally 6 jellybeans and you stick them all in your mouth at once and get a flavour that you will never, ever, EVER taste again
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Regret Machine is a shit name, I'm gonna call it something different
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For further reading on gumball machines, including a look at the coin mech and guts of this one, plus BONUS LEWD/HORNY gumballs, check my previous thread at https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops/111145593346006067
Replying to on retro.social
Imagine reading a blog post that goes on for five paragraphs and then just ends abruptly with the last paragraph saying like
"Later on, that simple and reasonable assumption would lead to two ruined pairs of underpants and a fire extinguisher refill."
And then it just ends. You'd go "Huh, that's a weird place to end a blog post," and the ten people who knew that there was more if you clicked the post date would never tell you hey click the post date
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Next time littleun has her mates over I'm gonna tell them they can taste every flavour combination for the low low price of three million dollars and certain death
Cement my reputation as That Dad
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Now you might well say well shit Dan, what's stopping me from just buying a thing of jellybeans and periodically taking out five at random and eating them, and I'd say nothing, nothing's stopping you at all, remember how in that film Big in the early scene at the carnival the lad went "Shit I can just have a mate write a fortune for me on a card and hand it to me and save my quarter, hell they can even just say it aloud, fuck that Zoltar thing" THE MACHINE IS WHERE THE POETRY COMES FROM, we've been putting coins into eerily lifeless machines and having Things come out of those machines for like two thousand years, this is in our cultural DNA, the act of putting the penny in the slot is what changes this Fleeting Taste from a Curiosity to a GAMBLE, you have inserted a Stake, you have parted with some small fraction of your power, the INERT MACHINE has MOVED because you INVOKED it, there are LAWS about these things, people worry about what influence they have on their children, Coin Operated Equipment Has Special Culture Juice, there are thousands of old gumball machines sat lonely in barns and you should go and rescue one and put it in your house and fill it up with jellybeans and make folklore about it
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Fedi is me explaining the above joke in detail regarding how working class people of a certain generation know to never wind the window down *quite* all the way because a common way that car windows fail is by winding them down all the way and not being able to wind them back up again and working class people often can't afford or don't have the time to get their windows fixed and eventually you just get used to it and then never wind a window down all the way and are surprised when someone Not Quite Like You winds the window down all the way because what's normal to them isn't normal to you, now imagine explaining the joke and explaining the explanation of the joke to every new person you try to fold into your social circle
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
Kiddo's had an unfortunate level-corruption incident on one of her Minecraft worlds and is pretty beat up about it, and I wanna ensure it doesn't happen again.
I could write a shell script to compress her whole .minecraft directory into a tarball, stick the date on the end, move that tarball to another directory where it'd get uploaded to my nextcloud server and copied to the downstairs pi box and then delete the oldest file, maybe even do summat like keep one tarball a day for a week and then one a week for a month and then one a month for a year but y'know what I just BET someone's already written that exact shell script and why reinvent the wheel y'know, Fedi gimme the scripts that you use yourself (firsthand experience only, please don't google this)
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Now if a doctor wants to join the mathematicians and say 🐺 Actually Dan you're wrong about that as well, you probably won't die, I think you'd live, I think you'd get some powers, I'd be open to that, I'm good at being wrong, I've practiced a lot
Sam Altman rape case update, very very grim
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If I was into dragons, if I was into guy dragons, this would probably be a very relaxing and chill game. I think bathing is an underexplored area in gaming and I'm glad someone's giving it a go.
Also I bet some of y'all are into guy dragons so it's called "Drag'n Wash," you're welcome
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To try all the possible combinations of 5 beans would cost nearly three million dollars and would also probably kill you
Except not, because you're not working through a list here, it's pure random, you'll get a combination you've already had before you've got them all
Also the 4-bean and 6-bean combos, the numbers are silly, you just Won't ever taste the same taste again, and one day I did the wee pennyspin on my way to the kitchen and tasted the best fucking thing I've ever tasted and I didn't write down the combo
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I had a chat with a mate in England a few weeks ago, we had to have it outside a coffee shop 'cause she had electricians round, and there was this neurodivergent lesbian couple a couple of tables over, anyway we're having a good chat 'cause she's always had the gift of the gab y'know, she podcasts now, and the convo turns towards social media and how it's all shit and that results in Me Trying To Explain Fedi To A Normal Person and lemme tell you my mate is 100% Not Normal By Any Means but isn't Our Particular Flavour Of Chronically Online, sometimes I feel like I'm in the most normal 10% of people on fedi and I'm a fucking WEEEIIIIRDO, and one half of the couple had gone off and the other one was hanging around and an hour or so into the chat she actually got up and came over and said hey I didn't mean to earwig but that was the most fascinating conversation I've overheard in years and it really brightened up my day, anyway my point is I was gonna ask hey remember the last time you tried to explain fedi to a normal person and then I went haha no of course, you're on fedi, most folk on here don't even KNOW any normal people
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When your dad's had a spare couple of hours recently and you're bimbling along in the car and he theatrically wipes his brow and goes "Hmm, it's hot in here, think I'll wind the window down" and then he winds the window down ALL THE WAY and you sit there like 😮 and he looks over to you all 😉 and jiggles the window up and down that last couple of cm just to show off
And you're all excited and tell your friends about it in school and half of them are all 🐰??? but what??? Can't you normally???
That's what it's gonna be like when mastodon works like normal social media
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This device's new name is Perfectly Neurotypical Jellybean Machine If You Don't Think About It Too Hard
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For a more relatable-to-fedi example, fedi is when you've got Home Assistant set up and you're going on a trip and someone's coming round to catsit so you write them a little couple-sentence guide to your weird lightswitches and it ends up being five pages long
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Trying every flavour combination of six jellybeans would cost you $138,412,872.01 and it's the .01 that's got me giggling
Like imagine slapping that down in notes and patting your pockets trying to find a penny and then going awwww fucking hellllll
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I bet there's a formula that can tell me roughly how many pennies it'd cost before you got the same combination again, but it's the sort of thing where because I've always been shite at maths I'd just write a computer program to brute force play the situation out a few thousand times, record all the results, lop off the top and bottom and then average them out and go Probably Roughly About That
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I didn't even LOOK at the beans, just stuck 'em in my gob, and you know what, I still don't, this is a machine of anarchy and whimsy
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That assumes the supernatural luck of getting 6 on every turn and never getting a repeated combination, and I'm sure some fedi maths person will be along shortly to say how impossible that is and how much it'd REALLY cost
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I've got those relegendable keycaps that come in two parts, clear and opaque, so you do your own art and cut it out and put it between the clear and opaque parts. My daughter helped me decorate this keyboard when she was maybe 4 years old, that's why some of the keys are labelled "meow"
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Dan Refills Whimsical Jelly Bean Dispenser, Generates Thread including Further Reading and Footnotes, an ordinary day on Fedi
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Primary school maths teachers of Fedi, feel free to use my jellybean machine to confuse some small children
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Weird how I've already had three people tell me that they use a third party app and can read long threads just fine, when I said early on in the thread that I can also read long threads just fine in my own third party app and that was the whole problem, the bug was hidden from us because we use third party apps
To reiterate, the mastodon website, y'know that you look at in your web browser, has broken threads and doesn't even tell people to download an app to unbreak it, it literally just stops early on in the thread with no indication that there's more thread to see
Like y'all see the problem here don't you, you can imagine that some people might want to link to a cool thread, thereby showing that cool thread to people who don't already have a third-party app
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It's the gratuitous genital trauma thread again (KDE edition)