Messages

1

/dev/random / Re: The last movie you saw....

« on: September 05, 2026, 12:58:15 AM »

The Substance - Quite unique. I liked it a lot more than Backrooms, but not nearly as much as Obsession. Great acting from Demi Moore. Really good practical effects. Very bizarre and weird, but that's what they were going for. Certain parts of the movie were so good, but other parts were more on the cliche or silly side. This one is kinda hard to rate for me. I guess we'll go 8/10 with this one.

Yes. Unique. Weird. Absolutely INSANE at the end. Been a little bit since I saw it, but from what I remember, I definitely liked it. One of the best recent "horror" movies I've seen. Dunno if I'm alone in this, but I'm disappointed by 99% of the crap coming out these days. Nobody makes good movies anymore. Everythings a remake or a rehash. 


Started my yearly Halloween horror binge on Sept 1. Again this year, I have so many movies I downloaded to my "to watch" folder that it's gonna take 2 months of non-stop movie watching in my free time to get through it all... and I probably still won't. Made a point of trying to avoid any Italian movies in particular. A select few of them are really good, like Black Sabbath, Blood and Black Lace, they have style and good story telling to them. But most of them are just BAD. I also made a point of seeking out any Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, and Boris Karloff movies I haven't seen before. I have lots of those.

Over the years I've also built up a hefty collection of images of horror movie posters of all the movies I watch around Halloween. The folder is almost up to 1GB now. I've managed to take many of them that are old and dirty and have creases from folds and use some tricks I've learned with Photoshop to clean them up. I've even completely reworked some that were too small, creating larger versions basically from scratch, matching the fonts and logos exactly or as close as possible. Some that I couldn't find any posters for, I've created my own custom movie posters for them. I use them for a screensaver with a screensaver program called gPhotoShow. If anyone is interested in something like this, let me know, perhaps I could start a thread and post them all somehow.

I've gotten off to a slow start so far, only 1 movie per day. I've watched all the Ghoulies movies: Ghoulies, Ghoulies 2, Ghoulies 3 - Ghoulies Go To College (my favorite of the bunch), and Ghoulies 4 (which doesn't even have the little Ghoulies puppets in it, apparently they couldn't afford to use them  ) They're bad. I wouldn't recommend them. Unless you're like me and you kinda like bad and cheesy horror movies, in which case, sure, they're okay.

I've got a few folders of franchise movies:

The Cheerleader Massacre collection, parts 1 (2003) and 2 (2011).

Rob Zombie's Firefly Family Trilogy - House of 1000 Corpses, Devil's Rejects, 3 From Hell.

Slumber Party Massacre trilogy - parts 1 (1982), 2 (1987), and 3 (1990).

Sorority House Massacre trilogy - parts 1 (1986), 2 (1990), and Hard to Die (aka Sorority House Massacre 3) (1990) - part 3 really has nothing to do with a sorority house, they're in a skyscraper being stalked by an unknown killer.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre collection - I'm doing ALL of them, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Texas Chainsaw Massacre II (1986), Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 (1990), Texas Chainsaw Massacre 4 - The Next Generation (1995), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006), Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013), Leatherface (2017), and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022).

The Prophecy collection - 5 movies in total. The first 3 movies had Christopher Walken in them, the last 2 were crappy direct-to-video things starring Kari Wuhrer. I think I've seen parts of the first or second one before, don't remember much about them, seemed interesting enough so I downloaded them.

Also found some great stuff to watch while handing out candy on Halloween night. Can't have my normal horrible movies playing in the background when the kiddos come to the door, so cartoons it is. Found the old Tales from the Far Side I and Tales from the Far Side II halloween specials. Used to love Far Side comics back in the 90's, had several of the Gary Larson books.

And also 60+ individual movies, I won't list them all. I'll try to review any good, interesting, or remarkably bad ones here at some point. 

2

/dev/random / Re: Whatcha listening to?

« on: September 01, 2026, 11:05:11 PM »

Alice In Chains recently added a few HD live clips from the old Live Facelift VHS (in 2016 they released it as a limited edition vinyl live album, only about 6000 copies were made).


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyy38mgimAQ

Alice in Chains in their PRIME! Later on, Layne wasn't quite able to hit the intense higher howls like he did here.

DON'T DO DRUGS, KIDS.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ckcguY4oRE

"I miss my friends." Dunno if that hits you like it hits me.

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/dev/random / Re: The Official Inclusive Non-denominational Holidays 2020 (and forever) Thread

« on: September 01, 2026, 10:01:36 PM »

No pics of the outside yet.

Forgot to post a pic of my outside Christmas lights last year. I posted this to Mrs Quadz kudosboard Christmas card last year, but forgot to repost it here.



Also have a few others I posted in older MrsQ Christmas cards, might as well repost them here too...

2024 Christmas card... (Dad, big sis, and baby Focalor - Christmas 1980)



From the 2022 Christmas card, Quake2 meets A Christmas Story...



From the 2021 Christmas card, 4 pics of my dogs in a Cousin Eddie hunters cap. They hated it and wouldn't sit still, and my digital cam is very old with a slow shutter - I wasn't able to hold the camera still so the pics all came out blurry.

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Quake / Re: DM server needs some admin attention.

« on: July 19, 2026, 12:49:43 PM »

A client called ProCheat?

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/dev/random / Re: The last movie you saw....

« on: July 15, 2026, 08:55:15 AM »

Citizen Vigilante (2026)

another movie from Uwe Boll. as expected its full of violence and interesting take on controversial subjects like illegals and islam..  love this one

I think I've seen one or two clips from it on youtube recently. The acting and dialogue just seemed very... forced. Like the whole premise of the thing was so ridiculous that I'm not sure even Oscar caliber A-list actors could pull it off. It didn't leave me with any desire to watch it.

Similar feelings from trailers and behind-the-scenes stuff I saw about a very strange and extremely fucked up documentary by another german director, Werner Herzog, something called The Act of Killing.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GiqYLrJBG0

I have zero desire to watch that.

I thought it was something new, but apparently it's from 2012. He has people who led death squads in genocides describe murders they committed in lurid detail and/or recreate their atrocities. I don't understand why someone would want to do this with these people. To see if they feel remorse? Who even gives a crap if they feel any remorse or not. There's certain things a person can do where any consideration about them as human beings ceases entirely. If your film isn't going to possibly result in them being mauled horrifically by the jaws of justice as they deserve, then don't even bother because all you're doing is attempting to profit from sensationalizing human misery, much like if Roman Polankski had decided to leave his house covered in blood and sell tickets to people to tour the Manson murder scene.

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Bot Drop / Re: Hulk Bot

« on: June 25, 2026, 07:48:58 PM »

The subject is a player who pings around the 160's - No doubt he has a ton of names but his most recent ones are Shi-sho and Adrenaline_Hunk and he sometimes spams the cheezy taunt-messages from the old Gladiator/Eraser bots.

Sounds like it could perhaps be the same person from years ago who would connect multiple non-human controlled bots at once hoping to take up excess space and frustrate people into leaving. They used a VPN to keep changing their IP and avoid the numerous bans. It became a game of whack-a-mole where we had to repeatedly and methodically manually blackhole the IP's as it happened, sometimes several times in a day, just being consistent with it until the person finally got tired of putting forth the effort.

At this point, I've heard different accounts from different players and it sounds like it could be multiple individuals cheating at different times. Keep posting demos, but try to notify admins via discord if it's happening live and maybe they can hop on and deal with it immediately, which would be better. While they're still on, it's easy to list the IP and blackhole it right away. If they've left, they'll need to search through logs for it, and likely the player will stop using that IP afterwards anyway.

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Bot Drop / Re: Hulk Bot

« on: June 22, 2026, 06:43:21 AM »

100% bot

8

Quake / Re: DM server needs some admin attention.

« on: June 21, 2026, 10:26:56 PM »

More clips from today:

#1 - Possibly botting. Then again, possibly not. With these two shots alone, it's kinda inconclusive. They are very snappy shots immediately after strafing into the line of sight, but it's a little harder to tell with railgun.

#2 - Looks a LOT more like bot behavior. When spec'ing for a bot, anytime the crosshair stays smoothly locked dead center when they're using a sustained fire hitscan weapon like a CG or MG, it's the ultimate tell.

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Quake / Re: DM server needs some admin attention.

« on: June 07, 2026, 04:11:10 AM »

There is also the other side where there has always been this attitude that quake 2 cant possibly have any cheaters. Head stuck in the sand syndrome and refusal to acknowledge it.

Then again, when it comes to you specifically, you've always had the suspicion that lots of people were cheating, and you've posted lots of demos of lots of different players, and very very rarely do any of the demos contain anything noteworthy.

You people just need to come to terms with the fact that this is just how it is now. The admin staff is small and busy with life. You want someone who's hands-on and plays everyday and knows the climate on the servers. Sure, that would be best. But the fact is no one else is trustworthy enough to handle the job without overstepping, including myself, including elysium, including some of the admins who aren't admining (so be thankful for that).

I don't play anymore, but I look at the messageboard almost daily, and I can't really say that I've seen excessive amounts of different posts where people have been posting demos of suspected cheating or condumps of objectionable behavior. That's probably the best path to follow. Post it to the boards, an admin will read it, they'll do what they do with the admin process, they may come back and post about what they did (maybe not), and then it's done. If what's happening is you're repeatedly trying to get ahold of someone on discord and getting no response, well then maybe they're busy or maybe you're pestering them so much that they're ignoring you for some reason.

Thing is, I'm in the Tastyspleen discord too. I haven't seen a whole lot of people coming forward on there in any of the various sections posting about any problems they're having on the servers.

You gotta speak up. Best thing to do is, like I said, Post it to the boards. Make sure you include a demo or a condump or at the very least an accurate time and date and description of the problem so someone can locate it in the logs if they have to. Then maybe to raise awareness about the board post, post something to discord about it, if not in the regular old "tastyspleen" section/channel, then perhaps in one of the other lesser used sections to help it stand out more, like "suggestions" or "general" or "ffa". And it may be 2 or 3 days before anyone has a chance to get to it. Above all, just realize it's 2026 now, folks. King Quadz is gone and we all miss him. But this is how it is in 2026. The fact that we're still here at all is a gift.

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/dev/random / Re: Whatcha watchin'/streamin'...

« on: April 22, 2026, 12:50:39 AM »

Crossing over from the "whatcha listening to" thread...

Started branching out into jazz late last year.

Chet Baker.

Found this sort of documentary about Chet Baker released a few months after his death in late 1988. Features lots of other musicians, etc.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9B8BeJKwY4

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art, music, etc. / Re: Live Performances

« on: April 03, 2026, 10:34:23 PM »

I'd always heard of this guy but never listened to anything from him. Probably wouldn't have liked it until now anyway. For the past year or so I've been getting into some jazz stuff here and there. This guy is RIDICULOUSLY talented. I don't think he's human, I think he's a biomechanical conduit through which an alien race broadcasts their music to us.

Jazz is "almost" like saying "ALL THE NOTES AT ANY TIME ARE POSSIBLE!" only... thats not entirely true. It's more like ALL the notes, but at DIFFERENT TIMES, and only THESE SELECT NOTES right now, and THOSE SELECT NOTES in the next second. In reality, you have the chords in a progression, and scales based on the notes of those chords,... easy enough... but then again, you can also have blue notes like in blues that aren't part of the scale, but if you play them at the right time, it's okay. And theres the thing about jazz: you have to pick up an instrument first and then MASTER it... and then when you've done that, you can start the journey learning how to play jazz without fucking up and sounding terrible.

I bet none of that makes any sense to anyone. Whatever. Listen to Allan Holdsworth. He's really good. Eddie Van Halen and Steve Vai both considered themselves hacks next to his playing. And they might be right.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX46MC8lfjQ

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/dev/random / Re: Whatcha listening to?

« on: April 02, 2026, 03:24:03 PM »

(Angine de Poitrine)

I've seen them all over youtube but I don't really pay attention to them.

Their weird style sort of reminds me of this other jazz fusion duo I came across. Domi & JD Beck. In my opinion, EONS more talented than those two, not that they suck by any means, but these two... WOW. Like the classical guitarists I posted above, they were also child prodigies, starting their music journeys as mere toddlers. She's every bit as good as Keith Emerson (of Emerson Lake and Palmer) ever was on keys. And JD Beck is mindblowing on drums. He goes with an old school jazz kit with just a snare, one tom and the kick, but can make it sound like 3 people playing at once, it's INSANE. He sounds like a machine.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4td2EImaG4

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/dev/random / Re: The last movie you saw....

« on: April 01, 2026, 03:32:57 AM »

I was chatting with Zether and others in the Tastyspleen discord channel about various Coen Brothers movies. There's so many really good ones, and I realized I hadn't seen some of them in a long time, so I went on a Coen Brothers binge - Decided I'd try to watch all of their films, earliest to latest, in order. Some of them I had never seen, or had seen only bits and pieces of them.

Their very first movie, Blood Simple (1984), was one I had never seen before. I figured with it being their very first movie, it wouldn't be very good. Very surprising though, because if you hadn't told me who directed it or that it was their writing and directorial debut, I would've never guessed it. Very well done. A twisted pulpy crime drama. I figured it would kinda suck. NOPE. Does not suck at all. A very underrated and un-talked about Coen Brothers movie.

Raising Arizona (1987), one of my favorites of theirs. A classic. And the scene with John Goodman hollering like a psycho as he's slowly being birthed up from the muddy hole in the rainy prison escape scene is still one of the most comically surreal things ever put to film. On the surface it seems like a silly hicksploitation kind of film, but there's a lot more going on.

Millers Crossing (1990) - a gangster kind of film. I'm not too fond of it.

Barton Fink (1991) and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) I had never seen before. Probably wont ever watch them again. Didn't really like either one of them, moreso Hudsucker Proxy. Jennifer Jason Leigh with her horrible sounding 1920's accent/voice got on my nerves and ruined the whole movie.

Fargo (1996) - A great story. And while at times it clearly satirizes the whole Minnesotan/Canadian accent, it still strangely doesnt subtract from the real tragedy of the story. It's weird how good the Coen Brothers are at that kind of thing, blending a sort of surrealism and reality seamlessly.

Big Lebowski (1998) - Like I said, blending surrealism and reality. One of my favorite Coen Brothers movies. And again, John Goodman steals the show when he dumps out Donny's ashes from an old Folgers coffee can into the wind and it blows the ashes all over himself and The Dude.

O Brother Where Art Thou (2000) - Didn't really like it. It's supposed to be a version of Homers Odyssey.

The Man who Wasnt There (2001) and Intolerable Cruelty (2003) - Meh. Not terrible. But not very good either. I had never seen them before. Don't think I'll bother watching them again either.

The Ladykillers (2004) - Another one I had never seen before. A strange one. A black comedy. I love the cast. Such a variety of characters. And I really liked the absurdity of the ending (i won't spoil it). Maybe not one the "best" Coen Brother Movies, but definitely a "good" one, at least in my opinion. Worth seeing at least once or twice.

No Country For Old Men (2007) - Their #1 best movie in my opinion. Lots of subtext involving the unpredictability of life and the inevitability of death. And that final scene with Tommy Lee Jones talking about the dream he had about his father... KA-POW. If that ending doesn't hit you in some way, then you aren't human.

(Several movies after that, most of them I didn't like.)

Burn After Reading (2008) and A Serious Man (2009) - Had never seen them before. Didn't like them. Meh.

True Grit (2010) - A great movie, I liked it. I thought Jeff Bridges was maybe one of the only guys who could've played a Rooster Cogburn type of character the way John Wayne did. I'm a big John Wayne fan, I've seen virtually EVERY SINGLE ONE of his movies (and he was in LOTS) and True Grit was maybe my #1 favorite Wayne movie. As good as this remake is, I still prefer the John Wayne original. There's just no contest. There was only one John Wayne.

And after being so bored by Burn After Reading and A Serious Man, I decided to skip Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) and Hail, Caesar! (2016). I watched the first 5 or 10 minutes of Inside Llewyn Davis, but in addition to it just being boring, it was shot with this fuzzy soft focus effect that drove me bananas. So I said fuck it and skipped it. Same for Hail Caesar. I'm not a fan of George Clooney as an actor. Didn't feel like sitting through 2 hours of his crappy acting.

Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) - Eh... interesting, yes. It's just a collection of little various western tales. It's "good", it's worth watching, but not my favorite.

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/dev/random / Re: Whatcha listening to?

« on: March 23, 2026, 01:18:08 PM »

Ana Vidocic, classical guitarist.

Absolutely FLAWLESS technique and she seems to play all of these pieces completely from memory. Just WOW.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e26zZ83Oh6Y&ab_channel=OmniFoundation

Ana Vidovic is immensely good. But I dunno, I think Thu Le might have her beat just slightly. El Choclo is a RIDICULOUSLY hard piece to play, and out of any 10 people who actually CAN play it, maybe only 1 of those 10 will play it flawlessly to where it sounds fluid and natural like Thu Le does.

How is she so good? Like Ana Vidovic, she started learning as a child (4 years old). That'll do it. Start doing anything that young and training hard at it every day of your life and by the time you're 25, you'll be a world-class master at whatever it is.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkdrX2UnzDQ

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/dev/random / Re: Whatcha listening to?

« on: March 22, 2026, 02:13:16 AM »

I was sort of a reluctant fan of country. When I was growing up, I was all about ROCK. "COUNTRY SUCKS!" That was the crap your grandparents listened to. But as I became a teenager, more and more people started listening to country. Then around 12 or 13, I got into playing guitar and it opened my mind to all sorts of different stuff - blues, smooth jazz, etc, and I even started giving country a chance. I started getting into classic country too especially, stuff like Hank Williams, Glen Campbell, Merle Haggard, Johnny Paycheck. I discovered that maybe the music wasn't always the best produced or most technically flawless and talented, but the songwriting was so good. They could employ a masterfully crafted economy of words in a few short verses to paint a vivid picture in the listeners head. Almost magical how they could make you see places you've never been and feel a certain way.

Anyway, Merle Haggard was always one of those guys. He passed away back in 2016. His youngest son, Ben, followed much of the family and got into music. He sounds a lot like his dad, but a lot more agile with his voice, and actually... he sounds better than his old man in my opinion. Maybe not a better guitar player though, I dunno. Merle was as brilliant of a telecaster player as he was a songwriter.

Anyway, came across this watching a musical tribute Merle's family did a few years ago. His son Ben did a fantastic little version of one of my favorite Merle songs, It's All in the Movies.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqjE4Nx4IIQ

Speaking of guitars, Merle had THE NUMBER 1 best looking signature Fender telecaster in my opinion. Velvety looking quilted maple top. I usually don't like the 2-color black to wood stain color sunburst finishes (I prefer the 3 color sunburst that transitions from black to brown with more subtlety), but with that super deep looking quilted figuring to the maple top, it looks perfect. Neck is actually a glued-on set neck whereas other telecasters are almost always bolt on neck. White body binding, nice walnut stained stripe down the center line of the body, gold hardware, pearl button tuners. This guitar is a work of art and looks like a million bucks. And almost costs about that, they go for $10,000 these days.