iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 9h

What the hell compelled IOI to add this button as a settings tab in 007: First Light? This button literally takes you to a major spoiler **BEFORE YOU EVEN START THE GAME.** I accidentally hit this while running through all the settings. Why is this a settings tab???

Screenshot of the options menu in 007: First Light. One of the settings tabs, "Opening Credits", is highlighted and demarcated in harsh red as a "LITERAL GODDAMN SPOILER BUTTON", as it quite literally redirects to a major story spoiler before the player gets a chance to even start playing the game.

Right after that is the ending credits, which I believe also accidentally spoils you.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 16/12/2025

TIL Steam Replays track playtime for unreleased application IDs :upside_down_face:

Steam Replay section for "Portal 2: Community Edition", a Steam application ID which isn't even publicly available yet

the Release State variable for the same App ID showing as "prerelease"

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 01/12/2025

i should add that the lower the RP level, the probability of explorer misbehaving on you just kind of spikes up to tenfold in contrast to RP01 or even the boilerplate Windows 7 UI you get on non-redpilled builds

7989 on RP03, with most Win32 shell elements (like the new taskmgr) enabled and the charms bar displayed. because explorer is expecting the Start screen to initialize, it never finishes loading and stays in an unusual state where the superbar has no pinned icons and the desktop area is never displayed.

oh, and trying to toy with the Charms bar in any way crashes explorer.

8102 explorer with RP03 policies installed in place of RP01. the Windows 7 UI is mostly there (traditional Start menu and all) but aspects of the new Win8 UI like the ribbonized Explorer are also shown.

the Explorer shell has also hung by this point because it tried to load the Start screen code paths a few seconds after the desktop UI has loaded.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 02/11/2025

i'm undecided, someone help me pick what upgrade option to pick from this list.

the Windows Web Installer for build 8028 prompting the user to pick an upgrade path... for which there's nothing to choose from.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 30/10/2025

Pro-tip: you can boot straight into a Command Prompt shell in any bog-standard Windows installation media or WinPE just by holding down the Control key; `winpeshl` has a hook that overrides the startup check for `startnet.cmd` and `setup.exe` in the ramdisk […] [Original post on wetdry.world]

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 30/10/2025

Bonus: the reference SFM render i hacked up in like fifteen minutes just for pose work + warmup

Pose reference for the above images: the surrounding area is a giant test stage for animation tests, and Atapi is instead substituted for a placeholder dummy mesh pointing at a rather threatening bitten apple.

For warmup purposes, I tried de-rusting my SFM skills by adding a standin pose of my folf fursona (Loxi) looking incredibly unimpressed at the situation while holding an electric self-heating coffee mug with the words "I LOVE ELECTRIC" and a heart symbol printed on.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 28/10/2025

the most recent Windows insider preview release added an internet speed test "button" to the Wi-Fi control center that actually just tells you to fucking Google it instead i cannot take this bloody company seriously these days

Windows 11 preview build screenshot of the Wi-Fi control center. There is a speedometer button labeled "Test internet speed" next to the refresh available networks button, which supposedly by its name would bring the user over to an actual network speed test page.

The actual result after clicking the button is Windows opening a Bing search result page for "internet speed test". The results it produces are bogus, and were clearly generated by a language learning/artificial "intelligence" model.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 27/10/2025

[Dispatch datamining; spoilers for upcoming episode?] Oh, okay, they left in an entire chunk of episode 3 right there

One of the hacking sequences present in the yet-unreleased Dispatch episode "Turnover" that was apparently left over in the demo's files, in which the player is introduced to an enemy that follows the player (the "antivirus"), an angry Cthulhu-like red ball with tentacles.

The tooltip says: "The Anti-Virus is a threat to any hacker that tries to invade a system. Avoid it at all costs."

Ditto, the same enemy in an angered state.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2025

now _this_ is the sort of speed the internet highway was designed for 😎

a graph showing send/receive transfer rates on the mobile hotspot i'm connected to, usually averaging 56 kilobits per seconds (Kbps), with send peaking at 500 Kbps at one point

status on my phone showing that it's connected to a 5G network and insisting it has relatively good cell coverage. the mobile hotspot is turned on.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2025

for once, i'm glad Valve did not go through with this godawful version of the AR2 when HL2 was nearing completion.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2025

* be an education company * get dragged into an EU initiative that promotes giving kids a tablet to work with * produce lots and lots of cheap tablets running some kind of Android with a crappy MediaTek MT8768 SoC * do some poor hardware design choice […] [Original post on wetdry.world]

an open lock, signifying that MDM has been disabled entirely. this device was originally shipped with MDM enabled.

about page in AOSP settings on said crappy education tablet

CPU-Z reporting on the crappy education tablet's device information. it has a crappy MediaTek MT8768 IoT chipset, a 1920x1200 pixel display (@ 25 DPI, which sounds wrong since it's recording the wrong screen size of 89.14 inches? (equivalent to a large whiteboard)), 4 GB of RAM and ~64 GB of internal NAND storage

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2025

ah, the two most critical sections of the Drive Tools explorer toolbar Manage, and Manage

two sections of a drive management toolbar both labeled "Manage", containing the Disk Defragmenter, Disk Cleanup and Format utilities. the latter "Manage" section does not have Disk Cleanup.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2025

TIL that the HL2: EP2 hunter's phongwarp texture has been consistently reused in the valve games following OB's release: * portal 2's laser reflection cube basically just copies the hunter phongwarp 1:1 for its glass * TF2's merasmus model also reuses the […] [Original post on wetdry.world]

the ep2 hunter model and the reflection cube side-by-side in portal 2; both of them carry the exact same green metallic sheen in-game

merasmus model reusing a green recolored version of the hunter phongwarp

the hunter phongwarp texture as seen in HL2: EP2 and portal 2; basically a 128x128 pixel heat map

the exact same texture but recolored to a very dark green and blurred, for use in merasmus's clothing in TF2

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2025

update: the Seven Hour Chore has now turned into a Month-Long Passion Project

A giant teleporter room in the style of the Combine Citadel architecture observed in Half-Life 2. there is a central, high-tech-looking teleporter situated in the middle of a very, VERY tall building made entirely out of metal, designated with code "X2". there is a portal being produced and is shining very brightly.

Combine forces (five soldiers and a Hunter) are attacking the player.

Same room, different view. The room is massive, being made entirely out of metal and stretching down to however the hell far down this building goes. Two glass bridges connect the pathway to the teleporter, which apparently can be controlled by a futuristic-looking terminal. Giant metal arms that rotate around the teleporter are present to supposedly conduct/contain energy.

There are organic pipes supporting the Citadel building at a corner, and the walls around the room primarily consist of exposed machinery and giant two-sided panels. There are decals on the walls to indicate that this is a core room. The room may be entered through two large hallways, one of which is gated off with an energy field.

Ditto, different angle facing upwards. The room similarly stretches upwards some baffling 3.4 kilometers directly up into the sky. There are energy pylons producing high-energy pellets in the background.

Combine soldiers chasing down the player in a hallway leading to the teleporter room.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 18/08/2025

so I ended up addressing this blaringly obvious elephant in code.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 09/08/2025

latest steam beta client update apparently includes a CPU temp monitor, which works nicely

in-game screenshot of a hallway containing work-in-progress PBR conversions of various TF2 materials like walls, ceilings and floors, with parallax mapping and reflections coming from the tiled floor. there are many energy balls and portals placed across the room.

the subject of the image in question is actually the Steam overlay's updated performance counters, which shows a one-line representation of the overall CPU, GPU, and RAM load on the computer as well as the current framerate (of which the game is currently locked to a solid 60 FPS). the new thing in this performance counter is the CPU temperature stat (added in today's client update), which is currently being recorded at 58°C.

same exact deal as the other image, at the other end of the hallway. the current CPU temperature stat as displayed by the overlay is 56°C.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2025

they could have fixed this by literally moving the intel room away and fixing up the brushwork. i fear what valve would have done in THEIR version of `mtt_spy.bsp`...

proposed fix in a fan-made recreation of the Meet the Spy stage map, where the intel room is actually separated away from the basement hallway. this fixes the continuity problem entirely.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2025

why have one PLOC language pack when you can have _two_ instead?

the Language control panel applet in the Windows 8 RTM build (9200) erroneously reporting two of the same pseudolocalized language pack being installed on the system, alongside a single copy of English (United States)

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2025

uh-huh yeah. _sure_ , VMware. _totally_ disabled on that end.

VMware insisting that my laptop doesn't have a GPU driver installed despite the fact that there very clearly is one present in it

DxDiag on the host machine reporting DirectX feature levels up to version 12.1 and a WDDM 3.1-capable GPU driver present

3D accel working perfectly fine on the same Windows 8 virtual machine that VMware claimed was not supported

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2025

ah, yes, i certainly would like to use the discord overlay for _checks notes_ art programs

discord hooking itself onto krita for whatever reason

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 25/07/2025

I heard some people liked nuts. So, here's my nut collection.

Picture of a small assortment of various ARM devices laid down on a bed, with comments describing each one. Depicted:

Two Surface RT tablets of both 32/64 GB varieties with original charging adapter. Both have a Nvidia Tegra 3 (T30) system-on-chip. They are used to differentiate Windows 8 builds. The 64 GB model has Windows builds 8422 and 15035 present on the eMMC, while the 32 GB "sacrificial goat tablet" is running a customized WinPE from Windows 10 April 2018 Update ADK off of a ramdisk. There is a USB hub with a US layout keyboard, mouse and a workload USB drive (marked with a cat face).

A Samsung Galaxy J5 (2016; SM-J510FN), which used to be my former daily driver phone, a Microsoft Lumia 950 Single SIM (RM-1104) and a 4 GB Raspberry Pi Model 4B prototyping board (with an attached heatsink, a corresponding SD card, an SD card reader and a USB-C power adapter) are laid on the bed.

The Galaxy J5 is running original firmware, but is temporarily soft-bricked due to Knox burning the warranty void fuse via OEM unlock. The Lumia 950 is running a standard copy of Windows 10 Mobile, displaying the glance screen (time and date while on standby).

Both phones have Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 (MSM8916) and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 (MSM8992) SoCs, while the Pi 4B has a Broadcom BCM2711 SoC.

The phone I took this picture with, a Samsung Galaxy A36 5G (SM-A366B/DS), is also labeled in this picture despite being out of sight.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2025

I WISH I WAS JOKING, THIS IS AN ACTUAL PRODUCT I JUST SAW NOW

a box containing official Microsoft-sanctioned body wash and a coffee mug with Xbox branding and colors. there is a pattern of a wireframe rendering of the current standard Xbox controller designs on the mug and the body wash.

the box, colored in green and black, reads: "100 ml (each) hair and body wash and exclusive coffee mug. Xbox official gear."

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2025

not every day you see Microsoft fuck up their client drop packaging by sending language packs for the right build and architecture, but the wrong edition combination to people

DISM reporting language pack status on the 6:40 PM compile of 8020 winmain server. in particular, the supposed client language packs for that build are installed, and they're actually for x64 server.

Japanese language pack running on 8020 server. there is a winver dialog popped open, server manager choking due to per-user MUI differences and the new keyboard layout picker interface shown.

same thing as the previous image, but localized in German now.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 11/07/2025

hallucinations brought to you by your very own graphics card

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 11/07/2025

half-life 2: rtx is a literal performance joke that makes fakefactory cinematic mod alone seem more tolerable despite its age and questionable content additions. as if being stared down by an exorcist with no soul wasn't disturbing enough.

Father Grigori as observed in the Half-Life 2: RTX tech demo. His reworked model is improperly set up, causing his eyes to turn into a soulless white void; ironic for an exorcist like him.

The subtitle reads:
"I am Father Grigori! You have already met my congregation."

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 09/07/2025

[really loud, please don't play if you don't want a headache or risk hurting your ears] this took me hours to somewhat figure out

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 07/07/2025

unfinished personal work, titled "schrödinger grate" - circa october 2022

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2025

Pride forever, and further more To the present and future generation We will persist, forever more And pride to you and the future world The month may be over, but our pride will never be.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 25/06/2025

the Surface RT is a perfectly functioning tablet device with no backwards compatibility flaws in its ACPI table whatsoever /s

7957 FBL_CORE1_KERNEL_NPC WinPE with barely working DWM running on a physical Surface RT device, with working USB support (although SD support isn't working yet)

ditto, at an earlier point with tables patched to output a 1024x768 framebuffer showing regedit displaying the Surface RT's CPU info as dictated by ACPI

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 20/06/2025

tfw you set up an entire win2k8r2 AD/DS forest and domain join a machine running some early win8 m1 build to it just so you can get a really stupidly early version of WinStore working

machine running fbl_grfx_dev 7776 domain joined to an active directory forest with the FQDN of "corp.meowcrosoft.com"

winstore attempting to load a "what's fresh" homepage on the IIS server in the AD/DS forest

windows store running with flag "RemoveWindowsStore" set to 1 in local group policy, displaying an error message saying that it's disabled by administrators

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 31/05/2025

forgot that two other cpp files related to activity definitions existed, so that's now working completely

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 31/05/2025

currently confused as to why a fix i'm working on that tries to restore the unused ar2 animations for soldiers and citizens doesn't work on the latter, but runs perfectly on the former the relevant activities are even there in the `male_shared` and […] [Original post on wetdry.world]

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 29/05/2025

the Fortnite Mobile OG S3 meta: * queue up * two thumbs on phone screen * land someplace that's marked * pick up an LMG * walk in front of somebody at Salty Springs * commit war crimes that take the lives of 22 or 23 people as the game's built-in […] [Original post on wetdry.world]

Fortnite Mobile gameplay screenshot in the zero build "OG" gamemode. I (the DJ Bop/person wearing a literal alpaca fursuit in front) obliterate the last guy on the map at Junk Junction with a light machine gun. confetti and golden lens rays shoot out of my view as I somehow manage to gain a second win today.

ditto, moments after the win. a stats screen showing a total of 22 "eliminations"/kills is shown, and many accolades are displayed.

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pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace: @winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2025

love these cute little hand-drawn glyphs in the andromeda OS OOBE, really gets the journal feel right

the end-user license agreement page in the Andromeda OS out-of-box experience. the glyph representing it on the left is a hand-drawn piece of paper with a little badge attached to it.

the network connectivity skip page in the Andromeda OS out-of-box experience. the glyph representing it and the network connectivity portal on the left is a slightly crudely hand-drawn radio signal.

the privacy options pages in the Andromeda OS out-of-box experience. the glyph representing them on the left is a crudely-drawn toggle option.

the regional settings page in the Andromeda OOBE page, identical to client versions of Windows 10. the glyph representing it is a simple, hand-drawn spinning globe.

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