I finally got around to starting 007 First Light last week–so far it’s been pretty fun, and even though my PC sits in a nebulous area regarding the game’s recommended specs, it runs fine with most settings on high. I began playing on keyboard and mouse, my default way to play games, but the keyboard layout is a bit clunky: The hand-to-hand combat involves a lot of keys, and having to activate Bond’s watch by holding down the Alt key is uncomfortable. So I decided to switch to controller, and now the game barely runs at all. 

On Sunday morning I started First Light over so that I could go through the tutorials again with the controller prompts, because I have a very humiliating disease where I need controls shown to me instead of just looking at a layout. The Iceland mission ran the way it had when I played it previously, and things certainly felt a bit more intuitive on my Xbox One controller. But while following Moneypenny around the MI6 office, I noticed that this time around Bond was subtly rubberbanding, lagging behind her and then rushing forward. By the time I got to Malta, the whole game was dragging.

Literally nothing had changed since I’d last played the game with keyboard and mouse, so I found this very weird. I checked to see if there’d been an update that might’ve broken things, but there wasn’t. I spent a good half hour tweaking all my graphics settings–reducing things back to medium, cranking down lighting and shadow effects, fiddling with DLSS–but nothing made the game run the way it had barely a week ago.

Worried something was going wrong with my hardware, I grabbed my mouse to start poking around my system. When I moved my mouse, the game stopped lagging. Shocked, I tried steering Bond with my keyboard. He moved smoothly, and the game played smoothly around him.

I picked up my controller and moved Bond up and down the Malta street. He jerked along, and the game flailed and stuttered. I switched to keyboard and mouse; I was playing a normal video game again.

I am known, when faced with PC problems, for not quite thinking through the way a computer actually works, inventing narratives to explain a situation that run counter to the cold, logical bounds of the machine. My first thought was “my controller is breaking this specific video game,” but even I knew this was an absurd assumption. I closed First Light, updated my graphics driver, and tried again with my controller, only to find the problem persisting. But when I played with my mouse and keyboard, everything worked. 

This all gave credence to the “my controller is breaking the game” theory, but it still made no sense. For months I’ve had no problems with this controller, a wireless Multiversus-themed Xbox One controller that got tossed my way when we were cleaning out our desks at The Washington Post. It connects to my PC via Bluetooth because Xbox doesn’t seem to sell a wireless adapter anymore, and while I sometimes have to pull out and reseat the Bluetooth dongle to get it to pair if I’ve left a game sitting on pause too long, it generally does what controllers do, and has never once fully broken a video game just by existing.

Incredulous at my own thought process, I googled “xbox controller causing lag pc.” And I could not believe it when results actually came up: a thread on the Microsoft forums from 2025, some Reddit posts, complaints on the EA and Steam sites going back years. Some people pinned it to dual instances of Microsoft’s GameInput program–I only had one installed but did find multiple instances of it running in my Task Manager, though closing them did nothing. Others pinned it to the controller batteries dying, but swapping them out for fresh ones did nothing either. Others suggested it was a Bluetooth problem solvable by wiring the controller up, my preferred method of attaching everything to everything but which would require a trip to the Microcenter for a USB data cable, and I couldn’t let the mystery sit half-solved while I left the house. 

I took to Bluesky with my discovery, where multiple people said they’d had the same problem. The Video Game History Foundation’s Frank Cifaldi even helped me narrow the mystery further, sharing that he’d had this problem when using a controller with games through the Epic store, and this was in fact my first time using my controller with an Epic store game. 

Here’s how I’m currently dealing: I play for about 20 minutes until the game stops working. Then I disconnect and reconnect my Bluetooth dongle, resetting the whole situation. I play until the game breaks again, then repeat.

Besides being a deeply unpleasant way to experience First Light, this entire situation is also ridiculous. Is this how computers work? I’ve made my peace with all the tweaks and fiddling required to be a PC gamer, but I’m not willing to accept that performing my gaming computer’s essential function–playing games–could require deleting processes and messing with my registry, or just playing a game in 20 minute increments. I’d be willing to accept a problem with the controller or with Bluetooth that caused input to lag, but the whole game? I imagine it doesn’t help matters that I’m still on Windows 10, which I can no longer update, but shit like this is one more reason why I’ve been dragging my heels on getting Windows 11. Why would I go deeper into an ecosystem that appears to have a known bug with using a controller to play video games? 

I’m even more baffled that this isn’t just a me problem, which I could chalk up to my shoddy, aging PC build and my own stupid luck. So many of you have experienced this, living in this absurd status quo, that I am extra furious on your behalf. It’s not even due to all the new enshittification being shoved down our throats–this is just how the fucking PC works. This problem goes back nearly a decade at least, and it seems like if we want to use the computer, we just have to accept it as a thing.

This is some first rate bullshit, and I refuse to go quietly. Of course none of my raging is actually fixing the problem, which will most likely be sorted when it stops raining here so I can go up to the store and buy a cable to wire my expressly wireless controller to my PC. In the meantime, playing First Light like I’m binge-watching episodes of a sitcom is annoying as hell, though the game is pretty good. I just wish I didn’t have to deal with the computer to play it.  

I recently learned of the passing of someone whose work nearly everybody knows, but nobody knows his name.

Tony Krueger is remembered in Wikipedia as the person who ported the game Chip’s Challenge to Windows for the Windows Entertainment Pack.¹ But that’s probably not the code he wrote that touched the most people.

Tony worked on Word 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, then on Word for OS/2 and Word for Mac, then returned to Word 6.0 and several versions beyond that. He probably holds the record for “most versions of Word shipped.”

In early versions of Word, the Spell Check feature was something that you explicitly invoked, and then you had to sit and wait while the program looked for all your potentially-misspelled words, and then showed them to you one at a time for a decision on what to do for each one. Word did introduce an Auto Spell Check feature to run spell check when the user was idle, so that when you hit the Spell Check button, the results were ready to go. However, the Auto Spell Check was still a blocking operation. As a result, a lot of users turned it off because it always seemed to decide “Now would be a good time to spell-check the document” just as you wanted to do something, forcing you to wait for the spell check pass to complete before you could, say, save and exit.

Tony made the spell checker much more unobtrusive so that it didn’t interfere with your foreground work. And when it found a problem, instead of waiting for you to trigger a spell check, it immediately drew red squiggles under potentially-misspelled words (and later green squiggles under potential grammatical errors).

Tony was an early fan of the magic/comedy team Penn and Teller. A friend and colleague attended a show and hung out afterward to ask the duo to sign a photo for his friend Tony. “He was on the team that did the red and green squiggles in Word.”

Upon hearing this, Penn Jillette announced in his stentorian voice which filled the entire theater: “The red and green squiggles!? I love the red and green squiggles!” Teller silently concurred.

Tony received that autographed photo for his birthday, and it wasn’t clear which he was more happy about, the autographed photo or the fact that Penn and Teller loved his feature.

Many years later, “Weird Al” Yankovic recorded a parody video titled Word Crimes, in which the Word red squiggles make a brief appearance. That same friend got “Weird Al” to autograph the screen shot.

Today, there are red (and even green and blue) squiggles in nearly every word processor, and often outside word processors. Tony did it first. The next time a red squiggle catches one of your mistakes, say thanks to Tony. I think he’d appreciate it.

¹ Probably not as widely documented is that he accomplished this without the source code: He reverse-engineered the MS-DOS version and then reimplemented it for Windows.

The post In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I think if any of us has any hopes for the unchosen series of alphanumeric characters that appear on a state-issued license plate, that hope would be that, somehow, that string of characters would combine in such a way that whoever reads them would feel an urge to use their hands to grip and clench our buttocks, “squeezing” our “ass” as it were. I had long assumed this was a universal desire when it came to car license plates, but I just learned that there are some people who do not, in fact, appreciate a license plate that suggests such an activity. One such person is almost 77-year-old Pompano Beach resident Nancy Dello Stritto.

The Florida DMV saw fit to bestow upon Dello Stritto a license plate bearing the characters SQZ A55, which most people would glance at and read as “SQUEEZE ASS.” Florida’s typographic choices do provide a 5 that really does read like an “S.” Dello Stritto somehow was not delighted with the license plate, saying of the plate

“I don’t think a woman that a woman that lives in a senior community, that’s going to be 77 next month, will be driving around with what this plate has to say.”

I guess some people don’t want a blanket invitation to ass squeezing? Strange, but everyone is different, I suppose, and I have to respect that.

(Here’s a link if the video embed above gives you trouble)

In talking with other members of her retirement community and her sons, there actually seems to be a lot of support for the SQZ A55 license plate, enough that Dello Stritto is at least considering giving the plate a try. She acknowledges that it may cause some perhaps unwanted attention, but notes

“I can handle it if I get a few honks here and there. Actually, being over 70, I might like a few honks.”

I know I’m being flippant here, but I hope everyone realizes there are no circumstances where a license plate should give anyone permission to touch another person’s body, in any context. We all get that, right? Good.

Interestingly, this is not the first time that Florida’s 5s looking like S-es and conspiring with As to form the word “ASS” has become a source of national tittering. Remember the ASS ORGY license plate from around 2005 or so?

Go Florida!
by
u/Chief_Beef_ATL in
funny

That was a real, officially-generated Florida license plate as well. In that case, the actual series of characters, A55 RGY, was assisted by the large orange in the center of the plate that resembled an “O,” making the whole plate read like a sexually-charged party that focused on the pleasures of the buttocks. That license plate was issued to a Lincoln owned by a software company, and aside from becoming an early internet meme, seems to have been in normal use otherwise.

I bring this up to encourage Ms.Dello Stritto to keep and use the SQZ A55 license plate with pride, knowing that she is continuing a Floridian tradition of accidentally comically ass-centric license plates, and in this day and age, I believe that is something worth celebrating.

Remember, any actual ass-squeezing are entirely at the discretion of Ms.Dello Stritto, at least on the receiving side. Any that she chooses to provide would require the full consent of both parties.

Top graphic images: Screen capture, YouTube, 10 Tampa Bay News

The post An Elderly Florida Woman Was Issued A License Plate That Reads SQZ A55 And Somehow She’s Not Thrilled appeared first on The Autopian.

Elon Musk and his apologists are getting upset by people pointing out that his illegal destruction of USAID had resulted in the avoidable deaths of countless people in exchange for no benefits whatsoever. Always both a maximalist and a liar, he’s claiming that no deaths at all have resulted from his termination of extremely cost-effective aid programs. This is obviously false, as systematic evaluation reveals:

Elon Musk really doesn’t want you to say he’s responsible for the deaths of millions.

Earlier this week, Musk threatened to sue Rep. Ro Khanna for charging him with destroying the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and putting millions of lives at risk around the world:

“There needs to be accountability for Elon Musk,” Khanna said. “You know, they’re celebrating that he created 4,400 millionaires [with his SpaceX IPO], but they don’t talk about the 4.5 million children around the world who he possibly sentenced to death by dismantling USAID.”

In response, Musk called Khanna a liar, threatened to sue, and said he should be in prison.

But Khanna is making a perfectly reasonable claim here. In that quote, he is (carefully) citing a peer-reviewed study that estimated the effects of dismantling USAID. It found that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will result in 14 million deaths overall by 2030, of which 4.5 million will be children under the age of 5.

This is probably a high-end estimate, but even lower end projections with different methodologies sit between 670,000 and 1.6 million annual deaths compared to a fiscal year 2023 baseline.

In other words, the toll from USAID cuts seems to be at best around two-thirds of a million people annually1; that’s about as many people as were killed during the Civil War. At worst, Musk is tied to the deaths of 14 million.

If DOGE had managed to cut tens of billions of dollars from the federal budget, Musk and his defenders would certainly have taken credit. It’s bizarre then to disclaim responsibility for the tragic consequences of the cuts they did make.

“But where are the names? Name the names!” Well, here you go [gift link]:

“There is not even a single dead child!” Musk protested on social media. I noted that I had met many families of children who had died — and that’s when he concluded that I was lying.

Musk’s assertion that not a single child died is absurd, yet he doubled down: “They cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died. Not a single name!”

On X, I began to give Musk some names. Let me elaborate:

Jibia was a 10-year-old girl, ranking third out of 58 students in her fourth-grade class in Rwamwanja, Uganda. Aid cuts meant that the local clinic ran out of $2 bed nets to protect from mosquitoes, as well as anti-malaria medicines. Jibia died of malaria last July, her mother told me outside the family home. Medical records confirmed that, and health workers told me that she would have been fine without the aid cuts: Replacing her tattered bed net with a new one could have prevented malaria, and in any case drugs would have helped her to recover promptly.

Yamah Freeman hemorrhaged while pregnant with her third child in her village in Liberia. The United States had provided ambulances to the local hospital, but the aid cuts under Musk and President Trump meant that the ambulances had no fuel. The strongest young men in the village placed her on their shoulders and raced down the path toward town, shouting encouragement to her as they ran, but she bled to death along the way. Her parents and sister told me about this, and I visited her grave.

Achol Deng, 8, had been infected with H.I.V. at birth in South Sudan but had been kept alive by American-provided medicines costing just 12 cents a day. The dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. and the resulting chaos meant that she lost her caseworker and access to medicines, and soon died of an opportunistic infection, health workers told me.

I could keep going. A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts have cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide. A study published in the Lancet, the British medical journal, forecast that at present rates, the aid defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030.

DOGE would, in itself, suffice to make Trump one of the worst presidents in American history. And all the money in the world won’t make Elon Musk any less of a horrible person and I’m happy that it’s getting to him.

The post Elon, Elon, what a killer appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.