I love calling things "dumb."

I think reading is good. I think books are great. But novels are just dumb.

If a novel is dumb, you'll have wasted weeks or months. If you stick to the end, it's a sure bet you had to struggle with dumb, boring sections that lasted a while.

But if a movie is dumb, you'll have only wasted a couple hours of your life, and chances are there was at least someone on screen to ogle.

So I think if someone asks me what my three favorite books are, or what the three latest books that I read were, the answer would probably be the same, and one of the books would probably be a textbook from school.

My review of the cheap, generic, ubiquitous SCART-to-HDMI scaler

As posted on phonedork's channel:

General Phonedork sir! I know it's been over two years, but I finally got that shitty generic HDMI scaler today. And you were right; it was just what I needed for capturing games that do the 240p/480i switching.

For $20 shipped, I'm pretty happy; I just set my Intensity Pro to capture at 720p60 (instead of 720p59.94 like most everything else) and it sees the shit scaler just fine. I was capturing things I thought I'd never be able to see outside of a CRT or my old s-video capture card... and even then, s-video capture cards are limited to 30 FPS. The Blackmagic Intensity capture cards are notoriously picky, but it didn't even blink with this scaler. It just works, quick & dirty.

Yes, the picture is just so, so shit, especially since I own an OSSC and have seen how good my captures look through that. Yes, the picture is stretched to 16:9, but that can easily be edited back to 4:3. But with superg's gscartsw_lite offering two SCART outputs, that means I can have one output dedicated to capturing with that shit scaler and have the other output going to my OSSC or fusionz916's Retrotek component converter to my CRT. In other words, I never actually have to look at what that shit scaler outputs while playing.

And, well, since the video quality is just so fucking shit (I mean... goddamn it is really shit), I won't feel bad not getting a 1080p60 capture card for anything I'd want to capture with the shit scaler.

I'll also add that the scaler's settings remain even after power down. I at first had to hook it up to my PC monitor just to get some picture. The scaler will provide an OSD so you know exactly what you're getting.

And really, is the video quality that bad? It's about s-video quality, but with extremely oversaturated colors. I've also measured the audio lag and it's 0.117 seconds behind, or 7 frames... which may or may not be related to input lag. That's harder to test.