BioWare needs to do what the Castlevania creator did. Konami wouldn’t give up the rights to Castlevania (or sell it — the Netflix deal was lucrative, after all) and just make their own studio “with blackjack and hookers.” Sure, the studio behind Bloodstained was problematic when it came to delivering on certain promises to Kickstarter backers, and sure, the mobile ports were abandoned and the Switch port was (apparently) never fixed… but on PC and Xbox at least, the game was fine. The best of Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow, it’s the best Castlevania game not called Castlevania, and it’s among the best Castlevania games, too. I’m not sure there is even one that is actually better at everything. They really took all the good parts of Castlevania and, instead of a gimmick like an inverted anti-castle or entering paintings, they just made the castle stupidly huge, almost unreasonably so. The architecture doesn’t make sense, but it never did.

It happened with the developers behind Fallout as well. They became Obsidian, and I think InXile got some of those developers. Obsidian went on to make Pillars of Eternity and The Outer Worlds. InXile made a bunch of RPGs too, but I can’t name any without looking them up.

BioWare needs to take its talent and go indie.

The first one came out when The Simpsons was at peak relevance — I wanna say it was right around the time Mr Burns was shot and we had that cliffhanger and nobody knew who shot him. I guess it was the new “who shot JR” except I still don’t know who shot JR. I’ve gotten curious a couple times, looked it up, said “oh” and promptly forgot about it because I never watched Dallas, so those characters don’t mean anything to me.

The neat thing about The Simpsons though, like most American cartoons is, what you know from the first seasons, when it was good, is still exactly what the show is still about. Homer still works at the power plant. Bart is still in fourth grade, Lisa is still in third, and Maggie is still in diapers. The characters don’t age. It’s not like Japan’s Fullmetal Alchemist where these adolescent boys age ever so slightly in every episode, and by the end of it all they’ve basically grown up. In The Simpsons, the family stays the same, it’s the world around them that changes, which is weird, because they do not grow, they do not learn, they do not evolve. That’s a good thing for those of us who gave up after the first movie or thereabouts, because we can just pick up where we left off, doesn’t matter if the last 20 or 30 seasons were trash. The movie can stand on its own.

That said, I’m not interested, maybe I’ll catch it on streaming, but I’m more likely to watch it in the next 5 years than I am not to. Assuming I live that long. I am old enough to have seen the first episodes when they first aired.

They were hot garbage before. They exist to make money from gamers. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but you basically have two kinds of game developers. Those who love gaming, and those who are tired of or burned out from gamers and just want to exploit gaming. Live long enough, you’ll see a lot of companies go from the first camp to the second (Bethesda, Blizzard). Developers and publishers in the second camp are best avoided. Problem is, people keep buying their games. So you’ve gotta try to support the ones in the first group. And, sometimes people actually like games from trash developers. Some will tell you their games are not that bad or that they found something they love.

EA’s been in the second group for a long time. I don’t think they will get any better. I think I will go on ignoring their games.

Reminds me of when the Klan we’re on Jerry Springer and someone tried to unmask them and that seemed to be the absolute worst thing in the world to them. Letting people see them for who they really are.

Not hateful people — not just Klan, or Reddit mods for that matter — operate more openly. It seems the one hateful group still terrified of exposure is child predators. Release the damn Epstein files! No, I don’t think Reddit mods are on it. They do defend child predators on Reddit, but Epstein only rubbed elbows with the rich and powerful, not the pseudo powerful.

I know MWAM but not Tricot, checking them out now — thanks!

Almost sounds like it belongs on a Hallmark card, but I can dig it. It’s like that bumper sticker “your vibe attracts your tribe.” It’s cliche but some cliches are popular because there’s some truth there.

I’ve found that, to most of my peers, I’m definitely the weird one. I often let others pick the music because, while most of my coworkers tend to play stuff I find agreeable, the stuff I listen to is too eccentric, weird, and downright alien to them. So we listen to hip-hop, country, R&B, or pop music at work. And I listen to Japanese rock in my car on the way home. So is the real me an eccentric, or someone who’s accommodating of others? I don’t think there’s an easy answer. At least not one that fits on a greeting card.

They do collect data, but they aren’t data brokers, they aren’t selling it to the highest bidder, like Google does.

I think the scary thing about Apple is, we don’t know where they’re gonna go. Right now the assumption is (from our side) that they are still a computer company first and they want to keep the data to make their products better, but that might be naive and overly optimistic. With Google, we know where they stand. So they’re less scary maybe? To some? I dunno. Call me what you will, but I still think of Apple as that old school computer company, just with some services now (e.g. Apple Music, TV+, etc.).

I said Magic: The Gathering but I was thinking of Weiss Schwarz, a less popular card battle game that uses anime characters. Sometimes called Waifu Wars because, well, waifus. Part of the gamble there was that the game would last, whereas Magic was a more established property.

I didn’t mean to shit on Magic. I got plenty to not like about it. When it came out, Wizards of the Coast was competing with TSR (who made D&D). Wizards ended up buying TSR out entirely. But, I think they’ve been good to the franchise, so I’ve cooled off on Magic. Even tried it. Got a starter set five, six years ago, tried playing, I was running forest or whatever you call it (all my lands were trees/forest, so I ran the related cards). Never really went anywhere. But I’ll tell ya what I love about Magic… the troll cards. So I was playing Weiss one day, guy comes up and asks for a high five. I bet you know where this is going — He Who Is Left Hanging or something like that. Had I denied him, he would have gotten some bonus in combat? And the card that forces you to set the whole game aside and run a sub-game out of your discards? Love it. So aside from the nice artwork, there are some really interesting game mechanics. I kinda wanted to get into Commander, but didn’t really have the patience/drive at that point. I know a guy with like a dozen Commander decks and we played a game, it was fun.

There isn’t one. Certainly never has been with baseball cards. It’s all the same though. Except you can’t win anything with collectible cards. Maybe you get one that’s worth something down the road… IF you took care of it.

Feel like I saw this on a video game once. The kind of thing that works in a game but not in real life.

Everyone saying loot box toys should be illegal should ask themselves if Magic: The Gathering should be illegal too. Or baseball cards. “Blind box”/“blind packs” have existed for decades. It’s only a problem now because they’re toys instead of cards? Or were they always a problem? Please clarify.

I personally think Labubus are fucking ugly as hell. But we have blind bags in the anime fandom, pretty much any big franchise gets them. SPYxFAMILY, My Hero Academia, Chainsaw Man… probably Dandadan and Demon Slayer, though I haven’t seen those yet. Anyway, you buy a bag and there’s a figure inside. The one you probably want is rare. It’s nice with SPYxFAMILY because Yor (the mother) is the rare one, not Anya (sort of the mascot of the show, the dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks four-year-old telepath with the pink hair and horns who is just so friggin’ cute). If they made Anya rare, the fans might be in trouble, but it’s just the ones horny for Yor that end up wading through a pile of Loid (the dad), Anya, and Becky (the friend) to get to the one hot chick they want. And that’s what it seems to be, the hot chick the horny young guys are after is the rare one. If you like the cute character or one of the guys, you’ll probably get your figure or you can trade for it, or buy it off someone who doesn’t want it. Then again, if you’re horny and not dumb, you can spend the money you’re spending on blind bags on a figure that has more detail.

But again: baseball cards have existed for decades. Where was the outrage then? And baseball is just as dumb to a lot of Labubu fans as Labubu is to jocks. What’s the diff?

As an iPhone guy who doesn’t mind the limitations, it’s really sad to see Android losing everything that made it different from Apple. Headphone jacks, memory card slots, and now sideloading, with an honourable mention to Nova Launcher.

If Android is going to be just like iOS, you better not still be paying iPhone prices for Android phones, being that the original intent of Android (as when Google bought it) was to harvest more user data (than Gmail could) to be sold. You’re getting a weaker phone that collects your data and sells it to the highest bidder AND you’re paying iPhone prices AND you can’t sideload anymore (or, after such date in the future)? Nah, fuck that. At that point you should just get an iPhone, right? Seriously, take a good hard look at the iPhone 17 (the base model, not the Air or the Pro). $800 gets you privacy first, 256GB of storage, it’s the second most powerful phone out there (the Air and Pro have more cores), two cameras (so not as good as Pixel 10 at the same price in that regard but better video recording). Samsung has some advantages but they sell your health data. Apple Health being private is now a feature that the others do not have.

Obviously we need a third option because if Google/Android won’t compete with Apple, who will? And if nobody’s competing with Apple, why should Apple improve? Hell, the 17 series is a joke… not that the 16 series was a huge improvement over the 15 series. I feel like my 16 Pro Max will go ten years, won’t need to be replaced unless it gets physically broken.

I don’t know if they’re CPU or GPU intensive, but I’ve heard Call of Duty Warframe pushes the phones to overheat. I dunno, never played it. Also, iPhone 15 or 16 and later can play a handful of AAA games. Nothing good, just some Capcom and Ubisoft slop. Assassins Creed and Resident Evil stuff. The new ones, too.

Pretty sure the last couple generations of iPhones are more powerful than the Switch 2. Pretty sure most phones from the last 5-6 years are more powerful than the Switch 1. The Switch 1 was just a reworked Nvidia Shield tablet… from 2014. It had more RAM than the phones of its time, and the Tegra GPU hit a little harder, but the whole Switch 1 was quickly outclassed by every flagship phone on the market after a couple years, and the Switch 1 came out in like 2016 or 2017. Basically if you have a good phone from 2019 or 2020 or later, it’s more powerful than a Switch 1, and Switch 1 ran Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom (with cel-shaded graphics and heavily optmised).

A lot of us in tech are guilty of underestimating ARM64, but it’s been doing great. Apple has used it exclusively in their desktop and laptop computers (the M-series Macs) since 2020. I have an M2 Pro on my desk, it can run Cyberpunk and you probably know how small it is. Whole computer is like 7.75" square and maybe an inch tall?

I’m not saying Washington/the US is better than China. But, the devil you know. Also, the devil we know (the west) has probably lied to us in a few ways about China. I remember as a kid I believed children in China were starving. I also remember hearing that they kill female babies (and often not humanely) because of their one child policy. My dream when I was a kid was to save all those girls and educate them and teach them basic fighting skills… may have been like a Charlies Angels kind of thing going on in my head.

I suppose I should have updated my information before saying that… last I checked, there weren’t, but I don’t know how old that information is.

Yes and no. It’s not about the price of the phone, it’s about the capability of the modem and the material between the modem and the sky.

About ten years ago, I went to visit family in another state, and I blew my brother’s mind with the speeds my iPhone was getting. He thought it was an iPhone thing. I said nah, much as I’d like to brag about having the more powerful, more private phone — I just had a newer modem. I think he had a Galaxy S3, which was a few years older than the 6s I had. I told him if he had the latest Samsung, he’d likely see comparable speeds.

Apple is getting into making their own modems, and the jury is still out on whether that’s a good thing. I think the 17 series still use Qualcomm for 5G but they use Apple silicon for WiFi and Bluetooth. Maybe LTE as well, not sure about that. The Apple modem will almost certainly sip less power, but I’m not sure if it will be “better”. Probably not.

I’ve been all over the smartphone debate and I’ve argued on both sides (for Android and for iPhones). I’ve never heard anyone seriously defend one having better network connectivity. iPhones are almost always universally faster. Right now the Galaxy S25 is faster than the iPhone 16 series, but the iPhones lose less power to thermal throttling, which is to say the iPhones are better for gaming since they lose less power, but if you’re not a gamer, the Samsung will be faster. Camera is subjective. iPhone almost always has the best video recording, but their photos are oversharpened. Samsung oversoftens, and Pixels hallucinate details they can’t see, with AI. (Zoom in on something far away with text, take a picture, then zoom in on the text and look at the AI-generated text that looks like it’s from Animal Crossing. So what other details is it hallucinating?) But network connectivity? We don’t get into that. Because it really boils down to “it’s all the same but each generation improves upon the last a little.”

I’m gonna go on record and defend the Deus Ex remaster. There’s no way to play it on modern hardware. The only game console that can run it is the PS2, and not even then. The PS2 version was a whole other game because DX1 was too powerful for consoles. So it was basically DX1 dumbed down. Maps were smaller, everything was reduced… it was like a “de-make”.

You can run it on Windows PCs with some tweaking, but if you don’t have a computer with spyware, you can jump through bigger hoops. Linux has Proton. On my Macs I can do it with Whisky. It’s really not hard, but I did need a third party tool called Deus Exe because the original DeusEx.exe was a complete no-go. I think it was made for Windows 98? Anyway, once I got Deus Exe up and running, I was even able to run Shifter, which was a mod for DX1 that tightened a few things up and added “legendary” versions of each weapon to various places around the world. I actually ran a mod of the mod, one I made myself that had more hacks to the game, like you could update your cyber link to rifle range, i.e. to use computers from across the room. Like V can do in Cyberpunk. Except DX1 wasn’t made for that so it was kinda game breaking. But fun. I mean the game was never hard.

Anyway, they’re bringing DX1 to Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch. And PC, of course. Hopefully Mac — the developer, Aspyr, has done Mac ports, but they were doing Mac ports of Xbox 360 games when Macs and Xbox 360s used the same PowerPC architecture, so that’s kinda cheating. That said, anybody porting to Switch is a stone’s throw away from porting to Mac since they’re both ARM64, and that’s part of why we even have Cyberpunk on the Mac now.

Stephen King is really bad with numbers. Apparently in the book they had to constantly walk at 4-5MPH, but they dropped it to 3 for the book. But sometimes King will just pull numbers straight out of his ass and his editor just lets it fly.

Similar case, in IT, he constantly described Ben as fat, as wider than he was tall, etc., basically fat shaming the kid, but his actual weight was just a bit over average. It’s just in 1958 when the book took place, there really weren’t fat kids, and the “fat kid” was the one who didn’t look starved. Not like now where everyone’s thick and fat really means fat. It’s a matter of perspective, but the fact of the matter is, we might even consider Ben to be normal or underweight compared with the 11 year old boys (what he was) of today. King just liked to fat-shame. (But he also gave Ben a huge member in the train scene. Like shockingly big. So he didn’t do the boy entirely dirty!)

IMO the best way to do it is to acquire lossless (e.g. FLAC) and compress it yourself, if you want to. I use the MPEG4/AAC Low Complexity filter in fre:ac at 192kbps. Makes .m4a files about 10MB each. They sound great. AAC is supposed to be about twice as efficient as MP3 (and a looser license) but the files I make are about the size of MP3 320k files. Which tells me they’re about twice as good.

Apple gets associated with M4A/AAC a lot, but that’s just because they use it. I do use Apple hardware, but the same hardware runs MP3 without issue. The only issue I had with AAC was getting the old Winamp (2.x) to play it, back when we used Windows. But even then I found an input plugin and from there it was smooth sailing. It’s basically superior to MP3 in every way. (But for free licensing I think Ogg Vorbis will be a better fit.) (I also stream it via my Plex server, so if a device can’t play M4A — rare — Plex will transcode it.)

Anyway, I use Nyaa for a source (nyaa.si) but that is primarily Japanese/Asian media. That’s mostly what I listen to though. I do like some western rock from the 80s and 90s, but as the west stopped pushing rock music, I went where it was being pushed, which was Japan (and a lot of those guys sing in English, like ONE OK ROCK and Survive Said the Prophet — though, to be fair, 1OR is basically an American band now; while the guys were born/raised in Japan, they’ve lived in Los Angeles for years now, are signed to Fueled by Ramen, and they want to be more like Paramore and Fall Out Boy, which is fine, but it feels a bit disingenuous calling them Japanese rock in 2025).

If you were to just burn the body, hood and all, they wouldn’t be as offended by the prospective of unmasking them.

Like how trump’s biggest fear right now is release of the Epstein files. (And I have no idea why my iPhone autocorrected his name to lowercase but I’m leaving it. Ladies and gentlemen, Apple Intelligence!)