CerebralHawks

And people will still pay it, just like people bought Switch 2s in record numbers and just like the ROG Ally X (Xbox handheld) will sell well.

I’m sure those who say they won’t are telling the truth, but most of them were never planning on buying it. Those who were will roll over like they always do.

It’s sad, but I’m somewhat rooting for $80-100 games and other BS like this, because I know at some point the frog will jump out of the water, we’ll have another video game crash, and after a few years things will return to sanity. But unlike last time, we all have huge backlogs — it won’t hurt gamers nearly as much as it will big publishers. I think it may even be good for indies.

What I’m really rooting for though: more indie games, more weird games, more dumb games that appeal to a niche and are loved by them for years to come that most people don’t get. A shift away from platform exclusivity. A shift away from Windows to both Mac and Linux. Something like Proton (LInux tool for emulating Windows games) on Mac. I’m fine with gaming being fine on Windows and Xbox, but it should still be fine if you don’t want to throw any money at Microsoft.

I think you’re onto something. I’d take it a step further — OP should have put the same energy into making this post that they put into replying to everyone.

Are they speeding? Then they are committing crimes, ergo they are criminals by the definition of the word.

Even if you ethically limit crime to harmful behavior, the risk to pedestrians and other traffic still paints them as criminals.

There are reasons they aren’t racing at a track, and part of it is the thrill of someone potentially getting hurt, or arrested. So even by your definition, they are criminals.

Now skateboarding is not a crime. Public nuisance, perhaps, at worst, but not a crime.

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.

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’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.

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.

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).

Seems likely. I’m sure Trump will need to personally examine the evidence of course

TikTok was run by a fascist regime: China. It’s just, most Americans are not of much interest to Beijing. Their intelligence probably wants to know what is trendy in America so it can better appeal to us and influence our elections to serve their interests, but Beijing is probably not concerned at all with you or I as individuals. But if they can get us to vote for a candidate they support by showing us the parts of that candidate that we agree with, we can be used as a tool by Beijing. Now Washington wants that power.

I don’t like it either way.

Eh, I’ll “have at” TikTok for being shit because historically, it has been. It’s driven by memes and trash.

That said, over the past couple years I’ve heard lots of good things. “BookTok” and other -Tok’s being communities within the service — I admit I don’t know how it is because I’ve never used it — but also, the rapid decline of YouTube has made me seriously consider getting on TikTok just to have something different. My resolve to be anti-TikTok has greatly reduced over the last couple years, as an “old guy” who does not like “social media”.

So yeah, credit where it’s due.

I’d love for the Fediverse to have a strong alternative, but again, the costs of running a video server that is anywhere close to being “widely used”…

Honestly I just thought it was funny they got rid of the cracker and the barrel.

Through the course of the controversy, I learned that the “cracker” was the Uncle Herschel mentioned in the menu a few times. He’s a character of theirs, something of a mascot, though a much subtler one than most other restaurant mascots. He’s in the art but his name isn’t widely advertised. A couple menu items have his name in them (e.g. Uncle Herschel’s Breakfast), but the name is not connected to the mascot in the logo.

Oh, I also thought it was funny that they said they changed the logo to be more inclusive (I guess of people who don’t look like Uncle Herschel), but they still don’t operate in California due to that state’s progressive policies, so they can shove their “inclusive” talk. Actions speak louder than words. They do hire women, and people of color, which is a great start for a restaurant so steeped in “Southern values,” but you can’t say nobody is excluded from the table while excluding an entire state based on the politics of its government. That’s just as dumb as rock groups refusing to play whichever Southern state did a stupid thing most recently.

TikTok was never good. Have at it.

Though, he is always free to start his own MAGA-themed video service, much like he did with Truth Social. I think the problem is — and if he doesn’t know it, he’s been advised, with crayons and hand puppets — that running a server serving video is orders of magnitude more expensive than running a server hosting a text-based social network.

Tom Nook for president

Love seeing love for Linux, but my Macs have never once complained about me using Firefox. Safari is there if I want an objectively worse Internet that does a couple things Firefox does via paid extensions but are free in Firefox. But if I use Firefox, macOS does not care.

I think the lesson is, as long as you’re not choosing Windows, you are choosing well. If you have to use Windows at work, that’s fine. So do I. But you don’t have to use it at home too.

Because Jesus showed them a better way? I thought that was the point of it.

All of Jesus’s followers who lived when he did were Jewish as well. They were all guilty of what Jesus was crucified for, going against the established religion of the land (I wouldn’t call it apostasy though; that’s renouncing God and none of them were doing that). Christianity is/was based on the teachings of Christ; it builds upon Judaism.

That’s my understanding anyway. I am not religious. But, I don’t think “Christians are not Jews like Jesus was” is a bad thing.

What’s wild to me is that today’s Jews believe Jesus was this decent guy but not the son of God. Then you have Muslims who believe that maybe he was the son of God, maybe he was just a prophet, but they still follow his teachings, they just lean more into the teachings of Muhammad (peace be upon him) (that’s how they say it, or they add “PBUH” which means the same). But guess who the Christians side with politically? I don’t get it. But I don’t think that (the political thing) has to do with who’s more closely aligned with Jesus, I think it’s who pays better.

But again, I’m not religious, so I don’t support or reject any of them. And of course my understanding of these religions is far less than actual practitioners of said religions.

YouTube is completely broken on my Apple TV — the last platform I have which actually does display ads. When the app loads, I get a black screen. When I tap on a video (click on it? on the remote?) it goes black, stutters through an ad, stutters through the next one, then stutters through the video for a couple seconds. Sometimes I have to start the video over. If I were running an ad blocker, I would expect static like this… but I’m not. I don’t have a PiHole. The Apple TV has direct, unfiltered access to my WiFi. The ads are showing, but the app is just… broken. On my computers (Macs) I get a perfect experience, because I use Firefox with uBlock Origin like a sane person who knows what they’re doing.

I just downloaded MKBHD’s iPhone Air review, and it played perfectly. 1920p whatever that means (somewhere north of 1440p but not quite 2160p… or 2160p/4K but slightly letterboxed). AV1 (Ay-Vee-Wun, not Ay-Vee-Eye), 30fps… looks and sounds great.

Glad to see the community fixed it fast.

I use jdownloader2 which probably uses yt-dl on the back end. But it also downloads from a metric fuckton of other sites, too. It’s like the Swiss Army knife of downloaders. And it’s Java, so it runs just as well on my Mac as it did on Windows back when I used that. (Wish they had an official dark theme that was easy to set up though. I know how to do it manually but can’t be arsed.)