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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I’ve got Gran Turismo 7 and it’s great in some ways but they ruined the pacing of the game. It hands out cars like they expire in less than a week. It can be fun to try out a whole bunch of different cars, but there’s not much sense of progression like the older ones gave.

    I remember building a connection to some of the cars in older games. When you bought a car, it was meaningful because it took time to win enough money to afford something, and then I’d spend a while upgrading it until eventually hitting a ceiling and needing a better car to upgrade to progress to more races. And then add some variety with a few races with rules or restrictions along the way to give a reason to buy some other cards in the same tier, but then then it would be a big decision.

    In GT7, all except the top end supercars feel like an afterthought, my garage gets filled for free as I win races, and any time I want to try a different car, first thing I do is buy most or all of the upgrades because it’s all trivial. Race with limiting rules? Ok, give me 5 minutes and I’ll find, buy, and max out another car to win this one.

    Granted, it has more of an emphasis on the driving than the older ones did (where you could usually take your super car into whatever races your wanted and see how many times you could lap everyone), but I think I like the progressing through cars part more than the racing part and GT7 is disappointing in that regard compared to GT4 or GT3.


  • Any of those topics that people who care more about society being polite than just tell you to avoid are ones that should be not just discussed but agreed on before making a relationship legally binding. Religion, money, politics. They are each too serious for “agree to disagree” to last long.



  • I didn’t go cold turkey but made myself stick with Dvorak in mIRC. I was competent with Dvorak within a couple of weeks and then switched everything with actual typing to Dvorak within a month or two while using qwerty for things where I just wanted to type before that.

    At this point (some 20 years later), typing with qwerty takes concentration but Dvorak is so comfortable.

    That was with a qwerty layout keyboard just changing the layout in software and using an image on my 2nd monitor as a guide that I needed for maybe a couple of weeks. I also did drilling with typing games. Programming symbols took the longest to get used to. I still haven’t gotten an actual Dvorak layout keyboard (which does make it easier when I do need to use qwerty).





  • I like that someone figured out half assing things can be just as funny or even funnier than putting in the effort to make it look more professional.

    Now I’m curious about who first bottled that lightning.

    Maybe the makers of Aqua Teen Hunger Force? Half the characters in there seemed like they were making it up as they went and is the earliest one I can think of where that was a common theme.

    Home Movies came later but is the earliest where that’s applied to media produced “in-universe” that I can think of.

    Home Improvement was earlier than both and Tim was often out of his league on his show, but that was more of a “ill prepared but at least trying to be professional” act than “making it up as we go and not even trying to hide it”.


  • Back in the day, when I fired up Mortal Kombat 3 for the snes, I’d usually end up spending more time in the space invaders game than playing MK itself, especially since the consoles kept the tuning intended to keep the quarters coming for the arcade version (first fight would be easy, next fight would be hard, then easy after continue, so it wasn’t just pay to play for the arcade but pay to win).

    I’m curious if I’d remember each of the codes required for the secret menus, one of which contained the mini game. Can’t remember them offhand but it might be different with an snes controller in my hand.

    Actually I think I do remember one of them (or maybe it’s the Konami code, or maybe those two are the same code):

    Up, up, down, down, left, right, A, B, A

    Or maybe it was right then left. Lol I also remember usually needing to try several variations before I’d get each code correct.


  • It’s also a tactic of bullshitters to say a whole bunch of stuff in series, just put something out there and quickly move on to the next thing, making it sound like they have a lot of substance but hoping the quick change doesn’t give anyone much of a chance to pull on any of the threads of what they said or look close enough to realize that there is little to no substance behind any of it.

    Ancient Aliens and Alex Jones both also use that.

    And it’s a pain in the ass to unravel because people who don’t want to look more closely and just want to believe think there’s a list of things that need to be disproven if you wait and let the speaker finish or don’t question him about it directly because the believers don’t feel like they have the expertise to rebut counterpoints (so shelve them instead of discarding) and instead just want to go down the list. Which is fair, though it would be nice if they applied that same skepticism to that list of points in the first place.

    But this seems like an effective counter for that strategy. Just pick an item on the list that doesn’t sound right and keep pulling on that thread with the person that said it on the first place rather than the disciples blindly following. Then they’ll see it’s not just their lack of expertise getting in the way of arguing back against counterpoints, it’s the whole thing lacking any real substance at all.



  • I’m the type that when I see descriptions like “be the hero of your own Star Wars story” for a tourist destination, I immediately think it’s going to be some cheesy oversold experience because you can’t really mass produce a main character role.

    First of all, just the resources that would be required for the one on one time that would be involved is unrealistic for any scale beyond small groups.

    Second, they aren’t like DMs that can roll with whatever their characters design; “your own story” needs to be pigeon holed into a limited set of choices they can prepare for, especially if there’s supposed to be high production value involved and special effects.

    Third, of course any interactive elements are going to be ridiculously easy. They’d rather deal with people disappointed at how easy it is than people (especially kids) frustrated that they can’t do something.

    So I knew right at the start of this video that it wasn’t my kind of thing.

    But this thing didn’t even live up to the cheesy experience I would have expected. Seems like they bit off way more than they could chew with the initial idea but then we costs ballooned, they could only cut features and offerings while increasing the price, leaving it as an overpriced but underwhelming thing, in the end.

    So much corporate shit is like this now. I think it’s just another symptom of the problems capitalism brings. Under capitalism, you get a mix of people who want to do a thing and make money from it and people who want to make money and think doing a thing will get them that money. Those that are focused on the thing will generally produce something of much higher quality than those focused on the money they’ll make. One asks, “is this good? Could it be better?” while the other asks, “is this good enough? Could it be cheaper?”

    She touches on the other aspect in the video a bit, but could have gone a bit further (though I understand why she didn’t): the misleading marketing. Social media marketers with conflicted interests between being honest with their audience and keeping the providers of the free shit happy so the free shit keeps flowing. She touches on that aspect.

    But I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those trolls defending Disney are paid by Disney, maybe directly maybe indirectly. I’m not aware of any regulation against hiring people to pretend to like your product online. I’m not sure that would even technically count as advertisement, if truth in advertisement even matters anymore these days.

    Jenny has integrity, at least as far as I can tell. Those “influencers” that don’t are scum, whether they are doing it for free shit or getting paid to do it directly.