I can totally forgive the photon torpedoes and shuttlecraft counts because I don’t see Voyager as being a strictly serial show. It kinda straddles the line between episodic and serial without being fully either - and on that basis I’ll allow it some degree of ‘reset’ between episodes.

Where Voyager certainly is serial are the show’s characters, and their change and growth as the seasons progress. That’s the real story in Voyager, versus whatever problem-of-the-week the ship finds itself in.

24-hour format when written

12-hour format when spoken

Exactly.

I’m not interested in any company announcing what they ‘plan’ to do, I’m interested when they actually do it.

The thing that makes me upset isn’t that it’s not for me.

I accept that plenty of games aren’t for me, and that I shouldn’t play them. I’m never going to get into Dark Souls or Elden Ring, because they aren’t going to be my thing.

The part that makes me upset is that Hollow Knight very much was for me, and was a game I enjoyed and have very fond memories of. I was very much looking forward to Silksong, but the difficulty is so much higher that I can no longer engage with this world I once loved.

It feels in TV terms like watching Season 1 of a show and really getting into it, and then when Season 2 comes out, you excitedly start watching - episode 1, episode 2, but your TV somehow stops working every time you start the third episode. Or any episode after the third. Everyone is talking about how great the show is and you’ve seen clips and you want to experience it, but no matter how much you try, you can’t.

If I hadn’t seen Season 1, I’d just give up after those two episodes like “That show’s obviously not working for me” - but I have seen Season 1. I’m invested, yet now I can’t see it through.

That’s why I’m upset.

I loved the first Hollow Knight incredibly, and I really wanted to love the sequel Silksong just as much, but the problem, you see, is that I am Not Good.

The first game had an OK difficulty and plenty of charms to help so I made it to the end, but all the first game DLC was so crazy hard I couldn’t even. And that made me sad.

I hoped Silksong would be a return to a more accessible place, but while it started reasonable it quickly got to a difficulty where I couldn’t keep up, no matter how much I tried. Way more than the original game.

So fuck you, Silksong. I love your world and I love your music and I love your vibe and I want to love you but I hate you.

I’ve recently been playing a lot of Minecraft.

I’ve not read the books or seen the movies or anything, so I don’t have a clue what Edward is like.

The ‘minor’ issue is one thing (eek) but if I had the power of telepathy, I can only assume I’d be pretty fascinated by someone I couldn’t read.

Human interaction is kinda built on the supposition that you can choose what you share with others and keep private things private, and getting to know people is the process of getting comfortable in sharing more about ourselves. We feel happy around our friends because we feel we have a sense of them and know them, and that’s an earned process.

If you always knew what anyone was thinking, it would make life very bland.

People are accustomed to consoles being unnaturally cheap, and even as manufacturing costs sky-rocket manufacturers are still eating a lot of that increase because they don’t want to lose sales to the competition, and expect they can make money back later on game sales and online service subscriptions.

Valve meanwhile doesn’t have that approach, and will be selling the the Steam Box for at least what it costs.

It will be exactly the same story with the Steam Frame - everyone is hoping it will be price-competitive with the Meta Quest but I can almost guarantee it won’t. It will be FAR more expensive.

Why? Because Meta are making money back later with advertising, and selling your data, while Valve are just providing a device.

If you want a little privacy, Linux support, and hardware you control, you’ll have to be prepared to pay a premium for it.

Since the API exodus, yes.

I made a very conscious choice to leave reddit at that time, due to that particular bullshit, and I don’t regret it.

Doesn’t mean I don’t miss reddit though, because I do. Reddit has a lot more traffic which obviously means a lot more content in the sort of niche communities I really love.

But I made the right choice. I don’t want to be part of that any longer. And the more of us make this choice, the better things will be for us all.

Minecraft is really out of place, yeah.

The rest are all multiplayer PVP/PVE shooters, MOBAs and the like, and then there’s Minecraft.

I’ve been playing Minecraft since Beta, and the way I like to play it’s a super chill and creative game.

When people say “Indie games are better” they don’t mean this as some universal truism, as if awful ones don’t exist. Of course they exist.

They mean that triple-A gaming has lost its way, and the soul of what is great about gaming is no longer found there, but in Indie.

Indie games are free to be just games - built with the intent of creating fun for the player, or telling a memorable story, or being interesting in whatever way the creator likes.

Triple A games are becoming only products, designed to make money. They are increasingly stuffed with mandatory accounts,microtransactions, DLC, and predatory gambling mechanics to keep players hooked while drip-feeding them dopamine.

The people at the top don’t care about games as creative expression, just games as a money product. If publishers could create ‘games’ without the annoyance of needing studios of developers or designers and creative types who have ‘vision’ and other bothersome things, they would. If they could just pull a lever and shit out another AI-generated turd, they’d do it.

Even single-player triple-A games aren’t immune. Despite enormous budgets games are coming out half-baked and bland, because they are made by a huge and disparate team who lost sight of the game’s vision because it’s too dilute, and they are overworked and being pressured to just fucking finish it already because we need this out in time to boost the Q4 shareholder results.

So yes.

“Indie games are better.”

I haven’t played it, but that sounds great honestly! :)

One of the things that absolutely winds me up in game cutscenes is where it becomes super obvious it’s just actors in a room. This is especially apparent when there is ellipsis, such as when a character is interrupted by a surprise event:

Char A: “We should head back before the…”

Char B: “Hey, look out!”

In writing, this is fine, but in the recording booth it almost always ends up with A’s voice actor stopping in the middle of their sentence for seemingly no reason (because they have literally no more script to read) and then B ‘interrupting’ them after a weird pause of dead air, with absolutely no overlap or cross-talk. It’s utterly unrealistic and completely destroys any illusion we were experiencing a genuine interaction.

I’m honestly shocked at how many big-budget games that clearly have a focus on narrative and story put out immersion-breaking rubbish like that and think it’s good enough.

On a somewhat related note, if you enjoy anime and good voice acting then check out “MILKY☆SUBWAY the Galactic Limited Express”

It’s super-short at 3 minutes per episode, and has fantastic VA work that sounds like real people having organic conversations, rather than reading a script. You can watch the whole thing on youtube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2erzV0ZmZKca9UHllZ2DObnwC56ffwqH

Honestly the best anime I’ve seen in ages.

Same, never got searched. It was a shock when I got older and learned that some kids regularly had their rooms turned over. The idea had never occurred to me that this could even be a thing, because I always felt safe in my room and felt my ‘secrets’ were safe too - even if they were mostly harmless secrets.

I was also not a kid who caused much trouble however, and you might argue “well there’s the reason.”

That might be true, but i think it’s mostly the other way around.

The one time as an older child I actually did something pretty bad, my friends all got grounded by their parents, but I didn’t. My mum just looked me in the eyes after I’d confessed, and said “Don’t do that again” - and I felt so disappointed in myself that I knew I wouldn’t. I didn’t need to be grounded, because I loved my mother and cared what she thought, and the regret I felt in that moment was punishment enough.

If you ransack your kid’s room on the regular, you’ll only create a person who grows up to resent you, and learns to hide from you and lie to you. Everyone deserves a place they feel safe in, and is theirs, even children.

That’s true, but let’s not pretend the perception of attractiveness against age isn’t very gendered, because it really is.

A male actor known for his good looks is likely to still be considered good looking for the majority of his working career, only it slowly changes from a ‘hunky’ look to mature and dignified. Male actors don’t quite face the same dilemma here.

You’ve clearly thought about it a lot.

Subtitle mistakes and bad timings is something that bothers me a lot too.

I’ve only ever watched the sub for Kimi no na Wa so I didn’t experience the English soundtrack, but the Japanese was banging and really helped make the movie.

I’m surprised the official subs are bad for such a big release, but I can believe it.

I kinda miss the days when fansubs were the only way to watch stuff, as much as that meant wating!

I assume that works only because you’ve seen it enough times you remember the intent of what is being said, even if you don’t understand it to listen to?

It’s more fun, certainly.

But I wouldn’t say it was any better - if that refers to quality.

It was my favourite season of the three, but pulling out the big nostalgia guns made it even more obvious they were really getting desperate.

They had to invent such a contrived and ridiculous plot, all to justify why that nostalgia trip could happen, or make the faintest bit of sense.

Even 20 years later the message is still bang on.

Consumers get hung up on some single factor, as if that is a direct and sole metric for ‘quality’ - and so manufacturers optimise solely for that factor, even at the expense of having to compromise in other places which make actual quality worse.

Dan gives the examples of IQ and of CPU Gigaherts, but examples of this numbers fixation are everywhere.

In bed sheets, ‘thread count’ is a direct proxy for quality, but in reality the material choice matters a lot more than the thread count, and if the thread count is too high the sleep experience can actually get worse, as the sheets become unbreathable.

It’s not solely the consumer’s fault either, for sure.

Manufacturers are quite happy to perpetuate and abuse the single metric of quality, because it allows them to create cheaply-manufactured products which nontheless still sound good to consumers, and therefore still sell well, despite being overall inferior.

Meanwhile in the cat gossip magazines

• FIVE SIGNS your human is HIDING TREATS!
• Top LICKING TECHNIQUES for the SILKIEST FUR
• Your CHRISTMEOWS HOROSCOPE presented by MYSTIC MISS MITTENS

👁️‍🗨️ 👁️‍🗨️