I was honestly getting a little excited for Dragon Quest Monsters: The Withered World, but I don’t really have a system I’ll be able to play it on at the moment and despite being a DQ series fan, I’ve never played any of the DQM games. With this in mind, I found a fan translation of Dragon Quest Monsters 2 for the 3DS to boot up in Citra and it’s been a lot of fun.

The game is bright and cheerful and oozes those pleasant, Dragon Quest vibes. Was a bit surprised to learn the game leans more heavily into the SMT monster raising than Pokemon. Which is to say you won’t be getting attached to specific monsters very much. I caught a drakee because I always loved their cute design and … it’s just kinda terrible. Instead you mostly want to keep breeding them which removes the parents for some reason. As far as I can tell wild caught is mostly useless and their power curve is too low to ever make them much good, but continually breeding them allows them to inherit skills. I’ve never wanted a random name button so much in my life. I’m sorry Splorg 7, I ran out of unique names ages ago, you come from a venerable line of Splorgs.

It’s very much a game for kids, the difficulty curve is pretty light but not without challenges in the arena and boss fights. You have Zoom instantly and can always teleport out of dungeons or to the nearest inn, which are free, to heal up. The stakes are pretty low, but that’s all I’m looking for right now. It’s just an excuse to explore the world and steadily breed a more powerful team.

Having not played the original GBC games I can’t tell how faithful it is, but there’s definitely a lot of content here. Given it’s a fan translation and the only people who are likely to have played it are people who emulate or crack their 3DS, I’d say this one is worth going out of your way to check out if you’re looking for more DQ content.

Save a bunch of money on this $150 product by only spending $20 in materials!

Now just take those materials to your garage workspace filled with thousands of dollars of tools and equipment …

This article does a great job of articulating a lot of the uncomfortableness I have around passkeys. I’ve always said they make a lot more sense in an corporate environment but the level of control you lose in a personal setting is not commensurate with the protections and possible lock-in they offer.

I just don’t like passkeys. They are an overly technical solution to what is mostly a human problem.

God, you people could make anything sound bad! It just means those people freezing their cabbages get the pizza add-on as a bonus! Now that’s a deal! /s

This is the whole overarching problem with tech. Most of us have fairly simple problems with fairly simple solutions, and tech has just straight up solved those needs, sometimes well over a decade ago.

I’m not saying there’s nowhere left for tech to improve, especially in the medical and biotech space, but in the consumer market there’s only so much we realistically need. It has been addressed, end of sentence, but capitalism’s need to extract infinite profit does not jive with solved problems.

I’m actually playing the Remakes entirely with a controller and I was skeptical of the control scheme at first, but it’s really grown on me. I played through the first one a few months ago and then took a break before digging into the second. The controls came back to me almost immediately now that they’re burnt into my head.

Sure, nothing is going to beat the tactile feeling of drawing with a stylus, but lacking the ability to do that or emulate it beyond a mouse, I think they pulled it off well and I hope they continue with the remakes (albeit at a more reasonable price, debuting at $40 apiece is fucking nuts; they’ve gone on sale a few times now though (or easily emulate through Switch on Eden >_>)).

STRAYYYyyyyAYyyAYYY! No regrets cause I got nothing to loooose! Eeeeeverrrrrr stray! 🎶

I remember paying $30 USD for a DVD with 3-4 episodes at most of an anime series. 26 episode Cowboy Bebop season? ~$120 USD.

Sure I downloaded that episode of Excel Saga once (❤️). It was 320x240 and took more than a day on my 56k dialup.

At some point I remember going on ebay and buying the entirety of Witch Hunter Robin (which at the time, I chose over Naruto that had just started airing as well, this would turn out to be an important tone setting point in my life …) and getting it for ~$20 USD. Basically just the cost of someone else to download it and burn it to CD for me. Did the same thing with Wolf’s Rain.

Good memories. Of the anime. This shit always sucked.

I grew up largely in the PS1 era and have a nostalgia for the affine texture warping. I’m not going to necessarily defend it as good in its own right, but I think a lot of older games play into that same “temporary suspension of disbelief” we get with movies. When something is less realistic, we are forced to invest more of our own imagination into it, an I believe that in a lot of ways this can form a stronger connection. You see this a lot with the whole analog horror trope, it’s the fear of the things hidden between the pixels that you’re not seeing and lets your imagination run wild.

Striving for realism only has one of two results: success of failure. Success is hard, and the numerous, subtle failures pile up until it distracts you and separates you from the illusion it’s trying to achieve.

I don’t have the time to write out the full response to this I want to right now, so I just want to say there is an almost immeasurable gulf between someone like Linus Torvalds using AI for debugging vs a coked out techbro junior engineer vibecoding the next Spotify but for access to water.

In my heart of hearts I still wish he wouldn’t touch the stuff just for the message this is going to send to all the wrong kinds of people but here we are.

People hate on Þat guy so much and I simply do not understand. Do I Þink it will be effective? No. Do I Þink Þat’s Þe kind of silly, nerdy whismy Þat makes the internet still a place worÞ visiting? Yeah.

Let him have it.

The comic actually raises a really interesting point. The internet already loves abstract, surreal humor but adopting it even more heavily as a defense mechanism against AI is the sort of thing that we’re going to look back at historically as having potentially influenced an entire movement.

Although it’s kind of debatable if art movements exist as such anymore. Somewhat related, I watched this good video about divine machinery a few weeks ago, check it out: Analyzing Divine Machinery as an “”Art Movement””

Can You Trust Your Computer? by Richard Stallman

I love deer. One of my favorite bits of trivia is the etymology of the word. It used to mean just generally any wild animal, but we eventually found names for all those other things. Deer remain unnamed. Truly wild.

I absolutely agree with you but I think that take is a bit short-sighted and undercuts just how evil this stuff is.

Tom Nicholas did a Youtube video on the metaverse a while back (oh my god it was 4 years ago, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM00M-dRMBk) and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. The pivot towards VR was an attempt to get even deeper ahold of our attention and what better way to do that than with goggles that are constantly in front of our eyes? The same with AI as it attempts to insert itself as a substrate layer of all technologies, and again with the smart glasses.

It’s easy to dismiss these efforts as hilariously misguided but they’re not. They’re extremely calculated and he only needs it to pay off once to make everything worth it, and I think there are others that realize this as well. We just gotta keep praying that these efforts burn him out before they strike it big. I’m neither a praying nor gambling man, but praying is all we got right now to stand in his way and I wouldn’t put money on the certainty of Facebook’s failures …

My first experience with WINE was trying to install an old Windows 3.1/95 pinball game (https://www.myabandonware.com/game/3-d-ultra-pinball-creep-night-3fh) and just double-clicking the installer to see what would happen.

It installed and launched without issue and even added a shortcut to the KDE app launcher.

I use Bottles now to keep cleanly separated environments, but … even I wasn’t expecting things to just work like that? I thought WINE would be more difficult to figure out but nope!

It feels stupid to say, but of all the things that got me to move to Linux and never even install Windows 11, it was that stupid Start menu. Windows 10 was kind of perfect. You had your full list of alphabetical apps if you needed it, but you also had the ability to pin nicely sized tiles for frequently used apps, sort them into groups, and even make folders. Windows 11 gives you a little grid of icons. Just a huge step back.

I don’t have the energy to rice my desktop anymore and KDE has been perfect.

The thing is, though, is that Microsoft is literally incapable of solving this problem when you think about it. So much of Microsoft’s current business model is centered around being able to subtly direct you and your actions and maintaining tight control over the UI experience is key to that. People aren’t stupid and they’ll always feel that friction, so it’s just a push-pull of how much they think they can get away with at any point and slowly nudging it until it pisses you off again.

I used to work at a pet store and we’d get big cartons of crickets for reptile food. If you’ve ever purchased them from Petco/PetSmart it’s just a garbage bin in the back room with some egg crate in it.

Anyways, they shipped with potato slices and other things to help sustain them but they were usually pretty savage by the time you opened the box to add them to the bins. Surprised me the first time I got my arms covered in them and they started munching away. Didn’t hurt at all, they’re crickets, but boy were they trying. Dozens of little cricket mouths gently pinching away. I just kinda stood there dumbfounded like are you for serious little dudes??

My bluetooth headphones have the worst power button. You have to press and hold it for ~1 second to turn them on, but that’s only the activation threshold. They still take a further ~0.3 seconds to turn on. So basically you just need to press it for the whole ~1.3 seconds because otherwise you end up pressing it for what you think might be 1 second and then waiting to see if they eventually activate and then if they don’t, then you’ll just end up pressing and holding it for 3 seconds until they’re all the way on.

Those numbers might not be entirely accurate, I’ve never actually really timed it out, but you get the picture. The entire window is frustrating to nail down and feels just awful and unsatisfying, sometimes I don’t manage to turn them off either because it’s the same behavior backwards.

I feel like the design is to prevent them from getting bumped in your bag and turning themselves on and draining the battery and while that might technically work, they’re just as likely to end up getting squashed in my bag in a way that presses and holds the button anyways. None of this would even be necessary if you just put in a cheap, old school, tactile slide switch??? Like what is the fucking point?!

I remember downloading a copy of King Missile’s Detachable Penis incorrectly credited to The Flaming Lips. Like … I must’ve known it wasn’t them, but it sat on my Flaming Lips playlist for years and I just assumed it was something from their earlier, weirder 80’s days.

I remember talking about this on a message board once before and like 3 other people chimed in with this exact same song, apparently it was a bit of a thing. Probably just one person’s mistake, but the internet felt a lot smaller back then and it’s not surprising it would’ve propagated like that.