dragontology

Shigaraki Tomura, Boku no Hero Academia.

For starters, he’s this regular emo kid (about 19-20), except he’s got like a dozen disembodied hands grasping him from his torso and arms to his head and face.

The reason for the hands is pretty bizarre. Spoilers for the second half of season 5:

Oh, his super power? “Decay.” Anything he lays all five fingers on turns to ash. It’s as awesome and terrible as it sounds. What’s worse? Final season spoilers:

The author, Horikoshi Kohei, is a huge Star Wars nerd. If Shigaraki Tomura sounds like “anime Darth Vader,” that’s intentional. Except when “anime Luke Skywalker” tried to turn him back to good, final season spoilers:

And the kicker? Minor season 5 spoiler:

Note that all names use the Japanese naming convention of giving the family name before the given name (e.g. “Lincoln Abraham”), and the show is known outside of Japan as My Hero Academia.

Edit: I also like GLaDOS. YSK she’s also in Cyberpunk 2077, if only in spirit. Ellen McLain reprises her role and reuses some lines while voicing a psychotic robotaxi. I assume, with permission from Valve (who probably loved the cameo).

If you don’t do it every day or on a regular basis, you lose the drive.

Also, between AI, fan fiction, and social media, no one from the newer generations is reading original hand written fiction anymore. Some are, I’m sure, but most of, say, Stephen King’s Constant Readers are Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials. Looking at Gen Z and later, they know who Stephen King is, but most of them don’t care. They’ll watch a Stephen King movie, but never care about the book. And that’s Stephen King. One is the world’s biggest and most prolific writers (and my favorite) isn’t getting new readers. So how do you think the little guys are faring?

If you wanna write to write and not get paid and have a few people read it, write fan fiction and publish it on Ao3. If you wanna write original stuff, write fan fiction and convert, like what happened with Fifty Shades (it was originally Twilight fan fiction). Even still, it’s rare that that’s profitable.

Mass Effect.

I’m Gen X, I don’t.

I might say “that’s pretty fucking funny” though

Which is fewer and fewer all the time. Internet to the last mile has been a thing for like, I dunno, 20-30 years or something. A lot of rural areas in the US have gigabit fiber and many have two or three options for 100Mbit or better.

And outside the US it’s usually better

As long as they can get enough, they’ll make money. I mean Netflix and other streaming services rule out people with slow Internet and they’re not struggling. It’s been a moot point for years.

I think the greater concern is if you can be kicked off the Net or excluded from it.

Yeah. It’s been a long time but Human Error, the quest that takes place in Covenant, was one of the first quests they made. Your character comments on things like you do in the first Vault and basically nowhere else. They fixed it though, but the settlement basically isn’t good. The good ending is them turning on you because they’re the bad guys. Well, they’re humans who hate synths and torture people they think might be synths. So basically evil. The bad ending is to continue letting them do that.

I do think they changed it to where you can keep the settlement, but some parts are still broken, like the turrets will always be hostile or something.

Starfield’s pirate quest line could be broken with no resolution and it was random. When you had to destroy or defend the three space turrets, the quest line would randomly lock up and there was no way to advance. It took them a whole bit I think they did fix it. They were having a hard time replicating it.

Maybe the PS6 (and next Xbox) will be a $100 streaming box, and the games will be run on their servers, and you’ll pay a monthly fee to access the games, which gives you a break on the cost of the game, which you won’t own, you’ll just borrow a license to it.

And you’ll like it. /s

But really, on one hand it kinda sidesteps the issue of RAM/storage cost, but it’s also kinda shitty. It also begs the question of, why do I need their box at all? I should be able to pay for their streaming service and run that on my MacBook Air. I mean if they’re doing the heavy lifting, why do I need to buy their branded box at all? And PlayStation does not like to play well with others.

My first iPhone, the 6s. I’m sure if I still had it, it would still be kicking ass. After that I got the SE 2, the 13 Pro, and now the 16 Pro Max. I do like having USB-C, but the SE 2 and 13 Pro were unnecessary.

So, an iPhone — but you really have to be careful. Some of them are bested by the next one. A few of them are good to run for a decade or so.

Not dumping on Android. I went through a few of them before I switched, and I liked the Galaxy S3. The others were all trash. I have a Galaxy S10 and I love it. I think these days it really doesn’t matter what you have as long as it has USB-C (for universal charging) and it’s decent or recent. The S10 will run for ten years. A lower-end Galaxy from a few years more recent would probably be fine, too. And that’s the thing with iPhone — none of them are bad, per se, they’re all flagship quality, they just have different compromises. Some Android phones are straight up duds. If you’re fairly tech savvy, this isn’t an issue. So, if you don’t like Apple, get a Galaxy S26, it should last you a long time. If you do, the iPhone 17 is the best deal in tech. It should last you at least a decade if you don’t suffer from FOMO.

MacBook Air. I’ve gone through a few Wintel laptops. None of them are good. No laptops are great for gaming, so you might as well get the MacBook. For a desktop, it’s a harder decision because no Macs are reallly good for gaming; even if you spend a few grand on a Studio, it’s only gonna be mediocre for gaming and you have fewer choices. Spend less on a decent gaming PC and have a better time. If you don’t care about gaming, it’s an easier decision.

Any of the krogan from Mass Effect. They’d just head-butt anyone who disagrees with them. Saving grace: head-butt them first and gain their respect.\

Talking about the really big reptilian dudes who look like they couldn’t exist outside of their armor.

They absolutely aren’t. Their last mainline game was Starfield, and it shipped without a map function. Two of my favorite bugs include the one where if you try to open the liquor cabinet on the pirate station, the doors open inward, forcing the bottles through the walls and they fly every which way in the CIC. Or the one where a crew of spacers has taken a ship hostage, so you dock and kill the spacers to save the ship, but the spacers leader is aligned to Constellation, so if you complete the randomized side mission, you piss off your crew!

Their other current projects are live-service money grabs (Elder Scrolls Online, and Fallout 76). So no, they aren’t.

To put that into context, I’m an iPhone guy who uses Android on the side. My old S10 will never have that issue (it doesn’t get updated anymore), but for my next Android phone, that’s one of the first things I’m doing. Enabling developer settings. Turning off the animation speed entirely. And that. So for 24 hours I won’t be able to sideload. After that: it’s open season forever.

Not sure how it’ll go for existing Android users. I imagine you’ll get an update and your sideloaded apps will be disabled, then you’ll enable sideloading, and after the 24 hours, they’ll be enabled again.

Currently playing Animal Crossing New Leaf Welcome Luxury. Balance the economy (buy price == sell price), makes fishing easier etc.

Also like Legend of Zeros Triforce of the Gods. Implements fixes from later versions, restored cut content, and adds some common sense features. Fixes the inventory. Lets you change directions while running. Stuff like that. Based on Zelda 3

Anime! Anime is to Japanese music now (really, since Attack on Titan and Sword Art Online blew up in 2013) what MTV was to western music in the 1980s. When I hear an opening or ending I like, I Shazam it and add it to a Japanese playlist I have, and if I really like it, I’ll explore other songs by the artist or band.

Sorry for the late reply. .hack//SIGN has not aged well. I first watched it in Japanese with fan subs, and I had nothing to base my expectations on. It was bad, but I didn’t know any better. Years later I watched the English dub, and it was borderline unwatchable, so I tried going back to the Japanese version, and it wasn’t any better. I don’t think it was meant to be good (in that way) and I don’t think it can be saved.

The second season of .hack (Legend of the Twilight; also called Legend of the Twilight Bracelet in fansub) went full chibi. This actually started, I believe, with an OVA to SIGN (the first season) called .hack//GIFT, which ended with the boys spying on the girls in the bath. The whole thing was a farce, but the chibi element dominated the second season. .hack tried to take itself way more seriously with the third season, but I couldn’t get into it. I think I got 8 episodes in before throwing in the towel?

.hack is not good, IMO. Maybe there’s a point to be made. SAO, on the other hand, works very hard to make you think it’s cool. And it is cool. As an old guy who grew up with Star Wars, I think it’s a great modern media franchise. Certainly better than any of the last three mainline Star Wars films, and arguably SAO is also better than Phantom Menace, and a case could be made for the other two. It does borrow quite a bit from .hack (or maybe they both just borrow MMO tropes; I never played MMOs), but it expands on those ideas greatly. For example, .hack//Another Story. Another OVA where one of the main girls is telling one of the guys about her first friend in the game, this unbeatable girl warrior and the sacrifice she made. So when the last third or so of SAO season 2 came out, and here comes a similar purple-haired female duelist, I said “oh I bet she’s logged in 24/7.” And I’m not going to spoil it, but while SAO took the story in the same direction, it went way deeper, and was so much more satisfying. I knew how the story was going to end because I’d seen the original. But SAO did it way, way better. Honestly, if the Mother’s Rosary (name of the book it’s based on) section of SAO were a standalone anime, it would probably be my favorite anime of all time.

Interesting… I don’t love oatmeal which makes me wonder if I won’t love oat milk, but again, I’m certainly willing to try it!

When I think of grains, I think of oat in terms of oatmeal, wheat in terms of wheat farina (e.g. Cream of Wheat), and corn in terms of corn meal (or corn bread — no offense to vegans, I’m not sure you can make that without milk and/or egg, but you can probably use vegan substitutes… I like honey in mine, so that might offset any “weird” taste of a vegan cornbread). So my first thought is “what about wheat ‘milk’?”. Because cream of wheat kicks the crap out of oatmeal. IMO. But I’m not sure you can make a cream suitable for coffee with wheat farina.

Yes, that’s the one. I love the look of both games, but I recognize that Cuphead is beyond my play ability. Gorgeous game though!

I can run Steam Deck verified games on my Mac? How? (I don’t think I can, I think you just missed that I have a Mac, not a Steam Deck.)

I didn’t look for Steam Deck verification, I just looked at the OS flags above the price. They have them for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

How do you milk oats?

I’m not trying to troll the vegans here, though I do feel a sense of sarcasm here. But it’s not because I consume animal products; it’s because I enjoy coffee and I’m wondering what… whatever “oat milk” is …adds to coffee.

For the record, straight up milk is nasty in coffee and I don’t understand why people do it. Creamer mixes milk and cream. Hot coffee does something to milk that just makes the whole cup gross. I think the thicker, heartier cream holds its own against the coffee.

So in my head I’m thinking you juice the oats somehow, but I’m not sure how you get cream without any cow’s milk. Soy?

I go to a local coffee shop and they do oat milk. I’m not vegan but I’m not opposed to vegan solutions. So I am curious about the oat milk. Can anyone explain without getting political, strictly on culinary basis, what oat milk brings to coffee?

Art style looks cool.

Requires Windows. My computer can’t run that (by choice, also by design — it’s a Mac). So that’s a red flag I can’t ignore.

Anyway, it feels like this game has been coming for years. It doesn’t help that it looks somewhat similar to that other retro cartoon bullet hell game I can’t recall the name of right now. That game doesn’t interest me though; this one tentatively does if it has an easy mode or the difficulty is fair.

Bought for me: the NES deluxe kit with console, controllers, light gun, and Mario/Duck Hunt.

I first bought Super Mario Bros 3 as in, with my own money.