Stepos Venzny

It also found a rise in suspensions and a dip in students’ feelings of wellbeing in the first year after a ban as schools adapted to the change. “Over time, however, disciplinary impacts fade and wellbeing rebounds, becoming positive in subsequent years,” the report said.

So it sounds like the winning play is to not give them phones in the first place. Then you skip straight to positive impacts without going through the negative ones first.

I played it when it was new. Spent hours on the demo alone. Killed a dragon with a stick.

I liked 1 a lot better than 2 but apparently that’s an unpopular sentiment.

The claim Nvidia’s making that you can apply it selectively within a given frame kind of makes me want a game where only one character looks like that so as to emphasize their otherworldly wrongness. A Dishonored game where only the Outsider has it, that kind of thing.

Having recently read the book, I don’t really see how there could be.

All the ads I get are about getting the foreign libraries in streaming services.

Yeah, “you shouldn’t have to learn how to use a house” makes me think of my mom who never learned to load a dishwasher and, even when it’s pointed out that the sprayers are blocked from spinning, refuses not to fill every cubic inch of its interior. I’m broadly against smart anything but thinking any technology requires no effort on the user’s part is laughable.

If there was ever a difference between being far-right and being disinformation, there isn’t one anymore.

The whole article is fixated on Grok being far right and never seems to care that an LLM is citing another LLM instead of an actual source.

The show is so much better written than the Bethesda games that this can only be a positive for them.

It’s more about companies getting people killed, less about companies doing a bad job at making video games.

There is no severity of raw capitalism that makes this makes this make sense to me.

Why, when making a game that centers on a judge, is the judge Snoop Dogg? Why, when making a game that centers on Snoop Dogg, is Snoop Dogg a judge?

Whichever angle I’m coming at it from I can’t make any sense of this premise.

Cookie Cutter

I heard ages ago that the animation was something special and then saw it was dirt cheap on sale and grabbed it a while after that but was just never in the mood to start something that looked so frantic. Finally actually started playing it a couple days ago.

For starters, the main character’s animation work really is something special. The snappy movement, the expressive face, the terrible posture, the confrontationally ever-visible underwear.

Everything other than the visuals seems so undercooked, though. The setting is high concept but the plot is a basic “get revenge and save the girl” type deal. It’s one big map like a Metroid game but the levels are as straightforward as a level-based licensed platformer. The combat is trying to be spectacle-fightery but there is absolutely zero complexity to it. And I was just playing it last night and have already completely forgotten the music sounds like aside from, like, there’s electric guitar.

I’ll stick with it longer in hopes that the game around this extremely likable main character develops into something beyond baseline technical competence. I’ve simply never played a game that is so lovingly and expertly made in one specific regard that phones literally everything else in as hard as this seems to so far.

I’m also getting into Death Stranding 2 but it feels like there’s nothing to say about it. First game again but more of it. Weird to see Kojima making so conservative a sequel. Like with Cookie Cutter, I’m really hoping for more from this as I progress. Not to say that they’re equivalently disappointing.

You’re calling people with different visual preferences than you ignorant cultists. Surely that qualifies as you pushing back on personal enjoyment?

You know, filmmakers don’t always like the tech they’re using. Matching their equipment isn’t always the same thing as matching their vision. All art is comprise.

You remember the Hobbit trilogy? That was a pretty famous instance of a director going against the grain visually, giving it a higher than normal frame rate. Looking like a soap opera rather than cinema, as you put it. On purpose. Audiences hated that. He spent more money making it and they said it looked cheap. They could see motion in enough clarity that it looked like they were seeing a human with facial prosthetics rather than a dwarf. It looked objectively more real than a regular frame rate but that proved too real for most.

Now if I were the sort that likes to turn on motion smoothing, do you think Peter Jackson who tried to pioneer high frame rate theatrical releases would disagree with me doing that for his earlier 24 FPS movies, like the good Lord of the Rings? Or does making the motion look more real make the movie more like he wishes it always had been?

Me, I don’t like high frame rate movies either. If he came out and said motion smoothing is the best way to watch the older movies then I would still leave it off. That’s barely even a hypothetical, since he said the theatrical cut is the best way to watch yet I still prefer the Extended Editions.

If he said OLEDs were the best way to watch them, would you stop watching on a projector? Of course you wouldn’t. You like projectors better. Directorial intent is irrelevant.

The correct response to weird gatekeepers who talk shit about projectors isn’t to gatekeep back in the opposite direction, it’s to just continue enjoying what you enjoy. And when somebody asks for advice on their home theater, sing the praises of your beloved projectors. But this long and unprompted argument you just started against faceless masses with accusations that people who disagree with you aren’t capable of forming their own opinions, maybe don’t be doing that so much.

I grew up watching 4:3 movies with monaural sound on CRT screens that were roughly a foot tall and loved movies then no less than I do today on my modern OLED and surround system. Bigger and clearer is nice to have but there’s no reason to stress over what display is optimal.

No, they were totally fair in saying that. As much as Tomb Raider is a knockoff narratively, Infernal Machine is even more directly a knockoff mechanically.

I played it back in the day and it felt terrible to play then, too.

I managed to beat Chibi-Robo and, dang, that story really went some places right at the end. If someone had attempted to spoil it for me one hour before I reached it myself, I’d be insulted by how gullible they thought I was.

In terms of my personal main quest, the game hasn’t explicitly stated that I’m the new husband but he lost his wedding ring and I found it and there’s no prompt to give it back and I can’t help but notice the symbolism.

I’ve always been shocked at the generally positive reception Circle of the Moon gets.

Handhelds that you can optionally plug into a TV to use the TV screen for and have higher specs in that mode aren’t exactly the norm.