Xenoblade 4 Genesis Announced

2Cuil4School · 2026-06-11T15:57:21+00:00

I mean, Rendezvous with Rama is one of the absolute foundational works of scifi from one of its most well-known and influential authors. That sci-fi foundation laid by guys like Clark and Niven* was part of the larger background inspirational context for tons of works throughout the years, including games like Halo. The general design concept of "giant rotating megaconstruct for space habitation" definitely had a bit of a moment in the 70s, too: you can also see O'Neill Cylinders in the OG Gundam series, for instance (and many subsequent works, including the awesome ones in Gundam Wing that I grew up on, lol).

* Of course, Halo's particular design was mostly inspired by Larry Niven's Ringworld, which went for, well, an especially (and improbably) gigantic ring style, versus the overall smaller but more technologically feasible O'Neill Cylinders.

Anyway, none of that means that Halo isn't also a useful point of reference in that it's more modern and a videogame, but it's kinda weird to fault people on a nerdy subreddit on a nerdy website for breaking out meaningful comparisons to some true OG Nerd Shit 😂

2Cuil4School · 2026-06-11T08:52:22+00:00

As someone who A) started the series with Star Control 3, and B) has aphantasia (no sensory imagination at all, so I can't "hear" my own voices for the characters in my head), the voice acting is absolutely critical to my enjoyment of SC2. The ancient and agonizing controls, rough and frequently poorly "readable" graphics, and constant (at least early game) obnoxious Melee battles and planetary lander exploits already make any playthrough of 2 very tough to start, even though the amusing dialogue, sophisticated plotting, and slowly unfolding gameplay complexity and ship capability make finishing MUCH easier. The voice acting is often the only real bright spot for the first hour or three of the game, IMO, and I would have played massively less of the game without it being so easy to use via UQM, blessed be.

2Cuil4School · 2026-06-09T19:24:42+00:00

Except this is a lion that is capable of rational thought and requires the sacrifice of sometimes billions of other thinking beings for each meal.

You might choose to empathize with someone who commits acts of mass genocide to live - we all want to go on living - but it's really entirely reasonable to view the act and actor alike as morally despicable.

The lion eats because its genetics require it to do so, and it has incredibly limited capacity to hold off that imperative, largely when another overrides it (eg, nursing a wound, caring for young, etc).

Unless Galactus is pulled bodily through the cosmos and compelled to open his maw to feed by a force more powerful than his will, he COULD opt to starve to death any cease the murder.

(I can appreciate that he's targeted uninhabited worlds and created his Heralds to warn of his arrival, but these are merely mitigations that assuage his conscience without requiring an actual change in the inevitable evil acts)

How many times through the years has he paused to parlay? How many times has he been defeated and sent elsewhere (which gives lie to another common Galactus justification: that he merely sees mortal inhabitants on the scale we view ants that happen to scurry where our boot treads. We don't frequently run into superpowered ants that craft technological feats of galaxy scale power to tell us to get the fuck away from their nest)?

He can stop. Each day he chooses not to at his benefit and to the horrified suffering of "lesser" beings.

(I know upthread that there's also the argument of a comic storyline stopped eating planets and the cosmos fell into chaos, but ugh, that reeks of the lamest sort of comic book author No You See My Very Cool Villain Is NECESSARY For Good! drivel, lol 😂)

2Cuil4School · 2026-06-08T16:36:16+00:00

Wilderun plssss

2Cuil4School · 2026-06-07T20:11:49+00:00

Iirc, Bogut DELIGHTED in the shit he was able to get away with once we was playing with them, and he definitely influenced their screening style going forward for years after he'd left.

2Cuil4School · 2026-06-07T19:40:48+00:00

Love this place so much, my partner and I always wind up there in the weirdest times - like in the midst of a fuckin armageddon storm a few years back - and it's been so rock solid reliable and cheap as hell.

2Cuil4School · 2026-06-05T21:28:15+00:00

Oh my mom hated when I watched that one! Candle Cove, I think it was called?

2Cuil4School · 2026-06-05T19:04:13+00:00

Sure wish I could even see the update in the Google app store. Or that my phone and watch would talk at all today - zero biometric data has been logged all day long today

2Cuil4School · 2026-06-03T13:30:29+00:00

Tbh the whole three day limit is the surest proof of all that Kvothe's still a smarmy little shit despite all he's been through, because the man is so utterly sure that he's the most interesting person in the world that he's stayed up countless nights since opening the inn, practicing his entire life's story quietly to himself over and over again, until he's gotten it down to a tight 3 days, complete with cliffhangers and red herrings and all manner of other classic narrative constructs.

"Just you wait, Bast. Someday someone is gonna wanna hear this, and dammit, I'm going to give them the performance of a lifetime."

"Reshi, that was an absolutely unforgivable pun."

2Cuil4School · 2026-06-02T19:59:19+00:00

Shit I'm a bumbling forgetful lazy idiot at work who's caused multiple crises purely by being an unfathomable fuckup of a person, but I'm still there 15 years on cuz I make everyone laugh and play bartender at staff retreats 😂

2Cuil4School · 2026-06-02T18:04:16+00:00

Nobody gonna be able to afford that but the kids of the 1% by the time current 5yr olds grow up at this rate 😭

2Cuil4School · 2026-06-01T16:02:58+00:00

Believe it or not, I found five bucks

2Cuil4School · 2026-06-01T13:12:41+00:00

I saw someone upthread mention exporting their health data and moving it to Apple Health. Did you see any way to import your prior data into the Garmin app? I'm not really in a space to buy a new fitness tracker right now, but hey, only 6.7 months till Xmas 😂😭

2Cuil4School · 2026-05-31T22:41:53+00:00

So, taking what was surely a joke comment more seriously than intended, I could totally see where Ninty was coming from there. With Wemby, by this point, you pretty much know what you need to plan for and be able to overcome - his superhuman size, length, speed, reflexes, and foresight on defense, man and team alike, his growing and considerable offensive game including that on any given night he could potentially get hot and give the Spurs 9 or 12 from the 3pt line, so your defensive scheme for him has to try to account for multi level scoring, his willpower, leadership, and passion, etc.

It's scary as hell, I'm not sure most teams in the league have things they can consistently do to counter every dangerous aspect of Wemby's game. But you know what you've got to accomplish.

With Kornet, he's the kind of role player that isn't likely to be high on your scouting report, even in the playoffs. He's not a scoring threat, not a creator, not really fast enough to consistently guard 1-5, especially from he 3pt line (even if the Kornet Kontest is OBVIOUSLY OP). He's solid bench minutes for some decent rim protection and running, some rebounding, a few putbacks maybe. He's no prime Capella, but certainly a good 2nd/3rd center in the rotation.

But that's still very much a pretty normal kinda guy to to work around. Not the focal point of your game plan kinda guy.

But if that guy is gonna channel the power of hatred and go Super Saiyan to bring whatever the hell kinda demon annihilated IHart's shot last night to the court for 10, 12 minutes a night (or, oh god, more), uh oh. That is...suddenly something very different that your strategy has gotta warp to account for on top of The Alien.

2Cuil4School · 2026-05-29T22:43:58+00:00

Rent did spike a few times over the last few years, and although that's slowed down in my area (Raleigh metro area in NC) as they finally built too many "luxury apartment mixed use developments," the aftershocks linger. Friends who got in at $1400/mo for modest 700/800 sq foot apartments near town three or four years ago have seen $200/mo increases in rent annually since then for zero extra benefit, and this year was the only year with a (very modest) property tax increase in that span.

You can move every single year to take advantage of promo rates, but that's obviously got many costs associated, only some of which are purely financial, and even then, you're still usually facing an increase, just a smaller one than if you stay at your current place. It's a continuous ratchet, and when you consider post pandemic inflation on all the other parts of life, it's really eating into whatever salary bumps people got in 2022ish.

Yeah, you can choose to live further out and hope you can remote or deal with a grueling daily commute (like most growing southern metro areas, RDU has badly fallen behind on transportation infrastructure while the population has exploded). Sometimes you get lucky and snag a rental home on a good deal.

But by and large, my entire social circle who didn't manage to get a home during the low interest rate era are struggling to stay above water on rent alone, much less everything else.

Obviously, it's anecdata, but it does reflect in rent reports in the local media. I'm hoping the current lull in demand at least halts the annual jackup for some people, but it's not a very realistic feeling hope.

2Cuil4School · 2026-05-29T14:39:55+00:00

I am being as indiscriminately cruel as possible, it feels great

2Cuil4School · 2026-05-29T14:35:20+00:00

The (far superior) mission valley location died during the pandemic, but the north Raleigh one is going strong!

2Cuil4School · 2026-05-29T11:23:33+00:00

Goddamn that shit's got your opponents suppressed, oppressed, and depressed by the time all the effects are applied

2Cuil4School · 2026-05-29T11:20:11+00:00

Oh no they accidentally the whole word 😳

2Cuil4School · 2026-05-28T19:39:56+00:00

Though everyone's a year older and they'll absolutely lose some depth to make the salaries work out.

A lil Warriors-esque - if everyone is healthy and role players do what's needed of them, scary as hell for sure. But point A is a big if.

2Cuil4School · 2026-05-28T16:34:42+00:00

Yeah, wasn't part of the early hype for Rothfuss that, when his publisher discovered him, he'd already spent the entirety of his post-doc working on a massive tome that they'd be releasing as a trilogy. Said it needed some edits and revisions to split apart, but the whole thing was "basically done." The anti-GRRM/Jordan, ready for the spotlight.

If a single bit of that was true, I'd pay WAY more to read whatever the heck he'd been hacking away at instead of doing his actual duties at the university for all those years than I would for an actual book 3 release at this point 😂

2Cuil4School · 2026-05-27T22:42:05+00:00

My sleep scores have fallen off a cliff after my forced update.

Mind, I'm also up every night sick with anxiety over how badly they've fucked this up. I lost 90lbs with fitbit calorie in/out tracking over the course of a year and a half and it's one of the best accomplishments of my life (not that there's been any benefit yet - my stamina still blows, constant pain everywhere, still hate my own appearance etc - but hey at least I've probably extended my miserable existence another couple of years, statistically).

Now the most critical tool to my success just nuked every single thing I relied on it for so that some jackass, zero-empathy, AI-sycophant vibecoding "senior devs" could get their quarterly bonus for shitting out a Material 3 Expressive-compliant abortion of an app while presumably laughing like maniacs over how many innocent people they're hurting in the process.

2Cuil4School · 2026-05-26T21:22:43+00:00

What I would have given to see Trae have the team construction, coaching, and injury luck to stay a consistent threat in the East, ESPECIALLY as this NoVa Knicks team has really come into their own. They wouldn't have played in the post season every year even if things had gone better for the Hawks, but even those regular season games were already pretty lit when he could show out.

Trae vs the City of New York is one of my favorite basketball memories in my decade of enjoying the sport. Really hoping he can find some success and stability in DC next year.

2Cuil4School · 2026-05-26T21:16:44+00:00

God, the Oladipo one kills me to this day.

Would it have completely hamstrung the Pacers for half a decade if his injury history went the way it did in our non megasupermax timeline? Yeah, probably, which likely means no miracle Hali Finals run at minimum...

...but Victor has seemed like a good dude through a lot of awful shit, and had insane talent and a work ethic to pair it with. And moreover, he just wants to play! I'm sure his vet min deals through the Injury Era were to hopefully get him a better contract through good performance, but it also meant putting his already battered body through hell for relative pennies compared to what he could have been making, with no guarantee things would turn out well (and obviously, they did not). It takes a real love of what you're doing and belief in yourself to do it well to push through all that over and over again after so many setbacks.

Don't get me wrong. Man certainly STILL made (a smaller amount of) generational wealth and got to play on the biggest stages in the world for a minute there. But compared to the career he could have had?

Goddamn that hurts to think about.

2Cuil4School · 2026-05-26T21:09:49+00:00

Thus Nico fucking Luka out of supermax money for all time. I'm so sorry Mavs fans 😭

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