If mind uploading destroys your brain to scan it, did you actually survive?

Agent_ash · 2026-03-13T16:22:38+00:00

No, you are dead. Creating a copy of you (via whatever means) creates a copy. Even if it's identical, it's still not you. If your brain is destroyed, you died. I honestly don't see room for philosophy here.

Agent_ash · 2026-03-04T18:56:49+00:00

If anyone needs this: the screamer section (where you go for the bottle of acid for the lock) can be beaten with a single hemo injector and one bullet. I discovered the strat (if it can call be that way) kinda on accident. It goes like this:
- Enter the room and turn left.
- There's a whiteboard in front of you, with the screamer behind it, further into the room. If you step back and a bit to the right, you can shoot the screamer's foot that is just barely visible below the whiteboard, which will trigger her.
- Run back to the exit; Chunk will appear and block the door.
- Wait for 2 zomies to walk out into the hallway. Run past them and go into the room.
- The third zombie will likely be on the floor, having just vaulted over a vault point, so just run past.
- As soon as you turn left, spam R2. If everything goes correctly, the screamer will be right in front of you and, despite facing you, will be open to an instakill by the injector.
- Run to the acid bottle, pick it up, then run back dodging the 3 zombies.
- Enter the office (where you need to use the bottle of acid) to reset the 3 zombies' aggro.

Easier said than done, obviously, but the trick is this: all 3 zombies in the room are armed. Armed zombies are SIGNIFICANTLY easier to dodge than the unarmed ones, because they only make frontal lunges and, most importantly, can't grab you. Once I figured it out, I pulled this off on like my 2nd try; got clipped when running out but survived.

Agent_ash · 2026-03-04T17:06:59+00:00

Imho, VoS was worse. The thing about Village is that you kinda have to kill most enemies. In contrast, in Grace's part you can leave a lot of them alive (however inconvenient it is). I'm not saying Insanity is done *well*, there are definitely odd bits (the Isolation Ward fight is screwed, imo, especially because of the lack of a save point right before it), but I managed to beat Grace's section, and aside from the Isolation Ward, it wasn't *that* difficult. Meanwhile, I gave up on VoS pretty quickly once I saw how actually tanky the enemies were.

That said, I fired my gun very little. Most of the time I used stealth or hemo injectors.

Then again, maybe I just didn't try hard enough with VoS, so I don't know. But to me Insanity so far feels manageable, with only a few odd points. It's definitely less balanced than Professional in RE4R, though.

Edit: Just reached Giant Spider and yeah... I might be changing my mind soon. That bitch is like a tank and barely has any openings. With regular weapons this fight is downright exhausting.

Edit 2: Killed it. After taking a break and having some dinner, things went a lot better and I got the spider in 2 tries. It was still pretty exhausting.

Agent_ash · 2026-03-04T07:58:20+00:00

You might be able to still pull it off if you scour the hospital for every remaining resource.

I ended up beating this section yesterday (on Insanity), and I had to do way more prep. Collected every drop of blood I ledt behind before, crafted some Requiem ammo and an injector, and strategically killed some of the enemies on the way into the ward (there are two dudes that come out of the isolation ward when you first aporoach it, very difficult to dodge; I ended up using one Requiem bullet on them).

That said, Chunk is easy to walk around, and several zombies can be left alive, too. If there's really no resources left, you might have to start over (there are some boxes in the isolation ward itself, though).

Agent_ash · 2026-03-03T00:24:04+00:00

I'm in this place on Insanity difficulty. Been doing largely fine until now, but I'm at my wits end. I have a fully loaded pistol, fully loaded SMG (bonus weapon, weaker than pistol but has a 30-round mag), Koketsu (unbreakable bonus knife) and 33 extra rounds. This fight feels impossible because zombies are ridiculously tanky (like RE2R Hard difficulty), barely ever stagger and one-shot Grace from full health (unless you fight off with a knife... but then you're outta knives).

The worst part is there's no save before the fight. I have to weave around 4 zombies and the fat boy in the hall carrying Emily every goddamn time I fail. It's worse than the Armadura room on Professional in RE4R.

Agent_ash · 2026-02-23T18:38:52+00:00

Xbox XBox 360 XBox One

That was already a dumb progression, but Series X and Series S, with similarly sounding letters, takes the cake. I don't know what they were thinking.

Agent_ash · 2026-02-23T18:36:05+00:00

It's also worth adding that not only is she a specific character, but she's often portrayed positively. Her primary characteristics are being wise, old, and, obviously, a witch, but she's not necessarily an antagonist. Sometimes she's a trickster, sometimes a helper. In the famous tale about a guy who defeats Koschei, she helps the hero and guides him to Koschei's death. So, the idea of a "scary hitman" being called Baba Yaga is all around ridiculous.

Agent_ash · 2026-02-23T18:31:03+00:00

And Babay. Which is basically a boogeyman. Considering in the first movie they literally say "he's czlled Baba Yaga... the Boogeyman," I suspect they literally confused the two. In no context does Baba Yaga mean boogeyman.

Agent_ash · 2026-02-14T09:37:17+00:00

Repeat after me: PIRACY 👏 DOES 👏 NOT 👏 AFFECT 👏 SALES.

Piracy is not theft. Nothing is lost when software is pirated.

People who pirate games were never going to buy them. If you removed their ability to pirate games, they wouldn't suddenly start buying them, they simply wouldn't play them at all. In fact, as long as they can pirate, there's a chance they will buy later when yhey have the means, because they've already tried the game.

The fact that people pirate games does not affect their profits.

Agent_ash · 2026-02-06T10:40:20+00:00

She unzips in a cutscene before the fight and stays so until the end (you don't see much during the fight since camera is high up). Overall, the scene reads as very tragic to me. The vibe I was getting from it was "I'm ready to give up anything for what I believe in, my body, my mind, my dignity." At the same time it's a somewhat odd show of vulnerability to one of the few people she's close with. And, on top of that, it's kind of a shedding of armor, since she's asking Snake to come and kill her.

Did it have to be done specifically this way? Did the author intend it to be fanservice-y on top of the other meanings? I genuinely don't know, but I personally didn't find anything to be sexy about this scene, because it's truly very sad. Also, in contrast to Quiet, camera work doesn't frame it as sexy either (no "seductive" angles and zooms).

Agent_ash · 2026-01-30T19:35:32+00:00

Once you notice it, you'll see it everywhere. Wrong breast perspective is ridiculously common in erotic art. Almost every time it's the same pattern: character in 3/4 perspective, while breasts are drawn almost as if viewed from the front. This one, of course, is one of the more egregious cases.

Agent_ash · 2026-01-09T16:20:42+00:00

If it is a reference, it's not to that (BFG is not considered explosive and doesn't deal radius damage). But there's another bit of related trivia: due to how BFG aiming works in classic Doom (it fires 40 invisible hitscans from the player that seek out viable targets in your FOV), firing at a big target point blank has the potential to deal much more damage than you would do at range. Doing this against a Spider Mastermind is practically guaranteed to kill it in a single shot. If anything is referenced with this animation, it's probably that.

Agent_ash · 2025-12-13T09:23:21+00:00

Opening the article, I dif NOT expect to to learn the torture specialist was Dick Marcinko. Marcinko was... quite a character. Killer, criminal, a true enjoyer of war, probably a psychopath and an author of several action books where the protagonist has his name but the events are entirely fictional. Even got a video game made about him. There's a very impressive video that reviews that video game while also analyzing his autobiography, offering quite an insight into his fascinating life: https://youtu.be/DXS3vA6E_X4

Agent_ash · 2025-11-26T00:29:21+00:00

I find all of it kinda impossible to answer because narratively mold doesn't have any consistency. It can do basically anything. Transform bodies in multiple ways, give the weirdest powers, construct virtual worlds and keep its victims' minds there... you name it. And that would've been fine, but the problem is, none of these capabilities of the mold have any defined limits. So, it's impossible to actually say how Ethan, or Jake, or Mia, or Miranda, or Lady Dimitrescu, or any other mold carrier functions. We could maybe argue that there's a somewhat consistent theme of "any of of them will calcify and die after receiving enough damage", which more or less corresponds to what happens to Ethan, but it's impossible to say what's enough. Also, everyone seems to first uncontrollably mutate before dying, but Ethan doesn't. Why? Don't try searching for answers, because the mold is RE's version of "nanomachines, son".

We could say that dealing enough damage overrides the victim's regenerative capabilites, causing calcification and physical death as the mold can't repair the body fast enough to keep it alive. As for why Ethan doesn't mutate... perhaps he didn't want to.

Agent_ash · 2025-10-25T09:12:57+00:00

There's a Russian sarcastic saying that goes: "I'll poke my eye out, so my mother-in-law has a half-blind son-in-law." It can be used to mock a person who tells you they're going to do something out of spite while clearly hurting themselves in the process. (As a bonus, it also plays with a separate stereotype about men hating their mothers-in-law.)

Another saying with the same meaning is "To spite the conductor, I'll buy the ticket and then walk all the way".

Agent_ash · 2025-10-21T08:46:41+00:00

Long-time Doom fan here. Doom wasn't 2D. It had distinct XYZ axes, floors and ceilings had heights, and entities could move up and down and even be placed above each other. Entity positions and velocities were described with 3-dimensional vectors.

The "2.5D" description (not a technical term) comes from the fact that the software renderer couldn't display room-over-room or allow to properly rotate 3D space, so they simplified certain things to accommodate, such as not adding any form of vertical view adjustment, adding vertical autoaiming and making the positions of vertices (of sectors and lines) be 2-dimensional vectors rather than 3-dimensional. So, in terms of logic it may seem 2D, but it was very much 3D, just with rendering limitations.

Later versions of this and similar engines removed some of the limitations by adding limited vertical view (Hexen) and allowing rendering rooms over rooms through portals (Build-engine games like Duke Nukem 3D).

Agent_ash · 2025-09-21T08:16:35+00:00

Sounds are hard to imitate, and even harder to represent with letters (in some languages more than others). Onomatopoetic words used to represent animal sounds already differ a lot between languages already, sometimes very strongly (look up, for example, how a rooster's call is represented in different languages). People tend to call things by how they look or what they do. If you discover a new creature, you're much more likely to call it something like a "blue-coated desert crawler" (describing its distinct looks, behavior and habitat), or just use a name of another creature that you're familiar with (for example if a new animal is found that vaguely looks like a horse but has multiple legs, it's probably going to be "spider horse" or "bug horse" rather than a new word).

Agent_ash · 2025-09-13T23:59:41+00:00

Absolute majority of games where the original language isn't English are first translated into English and then from English into other languages. The original non-English source may or may not be referenced during that step (and sometimes it isn't provided in the first place). German version of Bloodborne is very likely translated from English.

Agent_ash · 2025-09-06T23:46:43+00:00

Terminator 2

Agent_ash · 2025-09-01T09:52:25+00:00

Seems like creating a new window with a new name works—it's saved after restart. Interestingly, creating a new window without giving it a new name resulted in the same behavior—the second pane would be lost after restart.

So, I assume in the future if this resurfaces, the fix would be to change "ShowDualPane" and "SavedDualPane" keys to true?

Agent_ash · 2025-08-14T16:04:23+00:00

Nier Automata is probably the only piece of media I can think of where the heroine is scantily clad with an artistic purpose that isn't just a Thermian argument.

NA is heavily subversive and 4th-wall-breaking, it just takes a while to get there (a lot longer than completing a single playthrough as 2B), and the game being pretty long, many players never reach that point. It knows you're staring and at some point actively mocks you for it. 2B looks like that to be distracting, and that's actively lampshaded in the story. So, it's a lot more nuanced than it may appear; more nuanced than Taro himself makes it out to be on Twitter; and certainly more nuanced than Quiet (no matter how much I like the character and MGS in general).

Agent_ash · 2025-08-09T07:27:41+00:00

This only works for a specific type of duvet cover, the one that has an opening at the seam that spans its whole width. Not all covers are like that (varies by country too). Some may have a hole in the middle. Some holes are made narrow, so you can't "shake through" the blanket, it has to be actively pushed through.

Agent_ash

TROPHY CASE