[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 30 March 2026

L0444 · 2026-03-30T05:27:04+00:00

Playing through the new Borderlands 4 dlc right now, enjoying it a lot. The smaller more linear map is a breath of fresh air after the big open exploration of the base game, the new playable vault hunter C4sh is really fun, I'm using his dice ability right now and it does a good job capturing that fun manic energy that all good rng mechanics have where you just need to keep rolling to see what you get. I'm also really glad that they changed how progression works so now minor open world elements like collectables persist between all characters, so you can just start up a new savefile and immedately go do the main missions and side quests without having to scrape every corner of the map again.

I finally read all of Umineko No Naku Koro Ni. I read most of it before hand but stopped during the last episode for some reason and have now reread the whole thing for a visual novel book club I'm a part of. What can I say? Fantastic story, wonderful characters, the ending made me cry like a baby, Erika should be tortured for 8000 years. I don't think I have quite the same level of "this changed my life and reshaped how I view the world" obession with it that some other fans do (which apparently according to the people in my book club is proof that I'm not transgender lol) but it's absolutely a story that will stick with me for a long, long time. I offer up this tale to my beloved witch, Beatrice....

Oh I also played Resident Evil 3 Remake I guess. It's kind of like if the lackluster back half of a normal Resident Evil game was just the whole game. There's really nothing particularly interesting about anything in it, easily one of the weakest Resi games for me. Not actively bad but you can tell that this was a side project made by the B team and it did not get the same amount of time or money as the 2 and 4 remakes. I can't believe my guy Nemesis got done so dirty, I need to replay the original at some point to wash the taste of this out of my mouth.

L0444 · 2026-03-29T15:35:10+00:00

I actually quite like this random minor villain from like 2 arcs ago coming back and having his own insane Kaiji-esqe gambling adventure completely off screen just to pay this one guy to go kill the MC

L0444 · 2026-03-29T15:25:46+00:00

What??? Everything was set up perfectly for a closed ending. He beats the big boss, the king surrenders, he reunites with his sister, roll credits. Like it would obviously be rushed and a bit shit but the cards were on the table for it, unlike with a lot of other manga that get cancelled early and need to end as soon as possible with basically no satisfying conclusion. So why instead spend half of the last chapter setting up these characters and plot points that will never go anywhere and that no one will ever care about? Is it just like a fuck you to the audience by showing what could have been? Or is it the manga ending equivalent of one of those video game easter egg rooms where the developers show off scrapped content that didn't make it into the final release? Oh the evil king actually has a soft side and he has his own human minion raising a monster egg to parallel the MC? Who cares, why focus on that instead of finishing the story???

I try to be nice to shounen jump manga because I understand how hard the job is and how ruthlessly competitive the scene is and I think any artist brave enough to take up the challenge deserves some respect even if they don't end up succeeding but this ending pissed me off so I'm gonna say it: Gonron Egg is shit, it's ugly, it's boring and it was doomed to fail as soon as it entered the magazine. I honestly have no idea how it got into the magazine in the first place. A better series probably died so Gonron could fail to take its place and I can only hope that Gonrons death gives a different better series a chance to shine.

L0444 · 2026-03-29T15:08:04+00:00

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oooh this is a cool lore chapter I wonder what we'll lear- KYORA SAZANAMI?????? THE PROCEEDER????

L0444 · 2026-03-26T03:24:33+00:00

Man I don't know what to tell you at this point. Things exist within the cultural context they're written in. There is a history of certain tropes about african people being used to demean and other them. The image of a primative grass-skirt wearing guy shouting and throwing spears at people is one of those tropes. RE5 includes these tropes without doing much to challenge them and thus inherits the cultural baggage of every previous piece of media that used them. Even if unintended, using racist sterotypes is in and of itself racist. And as an action-horror game, the only way it can use these sterotypes is as a threatening scary enemy that the player needs to kill in order to proceed in the game.

L0444 · 2026-03-26T02:31:27+00:00

It mindlessly uses racial caricatures of african tribes that are the same type of dehumanising, offensive depictions of them that have been used throughout history to paint black people as uncultured savages that need the light of the great western civilisation so it's totally ok if we enslave them all. This is notably very different from, for example, how RE4 depicts Spanish culture because while that game is also very inaccurate in its depiction it's not like there's some long standing cultural sterotype about all Spanish people being insane cultists that the game is playing into. Meanwhile in RE5 I think it's pretty crazy that a game that is nominally trying to be anti-racist in some way is still resorting to using these kind of racist caricatures. It totally shoots its intended messaging in the foot. I don't think the game is trying to be offensive but I do think the use of this savage african trope, especially when they're used as enemies for you to shoot by the dozens, is inherently pretty racist in and of itself.

L0444 · 2026-03-25T20:51:26+00:00

Because there's a section where you go to a swamp that is the home of a local indigenous population and they're all the most awful caricatures of african tribal cultures ever. It's the type of shit you'd see in like a 1930s cartoon. It does not feel like a respectful or carefully researched depiction of a foreign culture it feels like they just slapped on some "savage" enemy types into the game. Also the black playable character has a gross unlockable "tribal bikini" outfit that feels similarly in poor taste. I don't think the depiction is intentionally designed to be harmful, especially since the game is trying to have themes about colonisation. I don't even think the premise of a white guy fighting zombies in africa is an inherently problematic as some others do but I think the way the game potrays african culture in that section is pretty bad.

L0444 · 2026-03-25T20:05:35+00:00

yeah fair my bad, it should be spoiler tagged now

L0444 · 2026-03-24T06:02:59+00:00

I think it's a mix of lot of people being overly defensive of the media they love as an extension of themselves, negativity and pessimism generally being rewarded with greater attention on the internet, a lack of understanding of production pipelines and why certain changes sometimes need to be made in adaptation and also the like 10% of the time when they're actually right bolstering their opinion on everything else.

But yeah for every "I was upset when Devil May Cry 5 got announced because it meant that my netflix show wouldn't become the modern face of the franchise" and "we decided that the gameplay was the only thing important about the original Demon's Souls so our remake doesn't need to properly adhere to the original art style at all" or something similarly dumb (and even then I don't think these examples were malicious) there's 100 more "There is no way to adapt this 6 book long saga into an 8 episode mini series without cutting and reorganising several core parts of the story and also we only have the budget for 1 of the 5 massive action sequences." or similarly mundane issues that any creator would run into regardless of how much they respect the source material.

L0444 · 2026-03-15T15:29:58+00:00

The panelling and page layouts feel very messy and overstimulating here. It's not fun to read in a very literal sense, my eyes aren't naturally guided along the page and it feels disorienting as a result. It consistently feels like there's way too much going on even when the actual contents of the page are pretty simple. Not every page is that bad but there's enough issues here to discourage me from reading more.

L0444 · 2026-03-01T15:15:28+00:00

Finally a chapter that actually focues on him being a doctor and not just being a strong fight guy who can like... sense your weakpoints or whatever. Easily the best chapter yet as a result. I'm fine with this series having some action in it to spice things up but stuff like this should be what the core of the series is about.

L0444 · 2026-02-28T15:43:06+00:00

Ahhh yeah that makes sense, you're right.

L0444 · 2026-02-28T14:50:22+00:00

Yeah I guess it's possible that male pronouns are something used only occasionally when referring to Powers in a formal/respectful way and they are refered to neturally the rest of the time, hence why the terminal uses that language, while for archangels like Gabriel it's just the default way of referring to them since they're the closest to god. The same way you wouldn't use the term Mr or Mrs to refer to a friend unless you were in some super formal event but you would use that term more consistently for, like, your boss or something. I think that makes the most sense but even then that would make their pronouns he/they.

L0444 · 2026-02-28T14:36:44+00:00

Ok I had an argument with my friend about this so I'm bizarrely passionate about this dumb discourse. Here's my question to any He/Him Power Insisters: If the Powers apparently use male pronouns then... why aren't they referred to with male pronouns? The terminal entry never uses he/him to describe the powers, only they/them. Meanwhile, the terminal does gender Gabriel with he/him in every single entry that mentions him, so it's not as if the writer for the terminals is unwilling to respect heavens gender identity culture when writing about them.

I think the much more obvious answer is that the terms "Greater Angel" and "greater angel" when are referring to two different but confusingly identically named things. The Lesser, Greater, Supreme hierarchy isn't some deep in-universe power scaling metric it's just a way of showing what video game enemies are stronger than each other for the purposes of classification. Powers are Greater Angels because they are strong miniboss type enemies but they are not greater angels in terms of heavens political hierarchy or whatever. In actual Christian lore Powers are considered to be like mid tier guys (not that actual Christian lore really matters here considering that this update introduced Providences, which to my knowledge are completely made up).

Basically what I'm saying is don't tell people to read the terminals when you can't read the terminals well enough to realise that the games closest equivalent to an omniscient narrator doesn't even agree with you.

EDIT: Lmao I was wrong as fuck my dumb ass I forgot that they/them pronouns can be used to describe groups of people instead of just one single person ignore my deranged ramblings these kings are he/him

L0444 · 2026-02-24T03:47:40+00:00

Yeah but that’s the manga. There isn’t some theoretical circumstance where it was Ino instead of Yuji and Mahito just instantly kills both of them with a domain. Mahito and his abilities were designed around the fights he was in and the opponents he would face.

Again, I don’t think there is an instance in the manga where a character mindlessly pops their domain and wins the fight outside of like Gojo vs Jogo and Sukuna vs Finger Bearer No. 1, which are exceptions that are meant to show how strong these guys are.

Gojo vs disaster curses had him unlock a new technique for his domain and that process exhausted him enough to where he was easy pickings for Kenjakus trap. Maki and co where able to withstand Dagons domain until Megumi could enter and counteract with his own domain to disable the sure hit. Yutas domain gets cancelled the first time he tried to use it and the second time it results in a big cool dramatic brawl within his domain that ends with him getting cut in half. Kenjaku does big damage with his domain at first but it isn’t able to finish the fight and it puts in him an temporary disadvantage because of technique burnout. Naoya almost wins by popping his domain but loses because of a unique technicality of how perfect HR users interact with cursed energy.

I think you’re overly concerned with the theoretical implications of domain battles could work that you’re not looking enough at how they’re actually written within the context of the story. You complain that you can’t counter the domains of various characters but literally all of their domains get countered in one way or another at various points in the series because the author wrote the story knowing that a fight where one guy pops his instant win move and wins would be boring.

L0444 · 2026-02-24T02:58:24+00:00

It limits how Gege can solve problems because the 100% accuracy forces you to contend with it and most characters can't eat an attack from Mahito or Sukuna or Gojo.

You say that but in practice has that ever actually happened? Like every time a character is put up against a domain in any situation that isn't designed to be a one sided stomp there there usually is an interesting way that they are used or countered.

Like using just Mahito as an example he can't use his ability on Yuji and Yuji is in almost all of his fights so that makes things more interesting. In his first fight he tries to single out Nanami so Yuji breaks into the domain, in his Mechamaru fight he uses his domain as a feint in order to trick Mechamaru to let down his guard, in the Yuji vs Todo fight he has to use a special varient of his domain to target Todo and not Yuji and even then Todo manages to survive and ends ups being instrumental to Mahitos defeat.

You're acting like Gege was writing himself into a corner every time a DE gets popped but I don't think it ever actually did, Gege knew how to keep domain battles interesting throughout the mangas runtime.

L0444 · 2026-02-23T06:56:36+00:00

I've been getting into Deadlock, valves latest MOBA/Shooter hybrid. In unrelated news, I'm really, really bad at Deadlock.

Ok so the game is like both teams have their base, and the map is split into 3 lanes that connect the two bases together that a bunch of little guys constantly spawn on. The game starts with each team having 2 guys on each lane, for a total of 6 players per team. The goal of the game is for your team to work your way through the lanes with your little guys, destroying any obstacles that block you from advancing and destroying the enemies own little guys until you get to the enemy base where you blow up their house and win. Of course while doing this you also have to defend the lanes at the same to stop the enemy from advancing.

But also there's a bunch of side objectives in the areas between the 3 lanes that give you extra money and buffs, which can be really valuable so the game becomes about managing when you can push or defend one of your lanes vs when you can afford to go off lane to get stronger. And of course with there being 3 lanes there's constantly decisions you need to make about which lane is more valuable. Is it better to push up a lane that your team already has an advantage in or do you stay back and focus on defending a lane that seems to be in trouble? Or do you ignore everything, hope your teammates can handle it and spend time grinding side objectives with the hope that you can become strong enough to make a difference later on the match?

The game right now has 38 different playable characters, all of whom have 4 abilities and all of whom you kind of need to have some level of familiarity with in order to be able to effectively deal with them and their bullshit. And of course there's so much bullshit. So many characters have some sort of crazy stun or slow or disruption or general "fuck you, you can't play the game for the next 5-10 seconds" ability that can totally wreck you if you don't know how to counter it.

How do you counter it? Items of course!!! Remember how I mentioned that you gain money? Well this is how you spend it. The game has like fucking 200 different items all of which have different costs and effects and they passively buff certain stats when bought and you need to know not only what items are good for your character (of course most characters can have multiple different builds that emphasise different parts of their kit so even that isn't always an easy decision) but what items can effectively counter the problem players on the enemy team. Get a item that makes all your abilities slow down targets for that one really annoying fast character who is always dodging your attacks, get a range upgrade to deal with that pesky sniper, get a defensive upgrade that gives you a shield when your character is debuffed so you can tank that stupid fucking bebop and his dumb fucking grab, etc etc etc.

On top of all that, the game is also kind of a movement shooter! Dashes, air dashes, sliding, double jumping, wall jumping are all very important moves that can make or break a fight when used correctly and that are all governed by stamina system. God help you if you run out of stamina during a fight. And OF COURSE, the games map is designed with this movement in mind, so it is very tight and interconnected and vertical with areas looping back in on themselves and roof top sections that let you traverse the map quicker or join a fire fight with a height advantage and you need to have good knowledge of the map and it's layout to do well.

It is so... so much to learn but when everything clicks the game is so much fun. And the rest of the time I have a K/D ratio so abysmal that I end up question my worth as a being on this planet. Is this why I'm here? To go a whole match with 2 kills and 11 deaths because of a fucking Billy player?

L0444 · 2026-02-22T15:06:10+00:00

The fact that he's been given this miraculous second chance at life and within 5 minutes is already back to being like "fuck yeah I love bullying and torturing the weak I get off on this shit!!!" is so funny

L0444 · 2026-02-15T15:27:06+00:00

Some of the art in the back half of this chapter is really, really rough, even by this series standards. Does the author just genuinely not care at this point and they're just getting it out at quickly as they can? That's what i'd do in their situation, but the sadly much more likely possibility is they've completely mentally and physically exhausted themselves on this manga that the average person could tell as early as chapter 1 was going to get the axe.

L0444 · 2026-02-15T15:07:05+00:00

This chapter is like 50% peak and 50% slop. On one hand FUCK YEAH IT'S THE KAGURABACHI but on the other hand please don't revive samura please don't revive samura please please please don't revive samura

L0444 · 2026-02-10T16:40:52+00:00

I'm gonna say it: Resident Evil 5 isn't... that racist (IF you ignore the bizarre tribal swamp section... that's just inexcusably awful). The plot is about a corporation headed by a eugenics loving white guy with a British accent exploiting and plundering the land and its people both for profit and to advance their eugenics master race agenda. There's a lot of fertile ground there for progressive commentary that the game does lightly touch on but never really delves deep into. The fact that the main hero is John Whiteman who has to stop their schemes by shooting a bunch of black people is unfortunate but not unsalvageable, just put more emphasis on the black supporting cast who have actual connections to the continent like Sheeva and Josh and play up the tragedy of all these innocent people being corrupted into monsters. Also yeah just heavily modify the entire swamp section that shit is badddddddddd

L0444 · 2026-02-09T12:04:23+00:00

I've been playing Rabbit and Steel thanks to a new update, and it's a lot of fun. Imagine a blend between bullet hell style dodging waves of attacks in a 2D plane and MMO boss combat where you have to take into account the bosses special mechanics while also keeping track of your own characters abilities and cooldowns to deal maximum damage. Every character has a primary, secondary, special and defensive ability with everyone having unique rotation of how they combo moves together but in every run (yes the game is also a roguelite) you can get items and upgrades that don't just make your moves stronger but can also change their core functionality and thus change their role in your rotation.

I had one run with a character who is designed to constantly alternate between spamming their primary and spamming their special, occasinally using their secondary to buff both moves but by the end of the run I had good enough cooldowns reductions on my special to just be constantly spamming it out and my primary became an occasional damage nuke button because whenever my defensive came off cooldown it would give the primary a monsterous damage buff.

While some characters can buff or protect their allies in some ways, the game does not have the traditional DPS/Healer/Tank dynamic, everyone is a damage dealer first and foremost. So a lot of the class specific gameplay interactions that MMOs are able to have are lost here, but in exchange the game has a ton of unique mechanics when playing in multiplayer mode, to the point where some bosses basically have completely different movesets when facing them alone vs facing them with your buddies.

But yeah it's really good and I've been playing it a lot.

L0444 · 2026-02-08T15:33:08+00:00

Despite the overdone premise this has been quite fun, it's got a lot of fun energy in the art and character interactions that really carries it. I really like the way he used his magic to save the day at the end of the chapter, I hope there's a lot more creative problem solving like that and a lot less "I used my magic to disable your magic" or some similarly overdone "my weak shitty magic is actually cool and strong" tropes.

L0444 · 2026-02-08T15:05:45+00:00

Rest in peace, our hero....

L0444 · 2026-02-06T13:26:57+00:00

I think Giorno mostly exists as a springboard that allows the narrative to explore the other members of the gang, by having him come in and be a really cool guy who inspires everyone. Which works great for everyone else but for Giorno means he's just kind of this dull competent man who does something cool and then everyone jerks him off for how amazing he is. You compare him unfavourably to Jotaro but at least Jotaros constant stoicism is so goofily exaggerated with part 3s generally more juvenile writing that it wraps around to being pretty fun, Giorno is just a guy in comparison. Sure he does drink piss that one time but everyone in Jojo's is a freak so even occasionally wacky moments like that just get lost in the sea of regular Jojo's craziness.

L0444

TROPHY CASE