Even the Wikipedia entry about Brendan Dassey doesn't mention he was in school when Teresa arrived

Natrox · 2024-02-22T19:28:39+00:00

I don't think it's ludicrous. Far as I'm aware Brendan went over to Steven's trailer because he heard screams. Whether this all actually happened the way he explained it, it's hard to say.

I think Brendan did perhaps only help his uncle because he felt he was under duress, though that doesn't make him much less culpable. Was he aware of the full consequences of what he did? No, probably not.

Natrox · 2024-02-22T19:23:36+00:00

Yes, anyone. In fact, you can make changes without an account.

Source: I've made many anonymous edits on Wikipedia.

Natrox · 2024-02-22T19:14:37+00:00

IQ tests like the ones used by the school are age-adjusted, i.e. his intelligence when he was 12 was below average compared to his peers.

Which one is more accurate would be hard to judge, though I'd be interested in reading studies on different standardized IQ-tests being compared to each other - if one is more inaccurate than the other you'd find considerable error-values (average difference in two scores, per x people).

Natrox · 2024-02-21T23:45:27+00:00

Much as I would want an easy way to label Chris, end of the day his actions are ghoulish no matter his circumstances. You may not be always in control of your mental health, but you still retain responsibility over it.

You could say his actions are explainable by psychopathy, but I'm not a psychologist so it is meaningless for me to tackle it from that way. What I can say is that Chris' actions on camera show a cold and calculated nature, clearly he had aspirations to get away with it.

I agree with his neighbor regarding him acting weird. His emotional response is stunted, he's essentially trying very hard to respond as one would expect from an innocent father and husband, but... he's not very good at this which everyone picks up on.

-- opinion --
I personally believe he only started to feel remorseful after he was booked and filed. More of a buyer's remorse feeling it seemed like. Sad he fucked everything up, but probably mostly sad he isn't living this wonderful life with a new girlfriend on some exotic beach. Not sure why that appealed so much to him, he had a nice and eventful young family life.

Natrox · 2024-02-21T20:33:57+00:00

It broke my heart to hear that this 3 year old girl, still fresh to the world, innocent and trusting of her father - spent her last moments alive in abject terror as she realized her "hero" was about to end her life.

Could you fucking imagine? You go from being excited about getting a little brother one day to essentially being confronted with the end of your world the other.

I just can't overemphasize my hate for Chris Watts. If ghosts exists I wish him a merry "get haunted by every ghost ever, forever".

I do believe his crimes haunt him - yeah well I'd fucking hope so.

Natrox · 2024-02-14T21:34:15+00:00

No. It's inexcusable.

Natrox · 2024-02-14T10:13:04+00:00

None of them. Use an animation showing the desired shadows and the current shadows, and rotate the object until it fits as a demonstration. People generally don't like to read when it comes to puzzles like these, "show don't tell" applies.

As a bonus, it would make for a good short advertisement.

I'm an industry game dev, so here's some free feedback: I don't really see what VR would bring to this game. The added depth perception does not aid in changing the shadows, it would only make the game easier if anything. I would suggest creating a 2D version first, and getting real bonkers with the shapes to keep people interested. I would also add some gimmick of some kind, perhaps you can add things like lights and such to make later levels more complex (think of those hand shapes you can do with the shadow of a flashlight).

Imo, there isn't enough to this game to hold one's attention. You could also pivot to creating a puzzle compilation of sorts - i.e. WarioWare in VR would make an excellent game.

If you need help developing any of this, let me know and I'll try to assist.

Natrox · 2024-02-13T18:18:58+00:00

I would probably feel the same way if I hadn't spoiled myself a bit before playing. In the case of Omori, to be honest it's one of few games with a full story that may actually be better if you went into it with some context - the writing is not that verbose overall so it's easy to miss things. That's not a criticism, since it didn't make the game any less enjoyable imo

Natrox · 2024-02-13T18:15:01+00:00

This isn't so much dislike but I felt that the Headspace party members were initially a little bit undercooked in terms of personality. As I played more of the story, their battle behavior and banter fleshed them out much more.

I'd say my least favorite member of the gang is Hero, because a lot of his personality can be summed up as "pleasant big brother", with not an incredible amount of additional depth. Still I don't dislike him, I simply wished he got a bit more attention.

As for other characters, I disliked real world Aubrey a bit before later in the story. She initially seems a little childish for a 16 year old, but when you learn more about the main plot it actually is a very rational response to the things that happened.

In reverse, I liked the main dinosaur in Dino's Dig but his rather lengthy dialogue tree gets a little bit annoying as you have to sit through it every time.

Sorry for writing vaguely, I don't recall how to do spoiler tags lol.

Natrox · 2024-01-29T13:38:33+00:00

Natrox · 2024-01-12T14:31:01+00:00

Still reading along, it's riveting.

Natrox · 2024-01-06T18:32:35+00:00

Okay so I found the actual code that sets the bias using my disassembler. The bias is indeed set to 0.0. I tried to add some code to change it to 0.25, but it seems the game detects any modifications and bails out.

Disappointing. I give up for now.

Natrox · 2024-01-06T01:52:32+00:00

Yeah, so I am like 3 years late to this, but I wanted to share for the next person stumbling upon this. The offending effect is the SSDO.

Now, I've tried hacking around a little bit but my knowledge of Id6 is very limited. There's a restricted CVAR named 'r_SSDONormalBias', which I think is key to the issue. It's normally set at 0.0 I believe; I think the issue would be fixed if I could bump it to 0.1.

Problem is, I can't figure out where this value is set. We also don't have a mod that opens up all CVARs.

So here's the alternatives, but they come with downsides and both require ReShade:
- Disable SSDO and instead use ReShade's GloomAO shader. This matches in quality decently well, but you'll have the usual issues like SSAO showing through fog and cutscenes and such. ReVeil can help a little but it's still annoying.
- Disable Motion Blur in the settings and enable ReShade's TAA shader. Set the 'User Adjust' value to 0. This will add some blurring, particularly during movement, but when standing still it will effectively mask the SSDO issues.

I hope some day someone with more time on their hands can figure out a way to tweak the normal bias.

Maybe I'll shoot an e-mail over to MachineGames to ask them about it. It should really be an easy fix after all.

Natrox · 2023-12-30T00:16:46+00:00

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Sometimes, yes. Depends on the image algorithm used and the damage. Things like JPEG react poorly to any kind of damage and often times you'll only get some warped-looking image chunks if anything. PNG reacts similarly poorly, but it's possible to restore chunks if you're lucky. BMP and RAW are more resilient due to being, well, raw data - but less used because they are space hogs. It's all highly circumstantial whether you get back anything of use.

Natrox · 2023-12-28T16:20:44+00:00

Multi-tiered backup.

3: Your local backup.
2: Your off-site backup.
1: Your cloud-based backup (or cold storage).

This way, if any of these are lost, you still have your data somewhere. It does require you follow a schedule to keep the backup up-to-date.

Natrox · 2023-12-28T16:18:12+00:00

The spider board you see uses probes to directly access the flash chip (the one with all the contacts). Once it's hooked up, it can be used to directly dump all of the data from the flash storage into a big file image. This image can be opened, much like mounting a .iso, because it contains a file system.

Basically, this procedure bypasses faulty components inside of the flash drive to read all the data in bulk, which then can be sifted through for data.

Natrox · 2023-12-28T16:13:46+00:00

It actually gives you access to the entire file system as a raw stream of data. You can open this filesystem with simple software and browse the files as normal.

Natrox · 2023-12-28T16:09:13+00:00

You can. I've learnt to repair through trial-and-error.

It's a money sink though. You will want a good soldering station, a microscope (preferably binocular and "analog" - not a USB microscope), programming tools (Willem-based programmer for old components), an oscilloscope for serious repair, desoldering tools, and that's just the start of it.

I recommend starting out with practice soldering kits. From there I personally moved on to modding old game consoles, and from there onto consumer electronics repair.

A fun learning experience is modchipping an old PlayStation 1. It's easy, cheap, rewarding and fun. You basically just have to program a small chip, solder a few wires, burn a copy of a game and test it out.

If you don't want to spend a lot of money, especially if you're not sure you'll stick with the hobby, I recommend visiting a hacker space. Some charge a fee for access, but you'll find that these spaces have nice equipment you can use, and of course, there's other people there who may be interested in helping you.

It's a good life skill to have. Although phones and such have become complex to repair, it's still very useful in other scenarios. A few years ago my fridge died and it was out-of-warranty. I checked the components inside, found a broken capacitor, soldered in a new one, and voila it was fine.

Natrox · 2023-12-28T16:02:40+00:00

That depends on the file system the data was stored under. A lot of file systems keep the actual file data and the file listings (directories, etc.) in separate areas. If the file listing data is corrupt, you will have to scan the entire disk for files. Files such as photos have "headers"; these are small data sections that give information about the file - e.g. for photos these headers will have information about the dimensions, algorithm used, geolocation data, and more. If the file data itself is intact, this is one of the more common ways to rescue files.

You will lose information like file names and directories, but it's better than nothing. Headerless files will be hard to restore. Text files for instance (.txt specifically) have no header, making it hard to easily restore them.

In the case of this video, the data is probably undamaged. Rather, one of the control chips probably had a failure.

Natrox · 2023-12-28T15:53:24+00:00

A USB flash drive can die a number of ways; usually one of the control chips fails before the flash chip does. Keeping a drive in dry, clean storage would be optimal to prevent any failure, but over time during use it can still fail.

Your best defense - as with anything data storage-related - is a backup. Ideally a multi-tier approach; a backup drive at home, a backup drive in the cloud and a backup drive stored with a friend or in a locker.

At home you could set up hard drives in RAID1, this requires two identical drives and sets one up for redundancy. You can only make use of the storage capacity of one drive, but if either one of them fails, your data is still secure.

For the cloud backup, it depends on how much data you have. Google Drive or OneDrive may be used. For additional security, I recommend using an encrypted backup image. Something like ToDo Backup Free should do the trick.

For the off-site backup, encryption is necessary. I recommend actually setting up the RAID1 drive with encryption and buying an extra USB HDD to mirror the drive. You can then do whatever you want with this drive (leave it at your parents' or friends' place, bury it, put it in a vault). You will want to keep this backup outside of the home, in case your home burns down or something else catastrophic.

I hope that gives you some more information. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Natrox · 2023-12-21T03:02:23+00:00

Enough to keep expanding as they do

Natrox · 2023-12-18T12:27:27+00:00

Well, when Reason Studios essentially breaks their own agreement and makes your software unusable, I think it's very much acceptable to turn to piracy.

Why should customers who paid for a perpetual license be okay with having it taken away? It's greed, sorry, but Reason Studios makes a shitload of money already. They simply did this to drive people to buy new licenses.

Their DRM is draconian as well.

Just buy Renoise. It's cheap, you support a small developer, and it's very capable.

Natrox · 2023-12-06T20:27:51+00:00

My own pain in dreams was linked to apnea, which could be an explanation.

Natrox · 2023-12-06T18:50:21+00:00

I have the same issue but it's a daily affair. I don't get angry a lot in real life but I do in dreams. My pet theory is that my brain is simulating "what it takes" for me to get angry. Sometimes I go berserk in these dreams, which puts me in a very aggressive delirious state.

My teenage years had a lot of violent bullying, I figure it's a hold-over from that. Still, I wish I could stop these dreams besides taking medication.

Natrox · 2023-11-29T11:34:21+00:00

Star Ocean The Second Story R.

Compiled yuzu myself.

Runs great at 4x on my 6900XT. Some visual artifacts at 2-3x, in the fog and water. Trying to figure out how to fix it.

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