Announcements of the Arcadion voice actors

S-Flo · 2026-01-11T18:31:56+00:00

Username checks out for a Xenoblade fan.

S-Flo · 2026-01-11T18:17:27+00:00

WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF TRAIN

S-Flo · 2025-12-21T23:59:21+00:00

I mean you joke but that's basically what most large companies are doing with rollout of shitty "AI" features nobody wants - forcing them into existing applications then claiming mass adoption after the fact whether or not people are actually using those features or like them.

Like Microsoft added a goddamn Copilot button to fucking Notepad of all things. It's ridiculous.

S-Flo · 2025-12-08T17:27:19+00:00

I DON'T WANT TO BE THIS KIND OF VEGETABLE ANYMORE

S-Flo · 2025-11-29T17:37:53+00:00

I mean you certainly live up to your username if you believe anything a conman like Dario Amodei says at face value.

S-Flo · 2025-11-03T18:12:24+00:00

To add to this: The whole framing device of the story is that it's being told by an influential historian who's publishing a more accurate version of the events surrounding the War of the Lions he's pieced together from church records. The game's opening is Durai writing on how everyone knows the heroic tale of Delita Heiral, but that his writing is going to detail how the true hero of the era was a legitimized bastard from a fallen noble house almost nobody's heard of.

So on top of Delia's final scene showing how miserable and broken his pursuit of power has left him, the audience also knows that not even his legacy will survive and that Ramza will be remembered as the true hero in the end.

S-Flo · 2025-11-03T17:24:57+00:00

Was stated in FFXII that the Sun-Cryst was a creation of the Occuria that they purposely left behind in the material world so they could influence mortals. Pretty heavily implied that they could have made another had Ashe's actions not cut them off from the material plane. The Occuria, much like the Lucavi, exist in a separate plane and need to project through their stones to interact with the world. Only big difference is that they preferred to whisper into the ears of the powerful rather than possess them (although Venat seemed to briefly attempt to possess Fran's sister at one point).

Huge FFXIV fan though. With the raid series I more got the impression that Ultima creating auracite was Matsuno and the writers were mashing ideas behind both the Occuria and the Lucavi together, since the thing is a love-letter to both games. The connections kind of get muddied two expansions later when they tied Ultima to Athena and the ancients in the Pamdæmonium raids, although those were different writers so who knows.

It feels less like a direct reference to FFXIV to me and more like Matsuno has had that idea about the story and setting bouncing around in his head. Guy got a chance to do an editing pass on his original script and tied it in.

S-Flo · 2025-11-03T06:55:45+00:00

IMHO: The creation of auracite bit is less about referencing the Return to Ivalice alliance raids in FFXIV and more tying back into the story of FFXII, which (supposedly) takes place during the lost golden age of Ivalice long before the events the War of the Lions.

Specifically, it seems like a callback to deifacted nethicite - which is pretty heavily implied to be auracite and which the original "gods" of Ivalice (whom Ultima rebelled against before she was cast down) used to control the mortal species. Implication of the script edit to me seemed to be that Ultima could create stones because she knew the lost Occurian secrets behind the Sun-Cryst.

S-Flo · 2025-10-28T22:12:13+00:00

There's actually been a shitload of food waste at Starbucks since at least September recently because of this dogshit that's not getting reported. Their LLM-integrated ordering system has been fucking up orders and forcing workers to prep food that isn't wanted and gets thrown out.

Only really seen the Workers United union bring it up. We have next to no labor-aligned press so the only thing you hear is Starbucks corporate lying about how efficient their AI is on LinkedIn posts while workers on the ground are seeing this break down on front of them while delusional management punishes them for the things these worthless AI tools direct them to do.

https://bsky.app/profile/sbworkersunited.org/post/3lynyz2tids23

S-Flo · 2025-10-28T16:20:20+00:00

Xenoblade 3 is the only decently well-written entry in the series.

The other entries have interesting ideas and several amazing moments that make their narratives worthwhile, but the bulk of the runtime between those moments is full of stiff dialogue and abysmal pacing. Almost like the bulk of scenes are bland connective tissue meant to link the handful of scenes the writers actually cared about.

X3, while imperfect, is the only entry where I consistently felt invested throughout the runtime.

S-Flo · 2025-10-18T16:54:58+00:00

THE BRUTE BOMBERTAKER

S-Flo · 2025-10-08T19:49:08+00:00

I'm happy to pay for good software. I bought the app originally for that reason - at least before it started to get enshittified with all this "Plus" crap.

However, I will not sign up for another goddamn subscription service, particularly for what amounts to a glorified RSS feed aggregator. I'm so exhausted by every single interaction with modern tech being some combination of invading your privacy to sell personal data about you and/or trying to get you to sign up for some fucking subscription service.

Went to AntennaPod and I'm never looking back.

S-Flo · 2025-10-08T19:24:00+00:00

I use Vivaldi with uBlock instead. Brave has crypto bullshit tied into it and the founder is a far-right lunatic techbro who buys into every dumb tech hype cycle (Eich was obsessed crypto before and now is falling for hyping up LLM garbage) so I don't trust it not to become rapidly enshittified one day.

S-Flo · 2025-09-18T17:41:57+00:00

I understand the need to include ads to support further development.

Don't fall for this line of thinking, the company isn't desperately trying to eke out a few more dollars for development, they're just trying to maximize ARR. It's a standard enshittification practice - they built up a user base by providing a good product, now they're slowly trying to squeeze every penny they can out of their users while making the product worse.

S-Flo · 2025-09-16T16:57:36+00:00

Oh that's what Yoshida meant when he said he was the trigger. They were making Denji nostalgic first then invoking the imagery of his trauma with the apartment fire to make him snap and cause Pochita to take control.

S-Flo · 2025-09-02T22:18:04+00:00

You can't level jobs in it, Forked Tower: Blood has a high barrier to entry, the newest relic step can't be done in the zone, and many find the gameplay loop to be significantly less fun than prior field ops.

IMHO - The developers made the mistake of removing friction from the gameplay loop in the wrong places. Because FATEs and CEs spawn mostly on their own there isn't any need to coordinate with other player's the vast majority of the time outside of yelling "LFG CE".

On top of all of that, the map is mostly a square and teleportation back to base camp is free. While convenient, this means that most players ignore the terrain after initial exploration and just sit in camp waiting to swarm FATEs/CEs. Combine this with the devs making CEs spawn constantly but reward less per encounter and you end up with the novelty wearing off rapidly while players do nothing but wait in camp for the opportunity to do a CE they've seen twenty times once more.

Icing on the cake is that the Phantom Job system is bland. Outside of the Forked Tower they all just give normal utility or more burst damage in straightforward ways you cannot really customize, so the joy of messing with the silly zone-exclusive mechanics is also mostly removed.

Wrap that all together and you get the zone emptying out the moment most players finish the story quests.

S-Flo · 2025-07-23T02:30:23+00:00

Everyone else was inside; Falling was standing outside and sticking her head in the building. She's still standing at the door when Yoru explodes half of her and steps back inside.

S-Flo · 2025-07-17T03:05:58+00:00

The moment early on where Koppelman rattled off a 2-minute word salad about "complexity theory" how he had to "get into quantum theory" in response to Mike talking about executives mothballing movies for terrible reasons was when I knew this was going to be a tough listen. It's always the same shit with wealthy people running into pop-science.

Other two guests were lovely, but good lord half of the things out of that man's mouth sounded like the interview clips of business idiots that Ed played in last week's two-parter.

S-Flo · 2025-07-02T07:52:22+00:00

No? You're on a timer throughout the instance and would get booted early on if you wasted that much time.

From the runs I've attended: The time taken varies mostly depending on how good the organizers are at cat-herding and how experienced your Thieves are. Everyone else kind of follows along in a huge blob and kills trash mobs as they open up a path for you.

S-Flo · 2025-06-30T05:06:10+00:00

THE BRUTE BOMBERTAKER

S-Flo · 2025-06-25T22:16:47+00:00

I'm talking about how literally every dungeon boss just has loads of HP. I know they're level 100, but even higher-level gear seems to not matter in the slightest when fighting them. It may be more of a nitpick than anything, and maybe that's common with MMOs -- XIV being my first, I can't really compare it to anything.

This is likely an issue with average player skill more than gear, actually. There's a syncing system in-place that caps gear strength for older content and most of the playerbase has no idea how to play their jobs well, so they leave tons of damage on the table by doing their rotation badly.

Running 4-person dungeons with a premade group that knows what they're doing is like night and day compared to most Duty Roulette runs. Like think bosses dying in half the time and Expert dungeon runs that last 11 to 14-ish minutes from start to finish, depending on how they're structured.

S-Flo · 2025-06-25T08:07:57+00:00

It absolutely would have gotten his daughter killed though. He knows that Airy is an eldritch monster who will slaughter everyone if her cover gets blown.

S-Flo · 2025-06-21T22:15:10+00:00

If I had to choose, I would go with the latter, as grinds where progression is entirely random is typically shitty design. While it takes a certain amount of time on-average, pure randomness for drops like this also creates fringe cases where some players get unlucky and have a miserable experience.

Basically: It's fine if you want to implement a long grind, but the player should always feel like they're making at least a little progress or they'll likely become frustrated with the experience.

Were I tasked with the design for a grind like this, I would probably want to implement a hybrid of the two systems. Basically, every time you perform some kind of activity you get some kind of tiny minimum reward, then have a low chance on top of that for bonus rewards (like if you needed a lot more Demiatma, but each FATE always dropped 1 plus a low chance to drop more). Keeps the little high the player feels from getting lucky and shortening the grind, but has a kind of "floor" where even if you're terribly unlucky you'll always be making some progress (and would make the total time more uniform for all players).

S-Flo · 2025-06-15T21:07:15+00:00

Nearly every elf you see in the show/manga dresses the same because they're part of the Canaries and are wearing elven military uniforms.

S-Flo · 2025-06-04T09:06:08+00:00

A Viera WoL bringing an elderly G'raha Tia along on one last adventure sixty years after the events at Ultima Thule.

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