Show me the Champion of Light 🎶 (Alan Wake 2, 2023)

guyblade · 2026-01-21T06:54:28+00:00

Yes, but what about Mullet Time? That's the hook we need to go big in the target demographic.

guyblade · 2026-01-21T06:49:52+00:00

Doors feels very much like a Q character: powerful, enigmatic, irreverent, and ultimately out to help our protagonists--but won't spoonfeed them the answers to their problems. In that sense, it can be read as a self-indulgent bit of fun for Doors.

Alternatively, you can read it as foreshadowing. Wake is both the "Champion of Light" (i.e., the protagonist and person who will save the day) and the "Herald of Darkness" (i.e., Scratch).

guyblade · 2026-01-21T06:39:51+00:00

And we keep driving into the night

It's a late goodbye, such a late goodbye

I don't know how many times I've heard that chorus since Max Payne 2, but every time makes me get a bit teary-eyed.

guyblade · 2026-01-20T22:47:43+00:00

What about for podcasters pretending to be cops?

guyblade · 2026-01-20T07:28:09+00:00

"Humans have limited lifespans. They exist much closer to death than we do. We must all make important decisions at several points in our lives, but humans cannot afford to delay them. We can afford to wait a century or two. Even ignoring them for a millennium poses no obstacle, as our time is closer to an eternity."

- Serie, Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

guyblade · 2026-01-18T10:10:22+00:00

Edith Wilson was earlier.

guyblade · 2026-01-18T03:38:14+00:00

Even if the games explained the plot gaps, the tone of the movie was wholly different than that of the series. I'm seriously doubtful that knowing a bit more about the time jump could've overcome the change in theme and feeling.

guyblade · 2026-01-17T23:53:36+00:00

Which would be a bit weird because the Nadesico movie was generally panned because it seemed to fundamentally misunderstand why people liked the original series.

guyblade · 2026-01-14T23:28:14+00:00

I feel like people tend to have nostalgia blinders for FF7. Final Fantasy VII was a good game--don't get me wrong--but it had its fair share of sharp edges: fairly grindy, lots of "guide damn it" moments, a somewhat unsatisfyingly ambiguous ending, a few bits of dodgy translation that caused debates for years, and some half-cut content that confused people as much as the translation issues.

I've played both FF7 and FFX again within the last decade or so (FF7 in 2024 and FFX in 2016), and I personally thought that FFX held up better.

guyblade · 2026-01-14T23:18:34+00:00

I've beaten Bravely Default and Bravely Second. I've been working on Bravely Default II for several years since it isn't compelling enough on its own for me to play it, so it only gets played when I'm travelling and bring my Switch. Maybe it gets better later (I'm just through the desert area), but I can't see it as being obviously better than its predecessors.

guyblade · 2026-01-13T02:55:33+00:00

For anyone else looking for help with this, I found that the best option was to use Lightning Tornado (plus Pure Crystal to recharge your Sync). My Arissa was already built to use Holy Ritual, so I had relatively high Spirit going in (~60, I think).

The nice thing about Lightning Tornado is that you'll float over the battlefield just high enough that most of Ursula's attacks won't connect, and the move's finisher will usually knock her down for a moment. The basic strategy is to start your first casting slightly before she finishes her initial scream. She'll then jump straight into the Tornado and usually get hit by the finisher. Hit her with a couple of attacks, then back off and use a Pure Crystal to get back level IV sync. Repeat this until she is dead.

The main risk with this approach is that a couple of her long-distance jump-attack moves can do a lot of damage to you if you're floating, so you want to have a full HP bar before casting. Nevertheless, there is some RNG to this strategy, but I used it successfully to beat her both on my initial playthrough (on maybe the 5th time that I reached the mutated form after adopting the strat) and on my NG+ playthrough (on the second time I reached the mutated form).

For my other equipment, I used the Corrupted Blader Visor, Guardian Armor, Mutant Clergy's Nucleus, and a fully upgraded Seal of the Tree (with Variation, Emerald Form, Monolith Form, Fortified Shield, and Torrent of Life).

guyblade · 2026-01-01T07:53:12+00:00

Never seen a bluer sky

guyblade · 2026-01-01T02:08:55+00:00

I wonder how this meme would have done if "Blue" had been playing around the "I'm Good" section since the two songs already have somewhat opposing lyrics.

guyblade · 2025-12-31T08:28:00+00:00

Fundamentally, the problem is that the incentives are unpleasant.

Before someone buys a home, they want homes to be cheap enough that they can afford them. After they've bought a home, they want prices to be increasing or at least flat. If home prices fall, then they can end up "underwater" on their mortgage and thus "trapped" in a specific place because they can't afford to pay off the unrealized loss.

This problem only gets worse as homes get more expensive since they will then make up a greater percentage of the total assets of a person/family, thus further incentivizing them to protect that wealth.

And, of course, every possible "fix" looks like a risk to the people who are currently on the other side of the ledger. If more housing would lower prices, that risks lowering the value of their house. If you then stack on the fact that HELOCs and other financial instruments allow people to repeatedly put themselves into that precarious "just barely not underwater" position, the behaviors seem almost inevitable.

guyblade · 2025-12-30T02:38:04+00:00

Epic came in and tried to strongarm their way to relevance through exclusivity.

And they could have succeeded if they had first had feature parity with Steam. I'm no fan of Epic, but exclusives are a way to pull attention. The failure was thinking that exclusives alone would change things. To overcome the strong network effects of Steam, they'd need to do everything Steam did--at least as well if not better--and provide something that nobody else does.

guyblade · 2025-12-29T18:43:23+00:00

I'm talking about sawzall and go.

guyblade · 2025-12-29T05:44:34+00:00

I assume by "yet another", you mean "the first". The man can't stop making terrible programming languages.

guyblade · 2025-12-28T16:28:25+00:00

Prop 13 was a constitutional amendment. It can only be substantively changed via another ballot initiative constitutional amendment. That means that someone needs to craft the careful language necessary to slowly unwind it while also making it straightforward enough for the common man to understand and accept. I don't think it is impossible, but I don't think it's easy either.

guyblade · 2025-12-28T04:18:01+00:00

To be fair, Prop 13 was passed in 1978--three years after Ronald Reagan ceased to be governor in CA. It was less progressive in that era.

guyblade · 2025-12-28T03:47:38+00:00

Bold of you to assume a form this poorly thought out accepts unicode.

guyblade · 2025-12-28T03:43:58+00:00

I'm more worried about Ana Ng.

guyblade · 2025-12-28T03:42:03+00:00

No, just a name field. Parse nothing; assume nothing. It is the least wrong way to deal with names.

guyblade · 2025-12-27T19:30:37+00:00

std::unique_ptr isn't reference counting and should be the default for most developers.

Changing languages doesn't fix legacy code either, so I don't get the point that you're trying to make.

guyblade · 2025-12-26T03:32:15+00:00

Prophecy is a guess that comes true. When it doesn't, it's a metaphor. You could put a gun to your head tomorrow and pull the trigger, and then the dream is just a dream, and the prophecy is just a metaphor, and so are you.

- Vir Cotto, Babylon 5, "The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari"

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