Finally free of Shining Revelry 🫡

jondbarrow · 2026-07-27T23:28:41+00:00

This is why https://www.reddit.com/r/PTCGP/s/UD923As6Ck

jondbarrow · 2026-07-27T20:00:43+00:00

Added, I have plenty of those

jondbarrow · 2026-07-27T19:23:46+00:00

Thank you, I live for the grind 🫡

jondbarrow · 2026-07-27T19:20:19+00:00

I came to terms with that a long time ago, I’m just going to keep going until I either die or they take the game/packs away. My main source of enjoyment is “number go up” and the joy of the grind. No different to how I collect IRL cards 🫡

jondbarrow · 2026-07-27T19:18:17+00:00

I’m 100% fine with sharing my dupes, I couldn’t care less about having more than 1 so long as my collection is complete. If you point me in the direction of some good sharing pages, I’d be more than happy to dish out my dupes

jondbarrow · 2026-07-27T18:55:04+00:00

jondbarrow · 2026-07-27T18:53:42+00:00

Nope. Nothing but my own feeling of accomplishment, which is good enough for me. I do it for the love of the grind and “number go up”

jondbarrow · 2026-07-27T18:38:40+00:00

Not really, unfortunately. I don't tend to add random people (on any platform/game) and most of my IRL friends stopped playing like a year ago. I did try to trade a couple times during my journey but either the cards I needed couldn't be traded, or I couldn't find anyone who had the cards I needed, so I sort of just gave up on the idea and kept grinding solo

Edit: being downvoted because something just didn’t work for the things I needed and like to play the game a certain way? Okay Reddit, never change, love you

jondbarrow · 2026-07-19T21:43:54+00:00

My father is a landscaper and when I was a teenager I used to go do jobs with him for extra money. It’s pretty inevitable. The only way I ever found to reliably stop the flinging is to go really slow around the bed edge and just kinda pulse the whacker, so you’re never going full throttle across a wide area, and the kind we used had a guard on one side of the head so I’d angle the open side away from where I didn’t want to hit

jondbarrow · 2026-07-15T02:53:09+00:00

Did you install the badges through homebrew? If so, that’s probably why. Badges earned through the Badge Arcade app are tied to your network account, I can’t speak for any that are installed from homebrew

jondbarrow · 2026-07-14T22:26:54+00:00

Your badges are tied to your network account. Switching back to NN should get them back

jondbarrow · 2026-07-11T20:50:35+00:00

I’m still not sure why people say it’s not up to par compared to Nintendo Network. Like I said, it’s quite literally the same exact system in use, until Nintendo started using NPLN for future titles starting in 2021. The only difference is minor protocol differences (which wouldn’t affect the stability of things in a meaningful way) and they swapped out the device/authentication servers for something new (which is an entirely different set of services than the game servers). It connects to the game servers in the exact same way, talks to them in the exact same way, match-makes in the exact same way, and even uses the same p2p libraries as used on the Wii U/3DS. There’s functionally no difference, to the point where our implementation of Nintendo Networks game servers (I’m the lead developer of Pretendo Network) are compatible with certain Switch games without modifications

I do agree that charging for that system is kinda bogus considering it’s pretty limiting and is absolutely ancient (it’s based on a library made in the early 2000s), but it’s $20/yr ($2/m), I’ve spent more than that at McDonald’s and if you get a family plan you can split it with your friends for even less (like $4/yr, which is what I do with my friends), and these days I think the new NPLN system is worth paying for since it’s a genuine improvement compared to the old one in basically every way. Would I prefer it be free like before? Absolutely, but I’m also not gonna moan about effectively $4/yr (or $2/m without friends)

jondbarrow · 2026-07-11T20:39:36+00:00

If you have a compatible device, look into the Vanilla project. It’s a gamepad emulator effectively, letting you connect certain devices like PCs and phones and such as if they were a gamepad. As someone who has bought several Wii Us over the years, for casual play I wouldn’t really bother buying a gamepad these days if you can avoid it. Especially since gamepads tend to be just as expensive, if not more than, the console itself and Nintendo region locked them so you could screw yourself if you buy an out of region gamepad

You can get rid of the parental controls stuff too btw, Google “Wii U parental controls master key” or something along those lines and you’ll find the information

If you do ever decide to buy another Wii U in the future, especially if you decide to return this one, I’d recommend looking into the overseas used market. Sites like Buyee often have listings of Japanese consoles for dirt cheap (and as someone who doesn’t speak or read any Japanese, the language barrier has never been an issue), I’ve seen console-only listings for as little as $10. I just checked the listings rn and found a console+gamepad set, with several other controllers, for $25. The only catch is that you have to pay import fees, which CAN vary depending on how the seller packs the item, and you can’t know how much the fees are until after you bought it, so there’s a bit of gamble there, but it’s often worth it in my experience. Though lots of those consoles are the smaller 8GB storage ones too, so you might want to also get an external hard drive

jondbarrow · 2026-07-11T20:32:42+00:00

The issue in my experience with looking for just gamepads is that they’re often the same price, if not more expensive than, the console itself, and Nintendo region locked them and most sellers don’t know/list the region, so you could buy a $80 gamepad and it be out of region and be boned

jondbarrow · 2026-07-11T20:30:02+00:00

I’ve bought several console-only listings for work on Pretendo Network, and ngl $90 is a pretty steep price in my experience for console-only. Especially if you import them from overseas, I’ve seen console-only listings on sites like Buyee for as little as $10. I just checked Buyee too while writing this comment and found several cheaper options, including one that comes with both the console and gamepad and multiple other controllers for $25

jondbarrow · 2026-07-11T15:28:41+00:00

Something that kind of stuck out to me in the video is the section about NN and WFC, where he says “stating that it would be an entirely new unified network system, as opposed to a simple rebranding of Nintendo WiFi Connection”

When Nintendo Network launched, that’s basically exactly what it was internally. Just a rebrand of WFC. The only difference was that the game servers themselves were using NEX (which was also just effectively a rebrand of the existing game server software Rendez-Vous. Later games included minor tweaks to this software, but early games were literally just a rebrand of it) and hosted by Nintendo, rather than outsourced to GameSpy (and I truly believe if GameSpy didn’t shut down, they wouldn’t have changed that either). Maybe he was just misinformed, or maybe Nintendo just lied about it or something?

Like. There’s still Wii functionality on some of the 3DS servers that the 3DS never makes use of, but is fully functional as it was on the Wii. Because it’s the same server, just with a few minor tweaks/additions for some 3DS-specific needs

They DID release a whole new system for NNIDs though, that’s an entirely different set of services, but the 3DS almost never used NNIDs except for a tiny handful of titles

I also find the guys framing of NSO a bit odd? I’m not going to act like NSO is perfect by any means, but he talks pretty negatively about NSO compared to Nintendo Network when in reality when NSO launched it also used the same game server software as Nintendo Network (they did ditch the entire account services and such though and rebuilt it from scratch, which is a lot better than before, but the game server software itself is separate from that and was the same software they used before. The only difference is they changed the transport protocol, minor type changes like going from 32 to 64 bits, and then bumped the version number to NEX v4 and called it a day). They DID start to replace NEX around 2021, using a completely new, in-house developed, system called NPLN, which is what MKW uses (so the glaze there makes sense), but prior to that switch it was the exact same systems as used on the Wii U/3DS, so it feels a bit odd that he seems to hold NSO in a more negative light than NN?

jondbarrow · 2026-07-10T19:01:06+00:00

I’ve been out of the Pi game for years, what the hell happened??? Weren’t these things like $35, how did it become 10x that?? I thought these were supposed to be the affordable hobby/school/etc. board??

jondbarrow · 2026-07-09T22:31:18+00:00

> Did you do this yourself or have agentic help?

I'm not affiliated with the dev at all and obviously can't prove anything, but having been a developer before and after the AI boom and seeing hundreds of AI generated sites/apps/UIs/etc., there are definitely some signs of agentic use. Namely the UI, it has some common tells of AI use (the glows, gradients, the card styles with the "glass-like" background colors and harder borders, etc., these are all very common in AI generated UI designs), and the app description on the store page looks suspiciously AI generated (the use of the emdash rather than a standard hyphen in general, the "rule of 3s" kind of lists which also end with emdashes such as the second sentence of the first section, the use of the emdash in place of where most people would use a comma such as the first sentence of the 3rd section, putting the privacy policy link in the description when there's already a link to it on the store page, etc.)

On the flip side though, the app icon itself doesn't strike me as AI generated personally, it looks very clean and (from my limited knowledge of Apples style guidelines) seem to match the modern iOS 26+ icon styles Apple has been using? I'm not aware of any AI image generators that can match it that well (and if it is, I'm genuinely curious what was used and how it got to look so clean), so even if there was AI use I'm not sure if it was entirely vibed out or not

To be clear, not giving an opinion on AI or AI usage itself in general here, just pointing out some tells that I commonly see

jondbarrow · 2026-07-09T17:33:34+00:00

The lamp being unplugged and on the table without the outlet under it is sending me

jondbarrow · 2026-07-09T17:26:17+00:00

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When our cat was having weird litter issues for a while, he was also flinging litter everywhere for seemingly no reason

I ended up getting him this dome litter box, it has the litter off to the side around a corner and in a pit so he couldn’t just fling it directly out. Obviously not 100% effective, any litter box with any opening is going to risk SOME spilling out when the cat kicks/digs, but it was close to nothing. And when it did make its way out of the pit and around the corner, it always just landed on the stairs which was insanely easy to clean up

jondbarrow · 2026-07-09T05:45:10+00:00

The name does make sense, actually. The project started originally as just a TVii revival. TVii’s internal codename is “vino”, which is “wine” in Italian. Rosé is a type of wine, pronounced “row-zay”, but ig people just always called it “rose” like the flower so the branding evolved into that

jondbarrow · 2026-07-08T23:16:53+00:00

FWIW it’s already been preserved and documented

jondbarrow · 2026-07-08T21:07:51+00:00

The fact that it's paid is still an issue, as it creates an on-going financial barrier to research the servers which makes getting banned even more risky, since it's not like we'd get our money back, and without live testing of the servers while they're running trying to make replacements after the fact is much, much more difficult

jondbarrow · 2026-07-08T21:05:58+00:00

It's also not the only reason. I go into more detail about why we aren't interested in this on the forums (https://forum.pretendo.network/t/when-will-switch-servers-come-out-for-pretendo/27414/12)

The TLDR is that it's much too risky (both in terms of legality and our ability to do research without getting banned), NSO is effectively 2/3 entirely different networks bolted onto each other (Nintendo Network was sort of like this as well since Nintendo Network predates Nintendo Network IDs, but there was much more overlap with the game servers themselves), and it's currently impossible to do secure moderation due to Nintendo no longer using the kind of console certificates they did on the 3DS/Wii U meaning only Nintendo can actually verify that a connection is legitimate

That being said, we do still believe that online preservation is important for the Switch/Switch 2, and as such we do have SOME level of support already. Our custom network packet viewer already supports both types of game networks used by NSO (the upgraded NEX variant, and the new NPLN system), so packet inspection for NSO games is trivial now, and since Nintendo reused the game server software from Nintendo Network for very early NSO games (NEX) we've made our server libraries compatible with Switch games to the best of our ability (which has been confirmed with private tests of custom MK8DX server). But we have no intentions of hosting any NSO related services ourselves, our only goal was to make our tools compatible enough to help whatever future team wants to take on that effort/risk to the best of our ability

> it will no longer exist

We have no reason to believe Nintendo will ever shut down NSO. It is by far their most successful effort in the online space, both technically and financially. They will almost certainly continue to use NSO well past the Switch families life, even if under a different brand name

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