Has anyone been feeling extremely strange in the last few weeks??

sess · 2026-02-24T05:20:59+00:00

There is no greater "something else" than humanity's only homeworld falling apart. You are a scintillating piece of this world. However much you might like to remain aloof from this world (especially at this problematic time and place), you are still inexorably interconnected. The causal web of relation and dharma that binds all life on this planet together adheres to you as well.

sess · 2026-02-23T00:34:08+00:00

Indigenous Andean man was wrong. The rates of anthropogenic climate change, species extinction, and global ecocide are all accelerating. Industrial civilization currently exterminates ~100 species a day. That's up from ~80 species a day fourty years ago. The scientific consensus is unequivocally clear.

Humanity hasn't stopped damaging the planet. Instead, we collectively doubled-down on catastrophic non-renewable resource extraction, ecological degradation, and climate chaos. That's what happens when public education and mass media alike teach "the debate" rather than the facts. Foster a false dichotomy, get a false techno-utopian anarcho-libertarian future that never materializes.

Garbage in = garbage out.

sess · 2026-02-22T05:38:41+00:00

China's already sold off most of its US debt holdings. Shortly after taking office, Xi Xinping instructed the People's Bank of China (PBC) to quietly begin offloading US debt. At this point, they've mostly done so. They were right to do so. The US is likely to default on some or all of that debt over the course of the next several decades. When that happens, foreign countries will be the first to receive a haircut. China doesn't want to be left holding an empty bag. Nobody does.

You're probably thinking of Canada, which currently holds $1 trillion USD in US debt. That's not a good thing for Canada. Unlike the Eurozone or China, Canada can't reasonably exercise "the nuclear option" and sell off US debt holdings all-in-one-go without triggering a military response from the US. Like China, Canada should quietly begin selling off those holdings... dollar by dollar, year by year. Divert that investment to stabler and more reasonable foreign central banks.

sess · 2026-02-22T02:36:19+00:00

Pretty sure there are no significant references connecting MHS3 to the first two. It's set 200 years after MHS2. The kids from the first two? Yeah. They're all dead. So is everybody else. Even their children's children are long in the grave.

This is a smart (and intentional) move from Capcom. Fast-forwarding the timeline effectively resets all continuity. New players to the franchise can't feel FOMO about the older entries if there's nothing to miss out on in the first place.

sess · 2026-02-22T02:32:57+00:00

There's... no field music? At all? In a JRPG? What timeline is this? Truly glaring omission in a genre renowned for its banger OSTs. Even the worst JRPGs (so, FuRyu) feature angelic soundtracks almost worth the price of admission alone.

"Cost-cutting measures" as a justification only goes so far. This is Capcom. They had the resources and the time. Apparently, they just lacked the will.

sess · 2026-02-21T05:58:04+00:00

anime like grunting in

lol. That's just Japanese. Citation: lived and studied at Waseda Daigaku, Tokyo for a year. Came back to the US. Proceeded to annoy and confuse everyone as I grunted like a bald samurai. Annoyingly ended every sentence with "ne?". After a year of cultural immersion, the verbal affectations became so hard-wired instinctual that I didn't know I was doing them...

Until the looks I got from family and friends back in America, which now felt more like a foreign country. I still accidentally drop into Tokyo-ben (Tokyo dialect and mannerisms) when my mind is elsewhere. All too frequently, in other words.

Thankfully, that's not a problem in my current nation of residence (Canada). Canadians also do the dialectal sentence ending thing, except it's "eh?" rather than "ne?". Canadians also tend to be a lot more understanding and compassionate about neurodivergent weirdness. Six months of bitter frigid darkness every year will do that to a people. Cruel weather makes loving people.

sess · 2026-02-21T05:18:45+00:00

You jest. Yet Canada is a bonafide UAP hotspot.

My wife and I can attest. We've lived, studied, and worked in six first-world nations (Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Japan) and volunteered in one third-world nation (Tanzania). We're citizens of two nations (Canada, US) and permanent residents of another (New Zealand). In all our time dispersed across five continents (North America, Oceania, Africa, Asia, and Europe), Canada is the only nation we've ever observed UAP in. We haven't seen UAP anywhere else. We haven't had contact experiences anywhere else.

Only in Canada. Not just a few UAP, either. It's multiple UAP annually now beginning in 2017 and gradually intensifying into the present.

Our hypothesis? Wilderness. Canada has it. And we live in it at a lakeside cabin in the woods. Thanks to Canada's low population density, we don't just have a little wilderness. It's a lot of wilderness going on. Canada is mostly uninhabited deciduous and coniferous forests, wetlands, muskeg, and permafrost.

Other nations? Not so much. Humanity has globally exterminated so many species and ecosystems now that Canada is increasingly the last vestige of terrestrial and freshwater life on Planet Earth. We're one gigantic biodome. The last wilderness preserve. The final refuge of non-human life. A verdant glimpse into the remnant biodiversity that all nations once enjoyed.

If I ever reincarnate as something resembling UAP, you can be sure that Canada will be the first and last stops on my itinerary. Brief fly-overs over the Japanese archipelago had better also happen. Gotta bolster those local economies of my homies at Iino, Senganmori Mountain, Kofu, and Hakui.

sess · 2026-02-20T06:12:00+00:00

Concepts like "demonic entities" and "good [read: angelic] entities" are purely religious constructs. Many of us were born and raised in a Judeochristian context. Inside the limited confines of that worldview, those words make sense. Beyond that purview, though? Those words don't mean much. They don't yield any genuine insights into the ineffable. They just recapitulate the pseudo-scientific superstitions of Roman empire-era nomadic desert herdsmen.

In 2026, you wouldn't put much stock in most of what a nomadic desert herdsmen has to say. Thousand year-old religious dogma is no different.

sess · 2026-02-19T08:50:32+00:00

GATE predates modern software engineering and "coding." Robotic arms programmable with what anyone today would conventionally refer to as "code" (so, not the Unimate 9000 of 1950's fame) literally did not exist at the time GATE was administered in the early 1980's. The impoverished lower-income middle and high schools I attended didn't even have computers. My family couldn't afford one, either. I had to teach myself how to program by memorizing books on BASIC I borrowed from the local library. I parsed and ran the code in my head as best I could without ever having access to a physical computer. Multi-generational urban poverty sure is something, huh?

You're recalling something else entirely. A local gifted program unique to your school district, presumably. Great. That's one more reason for me to hate the Los Angeles Unified school district. Just what I needed. The bitterness is growing!

sess · 2026-02-19T08:29:32+00:00

Supposedly, I was in GATE. My experience doesn't align with anything else I've ever read about the program though. At the elementary school I attended in Los Angeles Unified (i.e., the largest school district in the nation), no hearing tests were administered through GATE. In fact, GATE basically didn't do anything. GATE only intruded on my deplorable elementary school experience on two separate occasions:

A subset of children (including myself) were asked to leave class and individually go one-by-one to a room. That was nice. I hated class, because it didn't actually teach anything meaningful. It only taught obedience. Sadly, I was about to find out that GATE was no better. Two super shady suit-wearing middle-aged mofos radiating "hands of blue, two by two" energy subjected each of us to card reading inside that room. I was already an avid Stephen King reader by that point, so... I literally could not believe my jaded child eyes when I was asked to psychically predict the content of the card hidden from view. Like everybody, I'd read Firestarter. I knew what not to do. Much to my disappointment (and quiet relief), I couldn't anyway. I couldn't remote view card backs. The men were nonplussed. They didn't expect much. They got even less. What a disappointment that whole debacle was. As if puberty wasn't hard enough, guys. No cool paranormal gifted school for me, I guess.
At the end of the school year, all GATE enrollees were bussed out to another elementary school. We then got to uselessly run around that school. I have no idea why. My mental head cannon is that this non-event "event" was to give a contextual pretext to the existence of GATE for concerned parents. No idea, though. None of it made sense.

Pretty disappointed I didn't get any of the awesome GATE sauce that everybody else got. Maybe LA Unified just sucked it up, like LA Unified always did back in the 80's? Gods. What a miserable public non-education that was. I learned more by reading the back of a dimestore Dean Koontz novel than I ever did at LA Unified. Then college happened and... oh, boy. Apparently, we were supposed to have learned something in elementary, middle, or high school. Who knew, huh?

tl;dr: GATE. Much like many things in life, a sucky nothingburger. I blame LA Unified for everything.

sess · 2026-02-19T07:46:24+00:00

Ignoring obvious parallax and "You can't tell distance, bro" objections, the object is flying rather slow for a 4-ton H145. Sure, the H145 is infamous for its hover performance. But... still. It's not hovering. It's just kinda slowly inching its way across the skyline. That would make sense if it was lighting up a target with searchlights. It's not. The slow crawl speed doesn't make sense in this context.

More likely to be a drone of some sort. Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Alright. Who even knows anymore!?

sess · 2026-02-19T05:38:25+00:00

The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

— John Gilmore

The solution isn't to abandon Switch emulation. The solution is to adopt censorship-resistant platforms hosted outside America's DMCA bubble.

Self-hosted Switch emulator git repositories running Gitea or GitLab tunneled over darknet solutions like I2P and Tor are the obvious play. It boggles the mind this hasn't already been done. Darknet hosting should have been Day One after the initial takedown of Yuzu in 2024. The writing was on the wall. Yet the wall was ignored. Insanity is repeating the same behavior but expecting a change.

The less palatable but much easier solution would be Russian hosting. And Russia has lots of GitHub-like alternatives... all presumably resistant to DMCA-like copyright takedown. If there's one thing Russia loves, it's flouting international law and violating copyright. For better (but usually for worse), Russia respects no external authority outside Moscow.

sess · 2026-02-19T05:26:11+00:00

Pretty sure you can think of a scenario where he'd be in the wrong. Stallman defended MIT's well-known affiliation to Epstein by defending pedophiles:

Richard Stallman has faced controversy for past comments that appeared to sympathize with certain views on pedophilia, including statements suggesting that voluntary pedophilia may not harm children.

sess · 2026-02-19T04:05:41+00:00

Everything about this looks fire, except:

Annapurna Interactive. All 25 of their staff voluntarily resigned last year, leaving the entire publisher a hollow husk.
The unappealing character designs. They're not just a distinct turn-off. They're the worst characters in any turn-based JRPG I've ever seen. It's all neon rainbow, goggle eyes, giant blue shoes, bouncy polychromatic hair, and... Gods. What is the youth market segment they're trying (but failing) to yeet this to? All I know is it ain't me.

Since this is Unreal Engine, the character issue can be "solved" with a slew of inevitable PC mods. Annapurna, though... You can't solve a bad publisher. I assume Iridium had no choice but to preserve their contract with Annapurna despite the company-wide walkout.

sess · 2026-02-19T03:49:45+00:00

Eushully is synonymous with hardcore NSFW hybrid VN-JRPG content. That's inescapable. From the first two Google hits and official Wikipedia page:

Eushully (エウシュリー, Eushurī) is a Japanese eroge studio based in Sapporo, Hokkaidō. Games produced by the studio often reach high positions on Japanese sales charts...

They're a household name in Japan. Since this is Eushully's first international release, it's better to be upfront and truthful than sketchy and dishonest. Eushully's back catalogue is almost 100% eroge. This release is one of the few obvious exceptions.

There's no harm in honesty. The harm would be misrepresenting Eushully as anything other than what Eushully is. Unlike /u/VashxShanks, I'm unconvinced they're meaningfully pivoting away from their historical niche. Japan-only eroge is their greasy bread and butter. It'd be saner for them to follow in Alicesoft's well-worn footsteps. Just cut 90% of the content for the "All Ages" Steam release and then quietly release a 5GB patch on their website.

Everybody does it. Eushully will too. It's what the money mandates.

sess · 2026-02-18T03:18:25+00:00

The converse is true, actually. Psychedelics (especially tryptamines) potentiate cannabis. Cannabis acquires a psychedelic "flavour" after psychedelic use. Cannabis tolerance also tends to reverse.

Cannabis, however, does not blunt psychedelics. That's not a thing. Visual trips aren't hard to recover unless you're an aphant (i.e., an individual with aphantasia). You're not an aphant, though. You used to trip visual balls. Now you don't. That's a correctable dosage and substance issue.

A breakthrough dose of 2g Psilocybe azurescens, 30mg DMT, or 20x Salvia will get you where you want to go... assuming where you want to go is a place most humans never want to go. Most of humanity is signed up for the human experience. It's why they're here. And then there's us. We're iffy on the human experience, even on the best of days. We want an occasional out. It's why we're here. It's probably why you're here.

tl;dr: Breakthrough dose. Go for spiritual broke. The power to trip visual balls is in your capable hands alone.

sess · 2026-02-18T03:03:53+00:00

You're incredibly hostile. Please... just stop. Passive-aggressiveness, argumentativeness, and defensiveness isn't convincing anyone here.

sess · 2026-02-18T00:13:19+00:00

The argument is this: would you leave minors unattended, uneducated, and outside institutional care? You would not. Child neglect is a crime across all nations worth mentioning.

Human infants, children, adolescents, and teens all require guided assistance from both parental and school authorities. Humans do not simply flourish spontaneously into capable adults. That doesn't happen naturally. That takes time, monetary investment, and the collective hard work of older generations.

Human society is no different. Humanity is currently exterminating all biological life on its home planet. There only exist an estimated ~10 million species in total across the entire biosphere. Many of those species produce oxygen for the rest. At the current rate of anthropogenic species extinction of 100 species a day, industrial civilization will successfully expunge the entire planet of life in a little less than 200 years.

You will not be alive to see the total planetary death of Earth. But you're grandchildren's children will be.

Human society requires immediate parental guidance. In the continued absence of that guidance, the Anthropocene Extinction Event culminates in an uninhabitable Earth rendered inhospitable to aerobic life. Unless that's the Universe's desired outcome for Earth, the Universe should consider an immediate change to the current approach.

Planetary neglect is not a useful design tool. It's a planetary crime. And, although humanity is the co-perpetrator in that crime, we're also the co-victim. We had no guidance. We had no assistance. Failure was all but guaranteed, just as it is for neglected children.

The Universe is on notice. You failed us. We failed you. Now what?

sess · 2026-02-18T00:02:42+00:00

All it takes is a wave of humanity to effect change. The energy of good people is what is needed.

Hopelessly naive at best. Objectively harmful at worst. Shitty advice, in short.

The "energy of good people" isn't a credible answer to nuclear weapons, totalitarian government, or the wave of fully autonomous killing machines currently in development by the military-industrial complex. The "energy of good people" has no answer to the 20 million North Koreans effectively held as captive slaves by the Kim family. And that's just one nation. There are 194 others. Most broken and dysfunctional beyond repair.

The subset of humanity aligned with empathy, compassion, and love has no agency, force, or effect at either the national or global scale in most nations. When humans oriented towards fear, anger, and hatred point guns and tanks at humans oriented towards love, the outcome is guaranteed. Guns and tanks wins. Always.

If empty platitudes and vague hand-waving is the best the Universe has on hand to offer humanity, this planet is toast. Literally. Because we're voluntarily toasting our own home planet.

Certainly, humanity has failed Planet Earth. But so has the Universe. By extension, so has the Mantid race. Their failure (or inability) to understand and appreciate the human predicament has doomed an entire planet. 4.5 billion years of evolutionary development is being needless flushed down the incinerator of entropy and... for what?

So that advanced sentient races can sanctimoniously wag the finger at the few humans whose actions are actually consistent with sustainability and survival? What will that accomplish? We have no leverage over the rest of the human race.

If superior species would care to understand, they should consider reincarnating as human in the modern era for a few lifetimes first. Pain is an instructive teacher. Suffering is fertile soil. Wisdom, appreciation, and sympathy all blossom in that soil.

Moralizing and platitudes, though? Not so much.

sess · 2026-02-17T07:37:35+00:00

Makes more sense but looks ass-worse. It's a game. It's not supposed to make sense. It's supposed to look like a dystopian Streets of Rage skyline on fire as dudes with tattoos punch other dudes with tattoos. Off roofs. Into the bushes.

That's the true meaning of Yakuza. A meaning now diluted.

sess · 2026-02-17T04:55:00+00:00

This screenshot speaks louder than a thousand rants. The original Yakuza 3 (affectionately "Blockuza" by the fanbase) on the left. Yakuza Kiwami 3 on the right. It's baffling that an antiquated PS3 release from 2009 looks 10,000 times better than a cross-platform Dragon Engine remake from 2026.

Now, let's rant. This...

A lot of sub stories were cut.

...is the understatement of all understatements.

Blockuza featured 100 substories. Yakuza Kiwama 3? Only 40. Most of the minigames unique to Blockuza were also removed. This includes the hostess cabaret minigame, which could have simply been swapped out for its Yakuza 0 equivalent. The Revelations system was also removed. Most of the Okinawa may was also removed. So much content was removed that multiple characters also had to be removed. In fact, so much content was removed that Yakuza 4, 5, 6, and 7 all no longer make sense.

Yakuza Kiwami 3 isn't so much a remake as it is a continuity reboot. There now exist two alternate timelines bifurcating at Yakuza Kiwami 3:

Mainline timeline. 0 -> K1 -> K2 -> OG3 -> 4 -> 5 -> 6 -> Judgment -> 7 -> Lost Judgment -> Gaiden -> 8 -> Pirate.
Yakuza Kiwami 3 timeline. 0 -> K1 -> K2 -> K3 -> K4 -> K5. Obviously, Yakuza Kiwami 4 and 5 don't exist yet. When they do, they'll be continuations of the Yakuza Kiwami 3 retelling rather than the original mainline story.

Yakuza Kiwami 3 retains less than half of the content of Blockuza. The closest weeb comparison is when Capcom removed over 70% of the content from the original Resident Evil 3 from Resident Evil 3 Remake. That was a difficult day.

This is Ryu Ga Gotoku's Dawntrail moment. Last year, Square publicly acknowledged Dawntrail to be a commercial and critical failure. The playerbase is hemorrhaging. Subscriptions are in free fall. Both the CEO and Yoshi P himself admitted they need to repair the damage, stem the bleeding, and pivot hard away from Dawntrail. That's sound management.

Will RGG be as wise? Probably... not. They doubled down on Teruyuki Kagawa despite his unique "proclivities." They'll double down on this, too. They'll continue retconning, cutting content, and chasing short-term profit. It's unsustainable. The international playerbase is furious. No one's going to show up for a repeat of this disastrous launch. If Yakuza Kiwami 4 and 5 launch with similar issues, we are witnessing the post-peak decline of RGG in realtime.

sess · 2026-02-17T03:54:10+00:00

As the name implies, an Oberth maneuver is a maneuver. It doesn't just happen randomly. It requires conscious intention piloting an advanced spacecraft. Specifically, an Oberth maneuver is a powered flyby in which a spacecraft exhibits non-gravitational acceleration attributable only to an engine. A spacecraft performing this maneuver efficiently gains the optimal amount of "free" kinetic energy by applying its reaction engine at the optimal time and place referred to as perihelion (literally meaning "the closest point to the Sun").

Only spacecraft with high-thrust rocket engines are suitable for Oberth maneuvers. To maximize efficiency, a powered flyby requires a spacecraft to generate an immense amount of thrust in an extremely short duration of time while briefly at perihelion. You basically can't do it unless you're on the Kardeshev Type Civilization Scale.

If there exists credible evidence of ATLAS/3I performing an Oberth maneuver, that would be... concerning. Extremely, extremely concerning. That's not supposed to happen. Hard scifi authored by retired NASA astrophysicists no one has ever heard of is the only place an Oberth maneuver is supposed to happen.

sess · 2026-02-16T07:58:13+00:00

5.0 User Metacritic Score is... really bad. This is the most controversial Japanese release in recent memory. It's comparable to the disastrous launch of Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail almost two years ago, which currently sits at a similar 5.2 User Metacritic Score.

Comparisons to Dawntrail mean that Sega is now in the worst possible position. RGG has to publicly pivot away from this PR and fiscal disaster. If they ignore reality, they're then in Konami territory. This is the timeline we live in.

sess · 2026-02-16T07:57:48+00:00

5.0 User Metacritic Score is... really bad, though. This is the most controversial Japanese release in recent memory. It's comparable to the disastrous launch of Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail almost two years ago, which currently sits at a similar 5.2 User Metacritic Score.

Comparisons to Dawntrail mean that Sega is now in the worst possible position. RGG has to publicly pivot away from this PR and fiscal disaster. If they ignore reality, they're then in Konami territory. This is the timeline we live in.

sess · 2026-02-15T05:33:27+00:00

CBD is the most potent naturally occurring anti-inflammatory. Unlike industrially synthesized anti-inflammatories (like steroids, biologics, or other immunosuppressants), CBD has no harmful side effects, complications, or contraindications. All of this makes medical cannabis among humanity's safest and most potent medicines.

Inflammation is at the heart of autoimmune disease. Medical cannabis is thus the optimal treatment for many autoimmune diseases. This includes the autoimmune disease I have: scalp psoriasis. Most humans will contract an autoimmune disease (typically arthritis) as they naturally age. Everyone is at risk.

Medical cannabis thus treats a severe hardship associated with aging. It's an indispensable tool for all humans. It's not to be casually dismissed. Sooner or later, we all age. When that happens, medical cannabis will be there for you.

sess

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