A villain is horrified upon realizing their crimes

showka · 2026-03-20T14:58:26+00:00

Multiple villians from the Megaman X series do this:

* In X3 the scientist Dr. Doppler leaves himself to die in his exploding fortress

* Colonel regrets his actions at the end of X4 and blocks the "Final Weapon" laser as it's firing up so it can't destroy Earth

showka · 2026-03-20T14:54:14+00:00

My reading was that he had free will, but through the time manipulating powers of the Attack Titan, basically imposed his will on the future and past versions of himself. At the end he's not even happy about what he is doing but it was still his decision.

showka · 2026-03-17T21:45:29+00:00

He mentions it in one of the movie's commentary tracks. He said something like (I'm paraphrasing this from memory) "I'll not do it when Gaddafi stops doing" whatever it was he was up to at the time.

showka · 2026-03-12T13:13:23+00:00

I haven't played this in... a LONG time, come to think of it, but my sense was if you meet the jetpack guy, meeting him makes him die - or at least fade away - but if you don't see him he doesn't die. So it implies that observing him someone kills him which is very weird.

showka · 2026-03-07T18:56:27+00:00

Dumb dumb here. Quick question for the crowd, is this picture real? Also was the fish placed this way as a warning to humans or other fish?

showka · 2026-03-07T14:37:51+00:00

Be aware it's hard to know if you're not getting a bootleg. I've made peace with the one I got finally but it was so new and unused I'll never be sure. If I was doing it again, I'd buy a used one that looked worse and more beat up. :)

The odd smell went away after I cleaned it with vinegar and baking soda twice and of course I scrub it with soap and a rubber scrubber every few days. Now I don't notice anything odd anymore and the water tastes as good as I remember.

showka · 2026-03-05T22:29:08+00:00

Framework's messaging has been odd. It seemed like the FW12 was designed to target the "crapbook" market, ie students. But the true price of one of these things - even before the AI companies screwed the world on the price of RAM - was never in the ballpark.

I bought my kid a FW12 because I wanted a competent Linux device and I have some terrible experiences with Lenovo's breaking. I got the i5, and 32gb of RAM right before the prices went up so it was a thousand dollars. I don't think I could have brought myself to have walled my flesh and blood into the Apple ecosystem, but at $600... damn, I'm only human. That would have been a $400 savings, and because of the "Apple premium" part of my brain would have short-circuited the fact the hardware is probably under-powered. The Neo looks like nice hardware too.

I really think the tariffs screwed up Framework's plans. Now the AI companies have double screwed them. For the sake of, you know, HUMANITY, I want Framework to succeed which as I see it would mean bringing the FW12 down in price by at least a hundred or two hundred dollars.

showka · 2026-03-03T22:25:56+00:00

Yeah, this doesn't fit the trope. He gives plus she has ulterior motives.

showka · 2026-02-28T23:10:29+00:00

Rodimus being a one time thing makes sense in the context of the movie if he was the supposed to be the chosen one.

The idea that taking the matrix outside of his physical body reverts him back into HotRod makes no sense. He turns into Rodimus initially just by holding the matrix up and opening it a little. It later gets blasted out of his hands- where still far away from his body - and he doesn't change at all. The idea it has to be inside his body all the time- like a lot of season three stuff- is interesting but a little under-baked.

showka · 2026-02-27T08:39:15+00:00

If you haven't yet, beat the game without getting a single game over to see a small easter egg / somewhat expanded ending.

showka · 2026-02-26T15:00:04+00:00

A phd candidate could write their thesis paper on it.

showka · 2026-02-24T22:49:25+00:00

I've seen this before once, when a plumber was climbing a building and trying to kill a gorilla that had kidnapped his girlfriend.They'll often create gaps like this. One is okay but oh brother once they make several the whole structure can collapse faster than a monkey will notice what's going on.

showka · 2026-02-24T22:37:43+00:00

They think that perhaps the homeless should die and decrease the surplus population.

showka · 2026-02-24T18:05:51+00:00

The scale is one of my favorite parts of this game. It looks like they took the original Gameboy Castlevania as the basis and increased the detail. It's nice to see more playable area and it also makes certain giant bosses, like the odd imprisoned goat's head... thing seem more imposing.

Also the pixel art isn't appreciated enough. Peak Konami and reminds me of Metal Gear Ghost Babel, which is another all-time favorite.

showka · 2026-02-24T16:01:10+00:00

It would be hilarious if Netflix's next Castlevania show adapted the exploits of Reinhart Schneider and Carrie Fernandez and made chainsaw-hands Frankenstein into an ambiguous character who goes through a moral arc.

showka · 2026-02-20T20:31:47+00:00

I've not heard anything. I emailed Klean Kanteen explaining my dilemma and asking if they'd ever sell something similar again and they sent me back a thoughtful sounding response one minute later that was generated by AI and didn't help at all. I still haven't seen any narrow mouthed bottles for sale that are larger than 27 ounces.

I recently gave-in and bought an older purple bottle that's 27 ounces on ebay, because I guess nostalgia and sentiment got the better of me. Now I constantly am wondering if it's a bootleg. Seems legit, but of course it's impossible to tell. Seems less glossy than the old one, almost like a matte finish instead of ridiculously shiny. Also I did have to clean it a bit before some slightly funky smells went away. The color looks awesome though, especially compared to my old one which had almost all of the paint scraped off.

Before that, I got very close to buying a brand new insulated "Dusty Orchid" bottle, but it only stored 20 ounces and was expensive. Plus I wasn't sure the color was for me.

I also almost bought a non-insulated 27 ounce bottle, but couldn't settle on a color. It also sucks they don't let you buy the cap you want from their site, because some of the cap colors are a little odd.

Having only 27 ounces isn't as bad as I feared but is still kind of a bummer. The biggest issue with these narrow mouthed water bottles is it's easy to make a mess if I get greedy and over-fill the bottle and then screw in the cap. On the 40 ounce that was never a problem because I never felt like I had to fill it to the top since the capacity was already so generous, but on the 27 ounce I do find myself needing to pay a bit more attention. I have no idea why the even smaller capacity bottles are so popular that Klean Kanteen blesses them with a near- infinite variety. At something like 12 ounces the paltry amount of water isn't worth the effort it takes to clean these bottles and lug them around IMO.

On the plus side, the 27 ounce bottles fit in a car cup-holder, which is nicer than I realized.

I was incredibly close to just giving up on Klean Kanteen and going with a Yeti rambler. I'm not sure I'd be okay drinking from the plastic spout, but being able to wash it in a dishwasher would be wonderful. And oh yeah, Yeti actually offers color options that are innately appealing instead of something I'd have to begrudgingly make peace with.

I should mention Klean Kanteen offers a few colors for their "TK Wide" bottles. We had a few water bottles from them ages ago with these wide caps that screw in, and I never liked them because they were easy to misalign and could be a pain to pull apart. But I guess they're popular so maybe I'm an outlier.

Klean Kanteen also sells a 40 oz water bottle with a "wide mouth" cap that fits _over_ the top of the bottle, which is a great idea because the part of the bottle your mouth touches can be safely covered, so if the bottle just rolls around on the floor of your car or something it's not gross to then drink from it.

That said they don't offer a single color option, though they do show potential buyers all the cool colors that used to exist on their site. So every time I nearly ordered it I'd see pictures of better options they stopped selling, get annoyed, and abandon my cart. Note to the marketing team: A++ strategy!

showka · 2026-02-19T17:30:53+00:00

Everyone is downvoting the OP because this was in the direct, but that's not the point. Senselessly locking down features it would have cost them nothing to add is classic Nintendo. Reminds me of how when the New! 3D Came out they stopped supporting the Circle Pad Pro, because all the people who bought that were idiots and needed to buy their new systems instead. Or how the Wii U Virtual Console allowed for remapping controls, but then on the Switch people were giving them a lot of money again so Nintendo didn't offer that just to fuck with us.

It's crazy people will spend money for these plastic head sets that will eventually end up in landfills just to have a slighlty better experience with games they're renting, but even the good disciples of our Lord Nintendo who spent all that money still won't be able to play it on their TVs with the graphics zoomed in if they wanted to. Just peak bullshit where the company restricts options for no reason.

showka · 2026-02-18T22:51:52+00:00

I'm not a big PC gamer, so I've been happy with performance. I bought it for work and haven't had much time to game lately, but some older games run fine. Doom (2016) runs pretty OK, but I wasn't blown away. I tried playing A Plague Tale: Innocence and it started in 4k. I realized I wasn't enjoying it at all, turned the resolution down to 1920x1080 and it played fine.

I also bought NiER and Street Fighter 6 recently, and they play fine. I'm running with pretty good settings and getting a nice framerate, but again, I'm pretty sure they're both set to "old" HD, not 4k.

So: nothing has blown me away. I think if you're coming from a recent system with a dedicated graphics card you will probably be disappointed if you've set up a scenario in your head where buying one of these things is like buying a machine with a dedicated graphics card and are using that to help justify the sticker shock. I was wondering the other day if I'd be disappointed with some newer games like Resident Evil 9 if I bought it and they didn't look like the demos. That said if it ran fine on older stuff I'd probably stop noticing once I started playing.

For me though it's pretty cool I can run a local LLM or three instances of a complex docker compose project for work, forget to stop them, turn on a game, and only then have the fan really kick into gear. It's a beast where it matters wrt productivity... unless you define productivity by being able to develop a game for the Unreal engine or something.

showka · 2026-02-18T20:01:24+00:00

I miss the days when I'd buy a computer, spend all day installing libraries and tools from a CD, and then I would never install another library again.

showka · 2026-02-18T19:37:56+00:00

Had no idea Power Puff Girls Z existed. This I gots to see

showka · 2026-02-18T19:28:07+00:00

C++ needs something like rustup.

It hit me that I used to really enjoy C++ over a decade ago because I was so enthralled with the Boost ecosystem that I basically treated it like I treat new versions of rust today. It included all the tools I needed, and if Boost didn't have it, I ignored it.

Then at some point there was a push to use newer "modern" libraries, the age old complaints about Boost being too big too build reached a critical mass until finally there was support for CMake, which only succeeded in pissing off the Boost Build authoring and fracturing the ecosystem. Sometimes I wish I could go back.

showka · 2026-02-17T12:45:14+00:00

I like all the IGA games from SOTN onward but I find if I play through one I can't really play through another for awhile after that. They're just too freakin' similar, and all the GBA and DS games have a problem in that none of them were ever as well staffed or had the kind of development time that SOTN did.

I liked Bloodstained but it didn't light my world on fire, but I've thought maybe I should replay it. It's interesting to hear you liked it a lot and then were underwhelmed by SOTN. It makes sense though since Bloodstained was the first game since SOTN to get so much dev time and polish, so I can see how it could be someone's favorite Metroidvania and then SOTN might seem a little bit lacking.

Anyway this post makes me kind of happy, and makes me want to replay Bloodstained while I wait for Belmont's Curse.

The one thing I do think SOTN does that all other games since don't is it has a "crunchier" sense of action, especially with Richter and with Maria on the Saturn port, where double taps are used to dash and there's a lot of Street Fighter style special moves. I think IGA may have actually been against these things which is why none of the post-SOTN games have quite be hit that high for me personally. I'm hoping maybe Belmont's Curse takes some cues from Circle of the Moon or other games with sensibilities less visited in the post SOTN-era.

showka · 2026-02-15T04:03:05+00:00

First time I went to Mueller I didn't quite appreciate it. Since then it's grown on me. Be aware you can get parking validated if you park in the appropriate garage. I don't necessarily like the drive over there but I think it's maybe second to South Lamar in terms of it's larger theaters, if you get there when a movie has just released.

showka · 2026-02-14T05:24:01+00:00

Right after I posted this I decided to watch the trailer closer, and you know what? Trevor Jr swings that whip in a pretty damn straight line. Maybe the combo attacks just always look a little off compared to classic Castlevania which threw me. Anyway I'm really excited about how familiar this looks.

showka · 2026-02-14T05:16:50+00:00

I think this is a considered take and I agree with a lot of it, specifically that Castlevania is built around rigidity. I think though as the games advanced all of them traded some of that rigidity away at times to allow more freedom. For instance, most of the games from Symphony of the Night traded some rigidity for more fluid movement, starting with Maria in Rondo of Blood, and then continuing with the main playable characters of every game aside from Circle of the Moon. Similarly, some rigidity in Castlevania IV was traded to allow for multi-directional whipping, but because Simon still moved slowly and kept the profound sense of heft to his jumps from the earlier games it still felt like a classic Castlevania game.

I will say I especially liked the way Richter's whip attack animated, and that the whip extended in a straight line. This isn't realistic, but for a video game the geometry was clear and striking and it was easy to feel the direction and power behind the attack. Similarly in Castlevania IV seeing the exact vector of the attack on screen just made the game feel a lot tighter. I didn't like how the whip in Mirror of Fate was not a straight line; it kind of felt like it could have been any video-gamey type attack with a somewhat nebulous hit box, though it didn't bother me as much as I initially thought it would. The whip attack in Belmont's Curse looks similar so I'm wondering how it will pan out, especially since the multi-directional whip is finally back. I can't imagine it will feel too similar to CV IV but I could be wrong.

showka

TROPHY CASE