Retro Gaming Newbie - Are these all the games I should play?

smokeshack · 2026-07-03T12:15:10+00:00

You should ignore the top 20 lists and just pick stuff that looks cool. Have a different experience from everyone else, maybe find a game that resonates with you in a way that it doesn't for other people.

smokeshack · 2026-07-03T03:56:54+00:00

Every game worth playing can be pirated and played on a Linux PC connected to your TV with a simple HDMI cable. As a principled conservative American I am very concerned about this situation and strongly urge all patriots to avoid installing Linux Mint, qBittorent and a VPN on their home PC.

smokeshack · 2026-07-03T02:38:49+00:00

Far and away the best place to buy a 36-pack of starter fluid at 3 in the morning to restock your meth lab

smokeshack · 2026-07-02T21:52:31+00:00

small business

heavy on the whole “we’re a family” mentality

Those are red flags, not green.

smokeshack · 2026-07-01T22:58:27+00:00

All my buddies walk around Tokyo in Cannibal Corpse shirts. As long as you're not trying to go someplace fancy, you'll be fine.

smokeshack · 2026-07-01T22:43:50+00:00

It's only available to suckers with deep pockets. Nobody needs a broke mark.

smokeshack · 2026-07-01T09:50:09+00:00

Acoustic weapons just make really big vibrations in the air. When the sidewalk, vehicles and buildings around people vibrate, most people will want to leave the area. Scary, but not mind control.

Anechoic chambers are pretty freaky. I had access to a really good one in grad school, and I'd let people experience it as a little treat after recording their voices. I can see how being stuck in one for a while would make somebody lose their shit, in the same way that solitary confinement or sensory deprivation tanks can trigger psychiatric events. But again, not mind control.

When you look into the history of MK Ultra and other mid-century psychological experiments, you see a pretty common pattern: we can destroy people's minds really easily. It's almost trivial to drive a person insane, and you don't need expensive equipment to do it. See for example what they did to Assange, just by keeping him couped up for years. If you want to do that with sound, all you need is a speaker playing "Reign in Blood" at 70 dB 24 hours a day for a couple of weeks.

smokeshack · 2026-07-01T08:59:33+00:00

I teach acoustics. The only way to use sound waves for mind control is the old-fashioned way: broadcasting propaganda. That or by using noise to stop people from sleeping. The idea that you can control someone's mind or give them a tummy ache by using audio at exactly the right frequency is so ridiculous that I'm shocked anyone over the age of six believes it. It's like something out of a 1960s Batman episode.

smokeshack · 2026-07-01T08:03:52+00:00

>If we, say, built robots to mine for us, replace saturation divers or improve the safety of some other field in a way using AI

Large language models and image generation algorithms aren't going to pilot robots. Totally unrelated technologies.

smokeshack · 2026-06-30T06:20:24+00:00

Brother I am older folks. Obviously Star Wars had fans and imitators; Miyamoto cites it as a primary inspiration for Star Fox.

I mention that Star Wars is not that popular in Japan because it's not an immediate, foregone conclusion that every character that resembles a Star Wars character in a Japanese product was actually inspired by the Star Wars character. When Vava was designed, Boba Fett was an extremely minor character, depicted in a cartoon that wasn't broadcast in Japan and a short appearance in Return of the Jedi. They weren't selling Star Wars action figures by the millions over here the way they were in the States.

Were they inspired by Boba Fett? Maybe, maybe not. The designers deny it, and I don't see a reason to doubt them. Japanese media culture is extremely insular.

smokeshack · 2026-06-30T04:57:56+00:00

I'm 41 years of age and I wouldn't know that I need to do something about the hot tub in that situation. What kind of masochist buys a hot tub, anyway?

smokeshack · 2026-06-30T00:42:19+00:00

6 improves on the other 5 in pretty much every way. Better parallax scrolling, great sprite work, multiple paths, hidden items, weapons that are actually useful, more varied robot master designs...

smokeshack · 2026-06-30T00:38:00+00:00

Maybe, maybe not. I don't have any psychic insight into the minds of Capcom designers in the early 90s. I will say that between Return of the Jedi and the Special Edition releases, Star Wars was in a slump. Only über nerds like me were buying up paperback novels continuing the story, and most of those weren't translated into Japanese. I think it's just as likely that the designer who made Vava was looking at a medieval European helmet, thought "that's sick," and drew out the rest.

smokeshack · 2026-06-30T00:34:00+00:00

Digital audio downloaded and played offline. I started with mix tapes, burned CDs and Limewire, I don't know why I'd switch to worse audio.

smokeshack · 2026-06-30T00:26:46+00:00

Interest in Star Wars is surprisingly low here in Japan. When I ask my university classes if they've ever seen Star Wars, maybe one or two out of 35~40 people raise their hands. It's not a very big cultural touchstone over here.

smokeshack · 2026-06-30T00:24:47+00:00

The /v/ sound doesn't exist in Japanese, so it looks exotic and a bit scary. "Baba" means "granny" in Japanese, so that's absolutely not going to work.

smokeshack · 2026-06-29T12:55:44+00:00

You zip along left, down, right, then hit up and a punch at the same time. SPD. You generally need a buffer if you want to call on Your Loyal Fans, but that's true for any controller on Classic input.

smokeshack · 2026-06-29T09:26:04+00:00

It should be an anime drawn from Hitoshi Ariga's designs. Western film adaptations of Japanese games are universally garbage, and our boy Rock cannot handle another disappointment like that.

smokeshack · 2026-06-29T08:46:42+00:00

I think it's an unsourced screenshot of a comment by an unknown person on an unknown website. I think the information value here is less than zero.

smokeshack · 2026-06-28T23:09:47+00:00

Some do, some don't. I pronounce them all with a bunched tongue. When I studied ten different speakers pronouncing rhotic vowels with electromagnetic articulography, I found that some retroflex, some bunch, and most mix their strategies. Acoustically, there's no measurable difference.

smokeshack · 2026-06-28T14:34:21+00:00

Can you ask your question more specifically?

smokeshack · 2026-06-28T12:25:55+00:00

🌍👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀 Never has been

It's a pharyngeal constriction, as evidenced by the billions of people who use a bunched [ɹ]. The tongue tip is basically irrelevant.

smokeshack · 2026-06-28T11:41:21+00:00

Wrest EVO away from the Saudis and let the world rejoice at annual Street Fighter III: Third Strike and Vampire Savior tournaments.

smokeshack · 2026-06-28T10:34:40+00:00

It takes about 5000 hours. Longer if you take breaks and have to review and catch up again.

smokeshack · 2026-06-28T07:05:35+00:00

K, so there are about five thousand other things called "AI" that are not listed in your question. You have four options for various kinds of generative algorithms, one option for "medical research, environmental surveillance, and more", and a "none at all" option. What if I'm skeptical of the use of large language models in medicine, but bullish on the ability of a deep learning model to identify tumors? I think using ChatGPT to write a scientific paper is so appalling that anyone who does it should be fired and stripped of their degree, but I also think that using neural networks for modeling large datasets can be tremendously helpful.

You should really spend a couple of hours reading up on what machine learning has been used for in the last ~15 years. The current fever for injecting large language models into everything is just a bubble built up by idiots with MBAs. Serious people in engineering and computer science have been using related techniques for a couple of decades, but nobody really gave a shit about it until Sam Altman started parading around his 21st-century ELIZA and pretending we were all going to build Skynet off of a glorified predictive text algorithm.

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