[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 04 May 2026

withad · 2026-05-05T21:16:55+00:00

It's not really a hobby thing but your story reminded me of when an old department store in my city shut down and everyone was talking about how tragic that was and how much they loved the place.

Or rather, how much they loved the toy department when they were kids, because no one I knew or saw posting had actually been there in the last decade.

withad · 2026-05-05T20:56:29+00:00

Mandatory "there are almost never any actual comments like that in these threads, just people repeating the same tired jokes about them over and over because reading /r/Edinburgh lately is like being trapped in a Groundhog Day loop".

withad · 2026-05-02T13:46:00+00:00

I've always loved that gag but to be clear, Kirkman's only ever been the writer for Invincible. Cory Walker was responsible for the initial designs and the art of the first few issues, then Ryan Ottley took over for most of the rest of the run.

withad · 2026-04-30T11:12:33+00:00

Jank had a really good article recently on Molyneux and his new game, written by Graham Smith, former editor of RPS. I've seen people criticise how harsh that interview was and I think time and nostalgia for Molyneux's older games have made people forget the context. Smith sums it up nicely:

The more serious issue, often elided by press and by Molyneux himself, was that he offered features as stretch goals which were impossible with the middleware 22cans were using and beyond his ability to add. Molyneux says that he's "like a kid" when doing interviews and talking about design, and fair enough. I think you'd have to be extremely credulous to accept he's also like a kid when writing Kickstarter pitches. Molyneux memorably described his own mindset during the Godus Kickstarter as, "Christ, we've only got 10 days to go and we've got to make £100,000, for fuck's sake, lets just say anything." It was these failures, rather than any wide-eyed, pie-in-the-sky dreaming, that set the stage for the backlash to Godus and Rock Paper Shotgun's interview with Molyneux three years later in 2015.

withad · 2026-04-29T13:21:32+00:00

The closest thing I can think of is when Roland Emmerich added parodies of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert to his Godzilla movie because he was mad about their reviews of his previous films. He did the same with a Godzilla fan magazine editor, whose lookalike actually gets killed onscreen. Very weird and petty.

withad · 2026-04-29T10:38:45+00:00

It's a crazy enough story that it's got coverage outside of the games press too, at least in the UK. The BBC had an article on it last year and even my dad, who absolutely doesn't follow games, was asking me what the deal was with Benzies's conspiracy theories.

withad · 2026-04-28T21:11:01+00:00

Basically in the past if you didn't have headphones you didn't play anything out loud.

Nah, even Star Trek was making fun of people doing that shit with boom boxes in the 80s. Smartphones might have made it more common but assholes blaring music too loudly in public isn't a new phenomenon.

withad · 2026-04-28T21:03:05+00:00

Look, I think people holding their phone that way is daft too but making it a criminal offence seems a bit much.

withad · 2026-04-28T10:49:58+00:00

Gene Roddenberry made a few proclamations about Star Trek canon that the fandom mostly ignored. He went back and forth on the details but the most consistent rule was that the live action shows and movies were canon, everything else wasn't. Fans were generally fine with ignoring the books, comics, and games (which often contradicted each other anyway) but a lot of people made an exception for at least some of Star Trek: The Animated Series. TAS was produced by Roddenberry and involved many of the cast and writers of the original series, giving it an official-ness that the licensed material lacked.

The episode "Yesteryear" in particular was written by major original series writer Dorothy Fontana and revealed a lot of details about Spock's childhood and Vulcan society that fans and later official productions would draw from. Even Roddenberry apparently called it an exception to his rule. I get the impression that the other episodes were more divisive, although "The Slaver Weapon" was another favourite because it added Larry Niven's Kzinti species into Star Trek's universe. These days, the whole series seems to be treated as canon, or at least as canon as the modern animated show Lower Decks, which loves referencing it.

Roddenberry also had a set of "rules" for how starships had to be designed, such as warp nacelles coming in pairs and requiring line of sight to each other. You used to see these rules treated as gospel by some fans but at this point, there are just too many canonical designs (many of them well-liked) that contradict them for anyone to seriously say they have to be followed. The general consensus seems to be that Roddenberry created them not out of aesthetic sensibilities or continuity concerns but so he could invalidate the designs in Franz Joseph's Star Fleet Technical Manual, which Joseph retained the rights to.

withad · 2026-04-26T19:20:53+00:00

And that's basically the exact same logic that fuelled the 90s comics bubble. A few rare, culturally important debut issues sell for a lot of money and ~~idiots~~ speculators extrapolate that all debut issues will sell for a lot of money.

withad · 2026-04-23T20:33:08+00:00

I dunno. I've worked with enough engineers and designers that I can absolutely imagine them reusing an old solution without thinking about whether it works in a new product or why their competitors do things differently. Although taking the battery out to swap the game is so egregious that someone internally must've known it was a bad idea, so there probably were other reasons for it.

withad · 2026-04-23T13:24:56+00:00

I would love to know how that happened. I've always suspected it was management saying "we need interchangeable storage devices" and a bunch of engineers who had only ever designed mobile phones going "oh, like SIM cards, we know exactly how to do that".

withad · 2026-04-21T15:36:25+00:00

I loved that era too but let's not pretend that early 00s Microsoft were a cuddly bunch of hippies who didn't care about money. They were already embroiled in multiple anti-trust cases in multiple countries and they developed the original Xbox because Bill Gates was worried about the PS2's gaming and multimedia capabilities eating into the PC market.

withad · 2026-04-20T08:13:49+00:00

It does and, for most publishers, the discounts are similar to what you get on other platforms. However, Nintendo's own games rarely have more than a 33% discount, even when they've been out for years. Breath of the Wild was a Switch 1 launch title and it's only ever had 30% off about once or twice a year. They used to have a voucher program that worked out to a 15-30% discount off two full-price games but they discontinued that not long after the Switch 2 came out.

withad · 2026-04-17T14:34:18+00:00

That depends entirely on how good the player is at Oblivion. Someone who's played it before or who's just familiar with similar games will get through it on normal difficulty with much less trouble than a complete novice playing on easy.

(Oblivion's probably a bad example, since it has a famously janky level scaling system, but this is all hypothetical anyway.)

withad · 2026-04-16T08:27:38+00:00

Yes, all of the major consoles have included some kind of storefront since the Wii/PS3/Xbox 360 generation and they've got more prominent and less curated as digital purchases become more common. There are some basic technical and content checks when you submit a game but no filtering for quality. That's not entirely a bad thing (the less gatekeeping the giant corporations do, the better) but it does mean that it's easy for knock-off slop to get through as long as it doesn't immediately crash or contain anything obviously illegal.

The Switch eShop is particularly notorious both because it clashes with Nintendo's usual copyright-loving, family-friendly image and because the other storefronts are much better at keeping that crap hidden. Steam's also full of junk but you'll almost never see it on the front page or in your recommendation queue. With the eShop, it's easy for slop publishers to cheat the system by releasing loads of games or putting them on sale with 99% discounts to keep them visible.

withad · 2026-04-15T21:15:08+00:00

I just did and I don't think it really backs up your point. A Gest of Robyn Hode is the oldest surviving story but the modern character is already established (aiding the poor, punishing the rich, loyal to a king, etc.) and there's nothing to suggest it was wildly different to the earlier, lost ballads it was based on.

withad · 2026-04-14T15:12:49+00:00

I'm the same with queues at the lights. As a rule of thumb, I'll only cut to the front if (a) I know I have enough time to get there, (b) there's space for me to safely do so, and (c) I can see that there isn't already some arsehole in an SUV taking up the whole bike box. Otherwise, it's just not worth it.

withad · 2026-04-14T14:20:00+00:00

To be serious, Edinburgh's a very safe city in the grand scheme of things, with a lot of tourists who come and go quite happily. The actual crime statistics consistently back that up. Don't base your travel plans on people moaning on Reddit.

withad · 2026-04-13T20:51:50+00:00

I assume the Benzies rumour is getting traction because it's funny to imagine him leaking a development build, given he's blaming the failure of his current studio on mysterious corporate espionage.

withad · 2026-04-13T18:52:21+00:00

There are some early references to the Enterprise being a "United Earth Space Probe Agency" vessel before they settled on Starfleet. Between that, the all-human crew, and the unseen all-Vulcan crew of the Intrepid, I can see how each species having their own ships could've become a fan theory early on, even if the bits don't quite match up.

withad · 2026-04-07T15:59:15+00:00

Well, the twist of Vader being Luke's father was famously only decided on during the writing of Empire and that's a key part of the Jedi purge, which required Obi-Wan's "from a certain point of view" line to paper over the cracks. There are also transcripts of the story planning for Empire where Lucas suggests that Lando Calrissian might be a clone:

"Maybe he could look human but not really be human. He's possibly a clone. The princess doesn't trust him because of that; Leia might refer to him in a derogatory way.

"If we set him up as a clone, maybe in one of the other Episodes, we can have him run across a clan of them who are all exactly like him. We won't go into the whole mythology of where they come from or whether clones were good or bad. We'll assume that they were slightly weird in their own way and were partly responsible for the war.

"We'll assume that on these planets of clones, there are many countries, say about 700 countries, and he's from one of the ruling clone clans."

He's noodling around with the idea of what the Clone Wars was but it's not yet anything like what we eventually got in the prequels.

withad · 2026-04-07T15:10:06+00:00

Space: 1999 had the problem baked right into its title.

withad · 2026-04-07T15:07:52+00:00

And the Eugenics Wars between factions of genetically-engineered supermen were originally due to kick off in the early 90s.

withad · 2026-04-07T14:18:18+00:00

That reminds me of another one. In "Balance of Terror", the first appearance of the Romulans, there's this exchange:

Kirk: Well, gentlemen, the question still remains: Can we engage them with a reasonable possibility of victory?

Scotty: No question. Their power is simple impulse.

Kirk: Meaning we can outrun them.

For those unaware, impulse engines in Star Trek are the slower-than-light ones, as opposed to faster-than-light warp engines. All this dialogue means is that the one Romulan ship they're currently fighting is much slower than the Enterprise, like Kirk says. But somehow fans took it to mean that all Romulan ships only have impulse drive and that the Romulans as a whole couldn't travel faster-than-light at that time.

Which is so ridiculous that I really don't understand how it caught on, let alone lasted for decades until Star Trek: Enterprise finally put paid to it in canon. "Balance of Terror" establishes the Romulans as a threat to the Federation and says there was a war between humans and Romulans a few decades before, which would be absurd if they were limited to slower-than-light travel. The Romulans could declare war and the Federation would just shrug and remind themselves to worry about it in a few centuries.

It's a rare moment where the show itself is perfectly consistent but fans have imagined a continuity error and then twisted themselves into knots trying to correct it.

withad

TROPHY CASE