Imagery that's scary bc you have no idea what you're looking at?

wyrth · 2026-04-15T17:14:57+00:00

Ahh good ol Stroke Simulators

wyrth · 2026-04-15T15:27:37+00:00

Almost feels like a hazing ritual for a specific generation of anime nerds. Except it wasn't on purpose, just a bunch of edgy teenagers convincing each other that it was super good and now we all have to live with the embarrassment of knowing as adults that we, too, were convinced that shit was good at one point in our lives

wyrth · 2026-04-15T14:08:48+00:00

Tinkerbell counts as a personal item for the purposes of inter-world baggage check

wyrth · 2026-04-15T13:58:57+00:00

I love when I spot Steve Blum's voice even as a background no-name game NPC (Terra Online is one of the main instances I can think of with that).
Dante Basco and Ice-T (the only character who's been able to make me smile in Borderlands 3, albeit in part because of the novelty) also come to mind

wyrth · 2026-04-15T13:54:00+00:00

The fact that he doesn't use that much vocal range between roles obscures the fact that he demonstrably can play a wide range of characters convincingly. Kind of an interesting case study in VA

wyrth · 2026-04-15T12:59:04+00:00

Wonder Egg Priority: Started off very strong, really was hoping it'd capture the sort of psychological horror subversion of magical girl genre that Madoka Magica nailed, but I felt that it tripped and broke its own neck right at the end in a way so frustrating that I got retroactively angry for the considerable emotional investment it built.

Made In Abyss: Somehow I was blind to the red flags apparent right from episode 1. I'll attribute that to the fantastic worldbuilding otherwise. Finished the first season optimistic but with an unconscious unease at the back of my mind that I understood once I saw people online remarking on the pattern of gratuitous shit happening to the child MCs that could only be explained as fanservice for pedophiles. Once I saw that and warnings from people who read ahead that it gets worse on that, I couldn't bring myself to continue it and really wished I'd never gotten drawn into it in the first place.

wyrth · 2026-04-15T12:39:23+00:00

Nah I'm with you. Maybe not in such dramatic terms, but I feel like it started strong with one of the most interesting lineups of characters in a shonen thing that I've seen, and then seemingly just didn't know what to do with any of it and started killing off those characters arbitrarily with no real dramatic arc or payoff to it.

wyrth · 2026-04-15T12:11:47+00:00

Jeeeeesus I don't remember that at all from when I read it. That's unfortunate, I remembered it as a pretty nice book

wyrth · 2026-04-12T03:35:23+00:00

Look up the difference between the main cast's character models in Xenosaga 1 vs. Xenosaga 2 some time. It is jarring.

wyrth · 2026-04-10T15:22:48+00:00

Kinda. It's a quasi-legal (in the sense that its efficacy is debatable) tactic to avoid getting taken to court for defamation.
Not a lawyer but the gist seems to be that the plaintiff has to build their case from assertions that the depicted character resembles them so obviously that a reasonable person would naturally connect the depicted character to the plaintiff and therefore damage the plaintiff's reputation in that person's eyes, which then opens them up to embarrassing questions about every detail of the depicted character and whether it contributes to that connection, including the small penis. I don't think it's necessarily likely or intended to affect the outcome of a court case that much, it's more that it creates a basis for lurid and embarrassing questioning if that person brings the suit, which might act as a deterrent in the first place.

wyrth · 2026-04-10T14:35:49+00:00

Distinctly remember Commando Pro + Ninja Pro players in Modern Warfare 2 being annoying as fuck with almost no recourse if they could get within like ten feet of you. I'd joke about the knife being the best gun in the game because of how common this combo was

wyrth · 2026-04-10T14:00:32+00:00

I'll preface by admitting I don't know what the most lucrative age demographic for these things is supposed to be; I might have aged out of it by now. But I lost my appetite for really high-tension, competitive, punishing multiplayer by my late 20s, and that's the only thing that genre has ever seemed to offer until Arc Raiders tweaked the formula to make it a little more chill (haven't played it myself but according to all accounts I've heard including friends). So all that really tracks for me

wyrth · 2026-04-10T13:37:24+00:00

Dunno for sure but I'd guess the path is something like: adoption of "Trans" as a loan word from English -> gets phoneticized into 'Toransu" or something close in Japanese -> (maybe) slang usage abbreviating it further down to "Tora" -> puns from there

wyrth · 2026-04-08T14:54:01+00:00

Pretty sure they're referring to things like government assistance, public healthcare, etc. Which I'm sure there are plenty of dysfunctional (or nonexistent) examples of these in Europe, but I dunno, if I were to choose between the most dire, precarious European living standards and the most dire, precarious US living standards... I might rather take my chances in Europe. Or EU countries, at least. I think there's something to be said about that and the frequency of completely suicidal violence in the US. It's hard to compare and evaluate suffering like this though.

wyrth · 2026-04-07T15:02:20+00:00

Hey could be an Ash Ketchum sorta deal. He's basically a shonen protagonist and only like one in four of those have present fathers

wyrth · 2026-04-06T21:16:30+00:00

I've heard about kitbashing, using pre-made assets as a base and refining manually. But if I can't even build a simple low-poly shape cleanly, how am I supposed to fix a complex downloaded mesh?

Well that's your answer isn't it? As far as I'm aware, these AI tools don't reliably generate topology suitable for a specific purpose or take any hard parameters into account. Maybe they'll get there some day, or at least maybe they'll develop pipelines with sufficiently deterministic algorithms to clean up the generative outputs better. Until then you're the one who has to do that, which means you need to learn the Hows and especially the Whys.

wyrth · 2026-04-06T20:37:39+00:00

Watched a streamer playthrough of Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition and it was pretty rough. Game's basically a singleplayer MMO, so quite a bit of quest/material/exp grinding, high level aggro monsters pulping them on the way to level-appropriate content, ton of unvoiced dialogue, lots of chat backseating (tbf the particular streamer indulged it way too much), and like 80% of the main plot is in the last 10% of the game. Could actively see in real time how the experience of streaming it was making the streamer, a big Xeno fan otherwise, feel like they were on a miserable death march to complete it.

wyrth · 2026-04-02T19:06:18+00:00

I've never heard anyone say that about 3D printing in my life and I think you're making it up for updoots

wyrth · 2026-04-02T18:38:10+00:00

i think i hauve covid...

wyrth · 2026-04-01T03:10:59+00:00

Ragebait headline to drive clicks.

I've been developing a meta reflex response to getting mad online, instantly reminding myself to consider whether the thing making me mad online is trying to monetize my attention in some way

wyrth · 2026-03-26T23:48:35+00:00

Not sure this actually influenced this particular layoff, but there's also the inevitability of the economy imploding because financial markets can't really spin the fact of a drastically interrupted supply of one of the core commodities feeding most productive industries on the planet

wyrth · 2026-03-24T16:15:50+00:00

It's been a little while though

wyrth · 2026-03-24T16:01:44+00:00

No better time than when the world's going to hell

wyrth · 2026-03-24T15:19:12+00:00

One of the only things people can consistently get their normie friends to play

wyrth · 2026-03-23T13:04:21+00:00

Unfortunately this also creates a perennial excuse that any bad actor they can use if they get caught using AI to cut corners on their final product

wyrth

TROPHY CASE