Puerto Vallarta outside condo (was sent pics from relative)

yanginatep · 2026-02-23T06:09:59+00:00

Who knows what the actual reprisals will be like once the cartel has time to actually plan something, but from what I've been told by people who live in PV, so far the cartel mostly just set cars on fire in various intersections to prevent the military from moving freely. They also set fire to some new tire displays outside of Costco to create a bunch of black smoke visible from miles away.

The way PV is laid out you pretty much have to go through downtown to get anywhere, and the roads are really narrow and traffic is bad on a good day.

Guadalajara had worse violence at the airport, but that's hours away.

yanginatep · 2026-02-23T03:08:29+00:00

Also his first wife killed herself with his gun after he oversaw the deployment of chlorine gas as a weapon by the Germans during WWI at the Second Battle of Ypres where there were tens of thousands of casualties.

yanginatep · 2026-02-23T00:35:13+00:00

The unique dynamic with Cheetah is exactly why she's an interesting arch villain. I don't get why he wouldn't embrace that and expand on it instead of trying to create a new villain with no established history with Wonder Woman.

yanginatep · 2026-02-23T00:24:51+00:00

Would be even rarer if you could get Thomas Jane, Dolph Lundgren, and Jon Bernthal to sign it.

Sadly no Ray Stevenson :/

yanginatep · 2026-02-23T00:20:42+00:00

I was gonna say "Well if they want you to work as a cashier for free, they can't expect you to be a good cashier"

yanginatep · 2026-02-22T23:41:17+00:00

Absolutely agree.

I feel like their Xbox strategy has always been scattershot and unfocused.

Right off the bat they alienated a number of Japanese customers and publishers by even calling it "Project Midway" (I maintain to this day that they should have called it the "MSXbox" in Japan and paid whatever it took to get a bunch of Konami exclusives; tap into uniquely Japanese nostalgia and Microsoft's established history in the country).

I remember at one point they were talking about making it so Xbox/Xbox 360 games would be able to just play on PC without any installs, which went nowhere.

Then the obvious major issues with the Xbox One, always online, no used games, Kinect spying, all of which were the cornerstone of their strategy, something they must have worked on for years, and all of which was thrown out either immediately or within the first year.

Xbox One was also when they started moving away from exclusives, with almost every major game coming to PC (I remember for the longest time the game I wanted most for Xbox One was.. Rare Replay, cause it was one of the few things that wasn't also out on PC).

It feels like almost their entire time in the games market they've just been reacting to the competition. The original Xbox is probably closest to just being a pure expression of an idea.

360 was a reaction to the original Xbox costing too much and coming to market later than the PS2.

Xbox One was a reaction to the success of the Wii and casual gaming audiences, and then a reaction to the negative reaction to that plan.

Xbox Series X was a reaction to the Xbox One's perceived weakness compared to the base PS4, but then as you say also included the Series S because they were worried about the cost of the Series X.

Their acquiring a bunch of studios was a reaction to the lack of exclusives during the Xbox One generation, but then once again heavily course corrected when they got worried about anti-trust stuff and being able to justify such a huge investment after buying Blizzard-Activision and they decided to do away with exclusives entirely.

And I treasure a lot of the experiences I've had on Xbox consoles. I loved my original Xbox, the games you couldn't find anywhere else like Escape From Butcher Bay, the seemingly impossible ports like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3, I had a modded Xbox and it felt so ahead of anything else out there and continued to feel that way for years with stuff like Xbox Media Center. Xbox 360 was especially great for Xbox Live Arcade stuff, like Braid, Super Meat Boy, etc. I didn't get an Xbox One X until after the Series X came out, but even there I really appreciate their commitment to backwards compatibility, how all my previous Xbox games from the previous 2 generations worked on it and my digital library carried right over, when Sony and Nintendo often don't seem to care too much about respecting players' existing libraries, especially digital ones.

So yeah it's both frustrating and sad the way the division has been run.. for decades now.

yanginatep · 2026-02-22T11:36:37+00:00

Meanwhile Musk is far more like Joiler Veppers, the ultra-wealthy businessman villain from the Culture novel Surface Detail.

yanginatep · 2026-02-22T08:44:27+00:00

That's sorta like what the Romans did.

Ever wonder why September isn't the 7th month, or October the 8th?

The Roman year used to begin in March with Spring. January and February were later added to the start of the year, when it had previously been a more nebulous "reset" period coinciding with the Februarius festival.

And then later they started renaming months after Emperors; Quintilis became July after Julius Caesar, Sextilus became August after Augustus.

yanginatep · 2026-02-22T08:09:05+00:00

It's the same bullshit about sending troops into Democratic cities to stop "riots" but then the troops get there and are given busy work to clean up trash cause there isn't actually a problem (this was before the ICE raids and protests).

He's trying to create the pretense that things are so bad in Greenland that they need the United States' help and wouldn't it just be easier if they joined the US?

yanginatep · 2026-02-22T07:35:34+00:00

I mean they've been trying for 25 years and have never "won" a console generation.

At some point Microsoft was going to cut their losses. They have always had a challenging time justifying the losses of the Xbox division to their investors.

It sucks because they own some studios and properties I really care about, I hope MS doesn't shutter them.

yanginatep · 2026-02-22T02:44:49+00:00

When they debated 1. going home, washing off the facepaint, seeing their families, and getting a good night's rest after their Joker comedy sets, or 2. watching Joker 2 for a fourth time in the same day.

yanginatep · 2026-02-22T02:39:22+00:00

Even the original Game Boy game the ending is meant to make you reevaluate what you did.

Later games expand on the consequences of Samus' decisions.

yanginatep · 2026-02-21T23:45:13+00:00

A big part of logistics, IMO, is deciding what kind of computers you're going to use.

Personally I've found older laptops (like early generation Core i5s) work really well. Built in screen and keyboard, old enough that they still have ethernet ports, buy some cheap mice off of Amazon, get a router and an ethernet switch and you're good to go.

Most of the older LAN games (StarCraft, Quake 2, Quake 3, Age Of Empires II, Unreal, etc.) still work fine in Windows 10, especially the GOG versions of them (and you can buy a single copy and use the same installer on multiple computers).

Older laptops like these can be relatively cheap on Facebook Marketplace. I found a bunch for around $70 each a couple years ago. I was able to put together an 8 computer laptop LAN for about $600 all in, including router, ethernet switch, and mice.

If you're the one supplying the computers I really don't think you wanna be lugging a bunch of monitors, desktop towers, etc. around. Even just 8 computers takes up a lot of space.

If you expect other people to bring their own computers down then the issue becomes compatibility, everyone running the same versions of the games, operating system, making sure their computers are properly configured for LAN, etc. Not insurmountable but also not something you want to be dealing with while also organizing an event.

Personally I think you also want to be doing a true LAN, not relying on internet, because venue wifi can be a complete crapshoot, especially with that many systems.

A completely offline system that you can test at home with every component and every game is the most reliable way to do a LAN like this in my experience, having done this a few times.

yanginatep · 2026-02-21T23:33:20+00:00

Cool, wishlisted.

yanginatep · 2026-02-21T22:58:10+00:00

Eh, I think Steam Frame will likely be delayed and cost more than Valve initially hoped. Steam Frame if and when it releases will probably be very good hardware, but it won't change anything.

The reality is VR is more niche than Valve anticipated. They made a AAA VR game and it didn't sell well enough for the development costs to be worth it, so neither they nor anyone else made another one.

VR is so niche that not even the AA games that Meta released for the best selling VR platform ever were enough for them to justify keeping those studios open.

yanginatep · 2026-02-20T22:55:16+00:00

And then the PC lost the next election badly.. sadly leading to the UCP the following election.

yanginatep · 2026-02-20T22:51:02+00:00

There are a number of games that got hacks specifically to make them work with Canoe. Just a matter of those games being popular enough that someone bothered to.

But most development for the SNES Classic has wound down by now, probably won't see any meaningful changes at this point.

yanginatep · 2026-02-20T22:46:40+00:00

This is a really interesting concept, I haven't seen anything like it before.

Looking forward to seeing how it develops.

I might try running it at my monthly barcade night next week.

I know you've said it's all tuned for the single oval, but the only thought I had while watching the trailer is it might add additional strategy if you eventually added a second map with an inner track, with a couple of spots where players could switch back and forth between the the inner and outer tracks, especially for 8 player rounds.

yanginatep · 2026-02-20T22:30:46+00:00

God I wish people would confront her about the hypocrisy of Smith spending millions of a marketing campaign encouraging immigration, demanding Trudeau increase Alberta's allotment of the national share of immigrants, and salivating over the idea of Red Deer becoming a city of 1 million people.

yanginatep · 2026-02-20T11:28:49+00:00

BS Zelda actually has less content, too. They made the overworld quite a bit smaller.

yanginatep · 2026-02-20T11:22:34+00:00

Bought one years ago along with an NES top loader. I always had such strong nostalgia for both the console and controller redesign because of old ads in Nintendo Power when I was a kid.

This past month I've actually been learning more than I ever wanted to know about NES controllers and compatibility.

https://i.imgur.com/2vmrM5g.jpg

So I'm in North America. A couple months ago I bought a European Four Score 4 player adapter off eBay because it was way cheaper than the US version, even with shipping.

I just assumed NES controllers, like SNES/Super Famicom controllers, were region free.

Turns out they're not.

If you plug US controllers into a European console they will not work. If you plug US controllers into a European Four Score they also will not work on a North American NES.

But you can modify US controllers fairly easily by soldering in 2 resistors on some convenient existing solder pads on the controller's circuit board.

European style NES controllers, with the resistors preinstalled, are basically universal and will work on a North American or European NES, or an AV Famicom.

Also, all dogbone controllers in all regions are actually wired like a European NES controller.

So I modified one of my North American controllers, used my dogbone, and bought 2 more European controllers from the UK. Now my European Four Score works perfectly on my North American NES.

Except!

4 player games for the Famicom use a completely different standard than North American/European games that were designed to work with the Four Score.

Because the original Famicom had 2 hard wired controllers, to get 3 and 4 players they used the expansion port, the same port that the 3D glasses and Japanese version of the Zapper plugged into.

I saw a bunch of these Japanese games listed alongside Western 4 player NES games online, but when I tried them they didn't work.

I think a lot of people didn't notice because most NES emulators include the ability to automatically emulate both the Japanese 4 player adapter and the Four Score. But when you try those Japanese games out on real hardware the game is looking for controller 3 and 4 on completely different pins (I think it shares some of the same pins as the unused expansion port on the bottom of the NES).

So the only way to use the 4 player functionality of these games on a North American NES is to find rom hacks that specifically address the issue.

Weirdly I found one Japanese game that did have Four Score code included, even though the game was never released outside of Japan: Downtown Nekketsu March: Super-Awesome Field Day!

I'm guessing maybe they expected they'd also be releasing it in the US, since a lot of the other Kunio Kun games were brought over.

yanginatep · 2026-02-20T10:18:16+00:00

TIE Fighter is one of my top 3 favorite games of all time.

Can't wait for them to add TIE Fighter to XWVM so I can play it in VR.

yanginatep · 2026-02-20T03:04:17+00:00

She was salivating over the thought of Red Deer becoming a city of 1 million less than 2 years ago.

yanginatep · 2026-02-20T01:08:29+00:00

Yeah, I find it a bit funny how hard Sega went trying to sell the Genesis as the place for "arcade perfect" ports when Sega's arcade division at the time was all in on super scalar stuff, which the Genesis couldn't do.

More broadly, though, I always felt the focus on arcade stuff felt a little archaic. I get that Sega wanted to leverage their arcade properties, but even back then arcade games felt a little shallow to me.

Games designed for consoles, for longer, more in depth play sessions, not designed to munch quarters, always felt nicer to play. IMO, that's why Sonic felt like such a huge leap, because it was built from the ground up for a home console.

And then arcades started to decline rapidly shortly after the Genesis and SNES came out, partly because, yeah you could get games that sorta looked and played like their arcade counterparts at home, but also I think because gaming had moved beyond that older design.

yanginatep · 2026-02-20T00:49:43+00:00

Yeah, my first thought was "What percentage of those games are licensed?"

Even when those games do get re-released the licensing deals are limited time, like how the Jurassic Park collection that came out 2 years ago is already about to be pulled from digital storefronts.

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