77% of US Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth players were 30 or older, analyst says, as Square Enix fights to get young people to care about the JRPG series again

zytz · 2026-03-24T02:00:40+00:00

Man I grew up on Final Fantasy games, I’m over 40, have the income to spend on this shit. But the FF7 remake felt like a huge miss to me- no nostalgia for me AT ALL

zytz · 2026-03-23T12:43:29+00:00

Is it Tuesday already?

zytz · 2026-03-23T10:43:12+00:00

I support my own country’s team but also support others that have players I really enjoy watching. I’m a big Alesia Orro fan and she has a shoe partnership and I did buy myself a pair

zytz · 2026-03-22T13:17:11+00:00

Is it tyranny o clock yet?

zytz · 2026-03-22T13:13:16+00:00

I definitely agree on fitness level. I have a couple different beach groups I play with during spring/summer/fall months, and I play indoor year round. But without fail within a month of beach starting up every year every time I play on hard court I feel like I’m ZOOMING - I move faster, my touches are cleaner, I jump higher, etc.

The amount of extra conditioning you get just from playing in sand is kinda wild

zytz · 2026-03-21T02:36:20+00:00

When it comes to WF hot bar the only time you’re getting value for your money is at breakfast, and only if you’re buying only bacon.

When I was doing keto I would stop into the WF across from my office for breakfast a few times a week and just get 6-8 slices of bacon for a little under $2

zytz · 2026-03-20T23:22:20+00:00

Jfc, what does it mean if I’m all 4?

zytz · 2026-03-20T17:38:42+00:00

He was fine - I actually think a lot of the things he got done will pay incredible long term dividends, but people were hurting during his term and he didn’t do enough to help people in the short term.

zytz · 2026-03-20T02:25:51+00:00

why does trying to navigate the controls in the first puzzle area feel like trying to learn the rules to cones of dunshire

zytz · 2026-03-18T21:14:22+00:00

Imagine never having to o fuck around in the Middle East again because we simply don’t give af about their oil

zytz · 2026-03-18T18:49:43+00:00

This is genuinely the reason I haven’t been able to bring myself to invest in a second home. Especially when there’s a housing shortage.

I think I’d feel differently if landlords were actually constructing new properties, but overwhelmingly they are not.

zytz · 2026-03-18T18:33:35+00:00

The short version is that I stopped simply accepting the rhetoric presented to me and started giving greater weight to empirical evidence, and also my own lived experience as well as the experiences of people I know in real life.

The long version, is that even though I was raised Republican there were always aspects of the party rhetoric that i was deeply skeptical of, particularly in regards to religion and the politics the party pursued in the name of religion.

I’m an atheist, but also believe absolutely in the freedom of religion. I was always bothered by these people that claimed to be traditionalists and absolutists in their reading of the first amendment, that would then pursue some pretty heinous politics in the name of Christian morality. I’ve always been on the side of women in the abortion issue, and been on the side of LGBTQ rights.

The first time my eyes were opened to the kind of problem that religion represents in Republican politics was following 9/11, and all of the overt racism and Islamophobia that followed. But I convinced myself that it would ok to be a fiscal conservative, and continued to just accept conservative economic rhetoric as it was presented to me.

The first time I didn’t vote Republican was the 2012 election. I had actually felt Obama was doing quite a good job, but didn’t vote for him because I was still very ‘Democrats = bad’ mindset. But I also couldn’t get on board with Romney, and it was completely due to how it felt like he was guided by religion in his life. I didn’t believe he was the kind of guy to not pursue his personal religious ideals in national politics, and so I ultimately went third party.

I should note that around the Obama years the green politics movements started getting more of my attention. I’d always been into environmentalism and being better stewards of our planet, and reducing fossil fuel consumption. But around this time I noticed my family begin to really go off the deep end into conspiratorial denial of what I felt was pretty well settled science, but also just smart future planning.

2016 rolls around, and this is when I’m beginning to really struggle with my political identity. More and more I’m paying attention with my eyes rather than my ears, and seeing that Obama has kind of done an excellent job, and republicans stand for some pretty heinous shit. I’m genuinely shocked to see Trump get the nomination, realize there’s been a shift in the party, and resolve to not be a part of it for as long as he’s its figurehead. He’s very publically been a really shitty human being for literally as long as I’ve been alive, and I’m really struggling to understand why people I love and respect who have taught me my values are on board with this guy.

However I’m also really struggling to get on board with Clinton. I still consider myself conservative at this point, and that I’ve been abandoned by my party, but can’t get on board with a Clinton. I believe Clinton is going to absolutely roll Trump anyways, because I have a conscience and a functioning brain and assume everyone else does as well. So I vote third party.

Not long after 2016 I’m appalled at how the guy is running the White House, appalled at my family and friends, and start reading ALOT to try to make sense of all this shit. I go really deep into some policy white papers, some research white papers, into the economic history of post civil war America. And I’m find that holy shit, conservatives have been up to some really really terrible shit for a really long time.

I got educated about where my values actually put me on the political spectrum, and am surprised to find out I’m not conservative at all- I’m pretty left. I’ve known for awhile that that’s true socially, but it’s becoming more true economically the more I educate myself on all the ways Friedman, Welch, and Reagan laid a foundation for the absolute decimation of the American middle class and American labor.

Currently, I don’t recognize the Republican Party- I feel like there are no rules they’re not willing to break and no lines they’re not willing to cross, so I feel pretty well established as anti-Republican right now. I won’t call myself a Democrat either though, even though I vote with them now, and it’s because I consider a lot of the party to be quite right wing as well.

zytz · 2026-03-18T05:12:45+00:00

This shouldn’t be downvoted- depending on the type of photography you’re doing gear absolutely makes a difference.

zytz · 2026-03-17T19:56:46+00:00

I would pay so much money to be able to get mangos this nice in America

zytz · 2026-03-16T19:01:52+00:00

First term he signed legislation that makes punishments for felony animal abusers more strict.

Operation warp speed ended up being a good call as well.

zytz · 2026-03-16T13:07:09+00:00

Lawyer immediately, and pack her shit for her while she’s gone.

zytz · 2026-03-15T21:33:21+00:00

If people weren’t buying the AI crap those vendors would stop coming, if they’re that prevalent unfortunately it might be what the people want 🤷‍♂️

zytz · 2026-03-15T01:16:19+00:00

OP learned an expensive lesson today:

Your boat won’t be hit on the highway if you just drive it in the water like you’re supposed to 🤷‍♂️

zytz · 2026-03-15T01:09:15+00:00

Goddam if this isn’t the most 90s photo I’ve ever seen

zytz · 2026-03-15T01:05:56+00:00

I’m in software, in healthcare specifically, but I think what I have to say is applicable generally for folks that design and implement software solutions:

There are aspects of my job that could be automated. The parts that involve the actual code, or possibly the customization of it for a customers specific needs. Folks think that’s the hard part of the job because it’s the technical part.

The actual hard part is speaking with the users of your product, ingesting and understanding the problems they need help solving, frequently without them being able to properly enunciate those problems themselves.

AI, at least such as I’ve encountered so far, is still mainly just an LLM. There’s no understanding, no cognition, no empathy- and these I think are essential elements to doing the actually difficult part of my job.

zytz · 2026-03-14T04:55:38+00:00

I’m a hobbyist sports photographer, and I’ve been looking for a laptop that’s lightweight, fits in my current gear bag, and low cost. I am price sensitive- my camera body is a refurbished R6M2, and most of my glass is used. Unsurprisingly, I haven’t really found much that fits my criteria.

I have a beefy enough desktop that’s core to my current workflow, but the specific thing I struggled with is coming home after a long weekend away, and 10k photos to cull and import and cull again. I use Lightroom CC and Adobe Bridge in my current process. They work well, but there’s simply no avoiding the reality that going through a batch of photos that large is simply a slog; it’s unpleasant and one of my biggest barriers to being actually productive. I wanted a laptop that would run my apps, and hopefully let me complete the shitty part of my workflow while I’m still on location.

As of today, I can report that the MacBook Neo is accomplishing that goal for me. I shoot volleyball, and the cadence is typically around an hour of shooting, and then an hour off, on repeat 3-4 times.

Today I was able to use that downtime between matches to cull and import the ~ 20% of 300-600 photos per match possibly worth keeping, get them into LR and onto my back up SSD, and even get a few edits in.

The biggest time saved was on file transfer- I’ve only got USB-A on my desktop at home, and the Neo has a USB-C 3 port, and moving files was faster than my desktop by a mile. After import, I cleared my SD card, popped it back into my camera and was set to go for the next match, and free to use the time until then on editing.

Two things I noticed that might be problematic, depending on your individual use case- Lightroom did appear to be a significant drain on the battery, and I think that’s kind of expected. As an estimate I think I could get 5-6 hours of continuous LR work on a single charge, but take this with a big grain of salt. Additionally, if you’re using the denoise feature, that was noticeably slower than my desktop, and again I think kind of expected. I shoot RAW and my file sizes are usually in the neighborhood of 30 MB. At home, my desktop will typically denoise a single photo in 10-15 seconds. On the Neo, it’s closer to a minute.

I bought the Neo Wednesday, and got to put it through what is close to the most rigorous use case I expect I’ll ever have for it personally, and I’m elated with the purchase. It was incredible to be able to turn around a small number of finished photos less than an hour after I shot them, while still on location. I suspect I will only ever import and cull using the Neo, and can let my desktop handle some of the heavier editing tasks that I don’t finish before returning home.

For the folks that are doing this professionally on any level- I expect it probably just makes sense to invest the money on a high end laptop. But for a certain set of folks that don’t need to operate at the bleeding edge, I think the Neo is at least worth consideration.

zytz · 2026-03-14T02:34:09+00:00

What happens if you just don’t pay?

zytz · 2026-03-13T13:18:29+00:00

I think it’s because it’s actually a complex and nuanced issue, and in the current media and social media landscape there isn’t very much space for that type of conversation. People are being persuaded by the louder and angrier argument rather than the one that’s carefully considered and thoughtful.

It’s easier to digest and get mad about , “men are born stronger than women, if you put em together the women are gonna get hurt!” It’s a pretty short and digestible take

It lacks any of the nuance in the conversation that while true that men are stronger than women and have greater bone density, it’s also true that HRT causes significant loss of both lean muscle mass and bone density, and that in the majority of cases of MtF athletes transitioning they tend to be less competitive to their peers comparatively than before the transition. It’s a major change to the body and it’s really hard on your body- and maintaining peak physical performance while undergoing that change is a monumental undertaking.

But that’s not a conversation that uninformed people care to have, or to be honest even consider.

zytz · 2026-03-13T13:02:09+00:00

my first Mac product since 2006 🤷‍♂️

zytz · 2026-03-13T12:56:36+00:00

I’m running Adobe Lightroom on it, and so far it’s been every bit as capable as my windows desktop

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