I’ve started playing through some classic SNES and GBA games.
Chrono Trigger – Oh man, this one’s good. The soundtrack is on fire, and the game does a good job at making you feel like your actions make a difference.
Metroid Fusion – If you told me this was made in 2024, I’d probably believe you. It has a sense of pacing and suspense that I wasn’t expecting for a metroidvania.
I haven’t gotten very far in either, but so far it’s looking like they’ve aged like wine.
I don’t know whether or not an entire month is the right timeframe, but I definitely agree with the principle of counting to ten before you speak. I’ve already made at least one discussion worse by failing to consider my tone. If my ideas are worth sharing now, they’ll be worth sharing when the moratorium is over, and they’ll only gain nuance by being left in the oven for longer.
They made their decisions and you made yours. If you decided that we’d be better off with Trump, that’s on you. Own it.
Putting Trump in office makes Gaza worse. He’s promised us as much. Maybe you proved a point to the Democrats, and maybe you didn’t. Maybe now they’ll lean even harder to the center. Who knows. That’s a gamble you took, and you made steep sacrifices to make that gamble.
Gambling with someone’s life to make a political point does not make you their ally.
In the Weimar Republic, the Social Democrats (SPD) were the largest party as late as 1930, and had control thanks to a coalition with centrists.
In 1931, the Communists of Germany (KPD) – who had long taken offense at the compromises of the SPD – caucused with the Nazis to topple the Prussian government and remove the SPD from power, believing that Nazi rise would accelerate the collapse of capitalism and would trigger a “German October,” a proper communist revolution that would eliminate the Nazis and solve the shortcomings of the SPD.
On April 1, 1933, the Executive Committee of the Communist International stated:
Despite the fascist terror, the revolutionary upturn in Germany will inexorably grow. The masses’ defense against fascism will inexorably grow. The establishment of an openly fascist dictatorship, which has shattered every democratic illusion in the masses and is liberating the masses from the influence of the Social Democrats, is accelerating the tempo of Germany’s development towards a proletarian revolution.
They were… incorrect. Their gamble cost 85 million lives, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced back to the knock-on effects of the war. Accelerationism is creating a monster to defeat an enemy you cannot, then being startled to discover you can’t defeat the monster either, and then blaming your original enemy for the product of your own hubris. No matter how you justify it, no matter what issues drive you, refusing to find common ground and build coalitions against the fascists helps nobody but the fascists.
I’m guessing (hoping) you’re joking here and having a laugh at us all taking you too seriously. But I’ve seen enough of lemmy to doubt that.
If your accelerationist ideology is unironically promoting nuclear holocaust as its self-evidently ideal endgame, you’re long overdue for your “are we the baddies” moment. Maybe (definitely) stay off social media for a bit as you re-examine how you got here and who’s lied to you along the way.
Ships can register any nation as their flag state, so they often choose flags of convenience based on whoever has the lowest fees or regulations – or more insidiously, whoever has the least ability to hold companies accountable.
This is why so many shipping companies register in Liberia, Panama, and the Marshall Islands. Also Mongolia, which is landlocked.
So unless we want to fill the oceans and ports with ships that have nuclear reactors with no regulation, no safety measures, and no accountability, we’re gonna have to fix the last hundred years of international maritime law.
If resin is a non-starter for you, FDM printing can also make cool miniatures, but it will take more effort and the details won’t be as fine.
People are getting good results printing minis on the Elegoo Neptune printers which are around USD$190. The latest fad is multi-material printers like the Anycubic Kobra 3 combo (USD$380) and Bambu A1 combo (USD$490) which can make colorful figurines at the cost of wasted plastic.
Tomb of 3D Printed Horrors has been getting pretty good results and is a good channel to follow if you go down the FDM route.
(Elephant-in-the-room sidenote: If you look at FDM printers, you’ll run into fans militantly promoting Bambu Lab as part of an ongoing corporate-sponsored flamewar, and the community has a laundry list of grievances against the company. It’s a mess. Bambu printers are good but not spectacular, and easy to use but hardly the only user-friendly printers out there.)
I think for a small, detailed figure that you’re going to photograph, I’d recommend resin sprayed with a food-safe clear coat such as shellac.
Resin of all kinds requires rubber gloves, cleanup, and a well-ventilated room because it’s smelly and generally bad for you in its unfinished liquid form. A small resin printer will cost under USD$200. Creality has one on sale for USD$100. They also sell washing/curing stations – I built my own stations out of junk, but for USD$99, I’d go with theirs. Much more compact.
Nerdtronics made some excellent videos introducing resin and explaining how and why we print the way we do. These days, almost all printers are plug-and-play and the software is super smart, but I think these videos are highly educational anyways.
First, what kind of models are you curious about making? Big, small, decorative, springy, strong? Cosplay helmets, bike parts, tabletop miniatures?
This will inform whether you should look at tutorials for FDM (filament) printing or MSLA/DLP (resin) printing.
Beyond All Reason is my favorite RTS at the moment. I enjoyed Planetary Annihilation (despite its flaws), and BAR provides the same sense of exponential growth, escalation, and strategic pivots.
One of my favorite things about the game is that it’s not ridiculously APM-intensive. The controls have a learning curve, but they enable you to “fire and forget” most of your tasks.
If you want to get a sense for the game before diving in, Brightworks does some good casting for both competitive and community-level games. https://www.youtube.com/@BrightWorksTV
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s the last isometric Zelda game, and they made it a swan song. The main quest it pretty short, but it’s the sort of cozy game where doing the sidequests just feels right.
In the game, you shrink down to the size of a mouse to traverse rafters and explore tiny temples and float on lillypads. It’s the sort of thing that would be no big deal in a 3D game, but is wildly ambitious in 2D. Not only do they pull it off, but they fill the environments with lush, lived-in detail that springs to life when you shrink down and look at it up close. The art style still sticks with me after 20 years.
Also, forget all the “hey, listen” stuff, your sidekick Ezlo just sasses you the entire time. It’s great.
a bit melancholic sometimes
Viewer be advised: If you’ve ever lost someone you took for granted, or hurried through what should have been a formative time in your life instead of slowing down and appreciating it while you had it, then this show knows how to punch you in the tender bits, and it will not stop.
I cried during every one of the first four episodes.
10/10
Disagree. Every state will characterize the violence it receives differently than the violence it enacts. Even a well-intended egalitarian state can never equivocate acts of violence against its officers with those done by its officers, because if the state fails to produce an immune response against one attack, it will soon find itself overwhelmed by more. The state has to treat vigilante justice and especially attacks against its officers as illegitimate on principle, or else it will cease to be.
States claim a monopoly on legitimate violence, and I’d even say that’s what makes a state a state. If a given geographic region has a hundred different entities that can enact violence without each others’ permission, you don’t have a state, you have a hundred states.
You cannot ask officers of the state to equivocate violence by and against the state. That’s not their job. That judgement is our job.
(You can also argue that the state shouldn’t exist, but that’s a different and far more interesting discussion than the one the article poses.)
But we know what it really is all about - selling more cars.
It isn’t even about selling more cars at this point, it’s about selling securities. Their market cap dwarfs their total sales. Their P/E ratio is 67.67x, meaning they could sell cars for 67 years and still not make as much money as their stocks are worth today.
The real product is the rising stock price. The factories are just a front.
Not gonna lie, that was my first thought when seeing the news. The only legitimate course for absolute power is to destroy itself.
Gotta do the same for the senate and state legislatures (including governors). Redrawing state lines is not simple.
Maybe THIS will get the Dems to ditch the filibuster and pack the court. Of course, that would require the Democratic party as a whole to show some fight, something they refuse to do for some reason.
To pack the court, Democrats need to secure:
They need more than just a git-r-dun attitude. Remaking the SCOTUS (rather than waiting it out) means throwing the old government away and starting over.
Thanks for the analysis and insight!
I strongly disagree with the premise that there’s a “wrong” way to play retro games. Don’t gatekeep. Imagine if people told you not to listen to Pink Floyd unless it’s on vinyl. It would be lost media.
That said, CRTs present images fundamentally differently than LCD displays, and a lot of developers took advantage of those idiosyncrasies. There are scanlines everywhere. CRT phosphors aren’t square, and appear smaller when darker. Bright pixels can “bleed” into nearby pixels, particularly when using composite signals.
Before LCDs, many (not all) pixel artists used this to their advantage, basically harnessing the imperfections of analog TV to provide equivalents to anti-aliasing, bloom, extra color depth, and even transparency. Some particularly famous examples came from Sega Genesis games. This video goes into good depth on the whys and hows, and there are some solid examples of the outcomes here.
I’ve attached examples below (hopefully they upload). If you like the raw pixel art, then no harm done. Enjoy! But if you like the way CRTs interpreted and filtered those signals, you owe it to yourself to look up some shaders for your favorite emulator.
(Zero Tolerance, 1994, on the Genesis/Mega Drive)
(Sonic the Hedgehog 2, 1992, on the Genesis/Mega Drive)