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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • I know this became a bit of a cult classic, but I played it at the time (still have my original copy) and I’m a lot more lukewarm on it.

    It does have some neat ideas on paper, but most of the sanity gimmicks are pretty flat and both the story and the visuals at the time weren’t spectacular in a world where people had played Silent Hill 2 the previous year. The anthology setting at least keeps the narrative episodic and self-contained enough to avoid it dragging too much, because the constantly monologuing protagonists would not be able to carry a full game without some variation.

    It’s not terrible. As a spiritual successor to Alone in the Dark you could do worse (and we all have since), but it’s a bit of a curio, not a timeless classic. Good to check out, but I wouldn’t feel too guilty if you don’t click with it after getting through the prologue and the first episode, because that’s how it keeps going until the end.

    Oh, and it IS covered by Retroachievements.org’s fancy new Dolphin support, so if you want to check it out or revisit it on emulation that’s a fun twist.


  • Let me agree with you explicitly on loving the return to a sane power configuration here. I was watching Hardware Unboxed’s retest of this after the patches and it takes almost fifteen minutes of them reiterating that the 9700X and the 14700K are tied for performance and price before they even mention the bombshell that the 9700X is doing that with about half the wattage.

    The fact that we keep pushing reviews and benchmarks focused strictly on pedal-to-the-metal overclocked performance and nothing else is such a disgrace. I made the mistake to buy into a 13700K and I have it under lower than out of box power limits manually both to prevent longevity issues and because this damn computer is more effective as a hair dryer than anything else.

    We don’t mention it much because Intel was in the process of catching on actual fire at the same time, but the way this generation has been marketed, presented to reviewers, supported and eventually reviewed has been a massive trainwreck, considering the performance of the actual product.









  • See, this is a tough one. Privacy concerns are legitimate, but also, when people keep reminding that Meta was a key player in acts of terror and genocide what is often not said is that a lot of it happened over Whatsapp groups and direct messages, as in India and Burkina Faso. Direct messaging apps are also social media.

    I don’t have a solution for this. It’s a mess of an issue and honestly, I don’t know that I trust anybody with a strong, aggressive position one way or the other.




  • This feels like one of those small innovations that will become a marker of quality once somebody thinks about them for a while. Someone will figure out how to make the perfect indicator visible in a dark-ish environment without emitting much light otherwise, or some other way to confirm something is charging and it’ll become the way you can tell which electronics are expensive. I, for one, can’t wait. My fiber box is wrapped in so much tape you could drop it from a tall building and it’d be just fine.


  • I don’t know that it’s an eyesight issue. I mean, if you have good enough eyesight to read stuff on your phone screen you have good enough eyesight to see the difference.

    It may be an awareness thing, where the more you care about photography the more the limitations of the bad cameras stand out. And hey, that’s fine, if the phone makes good enough pictures for you that’s great. Plus, yeah, you can get phones with the exact same lens and sensor where one of them has a big fat bump that is deliberately blown up to make the cameras “feel” premium. There’s been a fair amount of marketing around this.

    But if you compare A to B it’s very obvious. Camera bumps became a marker of premium phones for a reason.



  • I am annoyed by most phone trends of the past decade, but… yeah, if you go back to a 2014 phone today there is some readjustment between what you remember phone photo and video looking like versus what they actually look like. That was the Galaxy S5 year. That thing had a single camera you would consider unacceptable as your selfie shooter today.

    EDIT: This thread made me go look up reviews, and man, yeah, I remember every single indoors photo on my own S5 looking just like this. What a blast of nostalgia. I didn’t realize there is a digital equivalent to 80s pictures having gone all sepia and magenta-y, but here it is.