FM Chiptune Musician | DX Complex Staff | SEGA, MSX and Retro Tech Dork | He/Him

Formerly _NetNomad@kbin.run
Microblogging at _NetNomad@oldbytes.space
https://netnomad.dxcomplex.com/

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • it’s worth bearing in mind that comparing audacity and reaper is like comparing notepad++ to libreoffice- in many cases libreoffice is a much more robust program but in others all the extra bells and whistles are bloat. you wouldn’t want to program in libreoffice!

    that said audacity has some wildly bizzare design, and any forks are either even worse with this or incredibly unstable, so audacity being terrible isn’t wrong sadly


  • i loved Atlantis otherwise and wish we got that last season but i really hated this arc. it seemed wildly out of character for everyone that no one was really bothered by the ethics of this, aside from Ronin whose concerns were more pragmatic than moral. whenever Michael showed up after this i kinda shrugged- yeah, i’d be pissed off too! i guess they were trying to go for a DS9-style desperate times call for desperate measures thing but for me it just didn’t work






  • it’s wild just how many Pokemon ROM hacks there are. there’s one that recreates Sword and Shield on the GBA and it’s pretty wild how faithful it is, it even has the raid battles. another cool one is Emerald ROWE which is an open world conversion where you can start anywhere. it uses some advanced hardware features so it doesn’t work in every emulator

    there’s a hack of Sonic 3D Blast for the Saturn that basically chains all of the special stages into their own game, it’s a very cool look at what a true 3D Saturn Sonic could have been, even if the stages are all just halfpipes

    if you count translations, i have poured an ungodly number of hours into Shiren the Wanderer 2 on the N64 (different from the Shiren 2 on the DS). it’s another one that doesn’t always play nice with emulators but if you take copious savestates you’ll be fine. each of the post-game dungeons is essentially a whole new game, and while i’m usually not much of a completionist i just can’t put it down




  • oh boy. here we go.

    Faith of the Heart is great. the arrangement is a little weak but the tune itself rules and the words capture Archer so well i was shocked to learn it was a cover and not purpose-written for that

    The Wrath of Kahn is just ok. it’s less Star Trek and more an action movie celebrating the characters that we love, which makes it just the same as the later movies everyone hates. the only ones that are really feature-length Trek are Motion Picture and The Undiscovered Country. Into Darkness would be listed there too if the plot didn’t keep getting hijacked by Wrath of Khan nostalgia baiting, ironically

    the soap opera vibes in Discovery make sense in universe. they never really got a chance to be a peacetime exploration vessel and then it turned out their captain was secretly a space Nazi. compare and contrast how Pike treats them and the Enterprise crew- he seems to be aware of this and treats them with kid gloves. whether or not that was intentional and/or if it makes for good TV is left as an exercise to the reader

    Dear Doctor was a good episode. they didn’t condemn those people to die, they offered them a multigeneration treatment that just kicked the can down the road. it’s not about the decision so much as the decision to not make a decision (which granted, Rush tells us is still a choice). it’s messy but that’s the point. Cogenitor is the episode that deserves the hate. it may very well be the single worst episode in all of Trek



  • hell yeah, it’s very comforting to know that someone actually gives a crap and is advocating for us. when i first started driving, driving at night was one of my favorite things, bar the occassional asshole with permahighbeams. now driving at night is a truly horrifying prospect. between that and car size, i feel like 90% of the cars being built today shouldn’t be street legal

    of course the best possibility is replacing cars entirely with bikes and robust public transit- and that’s coming from someone who loves (or loved) to drive- but in the mean time i’d really just love to be able to drive to rite aid or the laundromat after work and not be blinded six or seven times on the way there!


  • i don’t think it’s so much that they’re actually the baddies as it is that they became too dogmatic and process-oriented to be able to do the good that they were trying to do. on the micro scale they were too inflexible with their rules to always do the right thing, and on the macro scale they could bend the rules however they wanted in the name of The Greater Good. protecting the Jedi order so that they could hypothetically do good later was more important than admitting to mistakes and exposing themselves to criticism to do tangible good in the moment. in less words, they meant well and had their heads pretty far up their asses. the Dooku episodes of Tales of the Jedi demonstrate this very well

    whether or not this is just the Jedi Order or the larger light-side-user community is up for debate. a lot of people point to the prophecy of balance being brought to the force and say that that required an equal number of Jedi and Sith, and that idea seems to have seeped into Disney canon, but at least originally Lucas seemed to intend for the light side to represent balance and for the dark side to be a corruption of that, in which case the Jedi Order being assholes meant they also weren’t really Jedi to begin with

    another commente argues that of course they’re assholes because they’re a religion, but i’d argue that they’re assholes because they’re an organized religion. if being a Jedi is about harmony with all life and the force, as opposed to using it and abusing it, you can’t create Jedi by using and abusing life forms the way a beaurocratic institution invariably does. it’s not a coincidence that all of the great Jedi heroes throughout SW are either deviants within or otherwise estranged from the order. standing up for people and doing the right thing almost always involves sticking it to The Man, and the Jedi Order were The Man


  • honestly i’m not even sure how the author of this managed to boil down feed UI preferences into “questions” or “options” or whatever. all of the same content is there, it’s just a matter of if it’s expanded or collapsed by default- merely information density. what it really comes down to is older sites collapsed things by default, newer sites expand things by default, and most people like whatever they grew up with. i’m gen z and much prefer the older style just because i was on forums and old reddit right around when my peers opened their twitter and instagram accounts. there is definitely a discussion to be had there about which format is healthier and why companies prefer the latter format these days, but to skim right past that into the bit about third parties makes me think that was the real point the author wanted to make and contorted their UI argument to get there