How unattractive the world has been making me feel. Haven’t matched with anyone legit on a dating app for nearly a year. And I feel like whenever I open up about it (especially on Reddit) I get so much hostility and vitriol.

It didn’t. The Game Over triggered as soon as I retreated and the flagship was nowhere near the Federation base. I actually engaged it at the earliest possible moment when entering the last sector.

Three I can think of

Rebel Flagship from FTL: Faster Than Light

I fucking hate FTL and everybody hails it as the best thing since sliced bread for effectively inventing the roguelike genre. It’s an incredibly poorly balanced game that boils down to travelling across each sector, bouncing between beacons, fighting hostile ships, encountering random events and whether you choose to engage with these events, rolling the die and (more times than not) getting screwed over by dogshit RNG.

I’ve only reached the Last Stand twice. On the first time, I engaged the Rebel Flagship, had over half my health taken out in a few shots then decided to retreat. Retreating triggered an instant Game Over because the game was glitched. The second time around, I made it to the second phase before dying.

This is how rough the game is on Normal mode…

Xemnas from Kingdom Hearts 2

This is more like me not having the patience to learn the fight. Roxas had already worn me the fuck down, and the only way I got past him was to effectively cheese the fight with Megalixirs, Limit Form and Ars Arcanum spam, which is easier said than done. I not only had to grind my drive forms up significantly beforehand, but I also had to intentionally manipulate the game’s RNG so as to not trigger Anti Form at any point in the fight.

Xemnas is like a far more bullshit version of Ansem from KH1, in the respect that both are lengthy multi-phase fights that can take 20 - 30 minutes under normal circumstances, but unlike Ansem, his Nobody counterpart now has the ability to drive you down to 1HP with an unavoidable QTE attack where he launches a flurry of combos which you have to perfect parry.

And I think generally, Kingdom Hearts 2 is an objectively worse game than the first one in almost every respect, aside from the fluidity of its combat system. It has serious difficulty spikes, some incredibly bullshit boss mechanics, lacks the interactive game world that the first game had, gave us a substantially worse version of Atlantica that plays like a cringe Little Mermaid sing-along rhythm game, has substantially worse gummi ship sections, and unlike the first game, and it generally began the point where the plot of the entire franchise would start turning into a confusing clusterfuck.

And it’s not like I’m bad at Kingdom Hearts games either. Riku 2 took me a grand total of two attempts to beat in the first game, and the way I was able to beat both Riku fights so easily was because I learned quickly not to execute a full keyblade combo on him and cancel right before the last swing, because he will do an undodgeable counter. Also, Riku 2’s ultimate attack can be easily dodged by just jumping up and gliding around the arena. Even Sephiroth (the game’s bonus superboss) is pretty easy with healing items or Leaf Bracer/Curaga.

Elder Princess Shroob from Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time

Superstar Saga was a masterpiece. Its sequel on the other hand is linear as fuck, has bad writing, is ruined by the Baby Mario Bros who wear the same red and green outfits as their adult counterparts and therefore make Bros Moves substantially hard to pull off (as it’s easy to get A/X and B/Y mixed up.)

For me it’s the game that killed the Mario & Luigi series.

I could never get past the final boss and I’m convinced that my copy of the game is either glitched or she was designed to be a damage sponge. I genuinely gave up after one attempt took me well over half an hour only for me to die.

They’re all Reddit alternatives that existed.

IIRC I joined before the Reddit API protests. I wanted an alternative where I would be more free to speak my mind. The problem is, Voat and Ruqqus got overtaken by white supremacists, Tildes is too much of a walled garden and both Snapzu and Hubski are basically dead.

I’ve gotten quite into doing pub karaoke for the past three years. It started as me going to monthly nights at my local, then following that particular KJ after they cancelled future gigs with her, to befriending and following a few other hosts.

There’s three particular debates:

• Who produces the best karaoke backing tracks? There are a lot of websites/platforms that produce licensed karaoke tracks, such as Karaoke Version, Sing To The World, Sunfly, Karafun, Mr Entertainer, Zoom Karaoke and a few others. I think some can be more hit-or-miss than others. Karafun are generally good with lyric readability but their app/service is kinda shit if you don’t have an internet connection.

• Should the host get on the mic and sing at all? Some i know are the kind who like the sound of their own voice a bit too much and tend to hog the mic, but there’s also one I know who rarely if ever sings himself.

• As a host, should you play songs between singers. I can understand spacing out singers when it’s quiet, but if it’s busy and you have a few dozen singers waiting for their turn, you’re just gonna piss people off if you play full songs between each act in my opinion.

TADC is probably the only good thing to have come out of Glitch Productions since SMG4 got enshittified to become more “advertiser friendly.” But part of the reason I haven’t gotten into it is the fandom.

I don’t like how half the fandom sexualizes Pomni; especially against the creators’ wishes.

Sonic has one of the most divisive fandoms I’ve ever seen.

On the one hand, you have some very talented individuals like LakeFeperd, Stealth and Christian Whitehead who have created fan projects and original games that best Sega’s own efforts. But then you get the unhinged parts of the fandom, and then Chris Chan.

I don’t like how the r/sonic, r/sonicthehedgehog and r/moonpissing subreddits have been getting littered with a mix of borderline softcore furry porn and comics focusing around cringe character ships lately.

Someone I went to school with came out as a furry and got heavily involved in the fandom, to the point of helping to organize one of the biggest furry conventions in Europe, but he insisted it wasn’t a sexual or fetish thing.

About five years later, he’s founded a company that makes high quality dragon, werewolf and other bestial dildos.

Are we talking Halo CE Anniversary Edition or the more recently announced Campaign Evolved remake?

What solidified Anniversary Edition as a shit-tier remaster for me was how the level geometry doesn’t match up with the remastered visuals. A great example of this is in The Truth And Reconciliation, Halo CE’s third level. When you go further up the plateau, the Covenant can see and shoot you through some of the boulders if you’re in the remastered graphics mode.

This is gonna be more of a rant about recruitment agencies and the consultants working for them.

When I apply for one of the (probably fake) positions they advertise, it’s not an invitation for them to ring me, waste 15 minutes of my life and grill me about everything I did in my last few jobs, my responsibilities, duties, any employment gaps, people who I answered to in my previous company, etc; only for these assholes to tell me they have no positions available but will “keep my details on file.”

It’s on my fucking resumé, and you could save a lot of our time by not ringing me and asking me to verbally repeat this because you guys are too stupid to read…

When I was made redundant last year and was basically desperate to land another role, I genuinely had some of the worst cold-calls ever from recruiters when I made the rookie error of listing myself as open to work on LinkedIn and Indeed. One particular caller who I spoke to twice, maybe three times would genuinely pause for about 10 to 15 seconds in silence after I finished speaking then ask me some absolutely mundane follow-up question in a monotone voice. I genuinely couldn’t tell if I was speaking to a lady with a room-temperature IQ or some poorly programmed AI chatbot.

On a related note, posting ghost vacancies, using AI to screen candidates, and generally treating recruitment as a massive data harvesting operation should be made illegal.

Word Up - Korn. Completely shits all over the original sung by Cameo.

Africa - Quietdrive. This one is quite divisive, so I’ll also link Weezer’s more faithful cover.

Midnight At The Oasis - The Brand New Heavies. Don’t get me wrong, Maria Muldaur’s original version was great, but it just works so much better as an acid jazz and funk song.

As for remixes…

One Night Stand (Sunship Remix) - Mis-Teeq. It’s so much better than the original by a mile. Alesha Dixon genuinely drops some fucking bars in the remix.

Selekta (SIDEQUEST Remix) - Kyle Gordon. I don’t understand why this isn’t the official version. The difference is that this version is 45 seconds longer and has an additional verse.

I’m currently going through something similar with my 80 year old dad, and while I don’t think that taking the output of an AI chatbot as gospel is necessarily a sign of cognitive decline, I have witnessed worse signs in my case.

He is bad with technology and it’s only gotten worse over the years. Aside from times where I’ve had to clear malware from his computer, I quite often find myself assisting him with basic things like navigating his emails, online banking, resetting a password for one of his accounts, or ordering catheter supplies through a smartphone app which is otherwise incredibly easy and straightforward to use (the app isn’t very good on smartphones though, and everything about its UI is bigger than it needs to be.)

Another good example is with his television. Sometimes he’s struggled to even navigate through menus on the set-top box and isn’t properly reading through the menus. Next thing you know, he’s either set up a separate Netflix subscription, or signed up to an expensive cable package because suddenly we have access to Sky Cinema and TNT Sports.

Teaching and reminding him of how to use these things is sometimes like pulling teeth and it’s not like I’ve been half-arsing it either. I used to work in customer service for a major right-wing UK newspaper and when I wasn’t dealing with arsehole customers and the occasional bigot who think we can put them through to a journalist so they can spout their racist views, a lot of my job involved helping pensioners with website and smartphone/tablet app tech support queries.

This is challenging to deal with in-and-of-itself, but dealing with someone who can be obnoxious, rude, impatient and have the temperament of a male Karen makes it even worse.

Unfortunately this is something I have to live with. At 34 years old I still live with my parents and not necessarily out of choice. I lost my job last year due to mass layoffs and my work prospects have been dogshit ever since. But also, absolutely everything is switching to a digital-only model.

I haven’t completely figured it out. I was a very awkward and sheltered teenager twenty years ago for a lot of reasons I’d rather not go too much into. As a result there are very few people from my school, sixth-form and university days who I’m still in touch with.

What helped me come out of my shell was working in a call centre (where I had to start interacting with colleagues and customers) and more recently, karaoke. I’ve started going to pub karaoke nights quite often over the past two years and made some pretty good friends from it. It’s not something I’d recommend from everyone, because the pressure to drink is there.

As a straight man (who has a few gay friends, and has been to a few of these bars in the past) I understand why they do. A lot of men are predatory creeps and you’re far less likely to be hit on by such a creep if you go to a gay bar. But then you’re gonna see more straight men show up and start hitting on women who likely won’t be interested because of their sexual orientation.

That being said, I have met some very predatory gay men (mainly outside of these bars), and a lot of gay people I’ve met previously have had experiences of being spiked. I’ll just leave it at that.

Bristol has been declared the cocaine capital of Europe after researchers examined our sewage and found more traces of the drug than in any of the other dozens of cities they examined. We beat Antwerp, Barcelona, Amsterdam and Zurich…

It’s one of those series I never really got into because the 3D CGI looked grotesque and gave the world of Lyoko this uncanny valley feeling.

CGI has advanced by leaps and bounds since Code Lyoko aired, and I’d hope that if it ever got remade, they’d switch entirely to a toon shaded CGI style that looks hand-drawn.

Tabaluga. It never really caught on outside of Germany but I definitely remember watching a decent cartoon series of it in the late 90’s.

Based China

Moguri Mod is a great example of AI done right. A fan modder ran Final Fantasy IX’s original assets through stable diffusion models to upscale the graphics and corrected imperfections by hand to create a great HD graphics mod with decent quality 30FPS FMVs (the official ones are low quality and capped at 15FPS.)

For context, Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy IX port was quarter-arsed (only really adding battle skips and a fast-forward function), and as they didn’t even have the original assets to do a graphical remaster, Moguri Mod is the best well likely get until/unless Square-Enix decide to remake FFIX from the ground up.

AI remastering done wrong would be a recent online rerelease of the Super Mario Bros Super Show, and an update done to Killer 7’s Steam version a few months ago. Both were remastered with AI but zero effort was made to correct any inaccuracies or hallucinations.

Where I think AI could be really useful is in animation: specifically in speeding up the process of inbetweening. If you fed a decent model key frames and prompts to have it produce tween frames, you could heavily speed up the process.