CerebralHawks

We all have to do the course. And honestly I’m not even mad.

In my line of work, most people are not computer savvy. We’re running Windows 11 and no one has admin privileges, even the highest ranking people. They’re all limited. That’s fine. We can’t install anything. I’m pretty sure I could hit up PortableApps and get some portable software working, but I’m not trying to push my luck. I’m pretty sure I know what I can and can’t get away with, but it’s a good job and I don’t want to mess it up. Besides, a lot of people are illegally streaming sports or movies and getting away with that, so IT security is pretty lax. That’s probably true at a lot of places.

I don’t mind the cybersecurity courses because I mute them and make them run at double speed and I ignore them, clicking through, then I ace the test. It’s not that I don’t care. I just know the material already. I’ve also helped coworkers who earnestly sat through the whole thing and are genuinely struggling. I know they hate how casually I get all the questions right, but they hate having to go through it a second time even more.

Plus, there’s one vendor of training videos that is kind of like an office comedy, and one of the workers has a bunch of anime fan art in their cubicle. So it amuses me to no end that all of my coworkers are seeing these characters. It’s nothing recent and I haven’t seen it in a while. I know Killua from Hunter x Hunter is there. 12 year old boy, has super powers, something with lightning? (been ages since I watched HxH, and Meruem best boy) and he can rip your heart out of your chest (he’s done it before). I feel like they need to add Anya Forger (from SPYxFAMILY) to the wall. That would be funny. (Telepathic toddler, dumb as a box of rocks, and just as adorable.)

Yes.

But let’s be real, most of us aren’t going to read all of them.

I really tried with Cyberpunk. I love that game. But the credits just went on and on and on and…

I did it with Animal Crossing though! But every time I ask K.K. Slider to play a song, the credits roll. And there’s an achievement for doing it 50 times. It takes a year. He shows up once a week. I mean it takes a year if you play Animal Crossing every Saturday after 6pm.

I can’t wait to roll credits on Blue Prince. One dude made that game. Like Stardew Valley.

“Too expensive” means "beyond what the market will bear. Objectively, the Switch 2 didn’t cost enough — there was some other higher price that would have given Nintendo numbers such that while it might not have sold quite as well, what it would have sold would have made up for it. Would the market bear a $500 Switch 2? Maybe. $600? That, I doubt. $450 was a bit high for my liking, but the market bore it just fine and now it’s thriving.

I’m still laughing at those who said the Switch 2 was too expensive (on Reddit). The numbers prove otherwise.

So you also like it? You disagree with everything I said… including the part where I said I don’t like it? It sounds like you just want to be antagonistic. I’m not the future — being mean to me on social media won’t stop the future from happening. It just makes you slightly less of a good person.

The reason streaming boxes are the future in gaming is the same reason they are in movies and music. In movies and music, the common players don’t support physical media anymore — they’re too small. How do you get a tape, CD, or vinyl record into an iPhone? You stream it. Same with games. Even now, vs 20 years ago, physical releases are getting rarer and rarer. This generation, Xbox and PlayStation have digital-only models, and a lot of games are digital-only.

The compression is a trade-off and it exists in movie and music streaming as well. Latency will be mitigated by more servers.

And it’s actually already here. There are “Smart” TVs out there that play Xbox games. Via Cloud Gaming. I know guys out in the sticks who do cloud gaming. The myth that it’s only going to work in NYC, LA, and Chicago hasn’t ever been true. Seems like every town has servers now. And the fiber and cable running everywhere is good enough to solve most of the latency. Of course, there will always be latency… hell, I can’t catch fish in Animal Crossing if I’m using a wired controller, I have to take the damn Switch out of the dock and play handheld, but if I do that, I can catch the 5-star rarity fish every time, first try.

You don’t have to like it. I sure don’t. But, how’s refusing to accept things you don’t like working out for you? You wish us a good president yet, or do you actually like the one we have (in the US)? Your wishes in tech are about as effective… same as mine.

This would be fine if Xbox Cloud Gaming were available on Switch and PlayStation.

Honestly the future is dumb streaming boxes. I don’t like it but there it is.

Sony is behind the curve. If Nintendo is their only competition, PlayStation 5 will see another price increase and PlayStation 6, if it happens, will price itself out of the market. Nintendo gamers don’t care.

Sony should have made their own GamePass years ago, and as a peace offering, Microsoft and Sony should have offered each other’s streaming service. That would extend hardware out another year or two as people have access to more games.

Oh look, an Internet bully!

See, nobody cares.

Okay, honest question: how much preference do people really put into formats?

Because I’ve dealt with webp… I don’t like it, but if I can open it in XnView and convert it to JPEG I’m good. Like my iPhone takes pictures in HEIC and if I send them raw to my wife’s Galaxy phone, it doesn’t open them, but if I convert them to JPEG (Telegram has this option, it’s what we use for rich-text messaging), it’s fine.

I don’t like proprietary formats, but I don’t hate them if I can convert them, or better yet use them. Like I can read and write Microsoft 365 docx and the similar formats for Excel and Powerpoint in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote on my Mac. It’s not a problem. PDF can be an issue with Adobe trying to fleece users into paying to type in it, but open it in Firefox and you can type in it just fine. We shouldn’t even have anything by Adobe installed at work but we do. I’m not IT but I’m getting sick of teaching people how to open PDFs in Firefox instead of Acrobat so they can edit the bloody things. All our forms are PDF and I can edit/save them just fine but Acrobat won’t. So I set Firefox as the default but updates change it back.

Yeah, I get that, I think she’s just vocal to stir up controversy and it’s working. Totally agree she’s a piece of shit!

This was only a controversy because GIFs were falling out of favour and the format’s creator decided to stir up shit.

Reminds me of the stuff with Harry Potter. “Oh wait Hermione is Black, Dumbledore is gay, oh and trans women aren’t real women.” It’s just to get people talking about something that has run its course… and oh look, a new Harry Potter series coming to HBO. Because it works.

The actual pronunciation of GIF doesn’t matter. We say GIF with a hard G because the G stands for Graphics and that has a hard G. Some say it with a soft G because that makes it sound like Jif and they like peanut butter…? I guess? I doubt it’s because someone said that’s how it was meant to be pronounced. Honestly I think Jif sounds better, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. I prefer the English pronunciation of garage (rhymes with carriage) to the American (rhymes with barrage) but in the States I pronounce it the American way because I want to be understood… not because it sounds better. I could give a fuck how something sounds; language is about communication. And if you’re saying “Jif,” we still know what you mean, but we think less of you for either not knowing better, or are just pedantic — exactly how I expect to be received if I pronounce “garage” like I think it’s meant to be said.

What’s sad is his parents made his middle name James, like they had hope for him to be a beacon for humanity… as opposed to oppression.

Him not removing/changing the James part of his name means he either didn’t care or was trying to be ironic. Or completely missed the point of Star Trek. Or likely had never watched an episode of the original Star Trek. Jim Kirk is known for being a badass, like Sisko, but Kirk is easily as thoughtful as Picard. But that isn’t what he’s known for.

Point taken — and yet, motion sickness is a real thing.

Have you tried gaming on a plane before? I can’t do it. It’s more bearable than gaming in the car, but gaming in any moving vehicle messes with my head. So I’d go with an audiobook.

That said… old school RPG but plenty of people have suggested them.