MudMan

The generals still went the right way, but I’m quite frustrated by them not being as mobilized for regionals and locals as a way to signal disatisfaction on something they perceived to matter less. It has lots of practical effects that shouldn’t be ignored for the sake of performative anger.

Wait, which election were you asking about again?

Meeeeh… at the cost of breaking up the experience pretty severely.

They did it that way in the days of anaglyph 3D because the color filtering made a mess of everything else about the movie With modern shutter or polarization you can just watch the whole thing that way with minimum issues.

And even those proved to be too much. Nothing short of perfect glassless seems to be enough. I can’t imagine people would accept paying 600 bucks of a bulky HMD, stop a movie halfway and strap that on just to get immersive VR effects when they could just be playing a VR game instead.

Maybe as part of a more expansive mixed media thing, like in a museum or a theme park. For movie watching I don’t think it’d take.

I’ve blocked all US magazines and other social media channels I can, and I’m so much better for it.

When the moron actually invades Canada I’m sure I’ll hear about it in the news.

And, frankly, this magazine is on notice. If it starts being 100% US politics it’s getting blocked as well. I have zero regrets about this new policy I’m implementing.

Well, 3D was a feature on many high end TVs, all the way to the start of the OLED era. It’s not like it was mandatory to use. But yeah, not everybody was into it, and I certainly would much prefer glassless 3D as with the 3DS. The big problem there is supporting multiple viewers at once. I would definitely take it for a monitor or a phone, all else being equal.

Honestly? That I would rather have Meta (and a bunch of Western countries, while we’re at it) lift restrictions on that front first before they go against LGBT people.

I’m not on board with the idea that edgy or offensive humor is valuable in itself, but I absolutely abhor the scenario where offended conservative and traditionalist views are treated in their own terms while marginalized groups are considered needy or nagging if they ask for the same treatment.

Also not on board with comedians assuming that noting their ignorance or bigotry is the same as not having a sense of humor, incidentally. Everybody sucks, is my point.

How would that even work? Like, small segments in immersive VR? That seems… very specific.

The idea with 3D TVs is they could do 3D on demand. They failed because even the lightweight 3D glasses were a bit of a hassle. It’s fine in a movie theatre, more or less, where you know you’ll be seated for the whole thing, but at home you don’t want anything extra sitting on your face, let alone putting stuff on and off mid-movie.

I agree on the VR filmwatching being ass thing, though. It’s hot, sweaty and isolating to do at home when your TV is right there, and it’ll take a whooole lot of normalizing before I pull out a HMD while I’m on a plane or a train without feeling like a complete idiot, regardless of whatever Apple was thinking about how the Vision Pro would get used.

I did it fairly often throughout. Left the 3D slider of my 3DS cranked up permanently, too, if you must know.

Either way I do own a bunch of 3D Blurays until they started making you choose between 3D and 4K and eventually stopped making them altogether.

You get to choose your format if you dump your own media. Plus you also get to host a media server and stop paying to not watch Netflix.

There are tons of options to play back 3D media on a HMD. Honestly my complaint here is that watching media on a virtual screen in VR kinda sucks. The quality just isn’t there and you still have a big thing strapped to your face. I’d much rather have good glass-free screens and leave VR for VR things, but it doesn’t seem to be the way tech is going.

I do this in recent times, but I have to be honest, it’s clearly less helpful and worse than the old days when I fell asleep to a book. And even now when I try substituting a paper book in for audio or video content I fall asleep faster.

So I guess that’s a tip? Paper over audio over video?

Is this a big deal? I realize I have a skewed view because I dropped Google search ages ago, but… when I need maps results I go to a maps app, I never really relied on the search bar for that, even when I did use Google search.

Now who is confusing weather with climate?

It’s an article telling you that inflation wasn’t as high as intitially expected. Doesn’t mean prices went down, but it’s still good news against the alternative.

We’ve looped back around to arguing about the meaning of “positive”, which mostly tells me this is entirely a discussion about vibes, and maybe that’s the best takeaway anybody can get from it.

Ironically that is genuinely all I’m asking for. And yet I don’t think that’s true.

Yes, we do, you wonderful unique genius of an angsty fifteen year old.

It’s not that hard to understand, you are not possessed of a unique insight that somehow has eluded every economist on the planet.

You just haven’t figured out that getting angy on the Internet about how everybody is dumb is not the game changer you think it is. Turns out meaningfully altering the collective behavior of eight billion people, each with their own individual set of incentives, is less responsive to an earnestly worded social media post that one may think.

Also, you may have to be more specific about who “we” is supposed to be. Whose economic model are we talking about? Everybody’s? Just how much granularity are you considering here, if any at all?

You think the pandemic shutdown was simple?

I mean, man, I am more of an introvert, too, but… yeah, I’m gonna say “humanity isn’t willing to transition to Covid rules permanently as a matter of climate change policy” is not the rhetorical killing blow you think it is.

You can’t enact global behavioral changes as solutions to economic problems. That’s the kind of adolescent social media thought process that ends with retirees radicalized into fascism. “If everybody agreed with me this would not be a problem” is not how large scale policy shifts happen.

On the plus side, you not quite grasping this is far less problematic than Elon Musk not grasping this, but the underlying issue is pretty much the same.

Yeah, for sure. I find it needs less of a defense because it was an early indie darling built on top of a fangame foundation, while Penny’s ended up being a bit of a bomb on the back of not having stuck to the license or the specific set of Sonic mechanics.

Both are worth a try, I’m just saying that Penny’s could use the attention more.

It’s still a tolerable playthrough, especially with part 2 in the mix.

And honestly, people get stuck talking about 1-3 as if they had stopped making 2D Sonic games until 4, but the Nintendo portable games are mostly some shade of solid, with maybe a couple of exceptions.

There was a period in there where people got into the idea that “it was never good” and made the case for 1-3 as a bit of a contrarian take.

Got way less defensible in the context of Generations, Mania and Frontiers getting a bit of a franchise revival going, but it was a thing for a while.

I’m always a bit weirded out by these super good fangames that clearly are a sprite swap away from being viable commercial products because… man, just make your own game, you clearly can do it. But at the same time, it would likely not be nearly as popular without it being skinned as a Sonic or a Castlevania or whatever, which is a bit of a bummer.

In other news, go play Penny’s Big Breakaway. It’s good.

I mean, what’s the point of pipe rigate? Most of them are too small to eat a single one at a time by stabbing them and they are the perfect shape to wiggle free from any attempt to hold more than one on a fork. I’ve seen them slide right off of a large spoon. I’m pretty sure if you could make molecules in that shape you’d invent some perfectly frictionless hydrophobic material that would revolutionize several industries.

He was more the cause of the end of the world than the solution, but yeah.

I thought it was… fine? I mean, not the most well rounded thing in Trek history, but fine.

Discovery suffered from being just fine after having to deal with massive backlash for trying to be different. That and carrying a season-long arc while trying to be a Trek TV show in between the movie bits.

But I would absolutely watch any of the first four seasons of Disco than any part of Picard. Any day. Season five is a mess and I really don’t vibe with their take on spirituality, but that’s mostly just me.