my experience with Java has been miserable and I do not know why it persists
the one part of my job i genuinely do not like at all
DO NOT COVER D&D ON YOUTUBE
For any of my friends who are into Dungeons and Dragons or anything related to Wizards of the Coast, if you depend on revenue from your Youtube account to survive
DO NOT COVER D&D ON YOUTUBE.
DO NOT SHOW the Handbook, even if the embargo or review guide said that you should.
Honestly I’d recommend not even taking the review deal.
So… why not? If you already like D&D and are going to share it anyway and want to let your friends know how cool the new D&D is, why wouldn’t you do a video on it?
You Will Be Copyright Striked On Youtube. Copyright *Strike* not Copyright Claim. Remember, a Claim might just redirect the revenue from your video, but a Copyright STRIKE can kill your channel and potentially your entire Google Account if you rack up too many of them. And if they’re doing that even to people they directly approached for the purpose of having review videos go up, then they’re probably not going to be any nicer about it to smaller teams. Do please please please, take care of your financial and social well-being and DO NOT COVER D&D ON YOUTUBE.
maybe I’ll post some lore stuff or art next time, sorry for more downer stuff this time around
I Will Try To Remember To Post The Other Art Later
Posting this one now because I actually like it
okay also I guess I’ll add this one too
smol fairy dragon with a hammer probably about as big as her entire body
and as the tradition goes, she will be named Ribbon because all Bunnylike Metroidvanias tend to name the fairy/companion Ribbon (or Fidget if you’re Dust)
okay uhhh send blog
(SENSITIVE CONTENT WARNING) In Which I Whine To Two Different LLMs (Claude and Gemini) About My Concerns Regarding the Characters Jean (Jam) and Mia (Pepper)
Okay so I need to lead this one with a big SENSITIVE CONTENT WARNING because I’m talking about some topics that might genuinely be rough on people. Specifically:
- The following is a log of my chat with some “AI” LLMs. If you’re not cool with that, probably don’t want to read this one.
- It will discuss complex power dynamics in person-to-person relationships.
- I heavily speak of of psychological manipulation.
- There’s themes related to body dysphoria and transformation. (Hi, I’m Enby, expect this theme to come up a lot.)
- There are references to age-related appearance discrepancies in adult relationships. (This is the one where I feel kinda touchy because I’ve met people who deal with this kind of thing.)
- There is depiction of experimental biology and reproduction.
If you’re very sure you’re cool with that, click on through. But please be mindful of your health and limits. Don’t just click through just because I wrote it, only continue if you’re gonna be alright.
Transitioning to Wayland on an NVidia GPU Be Like
I’m trying to favor using Wayland instead of X11 since it is better in most ways, but also man whatever it is with NVidia and Wayland that just makes some apps completely unusable? Kiiind of a pain.
Closing the JetBrains Toolbox and relaunching it seemed to fix whatever that graphical glitch was though, so that’s nice????
In Which I Whine About The Music of Freedom Planet 1 and Freedom Planet 2
Freedom Planet 1 has a much more dance / rock / synth-rock soundtrack going on with a 90s kind of flare, while Freedom Planet 2 skews a lot more orchestrated, jazzy, and fusion electronica with only a couple of tracks that have the synth-rock/dance vibes of FP1. And I feel like a lot more of that is down to the instrumentation than the composition.
For anyone who paid for the Freedom Planet 1 Official Soundtrack, I think Track 67 “Beta Schmup Stage” along with it’s accompanying commentary kinda highlights this the most. Taken out of context, one could probably easily think that track is actually from FP2, especially past the 15 second mark where it drops the synth-driven intro for orchestra strings and fairly light overdrive guitar. The guitar is probably the most FP1 thing about it.
In a similar way, most of FP2’s boss tracks would be impossible to mistake as FP1 music because the pacing and vibe is radically different. However, “Boss – Arena” is a very butt-rock style track with a constant driving pace and simple but compelling bass line that feels right at home with FP1’s soundtrack pieces. The rock and overdrive guitars are the things that brings its identity closer to FP1 than FP2, but the…organ (0:11 – 0:34)? type sound used to fill the sonic space for much of the intro kinda detracts from that vibe and feels like something else.
When we go back to Freedom Planet 1’s Major Boss Battle, that song is far more of a dance piece than a rock piece, with catchy and memorable leads, a simple on the beat percussion track, and the guitars largely being background edge for the bass and occasionally a highlighting factor in the upper end of the lead parts. But the bulk of the melody is being carried by synth saws with plenty of delay and reverb.
The counterpart track in Freedom Planet 2- “Boss – Robot A”- is… not that. It’s decidedly synth-y yes, but something is going on with the mixing that results in a lot of the instruments seeming to overcrowd the same frequencies.
- The bass used in Robot A feels lighter and more “distant” and doesn’t have the edge of Major Boss. It’s using the same galloping pattern that is used in FP1, but the dynamics don’t seem to put as much emphasis on this as its counterpart. Or perhaps it is, but it’s being buried in the other layers of sound?
- No idea what’s up with the organ sound here (0:03). And it tends to crash into the same soundspace as the new synth lead (0:06) becoming muddied. This new synth in general tends to fall kinda back in the mix in general, which is not great as it feels like the bit it’s playing was meant to be the focal melody.
- The Breakbeat is actually a really good choice imo and probably hints more at what this track was going for that what it achieved.
- The guitar (0:31) is reasonable, but it feels like it’s maybe a little too on the clean side for a boss battle theme. I dunno.
- So this is another part where things get kinda weird. We have what I describe as a hypersaw melody lead (0:46) which works pretty well and kinda has the FP1 vibe, but it doesn’t have the delay nor the reverb one might expect this kind of energetic lead instrument to have. And I don’t know why? It ends up making the rests feel a little jarring too.
Like. I just dunno, that’s the one where it feels like the intent was to simply have a modern update remix of the original iconic boss theme and it ended up feeling like a completely different song and spirit. But it’s still melodically recognizable as the same motif.
There’s also Boss – Robot B. It’s got a bit of a jazzy saxaphone thing going with bouncy synths and percussion. And quite a bit of the background sirens going on to lean into the idea that the Main Four characters are now effectively the law enforcement / disaster response team. Or maybe just to evoke a general sense of “WARNING, DANGER AHEAD”.
Overall, neither the pacing, instrumentation, or composition of Robot B really reads as a boss theme at all to me. It’s solid music. Just. Doesn’t feel like something to get up and motivated to, and definitely not in the spirit of FP1 though it’s clearly not trying to be.I do like the guitar riff they bring in at (0:45) though.
Not much reason for me to bring this up right *now* in particular. I’ve been trying to figure out what I’m going to do for the soundtrack for my RAMP 2024 submission. But the way the soundtrack is almost an entirely different vibe from Freedom Planet 1 is something that’s been bugging me since Freedom Planet 2 released a year (or two, almost?) ago. Some of the issues of the perceived quality of the music seemed to have been simply down to the volume being unintentionally low in-gameplay in the earlier versions of FP2. But FP2 wanted to set an identity for Freedom Planet that was all its own without being forever tied to the fandom roots. It succeeded. Just, this is one of the things I much prefer the original for.
That’s not to say that I think FP2 is a bad game or that I don’t love it. I kinda favor the two games almost equally, though for very different reasons. FP1 I enjoy a lot for its boss battles and soundtrack. FP2 I like more for the characters, environments, and overall quality of life improvements (Carol is so much better in 2, probably the most comfortable character to play in the game compared to being fairly plain and painful to play in FP1). Or to put it another way, Freedom Planet 1 has the specific gamefeel and audio aesthetics I’d want to build fangames off of than FP2. Freedom Planet 2 has characters, settings, and lore I’d be much more interested in seeing fleshed out with with fanwork or supplemental content than FP1.
(And frankly, feeling that way kinda hurts because FP1 is an absolute nightmare to do any kind of meaningful gameplay modding or additional content for, while FP2 is much much easier to mod and add things to, but I feel like I’ve already gotten all of the enjoyment from its mechanics that I’m going to get. Short of people making brand new boss battles or something anyway.)
Playing Steam Games on KDE Neon
TL;DR:
If your Steam Client is flickering rapidly on your fresh Linux install:
- Go to Steam->Settings->Interface->Client Beta Participation -> Steam Beta Update.
If your Steam Client seems to refuse to launch any of your previously installed games (that you probably had installed on separate harddrives when you were running Windows:
- Steam for Linux does not like NTFS for some reason. Games that I moved to my main drive work perfectly. So I’ll probably just get an extra SSD for my SATA USB adapter, reformat it to something more appropriate, and just play from that.
—
So after the recent announcement of “Microsoft Recall” for Windows where it captures screencaps of the user’s activity every 3 seconds and feeds that into their machine learning algorithm (which includes looking at adult content, entering payment information for online purchases, online healthcare services, private video calls, or any kind of remote-work you may be doing which could involve PII) I finally went ahead and dropped Windows 10 for KDE Neon.
There’s been some frustrations here and there, but it is working for the most part. Main problem bugging me right now is that the emote picker pops up a separate application and when I choose an emote it gets copied to clipboard instead of added to the textbox I had selected.
I was also having some issues with Steam for a while, but now I’ve got that working (as mentioned in the TLDR section. To repeat myself:
Got it fixed!
For the client flickering: Go to Steam->Settings->Interface->Client Beta Participation -> Steam Beta Update.
For most of my games not launching from my other drives: Steam for Linux does not like NTFS for some reason. Games that I moved to my main drive work perfectly. So I’ll probably just get an extra SSD for my SATA USB adapter, reformat it to something more appropriate, and just play from that.
We Noticed You Are Using Dark Patterns. Please Don’t.
The new “fun” dark pattern I see websites abusing now:
They have the “Continue Without Supporting Us” button specifically stylized on their default theme so that one wouldn’t know it’s there unless they had seen this prompt on other sites before.
It’s not against the law, but it’s sleezy as hell and I see no reason to reward a business for being sleezy. So now Furaffinity goes on my boycott list with Nintendo (for constant anti-fandom shenanigans and emulator developer harassment) and Microsoft (Sending out Hi Fi Rush to die and then nuking the devs when the game turns out to be a surprise hit anyway, buying Activision-Blizzard to effectively do nothing with it, buying Rare to effectively dismantle it, and putting billions of dollars into machine learning for the AI buzzword shenanigans and starting to dismantle their gaming division specifically to fund their machine learning gamble), and a buttload of other “social platforms” that have grown far too big for their own sustainability and scramble with user-hostile behavior out of desperation to stay afloat.
To be fair, I do think it’s wise for a business to pivot and evolve as their needs change. But when those changes are actively user-hostile, socially damaging, or actively against the best interests of humanity in general, I’d rather the business cease being a business on good terms than desperately struggle to stay afloat while poisoning the underpinnings of their cause. (I do not hold living creatures like humans to this same standard, in which case I completely understand and advocate for those creatures doing whatever it is they need to to survive and thrive. In a just world collective interest would prevent most cases of desperate survival tactics from ever being necessary.)
Video Game History Repeats
Microsoft is now in its Sega Saturn age where they’ve managed to burn most of their goodwill despite their successes and having a good hardware offerings but not enough sway with devs to attach people to it.
And no matter how far ahead of the times the Next Version Of Xbox may be, it will- like the Dreamcast before it- probably be the end of Xbox as devs don’t want to take the risk and players resist buying it out of distrust from how the prior platform’s games were handled.
And the Steam Deck is looking mighty convenient and cost effective these days…
Meanwhile Nintendo sics their ninjas on anyone who so much as thinks about emulators, homebrew, fangames, hacks, tournaments, fanart, and literally anything involving their IPs that they do not have complete control over. And they do this even in cases when they know they do not legally have the means to “win” because they know they have enough money to wait out any smaller individual out until they starve out of court funds.
And Sony? I haven’t heard much of Sony lately, they’re probably doing OK.
Selaco
Just played the Selaco demo and it’s impressive AF! I had no idea GZDOOM could even do a fraction of what Selaco is doing with it!
Also I watched the Fallout TV Series. It’s great! And Superbuns. It’s adorable! And replayed through all of Goldeneye! Still holds up great, especially if you have one of a couple certain unofficial ways to play it…