Savaged Regime

A lot of PBR textures these days have that "clay" look to them which I find incredibly distracting and less believable than when more basic texture materials were used. I don't know if this is due to innate tech limitations or just that the skill ceiling for texture reflections has increased a lot.

It's always funny when you get to see computer specs in old future sci-fi media and how they chose to extrapolate. I remember something where the RAM and CPU rate felt okay, but the memory cache was still below 1 megabyte.

Ironically EA saved them initially. Before the buyout Maxis leadership was trying to pivot to sports and stuff and also experimenting with an early 3D Sim City that just wasn't working out. It was EA's idea to drop that and just focus on a higher quality 2D game for SC3.

A 19th century Edison phonograph can run without electricity doesn't really have many technological prerequisites to manufacture. Recorded audio could have feasibly been invented many centuries earlier if someone had just come up with the idea.

I've always had a hard time digesting literature since aphantasia puts such a mental strain on trying to parse all the detailed descriptions of environments, characters and body language, etc. that I can't really commit any focus to processing the actual plot. Nonfiction is usually fine though.

The level design is way more interesting in SA1 and I enjoyed seeing the same spaces recontextualized for the different characters. Helps that it had a lot more budget as well.

YouTube video by Adam Maciaszek 1930s Electronic Music With Animation 4K Restoration "Paper Sound" Nikolai Voinov

The crash course on early synthesis misses one obscure yet surprisingly relevant milestone: The variophone or "paper sound" accomplished with paper oscillator shapes that are read optically. The end result is actually very reminiscent of SID music in particular.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmej...

FM is of course extremely powerful and expressive compared to any of the alternatives, but that potential went overwhelmingly unused without the proper curiosity or software tools to leverage it.

SID was a lot more versatile than its peers with the wide range of filters available. I wonder if Chamberlain was disappointed with how the sound chip market developed compared to his extrapolations in the article. Most hardware either went FM, basic wavetable, or at worst just simple pulse tones.

We had an Australian soap opera from the 70s/80s about a womens prison always airing around 1-2 AM which became a big cult hit among all the late night stragglers. IIRC they even hosted a con where they got some of the actors to visit.

I would also encourage stepping up from mere mitigation to active sabotage. Use browser extensions like AdNauseam to send fake junk data to trackers. With how the modern tech industry treats people with such utter contempt, it's only fair we return the favor.

Header text: "HEY YOU! YES YOU! TAKE THIS SHIT OUT OF LINKS!" This is followed by a couple example urls, with a red square highlighting the sections with source identifiers. The rest of the text is as follows: Source identifiers are used to track your activity on a site. Where you came from, what device you use, and even who you talk to. Whether it's written clearly in the url or tied to a random string of characters, it's assigned to your activity. When you send a link containing a source identifier to somebody and they click it, it signals to the website that you two are connected. And that data goes right back to the website operators, and thus their advertisers. Whenever you select "share" or "copy link" on a social app or website, it creates a link like this. If you give even the smallest shit about online privacy, it's important to remove them. Everything after the "?" symbol can be removed without issue, especially sections starting with "si=" or "utm_source="

I saw an infographic a couple years ago about how to remove source identifiers from links and why it's important, but I can't find it again and too many people I know are sending me links with them so here's an infographic straight from the oven

RAMP 2025 is out which is a collection of user submitted Doom maps all neatly packaged together in a nice hub world by DavidXNewton. These are always a joy to check out every year.

rampart-dev.teamouse.net

Sonic stuck in the Phantom Zone

Oh, there's another Superman movie coming out. That gives me an excuse to post this lame joke

That whole period spanning the latter half of the 2000s always felt utterly bizarre to me. Felt like everything changed practically overnight and the industry (ie execs and marketing people) collectively decided that anything from before circa 2005 was now something ancient and totally alien to them

And his arch nemesis; the fastest quilboar alive

Playing WoW again. As a habitual orc player I never thought I'd play a kul tiran but this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

I'll always cherish the moment when Violet showed up in the chat for a RetroPals stream watching Bad Influence and Video Power back to back and being aghast at the state the equivalent US video game TV shows of the time.

More generally it seems that the whole corporate culture of MBAs and finance people moving in to take over every conceivable industry did not take root as much in Japan. Companies are more likely to be run by people with actual working backgrounds there and there are still implicit social contracts.

I tried emulating that kind of more primitive faked reflective texture in Blender as a total beginner but it was too complicated for me to set up manually in the shaders with no grasp of the math behind it. Glad to see others appreciating such a specific aesthetic.

Gluten free Sega Cookies

Blast baking

If I had to start over I would probably just pick Ko-Fi instead. To my knowledge they haven't gotten themselves mired in venture capital like Patreon did.

Not my favorite movie by a long shot but my favorite moment is probably the intro to Jason Goes To Hell where the feds ambush him and they're doing all this dramatic ziplining and tacticool combat rolls while he's just standing there helplessly getting sprayed with bullets.

I'm no programmer but from what I've heard (mainly from RTS devs) having multiple overlapping planes of traversal like this in a 2D isometric engine is pretty tricky, hence why you rarely ever saw it. It didn't even occur to me that Solstice featured this until I saw this video.

I find the overall character designs in X to be kinda unappealingly garish. I guess it was just part of Inafune trying to channel some sort of 70s childhood influence in the art direction?

The freakin doves at the end. Of course it's John Woo

Feels like most long running studios catapulted into mainstream success at some point have to learn the hard way that you can't simply go on working the same way you did in the old scrappy days once you're at blockbuster levels of scope spanning many years of development.

He also went on a long rant against common industry practices with textures in that era commenting on that oily/plastic look from badly handled normals especially on stuff like grass. Struck me as being very self aware over the tackiness of certain technical novelties from that period.

Remember reading an interview with the texture artist for this game. They managed to achieve unusually high fidelity textures for that era of consoles with the art direction putting much less focus on diffuse texture detail and instead budgeted way detail and resolution to the normal textures.

This movie was a huge flop but became popular in Japan. I guess they're just really into that heightened Americana vibe in general.