Researcher (program analysis); technical artist turned (sometime graphics) programmer; long-retired game critic; reader of the Local timeline; very tall queer enby.
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2026-08-17T11:30:16Z Event JSON
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Last Notes npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…29up @nprofile…gfdd This is real "insurance company refund all the dues you've paid rather than pay out on your policy when the worst happens" behaviour (should be illegal). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…29up Is this the same for other brands (I note that Micron literally no longer have a Crucial brand as they stopped producing RAM for consumer systems - at the time they said they would not longer be shipped RAM to channel after Feb 2026; which would be the longest dotted line). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch Highly amusing to me that when Amazon is concerned, most people can agree with comments by Reggie Fils-Aimé about how Nintendo considered Amazon's demand for giving them preferential pricing in order to be allowed on their store as illegal monopolistic crimes Nintendo could not take part in (hence their products not being listed at various times on that store). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…nuu0 Wait, they remade it for the 3DS? I thought they remastered it? (A remake is like Resident Evil 2/3/4 to Resident Evil 2/3/4, right?) npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…5y0h Unfortunately so. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch Your CEO wanted to guess what the hot next trend for the company to follow would be. They wanted to get data analysis of your business metrics without paying experts anymore to generate it. They handed all your internal business data over to the companies who spent the last 10 years stealing every scrap of text they could find and then claiming that actually IP theft isn't real if you only feed the data into a Chinese room. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…d0yj I only saw it when it came to streaming just after release (so almost a decade ago) so don't remember it very well. Beat Takeshi hands in another pretty checked-out performance, Pilou Asbæk seems to be the only actor having any fun, and where it deviated from the original I think they always made a weaker decision. But as I said, all of this is half-remembered vibes of why I didn't enjoy it a decade ago. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch The mad-libs of Tomodachi Life (mediated through off-screen cameraphone photos because Nintendo have disabled all official sharing tools) sure is something to observe in the era of AI slop and "deepfakes". Obviously no one is going to go after cartoons under likeness rights but it does feel markedly different to see "wow, look at what I made this real human person, who I have recreated in this game, say! lol!" stuff in an age where many people are weaponizing a more realistic version of that. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…d0yj Personally, I have been losing nerve sensitivity over my life and so I may not even notice minor cuts and scrapes anymore. I find this aligns with my memory of elders, who seemed not to realise when they'd injured themself. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…v4j3 Games today scale from 5090 to SteamDeck/Switch 2 and are pretty incredible considering the massive power and tech gap between the top and bottom. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…v4j3 Honestly this seems like a bug in the transitions from the baked/cached distant shadows (are they just using CSMs until the nearby geometry is in a local BVH and then swaps to RT reflections? I have not followed FH6 dev super closely to know their tech claims) to the real-time RT ones and something that can be fixed in patches. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…v4j3 20 years ago the shadows would have first drawn in 20m ahead of the car and we'd have thought nothing of it. Actually Fallout 4 on console still does exactly that and it's got nothing to do with RT or upscaling. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch If we are to believe the AI execs, GenAI for coding provides the work of a team of junior programmers to be deployed when managed by an existing human coder. And this is the promise that mgmt/your execs expect you to live up to when they mandate heavy GenAI use in your coding group. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…d0yj Comment blocks or added weird nonsense like every thing that isn't the chronological list of videos on the subscription page on YT (or any other webapp that keeps messing with a feed of data I opt into). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…29up Valve: data is my passion. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…5y0h A lot of these strategy (and idle) games now have "autoplay" where you let the automatic action ordering take over (as long as your team is strong enough to complete content without optimal action choices always being made). So the game is doing stuff but you can be playing an action game on a different machine at the same time. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch I'm finding it hard to understand why you'd use Steam for F2P or idle or casual games. Something you might have open while also looking at something on a different screen. How does this work with a Steam Deck? npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…zxj6 For me a non-deterministic calculating device is simply a non-starter. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…m644 @nprofile…5y0h Also got me thinking of the house system of Battletech (but that's probably also a lot of Dune influencing that setting, along with some Foundation and other epics). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…29up I worry that the most (unified) RAM is 8GB when a base Air (smaller volume as thinner, just as light despite a bigger battery) can be configured up to 32GB. Also very poor connectivity with the DP over USB losing DSC (Air is 4K 240Hz, this drops that all the way to 60Hz due to DP1.4 8Gbsp limits) and the second USB port being 480Mbps of USB2. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch You ever think about how they moved the pop-up volume info screen from the top of the desktop to the bottom middle for Windows 11 and then, at the same time, moved the buttons you click to open quick-launch apps from the bottom left corner to also the bottom middle of the desktop. Such that, if you change the volume before opening an app, you have to wait an extra 5 seconds for the volume display to go away (as it sits over the app icon)? npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…ezqw @nprofile…j05z Paramount Skydance already did exactly this to CBS News (now running under the leadership of genocidal fascist and anti-queer extremist Bari Weiss, platforming pro-Trump propaganda). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…nuu0 I mean, game developers _only_ pay Valve [up to] $5bn a year* to operate Steam. With such a tight revenue stream, surely it would be unreasonable to expect many improvement? npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch Have absolutely had enough of AI this & AI that. Everywhere I've been looking regarding work is nothing but. Try to relax on a computer, even more & worse AI. "You've got to join us or you'll be left behind!" not just at work but also in technical stuff I do for fun. I'm not dusting off my 15 year old undergrad notes about ML or "learning to vibe code productively". npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…hm63 Honestly, I think that might be something that is slowly creeping in. A lot of the stuff there is starting to use slop for promotional material (replacing key/concept art use) and I have to wonder at what point do all these voiced VNs have "now with a dozen spoken languages" (all AI stuff not actually VAs). I've already seen quite a lot of these games now doing "available in 20 languages!" and outside of the English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean it's all 100% AI with no human oversight. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…5y0h Although realistically the brands with value (and the staff making those games) are more Tencent than anything else now. Just the family leadership of Ubisoft will do anything to ensure their control of the company rather than selling up. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch Rounding out the year with some more videos to watch. https://www.youtube.com/@siggraphadvancesinreal-tim4519/videos npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…xlvy A couple of days ago I realised that Windows auto-ducks the audio from other apps when I chat on my laptop and yet there doesn't seem to be an easy way to make this system engage otherwise. They clearly have the infrastructure there for me to eg say "make the focuses app full volume and auto-duck all other programs to only be 20% volume, without me having to manually mess with any sliders" but there's no way to engage that. I bet a lot of people would love if they added a UI to do that. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…4m8e I am still amazed that people are actually buying a $100 VirtualBoy headset (requires existing Switch or S2 hardware) for which you can not legally buy any games at all and is entirely reliant on you renting access to the emulated games on your closed platform hardware. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…rtt8 We referenced this heavily back in the day when making our own game with 1-to-1 analogue sword controls (how you move the mouse allows you to swing the sword however you want). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…9vka So MGM is Amazon and soon WB will be Netflix. I guess it's nothing that new, Columbia Pictures was picked up by Sony in 1989 (and, even weirder, the Coca-Cola company involvement in TriStar/Colombia the decade before). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…9vka So MGM is Amazon and soon WB will be Netflix. I guess it's nothing that new, Columbia Pictures was picked up by Soy in 1989 (and, even weirder, the Coca Cola company involvement in the decade before). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…9vka The company is called Stratasys & basically the consumer history of affordable 3D printers (not from China) is the history of the extremely aggressive patenting 30 years ago slowly expiring. Touched on here: https://hackaday.com/2024/11/16/hackers-patents-and-3d-printing/ npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…9vka Hasn't 3D printing been set back 20 years by a set of annoying patents that a few companies took out when it was gaining more widespread industrial support back in the day and are only now expiring? Or have these more industrial scale things not been hit with the same issue that consumer models have (unless you buy from China, where they don't care about Western patents)? npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…rtt8 I would definitely give the classic "talk-em-up" of the genre a go, **Planescape: Torment**. Same setting as those other games but very much their own take on how to build a game the opposite of IWD's focus on combat. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…4m8e This is before we get into the absolute nonsense that "Valve do not pay for exclusives and other storefronts do". When Take2 print millions of Civilisation keys into physical boxes that use the Steam CDN to deploy and update, and even get a better (20%) deal on any sales made on Steam, they are being paid (in services rendered) by Valve to make all PC copies of Civ sold into Steam exclusives. And this was locked down 15 years ago when Civ V released, "Steam Powered". npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…4m8e I have met a surprising number of players who demand Steam Workshop for mods. I get the dev reason to not build an easy-to-use interface for mods but if one exists, players should be happy with any one. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…4m8e Something a shocking number of players seem to say is: "How dare you, the creative actually making the things I want, release your game on a platform where you don't have to pay the storefront a 30% cut for little more than handling the card processing fee, which we all know is set at 2.5%". npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…rtt8 I would say the majority of these have either had sequels/reboots or spiritual successors (many with KickStarter funding) in the last 15 years. Stuff like MoO very much lives on as still guiding the model of that kind of game (without it, Stellaris is probably a very different game if it as ever made at all). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…e330 I don't understand the specs being shown here. It doesn't seem like a good box to hook up to a big TV and play modern games with. Unless this radically undercuts the PS5 (now $350 in Japan and traditionally $399 if they can ever cost reduce) and makes it back on the Steam cut of sales, I don't know who this is for. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…na7g I've been hearing good things from people on their Android handheld gaming systems with the newer chips like the SD8Elite (Gen 4 basically I think) or even SG8Gen2 and many Steam games. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…rtt8 Life is Strange? I mean, I love that game (might argue about which specific game in the series is most cringe but the first one is certainly up there) but the teen drama is so cringe (positive) and on the nose. With the cringe dialogue. And the licensed music breaks. The entire vibe really - it is what makes those games what they are and without that you'd have a totally different series. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…9vka While the i5-2500K was a great CPU (ran that thing at 5GHz all-core flat until the mobo eventually cooked itself/died of age), I'm not sure how applicable that sort of scaling will be to modern CPUs with a much higher IPC and... four or even higher times the number of hw threads on a gaming CPU (and a lot lot more cache for serious gaming results). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch YouTube embeds (in Feedly and elsewhere) have gone from 50% "Error 153: Video player configuration error" to 100%. I assume this is what the exec at Google wants, who is obsessed with adblockers and doesn't care how many legitimate users they hurt to get even one person to see an ad that potentially violates their local laws (as Google ads are extremely poor at respecting local advertising laws). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…4m8e They always seemed like a fast counter-top mini fan oven (with higher speed air making them better at getting the food up to temperature) but I must admit I don't have the counter-top space or desire for a very small oven so had never actually purchased one. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…rtt8 It tells you roughly how well things had been going there that their first attempt at a Lords of the Rings MMO was cancelled after they couldn't find agreement with Tencent (who would publish it in China and possibly were doing dev support work) so they had to reboot that project. Presumably that was meant to tie into their very expensive TV series based on the books? But the reboot forced it to massively miss. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch I did kinda think that by next time they remade this campaign, we'd have shadow-casting particle lights. (I assume this is Series X footage because otherwise that foliage shimmer and shader aliasing is a bit rough for a high end PC, but you can easily iterate on that more than majorly upgrading your lighting tech.) Given the move to UE5, this would be an amazing project for Epic to sponsor with tech assist on integrating MegaLights. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…fnpd It's amazing how unconstrained a lot of these people feel by... the absolutely basic rules of copyright all of us were repeatedly taught to be very careful around when we first started learning to code. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…rtt8 I mean, have salaries (and inflation) been trending down or up since 2007? Given dev budget is a proxy for staff costs, modern games are made by many more people getting paid closer to fairly (and in line with increased living expenses). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…gwm4 You alos had fps reusing flightsim engines to try and get the scope in taht era. Project IGI was late 2000 and ran on the 1997's JSF. Lots of scope for long sniper shots and going between distant locations but it was definitely pushing the limits of what was reasonable at the time. See also games using the Comanche voxel engine (Delta Force 1 came out in 1998). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…gwm4 I really want to one day know what the Ellison/Mitsoda/Cluney game would have been. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…39ss A mix of C with raw ASM. Constantly tottering on the edge of collapse but insisted upon by a lot of rhetoric around "return to tradition" and "back when programming was a real man's job with no hand-holding". npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…0kgd Yep, my desktop 32" QD-OLED 4K is... not sipping at the power even in SDR mode when the power is a bit lower. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…0kgd I did a massive audit of my flat when the war caused energy prices to spike here and it really did seem like moving to a laptop as my daily driver unless I actually needed a desktop (occasionally for the CPU, often meant I needed a 150W GPU to be running for the work) was a significant change that helped fund a more regular update to more current laptop tech. Things like an AM4 mobo with Ryzen desktop processor and desktop SSD are sipping away as much idle power as loaded laptop. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…k0gr Ye, my vague understanding is this is often Japanese patents that Nintendo's massive US legal operations then get copied over to there with a lot less scrutiny than you'd hope for. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…k0gr I made an offhanded comment recently that Nintendo were granted a patent for proximity chat in 2023 as a sign of just how totally broken any Japanese patents are (especially as Nintendo routinely edits the patents after they are granted to solidify them before they take legal action - something no sane system would ever allow) but of course I got the details wrong, it was actually 2024. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2025/03/new-nintendo-patent-hints-at-improved-voice-chat-on-switch-2 npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…j2mx Isn't this RE7 team? Led by Koushi Nakanishi once more . npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…0kgd Honestly, I'm almost impressed that AI automation (unless this is being done by someone with very low wages and a free NLE app) has apparently gotten good enough to source a bunch of almost relevant video clips, steal them, and then talk over them (both voice synthesis and the script). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…0kgd Was this thumbnail attached to a machine voice reading an LLM script because... starting to see a lot of AI slop that is SEO video farming people with weird bugs and not actually fixing any of their stuff. It's the YTification of the SEO AI slop websites that just farm any permutations of possible issue descriptions and then offer non-solutions because it's all LLM output. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…k0gr I'm trying to think of the last time I purchased a PC game that wasn't a glorified digital code. Civ games have just been a disc with a Steam install/packages for decades at this point. Destiny 2 was a literally cardboard "CD" with a Battle.net code on it. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…j2mx Exactly so. We live in dangerous times. We've had (2025 highlights) in the UK: npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…j2mx When it comes from on high, the government mandating it, all the more so. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…0kgd Rendering all those precious expensive pixels directly into the bin. 😱 npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…0t74 Always seems a bit odd that the US is parked off the coast of the Chinese mainland pointing at the 2nd biggest military spender and saying to the rest of the West, "watch out mate, it looks like he's about to steal your cookie!" https://metro.co.uk/2016/08/21/a-banker-a-worker-and-an-immigrant-cookie-joke-is-resonating-with-facebook-users-6081944/ npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…6dzk I would rather they not use AA in their early trailers for games like Zelda that did not ship with decent AA solutions. If Nintendo internal studios wish to not use AA in their games, they should sell them on that "raw" look. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…6dzk It would be really cool if Nintendo added the standard disclaimers to all their trailers telling you if this is real-time capture from an actual console playing the actual game as it currently exists, uses the same engine as the game but is offline rendered to video on a dev PC, or was purchased from a 3rd party CG house with,(at most) some imported assets that will also be in the game. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…0kgd The reason why all the villages here are being transitioned over, no matter how small, is the owner of the copper cable network doesn't way to pay to maintain their copper cables anymore (too expensive) & would rather strip all the metal out and sell it off. So they had to do a huge upgrade project (helped by government subsidies to ensure everyone had a low latency fast connection to the internet, so the government could stop printing paper forms & tell everyone to go online). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…0kgd My parents' DSL got upgraded over & over again. The thing is ADSL2+ at the length of copper cable the village is from the exchange... is not faster than the very original DSL. Tech got better but only for people on short copper loops. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…0kgd My parent's DSL got upgraded over and over again. The thing is ADSL2+ at the length of copper cable the village is from the exchange... is not faster than the very original DSL. Tech got better but only for people on short copper loops. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…slxn The "sales" getting somewhat worse (along with GamePass/PS+ rentals and regular freebies from Epic etc, which will beat any sale price) has really helped me to stop worrying about sales events and just look for stuff when I actually want to play it soon. Typically I look up historical sales prices and then set a notification for "next time on sale, if this goes back down to this price again or lower, buy it and enjoy immediately". npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…k0gr I mentioned elsewhere that the Xbox Series S comparison is the real magic line to me, because the image quality isn't always quite there with XSS but it's also the same tier to my eyes. As I said there: "Switch 2 is ~20W power draw. Series S is known to be ~80-85W when playing CP77. 25% of the power isn't a bad showing (if some tactical cut-backs vs XSS; it's certainly not visually running far far lower resolved resolution or other typical compromises vs home consoles)." npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…7vxc I still find it amazing that the world looks on as a country talks about the sanctity of their civilians and military being in harm's way half way around the globe (from home) to justify why they should slaughter yet more civilians and military who are sat in their own homes within their own state. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…j2mx It makes a lot more sense with TAAU because you're selecting a "real" resolution (ideally your monitor native) and then tweaking internal res based on your fps needs and tolerance to upscaling. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…slxn I feel like "why are we not both intuitively agreeing on this answer before we even need to think further" is still something I struggle with. But also I try to step back and work through the stages with people who are more detail oriented so don't jump steps as often; to understand it on a different level & avoid mistakes. I hope this deepens my understanding of different viable solutions. But I still find myself thinking "why are we not all doing the obviously correct thing?" npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…slxn Honestly, I assumed when a child (all those decades ago, as best as I can understand my previous mental state) that this was a universal experience. That everyone just naturally leaned on a black box in their head that spat out correct answers rather than needing to deconstruct problems too much (and that exposure to new info trained the black box). Until I reached the point where the black box no longer spat out correct answers to the University questions. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…6dzk Someone carelessly moving strong magnets through a warehouse of game box stock could do... tens of thousands of dollars (at least to retail value) of damage then? npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…j2mx Definitely won't be allowed under the previous NDAs I've signed. If I allow it to record and transmit the data off the laptop, I'll have breached the contract. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…t3wn Yep, but this mismatch appears to come from assuming that your piecewise sRGB is actually what monitors display - so when you mathematically convert it to an equivalent HDR space it's actually showing the incorrect dark values vs the ones you expected/saw on your SDR monitor. And if you use an HDR OLED to play, it is immediately obvious (and there are now mods whose only purpose is to reverse this mismatch and so recover black levels similar to how the SDR blacks look in practice). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch One thing I will say about MS repeatedly releasing games with raised black floors in HDR (when their games actually have a proper HDR mode at all) is it's making it very clear that gamedev needs to better understand the difference between a paper spec doc that says sRGB is piecewise gamma and common monitor configurations of using a "pure" 2.2 gamma. Also that you can't master your game on g2.2 SDR monitors and then assume the maths will work out when you take those same artist tweaks to HDR. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch "Conquering FidelityFX FSR4 – Enabling the pretty pixels on Linux through maniacal persistence" https://themaister.net/blog/2025/05/09/conquering-fidelityfx-fsr4-enabling-the-pretty-pixels-on-linux-through-maniacal-persistence/ npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch There is nothing you can do to convince me you care about technical rendering quality if you so clearly don't care about aliasing. We have literally "cheaper than free" AA solutions with the cutting-edge TAAU options. You get great AA and frame times go down vs not doing AA at all. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…3kf4 The game does drip-feed new outfits (without paying) and you can play through the story for free. It's just that outside of the open world platforming/puzzling then there are a lot of real-money stores to navigate (and as the video notes, the game is really not in a great place to jump into right now after the recent patch woes). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch Oops! https://youtu.be/jCRiq002enw npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…k0gr I once saw a http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Panasonic_PV-SD4090 (actually makes some sense, given the LS-120 format is a lot lot bigger). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…k0gr As far as I've read, only Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour (if they're charging money for it, it's a premium "title") is also totally confirmed 120fps. I suspect that Fortnite is going to want to offer a 120fps mode due to competitive shooter (and parity with other consoles) and Epic having a working demo of their UE5 tech working at such framerates on a low powered device to point at for others. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…slxn The eternal curse of wanting to play a game in the dev's native tongue (which, from the opening section I played, is pretty good) while knowing they also did a great job with the English localisation VO. 😬 npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…slxn And the reason for the "radio shows" is so they can now sell you MAX, a higher tier of subscription where you "live chat" with said AI voices because you're now used to their "characters" from the "shows". npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…6r7t Honestly, given that premium displays have moved onto 4K240 now (if not even higher refresh at the really premium end), I would strongly recommend going up to 4K120 (or 1440p120 & accepting a bit of extra rescaling - Switch 2 UI was shown to support 1440p) even if the NS2 (due to HDMI 2.0 limitations) can only do either 120Hz or 4K output not both. VRR would also be a huge plus for gaming feeling as smooth as possible (far more likely to be found on a 120Hz monitor). npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…k0gr €80 digital and $80 US. But 8980 yen (that's $60) in Japan. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @nprofile…j2mx The studio GPL'd the source in 2011 https://www.gamesindustry.biz/arkane-studios-patches-arx-fatalis-and-releases-source-code so as long as you get a cheap copy of the art assets (eg from GOG - it appears to currently be about $1.50 on sale) or already have it, you can see how far the community has come with modernising that engine with https://arx-libertatis.org/releases/1.2.1 npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @npub14yq…rfl3 I'm glad I'm not going mad. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @npub1aw2…8vv5 👵 Oh no, I wasn't prepared for hearing this! npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @npub1j6x…q4dz In the advanced view (may be at the top of the single column when you select it) then at the top right of the Notifications list is a settings icon (3 horizontal bars with squares on them - like a sound mixer). You can turn off "Play sound" for each type of notification individually so you avoid the audio feedback. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @npub1aw2…8vv5 I'm sure that some of what I do today can still be traced back to Torque Game Engine, or maybe even earlier engines that I was building mods on & how they exposed their internals via the modding API. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @npub1aw2…8vv5 Gotta be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmings_(video_game)#Expansions npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @npub10r2…w6yx Politicians where I am are all cheering inflation getting below 4%, meanwhile food inflation is still over 9% and some stores are selling basic items at well over twice the price they were a few years ago (many of which have similar lying labels like "price promise" or "great value"). ☹️ npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @npub1aw2…8vv5 I finally upgraded my old desktop from an overclocked 1070 to a 4070 (which I'm running at TDPdown to use less power on average than a stock 1070) and the upgrade in settings + performance is not staggering (it has been many years and the $550 4070 is not quite a direct price swap for the $400 1070 from 2016) but is very substantial. Almost modern games which maxed out a 1070 to hit a 60fps game limit now run at ~50W idling, no fans spinning up on the 4070. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @npub1aw2…8vv5 Really depends on the game and setting though, right? Put Alan Wake 2 into the mix and it's a very different story. Also note that the board power is almost halving there, in some cases your "upgrade" is working within the 125W window that laptop dGPUs operate within. npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa Dr Jess Birch @npub1aw2…8vv5 I'm reminded of the classic caveat on top of this, "lifetime only means the lifetime of the product so can be terminated at any point".
