That’s what started me on stopping of purchasing of EA games. It was also made easy by how mediocre EA games have been. Also I tried Unbound on game pass when I had an Xbox. I couldn’t last long. It’s writing is so vanilla for a street racing game. Characters sound like they should be in yoga classes rather than doing anything illegal

Quit Ubisoft because of Uplay. That’s consistently been worse than EA account stuff for like 15 years straight

A an 8GB RX 7600 is around $300. Add everything else and $700 sounds about right. May not sell high volumes but there’s got to be dozens of manufacturers making minipcs. It’s still a full on computer. It’s be a good value workstation. My gaming PC is my photo and video editor

Seems a decade too late. Mobile/ChromeOS laptops were solid a decade ago since cheap hardware sucked. Dual core Ultrabooks and far worse entry level with spinning disk storage. Now the worse you can get is like an Intel N100 with a SSD. Solid. MiniPC with an N100 is like $200 now since the price hikes. Don’t let desktop become captured by these overly managed mobile operating systems. Glorified web browsers

I’m hoping they can revive Star Fox Adventure. Next Zelda, I think it needs something new to it. I got tired of it way faster than Breath of the Wild. Too much of the same

Classic Civilization. Buy it when there’s been numerous expansions and it’s on sale for it with the most important early expansions for less than $20. I’m pretty certain I remembered first year people hating V, VI, and now VII. Another year or two and it’ll be good. I just started playing VI last year

I wonder if Nintendo will manage 2 main Zelda games for the gen considering how long it took for Tears of the Kingdom and how recent that was. Mostly want to see how the next Xenoblade looks

Still waiting to see if they did any upgrades on PC like adding ultrawide support

Switch has Mario Strikers and Mario Party. There certainly are indie games just as good, but people love playing Nintendo characters just as much as the gameplay. Someday I’ll get more friends into local multiplayer PC games. That may be a case of using a Nintendo Switch emulator regardless

At the price point of the Q30, for ANC, they were at least a year ago the best value. Maybe still today. The more expensive ones like Q45 and Space One Pro are supposed to be a lot more durable.

You can also go the IEM route. Very good for relative cheap. You’re taking them outdoors so no open or semi open backs. Generally in reviews you see how neutral they’re described and clean they sound across the sound spectrum and then when you get them, use your audio players equalizer to fit your wants

Indoors I use open back headphones. Outdoors I use wireless ANC headphones or ANC IEMs. Sure ANC sound quality isn’t as good as plain dedicated wired closed or open back headphones, but they’re still sound good. And if you’re not going to be buying numerous headphones, maybe an ANC wireless headphone is what you want again. Just this time more premium. Like the previous years on sale Sony. Or the $150+ Anker Soundcore. Edifier WH950NB Gen 2. Yesteryears on sale Bose quiet comfort. Sennheiser Momentum.

You can read/listen to reviews for each how they sound with ANC off and the phone app quality

Also for wired non ANC headphones, I’m used to buying used. It’s always worked fine for me. Headphones with removable cables

The Element application is solid now. Still I think it’d be a rough transition for most discord users. But more users probably means more potential for developer interest

For movies, look up what Alexa Mini’s can do. The very recent past dominant Mini had a 3424x2202 resolution. Most movies shot digitally (most in the last like 20 years) were shot at below 4k. Many had special effects done at 1080p. When movie theaters switched to digital projection, most used 2048x1080 projectors and the shift towards 4k projectors wasn’t that long ago.

The Alexa Mini LF can do 4448x3096. The Sony Venice 8k camera is a few years old only. There’s a huge amount of loyalty to Arri, particularly the lenses. Panasonic and Z-Cam have 8k cameras. But like Arri, I’d bet most filmmakers would choose the 4k/6k cameras

Even the ones that opt for the 8k cameras, there very likely would be lower resolution cameras in use as well like the Alexa Mini or a 4k/6k Z-Cam or like a Sony FX3. Including most nature documentaries. Unless it’s just wide canvases, you’re not going to be mounting the 8k cinema cameras all over the place like you would cheaper small cameras like an FX3. Plus stuff like shooting at 240fps 12bit color for slow motion playback. I’m betting that none of the cinema cameras support that at 8k. So back down to probably 1080p. Don’t know the status of 4k240 out there. That’s a lot of bandwidth, storage, processing power, and cooling needed

Then there’s 70mm filming. The vast majority of productions cannot do that. There’s a lot of unused footage that goes into filmmaking. If you look at the size of a roll of 70mm film used for projecting a feature length film, it’s huge. It’s boutique equipment. There’s not a ton of cinema 70mm cameras and lenses to rent. Camera operators. Labs to get them scanned for digital editing. 70mm will always be limited in adoption especially now that digital is the dominant form of cinematography

So 8k will for many many years be the land of upscaling and for native, old video games. Videos, I guess two 8k60 cameras rigged together for VR will lead the way along with an occasional movie/documentary. No guarantees that the movie theater will show it in 8k though. It’s taken a very long time for 4k projection to approach standard for theaters in places like the US let alone poorer countries or countries with less mega theater chains that could more comfortably afford the upgrade

Same song and dance since at least Windows me. Overtime it keeps getting more bloated and focused on advertising. If you got to use Windows at work, it is what it is but at home, get over it and switch to Linux already. It’s very clear that all the complaining of the world has little chance to ever get Windows to be what people want it to be

Terribly need degoogled android to become popular and/or a normal Linux distribution phone to become popular so that normal Linux market share couldn’t be ignored

Mildly entertained how fast it went from a bill to give the executive power to designate applications as security threats and ban them to then it being abused. A lot of folks saying the EFF and ACLU were wrong this time and then the EFF and ACLU being right less than 2 years after the bill passing. And it’s not like TikTok has been around all that long. 2021 all the pearl clutching about China’s influence ruining the youth just look at the zoomers entering the workforce - the app was popular for like 2 years at that point. Everyone people were complaining about were raised on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter. Not only that, TikTok was about the only social media platform that leftist were pretty good at compared to right wingers. The ridiculous dichotomy of leftist supporting a bill to ban TikTok while TikTok was core to the lefts grassroots outreach and networking. So now TikTok is right wing owned and Instagram and YouTube are still the same kind of content that people blamed TikTok for and have had for much longer.

That bill in 2024 was a Democratic Party self own especially when the bill wasn’t even TikTok specific. Somehow saw masked plain clothes federal agents kidnapping people in 2020 to pretty much no consequence and decided in 2024, the federal government won’t abuse this bill

I just got the update this morning. Looked kind of ugly but I can manage. When I touch the screen to see the time, that digital clock font they went with looks real ugly to me. Opened up the phone app to see a missed call and hit the button to try the new unified phone layout experience and switched straight back to the classic layout

I do not follow apple update news so this was pretty jarring

Something about this series where the games seem budget for their era but has great polish. Good music. The stories are fun entertaining adventures. The characters are lovable. Gameplay is fun to me and iove the music. I’m impressed with how the games on PC have ultrawide support. Eventually I’ll get to 8-10 where everyone hypes up 8 as best in series. And all the modern games are easy enough for pretty much anyone to run on cheap hardware. Great series

I’ve been playing the older Ys games. Ys seven and back. These games are great. I didn’t play a single Ys game until last year. No nostalgia for them. Practically no JRPG nostalgia either as I was a Diablo/Baldurs Gate type gamer 20+ years ago. Now I’m eating up all these old JRPG games

It is pretty great for shrinking the filesize of my photos. It’s a part of the PDF standard now. It’ll get great support across the board eventually. Still pretty early in adoption

I know people that work in documentary film making, will eventually be incredibly annoying/expensive to practice in the US though it is always possible to rent gear/hire an operator with their own gear in other countries when filming outside of the US

That’s the hard part. People with advanced degrees or deep in the arts are used to regular praise. Don’t respond well when you don’t get excited for the things they say. One thing is to focus criticism onto how the upper social classes of leftist movements speaks they get used to taking non-academic criticism again from political colleagues.

Right now it’s the lower class that gets scolded for language and behavior that doesn’t fit with upper class language. The opposite should be it. The upper class either needs to step aside, adapt their speech like they’ve demanded everyone else for decades, or get ignored or scolded. The getting ignored part is already happening. The scolding seems to be increasing to me as the lessening of respect that academia seems to get now (not that academia should be disrespected but that the default to following academics seems to be in decline)

I’ve gotten used to calling out peers for being out of touch and for getting in fights with their imagination rather than just asking people at like a town hall in the poorer parts of town or a food bank what their concerns are or cashiers. It’s great. 10 years ago they were certain they were doing things well. Now today I’m finally seeing my academia friends thinking saying BIPOC and Latinx (two terms lifted from academic papers) isn’t resonating with minority communities or most white people outside of small university groups. The majority outside of universities have way more basic needs concerns compared to university students.

Telling people to go to therapy and travel more and go to music festivals isn’t working. Yoga, meditation, etc are not solutions that display urgency. Wellness rhetoric is weak. People that suggest these need to be shoo’ed away. The first time I heard bipoc said was at a fundraising event. I have never heard it said outside of political events that has significant speakers in attendance like local politicians, university professors, leaders of major nonprofits. I never hear it said out in the minority majority neighborhood I live in. Pressure the leftist upper class to speak the language of the common person by pulling them down into the lower class communities or push them aside by ignoring them and encouraging others to do so as well. If they want a career in politics either directly in government or in community organization groups, they better learn the culture and speech of the community

It’d be good if after speaking, like at those 50501 marches, canvassing the crowd for response. Do you remember anything people on the stage said? What are your pressing concerns locally? Did the speakers today address those? After today do you know where you can continue involvement in days between marches? Do you know when local town halls with local politicians occur and where? Are you active in any boycotts? Are you a part of a group in these boycotts? Did anything today bring you into membership of a grassroots political organization that you weren’t before?

If we aren’t being affective, we need to know as soon as possible.

Every bit of communication we do is an opportunity to also hear whether we’re even communicating well rather than relying on if the crowd clapped or cheered. The crowd almost always does once some starts to do so. We should constantly be optimizing our speech for how people respond in understanding and action

Also telling the higher class leftist who make fun of conservatives for being poorer on average to stop being a dick. Plenty of poor people are leftist. Or for being born in a non-destination state. Nothing wrong being born in South Dakota or wanting to live in South Dakota. Same idea for other countries. Plenty of conservatives are conservative because that’s what they were born into and are surrounded by. Either provide an avenue to be a leftist or an ally in benefit, not fully in ideology, or shut up and keep the elitism to themselves.

Sure it offends upper class leftists to be called out of touch and be ignored. Doesn’t matter, they’re a very small portion of the movement that by and large just vote and socialize among other champagne socialist. Their contribution is small. Better to alienate the well off upper class leftist than alienate the poorer leftists and middle swing voters that barely follow politics for whatever reason. There’s way more that aren’t upper class leftists

Local politics over national. Local town halls with city council members have plenty of unpolished but passionate speakers that are desperate in their situation. These are the people that should be getting positive reinforcement and encouragement. Someone that gets potholes filled because of their pestering city council members has displayed more political willpower and ingenuity than someone who got a bunch of college people to hold a moment of silence for all the people who’s voices that aren’t being heard

Should have accomplishable goals short dated and long. Short ones can be simple community work like cleaning up litter and volunteering at local community centers. Organizing fundraisers for random children activities that kids do. Associating regularly with counseling centers. Food drives. Clothing drives that deliver to people directly rather than pass on to the mostly faceless very large established non-profits. People should see the results of their efforts.

Like a friend of mine has been working as a councilor for ~18-20 year olds in a poor neighborhood. Often broken and/or impoverished homes. Got a friend that coaches sports. Others that work I restaurants and enjoy showing people how to break down whole chickens, fish, beef, etc which people love to learn especially the budget conscious. I don’t get why there’s such a strong separation between social workers and political organizations. Political organizations should be doing community volunteer type work on the regular to constantly be in touch with community member and potentially find people that would be great in helping plan, organize, and communicate with the public and that should be a part of their whole mission. On their website. In their brochure. In their marketing. Fundraising and paying for lobbyist is not a very engaging organization to keep people active

Don’t discourage anger from poorer people. In the art/politics/academia world, everyone is too sedated and decorum too required. That sort of attitude does not make poorer people feel like there’s urgency for them.

Shits hard but got to keep trying. Right now my attempts are focused on supporting local needs and trying to get the university/art people to stop trying to culture police people who aren’t even doing anything bad really and stop making people feel like they’re greedy for being more concerned about their finances rather than whatever the current social cause academia is hot these days

My thoughts are based around about 25 years of being the guy that grew up in an abusive poor household but managed to make it to college and into middle to upper-middle class social and political groups and being repeatedly frustrated with how much of a class divide there is on the left and how the upper portion dominates over the lower and it being really ineffective including the Obama years. We’ve been losing more and more of the non-college educated voter for decades and keep acting like the solution is to get more and more people a college degree. Now less people want to go to college and 2024 college students didn’t vote as lopsided left like they did in the past. Hoping demographics will save us is too passive