HetareKing

@HetareKing@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Star Trek Resurgence and Across the unknown has bad graphics?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re low-budget games made by small teams and the subject matter limits the amount of stylisation they can do. Making photorealistic depictions of humans not look like toys actually takes a good amount of work, it’s not just about having the technology available to you.

  Also, Dramatic Labs (Resurgence) is made up of former Telltale employees, so they’re mostly experienced with stylised graphics, and before Across the Unknown, gameXcite only made a bunch of Asterix games, so this is their first time making a game that isn’t supposed to look like a comic book.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some of the weirdest/most niche genres (in your opinion) that you enjoyed watching?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you like Yakitate!! Japan, there’s a whole genre of competitive cooking manga and anime that includes Chuuka Ichiban!/Cooking Master Boy and Shokugeki no Souma/Food Wars.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some of the weirdest/most niche genres (in your opinion) that you enjoyed watching?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not quite a genre per se, but I often enjoy it when there’s an educational aspect to something. Cells at Work and Ruri Rocks would be obvious examples, but I would also include, say, Golden Kamuy or (manga) A Bride’s Story. Hobby and cooking anime tend to have elements of this too, Yuru Camp, How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift?, Sweetness and Lightning etc.

  So not really “edutainment” in the sense of trying to trick children into learning by wrapping it in something that looks like entertainment, and more something where you can imagine the creators pointing at their work and saying “Look! This part of the world exists too! Isn’t that neat?” with stars in their eyes, if that makes sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨California’s billionaires pour cash into elections as big tech seeks new allies⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Your points? You haven’t been making any! All you’ve been doing is treating the assertions that democracy is susceptible to corruption and anarchism less so as almost axiomatic, backing it with little more than “look at how bad things are!” (while ignoring all other factors that created the current state of things) and a need for an alternative, while being dishonest about what democracy is.

  All forms of governance, with no exceptions, require delegation. But as soon as you delegate, there is room for corruption, and therefore a need to prevent it. In other words, there is always going to be a minority of people mandated with authority and a need for mechanisms to ensure that they don’t abuse that authority. And any system of accountability that involves fewer people than the public, is going to be more corruptible than one that does involve the public. Even anarchism would, without a democratic core, inevitably decay into a dictatorship in all but name. By insisting that anarchism is distinct from democracy, you’re contributing to undermining the very thing you’re trying to achieve.

  If you’re trying to say that there are some very fundamental problems with current implementations of democracy, I wholeheartedly agree. But do put it that way, then. Democracy is entirely too important to be reduced to a lure for replies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨California’s billionaires pour cash into elections as big tech seeks new allies⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Arrow’s impossibility theorem just states that strictly speaking, there is no system within a particular subset of voting systems that is guaranteed to be immune from spoilers affecting the outcome. So not only are you using an overly strict definition of democracy that doesn’t even encompass all democratic systems implemented today, let alone all the ones that could be (which again, includes anarchism), but you’re disqualifying things based on not meeting a level of perfection that is unreasonable to expect of anything. It’s not like anarchism would be free of irrelevant factors affecting decisions; it would be a lot more affected by relationships between people and people’s standing in a community for one thing.

  None of the problems you point out are innate to democracy. The reason you associate them with democracy is not because of any inherent quality of democracy, but because of history. To simplify things a lot, the people who championed democracy back in the days of absolute monarchies and nobility also championed a liberal economy. At the time that would have made sense, since it was seen as more fair and meritocratic than an economy managed by the nobility. And compared to that it was, but ultimate it just ended up creating a new nobility in all but name.

  But just because they were wrong about one thing doesn’t mean they were wrong about everything. You can pick and choose ideas, and the anarchism you’re promoting is one such attempt.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨California’s billionaires pour cash into elections as big tech seeks new allies⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  We don’t actually know that it doesn’t work, because as I’ve said, all modern democracies have a particular flaw and we don’t know what happens when that flaw is fixed. I would also say that what you’re describing as “anarchism” is just another form of democracy; democracy is a set of principles, not a concrete system. And that anarchism would in practice not be as different from what we have today as you’re imagining. Instead of top-down it would be bottom-up, maybe (which has some problems of its own), but you still end up with elected representatives at higher levels of governance, because even with modern technology it would be impractical to have all the stakeholders of the Rhine, for example, do consensus-building in one big meeting. And those representatives would need to be held to account, just like today.

  I think it’s far more fruitful to look at the actual problems we’re having and what structurally is causing them and try to do something about those causes, instead of going on about what systems would or wouldn’t work, because there’s never going to be a perfect system, we’re always going to have to solve problems as they come. Especially when clearly the problem here isn’t the system itself, but the existence of power structures that exist outside of the system and are therefore not constrained by the system, allowing them to undermine the system. If solving that problem results in something that can be described as “socialism” or “anarchism”, so be it, but one thing it absolutely has to be, is a democracy. Because again, anything that is not a democracy is going to be inherently more susceptible to corruption (and therefore be ineffective at solving problems) than even a mediocre implementation of democracy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨California’s billionaires pour cash into elections as big tech seeks new allies⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s also one of the oldest (in the modern sense), an early adopter with little to no best practices to learn from. Not to mention that it kind of wandered into being a democracy through legal interpretations rather than being one by design.

  Anyway, you’re not looking at things structurally enough and missing the fundamental problem: excessive consolidation of power. By which I don’t mean the “big government” conservatives like to complain about, because governments don’t have to be monoliths, but simply what it sounds like: one entity having an excessive power at its disposal that it’s able to use at its own volition. To prevent that in government you need to not only design it in a way that not one part of it has an excessive amount of power (through separation of powers, independent institutions etc.), but also have mechanisms in place to keep it that way, because it’s ultimately people who are doing the execution. And any such mechanism that does not involve accountability to the public is doomed to failure, because that mechanism is, once again, executed by people, and the fewer people are involved, the easier it is to take over. In other words, it’s not simply that democracy can work, it’s the only thing that is structurally capable of working. Any other form of government is inherently more susceptible to corruption.

  However, implementation details matter and a flawed implementation can cause it to fail. And basically every modern democratic state has one big flaw: it has political democracy, but not economic democracy. As a result, there is very little constraining private actors from accumulating as much capital (=power) as they can, based on the naive assumption that market forces are enough to prevent them from accumulating too much. And so once enough capital has accumulated in once place, that power can be used to undermine political democracy as well. So the problem here isn’t that democracy doesn’t work, it’s that we don’t have enough of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Now why does the Tomodachi store staff got their heads like... this?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s kind of hard to tell because it’s a low-poly model at a low resolution, but it looks like they’re wearing the mask kuroko wear, who are stagehands in Japanese theater that you’re expected to pretend aren’t there while they move things around on the stage.

  This is from Tomodachi Life, right? I haven’t actually played it, but from what I know of the game, all the characters are Miis. So if the store staff were also Miis, there would be nothing to distinguish them from regular characters, so maybe they’re trying to avoid giving the impression that you can interact with them in the same way as you can with regular characters.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This "March for Billionaires" event in SF happening today⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Vilifying billionaires is popular. Losing them is expensive.”

  Certainly, in the same way that failing to catch a bank robber and allowing them to skip town is expensive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gaming market melts down after Google reveals new AI game design tool — Project Genie crashes stocks. (A.K.A . Investors panic because they don't understand what "real" videogames are)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I see a couple of major practical reasons why game (engine) devs are under no threat from this even if it gets better in the future:

  1. Scale. Like all things AI, this is not going to scale well. This doesn’t generate code, 3D models and textures, both making games and playing them requires running the model. So if you want a game to have a persistent environment where the world behind you doesn’t get regenerated into something different after taking 8 steps, the context window is going to get real large real fast. And unlike programmed games, you can’t make choices about what’s worth remembering and what isn’t, what can be kept on persistent storage and is only loaded when it becomes relevant etc., because it’s all one big, opaque blob of context, generated by a black box; you either have it remember everything or it becomes amnesiac in a way that makes it useless. Memory availability also isn’t increasing at a rate where this becomes a non-issue any time soon.

  2. Control. Manipulating the world though a text prompt gives a lot of control, but it’s also very course. It’s easy enough to tell it that you want a character that can run and jump, but how fast does it run? Does it accelerate and decelerate or start and stop instantly? Does it jump in a fixed arc or based on the running speed and duration of the jump button being pressed? How far and how high? You’re going to run in the limits both of what you can convey and what the language model will understand pretty quickly. And even when you can get it to do exactly what you want, it would have been faster and more practical to manipulate values directly or use a gizmo place things. But there’s no way to extract and manipulate those values, because again: big, opaque blob of context.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nazis Have the Dumbest Star Trek Opinions | Jessie Gender⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  …? We’re not the producers of the shows, how is that any of our concern? They’ve got plenty of bean counters at Paramount, if a show isn’t hitting their financial goals, they’ll either cancel or retool it. All we can do is watch the shows that get made and express and discuss our opinions about it, there’s no point in the fans engaging in bean-counting themselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nazis Have the Dumbest Star Trek Opinions | Jessie Gender⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  MAGA is an American thing, but there are plenty of people sharing their dumb opinions outside of the US.

  Also, MAGA nutters aren’t actually less intelligent than anyone else, just cowardly and resentful. They don’t want to think about what’s causing the problems in the world, because then they might have to reconsider parts of their worldview and that’s scary. So they want someone to just swoop in and fix the problems without fundamentally changing anything, or failing that, gives them the feeling they have permission from society to lash out against anything they consider “abnormal” and is therefore a potential cause of the problems. And so they’ll resent anyone who criticises them for that or tries to undermine that feeling of societal permission they want or already have.

  But not wanting to think about certain things is not the same as being unable to, and any intellectual capacity not spent on actually thinking about real problems and how to solve them can then be spent on how to create the impression that their opinion is dominant and therefore they’re not doing anything wrong.

  Anyway, the point is that while there are definitely legitimate criticisms to be had about the newer Star Trek shows, your metric isn’t very useful for demonstrating that. To begin with, why hide behind numbers at all? It just makes it look like you’re trying convince people that your criticisms carry more weight because the world agrees with you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bomberman has a lore?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the story reboots every few games, so it’s not like say, the Mega Man games where every game is part of one big continuity. There’s a setting and recurring characters that’s built up over the years and that’s about it; everything else is specific to that game or subseries. Basically, the Bombermen (M/F), who may or may not be siblings, are some kind of space police from the planet Bomber and they have to fight a villain, usually but not always Bagura/Buggler, to protect the peace in the galaxy.

  There is a bit of a rabbit hole (puddle, really) you can go into where some of the earlier games have a connection to the Lode Runner games, because Hudson Soft did the Famicom port of Lode Runner. It boils down to that Lode Runner used to be Bomber Man. This connection hasn’t really been relevant for a long time, but the fact that Lode Runner is a Galactic Commando may have influenced the current setting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Urusei Yatsura: old and new?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve seen both in full. I’d say that the new series is never as bad as the old series at its worst, but also never as good as the old series at its best. As someone who like Urusei Yatsura, the new series was a decent watch, but it hasn’t replaced the old series for me.

  My biggest complaint about the new series is that it never seems to really manage to convey that sense of chaos that’s central to Urusei Yatsura’s comedy as well as the old one. My second biggest complaint is that untz! untz! untz! BGM they like to play during fast-paced scenes (especially early on) that to me doesn’t really match up with the show’s timing.

  I also generally prefer the old voice acting. Now, the new series has an all-star cast, and they’re all great voice actors that do a good job embodying the characters (though Kamimiya Hiroshi as Ataru took a while for me to get used to), but I think the old cast was more willing to go all the way for the sake of comedy, whereas the new cast seems more careful about walking the tightrope between exaggerated expression and breaking character. This comparison video someone made does a good job of demonstrating this, I think. That said, I can definitely imagine some people preferring the more naturalistic acting of the new cast compared to the more theatrical and stylised performance of the old.

  I do like what the new series did with Lum’s hair. A kind of combination between her iconic green hair from the anime and the oil-like refraction her hair is implied to have in the manga. And just in general, the colour palette is very pleasant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That sounds more like tinkering around the edges to me. Whipping companies like Twitter into behaving, while it absolutely needs to happen, won’t fundamentally change anything about the dependency of Europe to those companies and the pressure the US can exert through that dependency.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  “But the plans were on display…”
  “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
  “That’s the display department.”
  “With a flashlight.”
  “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
  “So had the stairs.”
  “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
  “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Favourite Pokemon⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  She recently evolved into Hatterene, which was… quite a shift in character.
  Liko’s pretty imposing now, though, with two humanoid Pokemon taller than her.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nvidia GeForce Now’s Time Limit Will Stop Gamers After 100 Hours Each Month⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure I entirely buy that. For cloud gaming to be any good at all, you need a high-speed, low-latency internet connection. Yes, nowadays having an internet connection is pretty much a requirement in the industrialised world and even someone of lesser means will probably have one good enough to watch streaming video at a decent enough quality (unless they live in the middle of nowhere), but that’s not good enough. So with the expensive internet connection and the monthly subscription, cloud gaming doesn’t strike me as a very economical.

  We’ve also been living in a period of diminishing returns when it comes to visual fidelity improving as hardware power does for a while now, so you can buy older, more affordable hardware and still have games look great on them. Meanwhile, I don’t think someone who insists on being able to see the surroundings accurately reflected in every window and puddle is going to accept the compression artifacts and latency of cloud gaming.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Alternate Ending [Death Note]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It seems unlikely to me that what your legal name is, is what matters. If it did, that would mean you couldn’t kill anyone who is not legally documented anywhere using the Death Note, which seems like an odd restriction for a supernatural notebook to have (there’s also the matter of people who are documented under different names in different jurisdictions or with different spellings etc.).

  So I imagine it’s about what either the writer or the writee acknowledges as their name. However, one of the rules of the Death Note is:

  This note will not take effect unless the writer has the person’s face in their mind when writing his/her name. Therefore, people sharing the same name will not be affected.

  This suggests to me that it’s the writer’s cognition that matters, meaning this wouldn’t work because the writer would still acknowledge someone’s dead name as their actual name.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Original ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’ Studio Gainax Officially Shutters After 42 Years⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s still kind of sad, but at the same time, long overdue. Gainax had been a shell of its former self for quite a while, with basically all the people who made it what it was having gone elsewhere (Khara, Trigger) a long time ago and what was left being a miserable pile of debt, tax evasion and dubious IP management.

  Speaking of IP, I wonder what’s going to happen to the Daicon Film IP. It’s impossible to make money out of, so I guess it’ll end up at Khara, given Anno is there?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baby boomers want to axe property taxes. Millennials and Gen Z would pay for it.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Most countries don’t do the absurd funding the local public school using the district’s property taxes thing, but they still have property taxes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2025, Week 47]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think there’s a 50% chance we went to the same theater, because I also went to see The Colors Within yesterday. I agree, great film. It’s interesting to me how Japanese entertainment tends to do a better job at telling a story where Christianity plays a role without being utterly obnoxious about it. Or maybe I’m just less suspicious about a Japanese creator’s intentions when it comes to this.
  Anyway, I did notice a slight plot hole, maybe?
  

  spoiler
  

  Early in the film, Totsuko suggested she would get in trouble with the school if they found out she was fraternising with a boy, but at the end Rui participated in the performance at the school festival without any problems.
  

  
  But well, it’s not that big of an issue.

  I already went to see Chainsaw Man a couple of weeks ago, which was great fun. I did like the first season quite a lot, but I enjoyed this different approach as well. Still a weird experience to go to the mainstream cinema and see an anime film in a packed house, though. That would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Episode] This Monster Wants to Eat Me • Watashi wo Tabetai, Hitodenashi - Episode 6 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think I’ve solved the main conundrum of this show. Hinako wants Shiori to eat her, but Shiori first wants Hinako to want to live, so that she’s more delicious. But if that happens, Hinako won’t want to be eaten anymore. Also, she’s worried about leaving Miko behind without a friend. Then the solution is simple: all Hinako has to do once she wants to live again is eat Shiori so that she becomes immortal (because of eating mermaid flesh). After that, she’s pretty much a youkai herself, so Miko probably won’t want to eat her anymore (at least not in that way).

  MikoHina lives on forever, Shiori has become a beautiful martyr for the cause, it all works out!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anime studio bankruptcies and closures continue to rise for third consecutive year in Japan⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you go to the official Japanese website of a show and look up where you can watch it, almost every time you’re presented with a list of close to two dozen streaming services. The exception is when one particular service (always an American one like Netflix or Amazon Prime) has exclusivity rights to it, but they’re the minority.

  Exclusivity deals aside, this seems to me like a much better setup, at least from a consumer perspective. Shows are for the most part not dotted across different services, but there’s no market consolidation. And even if something isn’t on the service you’re subscribed to, it will probably be available on a service where you can just rent an individual show or episode instead of having yet another subscription. And I imagine that if they’re not competing on hostage-taking, that would mean they’re competing more on price and quality of service instead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Episode] This Monster Wants to Eat Me • Watashi wo Tabetai, Hitodenashi - Episode 4 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting how they used the lighthearted side-story to prevent complete tonal whiplash with the practically denpa song ED.
  Also, Fairouz Ai can really draw, wow.
  sOiwHNJrKf5Ar1l.jpg

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[News] Frieren Werewolf game on sale Dec 18⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I imagine it’s also because the werewolves in this version of the game appear to be demons (which actually makes a lot of sense), so it also depicts the two sides in the game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2025, Week 42]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Steins;Gate gets quite dark and serious, but it starts out pretty goofy, so if you’re trying to avoid comedy it would leave a pretty bad first impression. I don’t think I would recommend pushing yourself through the earlier parts to get to the later parts either, because you do need a certain attachment to the characters to appreciate the latter.

  Vinland Saga, from what you’ve written, seems more up your alley. In a similar vein (bloody serious historical fiction) I also recommend Orb.

  Other than that, Pluto and Monster, both thrillers based on manga by Urasawa Naoki, are very straight-laced.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Try the other side maybe⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Actually, I wonder how light would interact with something that is infinitesimal in width, but does have a significant amount of depth. Have any experiments of this kind been done with graphene or something?

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Episode] Let’s Play • Let’s Play: Quest Darake no My Life - Episode 1 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s weird, it feels kind of like watching a Japanese dub of an English-language show, which I haven’t felt even with other adaptations of works originally in English. I guess it’s because it also uses the visual language of the comic? Pretty luxurious cast, though.

  Anyway, the writing isn’t very good. A bunch of things just don’t seem to make any sense; the dumb incident at the office it sends half the episode or so on, the whole deal with the rating of the protagonist’s game by the streamer. Still not sure what the show is about, either, but I don’t think I have the motivation to find out.