Holy hell. I have some bad GameStop trade-in stories, and that’s just from taking in normal trade-ins. I can’t even imagine the clusterfuck this would be. I’d be calling in sick.

A small AAA production in 2000, maybe. E33’s was only a fraction of a small AAA budget today.

TGA calls it “a game made outside the traditional publisher system,” which fits. I’d agree that we’re looking at wildly different scales of production in the same category, though.

Good showing for E33 but I’m not convinced it’s a shoo-in for GotY. It’s a media-run event and the press adored Hades 2. Plus there’s always the Kojima factor and it would be the first time TGA’s ever given it to a studio’s first game.

Had a solid week. The no-lookup reading is starting to feel almost cozy, and it’s giving me a ton of confidence. I feel like if I can just get on the other side of these intermediate grammar structures and boost my overall comprehension rate just a tick, I’m going to unlock so much content I want to read and listen to. Already the textbook is feeling so much easier than it did a couple months ago.

I can see vocab and speed being more the focus soon, and I can definitely handle that. Here’s hoping!

This article didn’t even go into the service disruptions Perplexity has had the past couple of weeks. In short, the best thing Perplexity does is give you access to multiple models at once, but frequently when you try to select one for a specific thread, it will throw an error and (quietly) kick the response to your prompt to a backup.

Perplexity’s calling it a technical issue but it looks more like throttling, especially considering API access to Claude is expensive and that’s the one that is having the most “technical issues.” I would have already gone elsewhere if my sub wasn’t free, and if it continues to be this bad, I might end up going elsewhere anyway.

In terms of content moderation? Not in the least. Discord is extremely laissez-faire about it. They intervene when compelled to by law enforcement. I can’t speak to the large server experience, but we’ve run our server for nearly six years and not a single member of staff has ever spoken with anyone at Discord. Every single one of the moderation tools we use are third party.

As a practical matter, Discord provides the communication infrastructure for us and that’s literally it. Irrelevant to the topic at hand. We could pack up and move it all to Matrix tomorrow and our content moderation experience would be just as centralized (that is to say, it would not be).

I don’t think it’s necessarily true that it’s so overly onerous that it must lead to centralization. I’m part of staff on a medium-sized Discord server and we have more than enough coverage to handle objectionable content. As another example, Fediverse instances here have proactively established rules and norms for NSFW content that ensures the communities keep running, and most are still going a few years later after the Reddit exodus exploded their populations.

It absolutely does make scaling up more expensive, but I’ve gone from a fairly libertarian stance on this to now asserting proper community moderation has become part of the social responsibility corps have now when making these spaces grow to have massive reach. And yes, I don’t think big corps do enough on this topic, and it’s another inequity because it’s really starting to look like new organizations are going to have to be more responsible for what content they allow. But I’m all for coming down hard on the big corps. Everyone got by just fine in the 90’s and 2000’s when they had much, much larger customer support/moderator staffs. “It’s too expensive” is the same garbage excuse used for other forms of enshittification today while these platforms make money hand over fist.

Yeah, my phone has productivity timers, my note taking app, temperature controls for my home office, not to mention 2FA and other tools I need. I don’t see myself leaving it in the kitchen.

That said, reading this did made me think to turn off email push notifications. Fortunately I’m not in a position where I have to reply to emails immediately, so I like the idea of scheduled email time. Honestly don’t know why I didn’t think of that.

You won’t find any questions on the CES about, say, whether the respondent approves of capitalism. So yes, this analysis was likely done with the American Overton window in mind.

Thanks for this!

This is leading to speculation that it’s going to be a while before we see the next new Trails game. Will be nice for English-speaking players to finally be caught up, but now we’re just waiting along with the rest of the world…

If you’re still playing it, feel free to message me for tips on the Fediverse or on Discord. I love talking TO.

Difficulty definitely starts picking up chapter 4, so you’ll have to start finding creative ways to work within the level cap. Gear crafting is one of them.

A lot of the sports subs’ better content is instant reaction. Harder to fake. The only participation I still have on reddit is a similar community for a large video game. It’s more like a chatroom than a message board. Small wonder I spend way more time talking on Discord than anywhere these days.

I tried it when I had a free month of Xbox Game Pass and ended up bouncing off it within an hour. Really didn’t help that my favorite character, Kasumi, was shuffled off to DLC.

Something’s that’s easy to forget is barely half of US households were even online by the 360’s release. Under a third had broadband. Even the Nintendo Power hotline ran until 2010.

I sold thousands of book guides at Gamestop, and the retailers also pushed them because they were higher margin than the games themselves. Yes, back then, the gaming enthusiasts knew GameFAQs was the place for info, but the mass market? The vast majority still got their info from guides and magazines, or word-of-mouth.

It’s like social media adoption. The mass market didn’t jump in until a generation later.

Even just revising my guide for the new Final Fantasy Tactics remaster is way too big a project for me right now. It’s amazing how much work it is.

Woo, nice! I’ve had a lot of ups and downs myself lately, so always good to hear about the wins.

I’ve shifted my focus to automaticity. The listening practice has continued to be a frustrating disaster, and I decided to drop the focused practice and change gears towards reading–a lot–at an easy level to cement comprehension of upper beginner/lower intermediate grammar structures in my head first. The idea is once easier content becomes more automatic in my head, I’ll have more bandwidth for the additional parallel brain processing power I need when the input is by ear. I’ve already gone through an entire graded reader book which is leading me to think I might have a different problem of being short on content. That’s a better problem to have, I suppose! It should also be easier to find reading than listening material. I also ordered a Japanese folktales book at my local library that I tried a few months ago. It was a tick too difficult for me back then, so it’ll be interesting to see how that goes later this week.

Automaticity is a really interesting concept, and it applies to the broader skill as well. The past week in general, I’ve found my study to be less draining, now that I’ve stopped planning and started doing the reps. I’m not holding my schedule in my head, or the processes, any of that anymore. Just sitting at my desk and knowing what to do, where my tools are. It gives me the energy to put more time into it.

Oh, I definitely didn’t have the money for it myself 😅 My local library came through on this one. Usually it takes them more like six months for me to get new releases.

This is where I’ve been at on it. On top of that, the stuff that’s not directly exploiting human actors (like drawn or animated content) or pushing their boundaries is still coming out of studios that aren’t exactly known for healthy work/life balance. To say nothing of the kind of fetish content that might come out of those places too, which surely takes its own toll on creators.

If we can offload all of that potential trauma onto computers, I’m all for it.

Didn’t finish any JRPGs this month (again!). I’d actually been going at a decent rate the past few years, finishing around 9-10 JRPGs in a year, but I don’t think I’m hitting that mark again. In October I got sucked into Hades 2, which is probably going to be my personal game of the year.

Right now I’m playing Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, having a good time overall and settling into a very familiar old rhythm with it. Playing through on Tactician difficulty, I just finished Chapter 2. I’ve been frustrated by it here and there, but I did want a challenge on replay #15 or whatever the hell it is for me at this point. A couple of minor changes caught me off guard, like how the best/worst zodiac compatibility works now. That’s going to force me to rethink my Riovanes Castle strategy.

Speaking of which, I can’t believe they omitted the in-battle zodiac reference chart. At first I thought they’d color coded, which seemed like a great addition…until I realized it was just cosmetic. Overall, the UIs are very thin compared to the earlier versions. You used to be able to hit SELECT and get info on literally every single part of the UI, and that’s all gone now. I was pretty surprised by this considering how it looked in early screenshots. Looks pretty, but functionally, it’s a big downgrade.

That said, there are good additions. The revamped poaching system is a nice QoL upgrade. The way job info is presented now should be great to help out new players. However, the voice acting is the standout: it is phenomenal. It’s a step up from Tactics Ogre Reborn, which was already largely good; I think Creative Studio 3 might have the best dubbing team in the business right now. Ramza, Agrias, Milleuda, and Folmarv have been great so far. It’s funny, a long time ago I used to think Chapter 1 was on the weak side, but it hit so damn hard this time. That part of the story is just a fantastic stretch of the game now, wire to wire.