I’m not musically inclined at all but seeing as how you’re the second one to mention music I’m definitely going to try it. I’ve tried so many other things to help with my listening that a totally different mode might be just the thing.

So, podcasts have been my primary vector for attacking this and it’s been brutal. It’s possible I’ve been overthinking it and maybe I should just struggle through as you say, use speed controls, pause frequently. I was doing the following:

1. Take a small segment (4-5 minutes)
2. Actively listen three times
3. Read a transcript
4. Listen a fourth time and shadow the segment out loud

Supposedly language learning research backs up this method, but maybe it was just overkill and now that I’ve done a few more months of adding vocab and grammar practice, I should just try bulk input again to build up input automaticity and simply pause/rewind where necessary.

The dopamine hit is a real thing!

I’ve barely touched songs as my comprehension is even worse, but this is an interesting approach. I’ll definitely try it. I don’t think I’ve ever tried an audiobook in Japanese of a story I know. Both seem like a good idea.

Yeah, and I also have been supplementing my reading with recorded audio whenever possible, too. My listening skill keeps lagging behind, though.

I wish dedicated listening didn’t frustrate me so much.

That’s more or less where I sit on it. I think there’s a way to create a personal shopping assistant that would save people time, but the problem is I don’t make enough money to have a comfortable enough margin for the error rate it would certainly have, to speak nothing of whether it would find the prices I’d be satisfied with. I don’t know how many people are in affordable enough living situations where using this to save time would even be responsible.

And that’s assuming the agent is working in the best interests of the user, which we all know won’t be how this works. In general, I don’t know if I’ll ever be comfortable with agentic AI spending my money without it being codified into law that AI agents must have a provable fiduciary duty to end users. As far as I know, no one’s even talking about that.

Just finished the story demo. Really impressed with it, both gameplay and story.

It took me forever too. Doesn’t help that I insist on playing these games turn-based.

Yeah, I’m planning on leap-frogging this time for this very reason. I tend to get GPU-bottlenecked more often than not, so hopefully whatever GPU I pick up next year will extend my system long enough for a little more sanity to return.

If you know how to replace a CMOS battery, you know how to disable a fan. And even if you don’t, it’s not gonna bite your finger off 😂

It’s 100% cultural, a combination of generational trauma (“I did it so you have to”) and pressure from upper management leading to performative effort. We now know from productivity research that overtime periods in game dev get diminishing–and even negative–returns pretty quickly.

The game’s press kit has a few hints. Sounds like a similar RPG style as Larian’s last few games, the question is what kind of combat.

I finished Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles. I’m a nerd for this game in a particular so I have many nits to pick, but I was happy with it overall. That said, I don’t recommend the hard difficulty; I didn’t get much out of it.

The voice acting, though. Wow. Chapter 1 hit hard this time, especially Milleuda’s and Ramza’s performances. Joe Pitts is excellent in this role, and you can really feel now how much of a turning point the Plateau was for the character. I appreciated the additional dialogue too, although it got oversold in the marketing. Pretty sure most of the script size increase Matsuno was talking up ended up in menus.

Not anticipating playing anything in the genre. I’m sucked into Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader currently, and I’ve got Trails Beyond the Horizon next month anyway.

Edit: scratch that, after seeing a recommendation I ended up picking up Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch to play in Japanese. I’ll be playing a little here and there.

In my experience this is the biggest knock against it, and it can be fatal for multiplayer games. I had to wait several days for a patch to get pushed to continue my Baldur’s Gate 3 campaign with a friend because she’d picked it up on Steam. We eventually had her keep Steam offline.

Considering the condition games can be released in lately, it can really suck to wait in general, too.

Not sure how you got to that conclusion. The survey prompt was “Please indicate whether or not you ever use the following websites or apps.” 29% responded that they do not use the platform, less than 1% did not respond. That’s 70%.

It’s also far from the first time Steam’s content review process has stirred up controversy–even before Collective Shout–which is ultimately the reason why this is getting so much run in games media right now. At some point Steam has to get their shit together, start hiring people, and revamp their scattershot content review system before they get on the wrong side of an incident by either letting something through that stirs up a shitstorm and Congress gets involved, or pissing off the wrong publisher and having the ESA come down on them.

That said, I don’t think this particular game is the horse to back for this effort, so to speak.

I mean, this is the Internet, nothing stopping you from that lol

Here it’s a katakana character purely used for the sound, in this case “ne,” the first half of neko, for cat.

That’s why I said local models. They aren’t automatically taking outputs and training updates on them.

And yeah, we’ve all already had our likenesses folded in somewhere. That’s the bigger problem here.

Yes, if it was on a locally-hosted generative model, I wouldn’t be bothered if someone did this in my likeness. That wouldn’t be meaningfully different than using Photoshop to fake it ten years ago.

Passing it around to their friends and gods know whom else is still just as reprehensible though.

Kondo had a recent interview with Dengeki that made it sound like more remakes are guaranteed. It made a few waves in the fandom because it sounded like some at Falcom wanted to remake Zero first, and there’s this bizarre persistent narrative around some fans that Sky 3rd is skippable.

Could be? I know Beehaw is defederated from a lot but I haven’t kept up. The community is definitely active.