chim

Thanks for playing, let's see what the reaper's got up his sleeves this time.

Poor ol' BDE boy

These crowdfunded joints are getting pretty damn crazy. https://gamefound.com/en/projects/awaken-realms/nemesis-retaliation#/section/project-story

That is quite impressive but I find it a slippery slope as to how "real" is it? We can already tell space photography changes wildly with the optics used, from the diffraction spikes to the multispectral sampling, and them Nasa boys love artifical coloring. The lighting in this suggests to me that it's synthesized multispectral data. The Cassini probe photos felt a bit more dull and authentic.

Have a great one! Obligatory https://cytoplantastic.bandcamp.com/track/silent-nyeet

OC

Sad last few years for him but geez, if anyone had it coming..

I tried sleuthing but it's almost impossible to find the exact make as there are countless traditional flute makers out there. Main one is a Mayan double drone flute. He has at least two, bright and dark wood. Looks like Southern Cross or Nash as they make that design but it might as well be custom made in South America. His transverse bass flute featured in the cover and promo pics also looks custom made. Ornament looks similar to Southern Cross ones but that's just traditional Mayan jade. The digital flute, no idea as there are no photos. He also plays everything from bamboo and contrabass to regular concert flutes which all look the same regardless of brand.

Shit's doope. Some hilarious comments in the FB hiphop community on this.

I've been listening to trance as a guilty pleasure for the past five years or so. I think it's an undervalued genre, with tremendous capital in some tracks. It's so validating and refreshing to see it "burialized" in the hands of a competent artist.

This is insane

Didn't expect to find it just using Google, but here you go. It's legit, from an old acquaintance.

Mexican congress have produced (literally, it seems) two alien corpses. The bodies are on display in little coffins. Photos include x-rays featuring eggs and the all-important, uh, shoulder glands.

18 hours in and it just grows and grows. People are insanely harsh on it, probably due to expectations and Bethesda are partly to blame with the hype machine. Everybody seems obsessed with what it's not. Sure enough there's flaws, most NPC's are plastic scenery and similar stuff you don't really want in a modern title, space dungeon crawling and endless variations of "go to X, talk to Y and do Z" without deeper hard-RPG elements or continuous space travel. Prominent characters look pretty good (for a Bethesda game) but it's sorta hit/miss depending on lighting conditions. But the variety of environments, crafting & skill progression, lots of weird little tangents to get sucked into ("let me hold off whatever I was doing and go check this out") more than make up for all that. Urban areas aren't massive sprawling cities but they're well detailed, and the sound design helps sell everything from a seedy kebab joint below ground to a space station orbiting Mars. Trying stuff out in the ship builder and then walking around your massively overweight ride before flooring it into a different star system is incredible. The Nasa-punk aesthetic is geeky & fresh, no grim-dark BS, even the weapons look fun & inventive, the score is absolutely terrific peak Goldsmith. Most of all I love the sense of exploring what's around the corner, and there's so much of that in every direction, even if there's a bit of old school fast travel & cutscenes. A two second faux-loading screen makes people go apeshit? People are spoiled as hell nowadays... I also haven't encountered any bugs beyond some NPC's facing the wrong direction in a conversation. The poor PC optimization (and Xbox too I guess since it's capped at 30 FPS) is a big drawback, so we're probably looking at a lot of patching and modding before people take more kindly to it. The persistent ship decoration mini-game is one of my favorite pastimes.

Meet Lars-Göran, stuck in Space Middle Management.

^me dodging everything Starfield-related for a week BGS titles are what they are and I've enjoyed pretty much all of them, especially when coming in blind. Sucks not being able to play until Friday but then I'll lock myself in for three days and give it a good go.

Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage...

C'mon, we're talking about a guy who would DJ with sandpaper without a second thought. I'm pretty confident he takes little offense from bantz and divided opinions on his output. The whole composing with a cirklon and dinosaur hardware, while no doubt skillful (and tedious), is a very luxurious and deliberate problem. It's also been the M.O for over a decade by now. I think he's just comfortable where he's at and has nothing to prove.

Dude's getting old. It's a tale repeating itself ever since Ughnub's stick banging 50,000 years ago eventually became percieved in later years as less innovative and passionate.

Remedy have always had a knack for authentic and detailed environments. Years before every game out there still had problems with cartoonish scaling, they already nailed that bit in Max Payne (especially the second) and now they're really outdoing themselves. I just started Quantum Break and even though it's last-gen it still looks terrific.

It's hard to tell with a teenager at the peak of hipsterism in 2008. Like someone commented in another retrospective, it looks more like he used a spatula than a sharp edge. I am actually not sure but I suppose no teenager with an exhibitionist artistic compulsion is really sane. Here's to the kid growing out of whatever phase that was. Reading "deze mans hating" today is like unearthing an ancient spell.

Bought a Series X, my first console in a long while since the 360 back in the stone age. I had a hard time deciding between it and the PS5 but figured I don't want to miss out on Starfield, and Game Pass has a decent game collection that appeals to me more than all the Weeaboo arcade stuff on PS+. Bummer about missing Demon's Souls and Last of Us, but eh. I kinda figured it was a decent machine, but seeing first-hand a 4K HDR game like Jedi Survivor on my 70" is really something else. Blindingly good visuals and it runs so well. Stoked to try a bunch of other titles, thankfully Game Pass ought to keep me occupied until Starfield drops two weeks from now. Really liking the juiced up retro games like AoE 2&4, Quake, Doom 3. Hoping Baldur's Gate 3 drops before the end of the year.

Good ol' Priggy got merked in the most explicit of ways. There's no way those white smoke puffs, right before the plane drops flat-spinning out of the sky like a brick, weren't anti air. There's loads of specualtion that he faked his death but I don't believe it as that James Bond shit doesn't happen IRL. It was careless but more likely he was given an ultimatum, you or the family. Kremlin dwarves ain't nothing to fuck with. Reading about the sappers have been very sobering. Metal detectors don't work when the frontline is littered with debris so they have to poke around haphazardly using long metal rods. The mine fields can have as many as five mines per square metre and loads of them are Bouncing Betty-type ugly stuff. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/13/ukraine-sappers-mine-clearers-russia-war

Some new sign-up with considerable mental health issues posted weird self-harm photos. When asked why he did it, that's what he said. Laughs were had all around.