just a machine lurking
it is like adopting linux
very funny you say this since one of the main reasons i stay on lower-end devices is that they use linux instead of android. that and that i’m not really interested into playing more modern games in a portable way (with exceptions that i can accept)
how is the remaster compared to the original? i have been wanting to play it for a while but haven’t had the time. does the wiiu version sitll holds up or does the remaster made it obsolete? i prefer to play the original but if it’s a way better version i could accept the new one
i remember liking season zero lots the first time i saw it. it’s a more interesting take than the “everything is card games” that the later version. then i read the manga and found the series to be really bad. they tried to adapt short episodes to be way longer which made them a bit boring. also, the first episodes being full of psycopath characters that wanted to kill people for simple reasons was part of the amusement and it was toned down in the anime
Ranma 1/2, the 80s version
i kind of want to watch this one again but the length is a big problem since i don’t want to binge it (and i know i will because i love that series). since watching the remake i have had this feeling that i want to experience the original adaptation again.
for me, this month has been quite weak. finished fma and haven’t started yet any new series and since the season just started i don’t have yet an opinion about the shows i’m trying.
Fullmetal Alchemist (2003): finally finished it and i am incredibly amazed at how much i loved it. i had many problems with Brotherhood’s last arcs so i expected something similar but i really loved everything it did with the story. ending was a bit rushed and left some open things that were later addressed in the movie but even then it was quite enjoyable.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shambala (2005): this deserves it’s own entry since, holy shit what an amazing movie is it. if it didn’t require 52 episodes of context i would recommend it to every single person i would ever met because it is that level of amazing. it serves as a perfect closure to the series’ story while also being an interesting piece of historical fiction and an interesting comentary on the events it portrays. i don’t tend to revisit films often and i want to watch it again soon with a more critical mindset.
yes and no. it depends on the fedi implementation but most microblogging software sends private posts to other instances when someone on that instance follows you. then, they can do whatever they want with the private posts (pixelfed made all the posts not-private due a bug in the code but this can totally be done on purpose).
due to the way federation works, there is no way around this since the server has to has access to your private posts if it wants to show them to their users that follows you. this should be mitigated on the instance level (by not federating with bad instances) and on the user level (not accepting follows from bad instances) but both defaults are usually fully open, making it possible for anyone to create a new instance and pulling all your “private” posts. having an allowlist federation and private could improve the situation but this would make federation with new instances so there will always be pushback against that.
at the end of the day, there is nothing really private on the fediverse, even of the best scenario, so it should be taken as that.
i’m happy to see The Summer You Were There mentioned in possitive light. i did enjoy it and while i don’t think it’s amazing i have read quite a lot of negative comments about it which i think are ungranted.
about manga recs, have you read The Moon on a Rainy Night? it’s probably my favourite teenage romance manga so i heavilly recommend it.
for LNs, “Adachi and Shimamura” is really good altough a bit slow teenage romance. there is manga and anime adaptation of it if you prefer the medium but both are behind by far
translator notes are one of my favourite parts of reading something foreign. it’s just a small trivia about something and allows me to understand the target culture just a bit more. this is way better than translators aggressively localizing some text to a comon american phase that will anyway make no sense to me.
tns get bad rep because lazy/elitist translators (i would vote the op is a bit more than being lazy) but they are a very important part and can be very valuable when done well
i was missing this thread. glad is finally here. this season i’m mostly watching sequels so i don’t have yet many things to write about. i also have been revisiting some old shows from my childhood to see how well they hold up (coincidentally, fmp is on the list for next revisits). this time i have a wall of text
Dragon Ball GT (1996)
After weeks of screaming “this plot idea was also on gt!!” while watching daima, i decided to go back and see how well had gt aged and if how much of my love for it was just nostalgia.
to my own surprise, i enjoyed most of it a lot. while the series had common problems found on 90s children anime, it actually did very interesting things. having a “20 years later” type of story was a very good idea since it lets you see a clear difference in the characters while keeping all of them familiar. new characters are interesting enough to keep the overal story entertaining. the big bad villain from the first half is simply great and probably one of my favourites from the whole db franchise. the last arc is great and thematically conected to the whole story, with the ending making me cry even if i already knew what was going to happen.
sadly, the show has quite some problems. many ideas were great but were not executed well. the second half screams production issues by how inconsistent it is and the ending, even if i loved it, was draged out and many events appear out of nowhere. it also has one of the worst sagas in the whole franchise (super 17) that is not only inconsecuential but it’s many recycled ideas without any proper plot. pan was a great character and it was on the spotlight for most of the show (excluding the big fights) but at the very end she was delegated to a background character and didn’t even had a last scene like other characters that barely appeared.
even with all of that, i still believe is a very strong db show and an amazing sequel to z. it tries to keep the core of the franchise while trying new things to keep it fresh. it’s full of callbacks and homages without making them pure nostalgia. i didn’t expect to hold up but it actually did
The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World (2025)
this one is actually a bad one. it’s very close to a generic comedy isekai. it falls in common tropes and characters are quite simplistic. but for a fan of tokusatsu, the jokes about its exagerated nature in a somehow serious world are incredibly funny. they are starting to get repetitive and the plot itself is almost non-existant but it has been enjoyable until now. i’m not sure if i will get through until the end.
containers get bad rep because docker and all the mess it causes, but every process, or at least most, in the system should use containers in one way or another. it’s a shame this is nowhere close to normalized and doing it is messy
ps2 had very good horror games, like the silent hill saga, fatal frame saga and some hidden gems like haunting ground and rule of rose. there is also the resident evil outbreak games with the online patch so it’s possible to play them in multyplayer mode.
there are also many good action games like the devil may cry saga or many jrpgs like the persona games or the disgaea games.
honestly, ps2 had so many games that it’s hard to list just a few. there was lots of slop but also lots of interesting ideas there. some games got re-releases later for more recent consoles so there are better versions but most of them still hold up
glad to see unc ensored art of ranma (new anime removed the star in the hat for all characters that used it)
privacy/security and convinience is almost always a linear scale where you need to choose to risk one to get the other. you should draw the line at the exact point you feel is correct. you have to decide how many hops are you comfortable jumping through to simply use something you want/need to.
no google is way better than microg that is better than play services, but every step requires you to stop using MANY things directly. is way worse when you need things like banks that require the full package and will keep breaking all the time if you ever find workarounds. this will in turn increase the time you spend making your device work instead of using it as a tool.
nice, i was starting to get worried when nvidia stock price started going up again
i have been constantly checking the collection and all of the pieces are really good. they really kept the character feeling while keeping a lolita style. this makes me wonder on why Zun’s design translate so well to lolita. maybe he did get some inspiration from it? (i really need to look into this). even outfits that i would not read as lolita (youmu) translate really well without big changes to the base.
i didn’t know this existed and now I have an intense need of having them… all of them…
the alice dress is… just gorgeous. i would buy it no questions asked if it was not an op (and not incredibly expensive, but lets ignore that). the complete style is incredible but having a jsk to coordinate with other styles would make it amazing. i really need a jsk in a similar style.
the whole concept of “not exactly cosplay” is really nice. there should be more touhou-inspired fashion
curse you bisexuals, you always get the best flags
wiiu was a complete mess because nintendo didn’t really knew what to do with it. it tried to market it for 
(i remember there were conferences where the highlight was fifa or some “grown up” game) while trying to keep it’s usual family friendly userbase. it tried to move away from motion controlls (again, trying to appease gamers) while also having a very interactive gamepad without many games using its features. even the most popular games failed to sell the console so nintendo decided that they will try to slowly delete its existance from collective memory and re-released almost all the games for the switch.
i don’t doubt the name problem was real, but i also read of things like this on the ps1/ps2 transition so i doubt it was as bad as many make it sound.
why p2p isn’t popular
my guess is because is quite hard to get it right in a generalized way. as you mention it, most people approach the internet as just consumers (not by choice) and p2p breaks this model. it requires interest and knowledge to succesfully use it and poses many problems not found in the standard client-server model (open ports, nat, global discovery). while there are known ways of solving them, they usually require workarounds and tend to have downsides. i remember following the tox development for a while and it had to use a central server for push notifications because general usage was very battery hungry.
all of this problems make the projects quite niche so their development tends to be way slower than centralized one (usually sponsored by corpoations). they tend to lack user friendly interfaces and non-vital features so they fail to bring new users, specially non-technical ones. also, open source culture has been slowly going towards a corporate-friendly culture, making this type of software alien to many.
edit: formatting
decentralized is the part that makes it hard to find. there are projects like briar (interesting project but very few features) and tox (had many features features but used to be quite unstable) and gnu jami (haven’t tried it in a decade) alongside others but tend to have a bunch of downsides. you can ignore some since you have a static list of contacts but you might want to look deep into them to learn the caveats.
what I recommend is xmpp. is very lightway and easy to setup and gives you all the features you listed (not all clients support stickers but some do) but you need a server for that (any small one would work tho). matrix works also good but it’s way more complex and more geared towards group chats
this is the next step from just reading headlines and getting everything wrong