A 1970 Corvette

Went to Anime Expo yesterday just for the day. The actual expo was pretty impressive in size (the only anime cons I've been to are pretty small Vegas ones previously) but had too much Hololive. I picked up some merch I probably could've got online for cheaper and saw some funny stuff (including an artist I never thought I'd see in person).

The real reason I went was for the concert happening that night which you needed an AX pass to get into anyway, pretty much 95% to see Togenashi Togeari.

They killed it, just as good as they were at Avoid Note. I popped off for Bleeding Hearts in particular. On the upside I even knew some of the other songs played by other artists. Colors (aka JIBUN WO) was pretty damn hype too. Honestly not sure how much of the lineup really counted as j-pop (sakurazaka46 definitely counted at least, and I liked their performances way more than I was expecting to) but hey, I had a ton of fun. Totally worth flying out for a day trip.

Spooked everyone near me cheering for togetoge at the end. Don't think I ever yelled that hard. 

On 6/28/2025 at 10:15 PM, Gyokuyoutama said:

On a slightly related topic, I was watching some South Park videos on Nico Nico (as you do) and got to a Canada episode.  One of the comments was something like "ah! so Canada is like America's South Korea."  And I was enlightened.

I wish I had that image (which may have just been edited and not real?) of a Japanese TV show poll with something along the lines of "If America attacked China should Japan intervene?" and there were three normal options (Yes, no, maybe) and then one was "we should then attack korea" 

11 minutes ago, Moby said:

I wonder if we ever talked about what happened on the day this forum got almost a thousand people at once.

 

Was it a bot attack?

Did that happen more than once? I swear there was one incident before I joined like that, and then another when I was here.

6 hours ago, Razputin said:

I've been eyeing the TIAM post number count a while and wondering if we can still get to another 10k

I don't think it's impossible but TIAM is kind of in a weird spot since we've got topics spread out even though the forum is kind of small enough at this point to have everyone post on the same thread.

I mean it still is probably good to use threads for a specific purpose like the anime thread for anime and I don't really think we would even want to just put everything in TIAM, but it's just a thought

6 hours ago, Razputin said:

Man reading through the mausoleum is fun

I'm afraid to go in there

51 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

She was but a girl, younger than myself, but what a girl! Her body was encased in a transparent glitter; her skin a rosy pale purple; her legs, mottled with white, ended in a pair of cloven hooves. And as my brain struggled to grasp her colorful young perfection— she wagged her tail!

Twilight Sparkle?!

50 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

If you are familiar with Francis E. Dec, some of this may remind you of stuff that he ranted about.  Really, it's astonishing that Shaver didn't just go down as another paranoid schizophrenic.  It could be because the original alphabet article was pretty innocuous, and when Palmer wanted a follow-up he was already invested.  Or maybe Shaver wasn't as incoherent as his beliefs might lead you to think.  It's hard to say because I don't think much if any of Shaver's original writings are extant.  What would happen instead is that he would mail things to Palmer (and later to other magazines) and these would be edited into more palatable forms.  Most famously, Shaver's memories of being "Mutan Mion" were published in novella form ("touched up" by Palmer) as I Remember Lemuria.

I'm sure that many an editor would proudly proclaim the difference between schizophrenic rambling and a publishable article is a good editor. Unfortunately I don't have an editor to hand this statement to so they can make it actually work.

6 minutes ago, Moby said:

Isn't account creation working but no one outside us can figure out what "spuf" meant?

Unfortunately I don't want the mods to ban me for alt accounts so I'm too afraid to check.

31 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

But will we get members to 300?

We'd need the account creation to be fixed for that to happen 

honestly I was just thinking back to how many threads were made fairly early on in subSPUF history (like the one that was just ':(' and nothing else) and how getting to 5000 isn't really that much of a crazy milestone but more of just a passing coincidence that it was noticed at all. To be fair it is listed on the site's main page but who's reeeaaally scrolling all the way down to check?

We're at 4999 total threads. Who's going to make a suuuuper meaningful and relevant thread #5000? 

I played some Next Fest demos (and one completely unrelated one):

• PARKSIDE: DECAYED SOUL MANIPULATION - Clearly aping Cruelty Squad but without all of the polish (this is where you laugh a bit at that but we all know it's there) that makes it a good game underneath all the clown vomit aesthetics. The mission areas are a little more fleshed out and less abstract but I feel like that is to the detriment of the game since the design isn't quite there and they feel a little mazelike and hard to understand. This could be good on full release but it's currently chock full of jank and not much else. The story bits in the demo also kind of didn't give me a good feeling but that's probably just me being impatient and wanting the demo to just be gameplay.
• Darkenstein 3D: I thought it'd just be a fun wolfenstein-esque retro shooter but it felt more like someone's unfinished unity project, which to be fair, is probably what it is. Didn't feel good to play and the level design was idiotic. It felt like it was mainly gliding off of the aesthetic (which to be fair is fun, a deranged hobo loose in nazi germany murdering everyone trying to get his dog back is a perfect premise for this type of shooter). I feel like this game probably doesn't have much potential because just movement and shooting feel kinda floaty and not satisfying, and it seems like that's intentional, but who knows.
• PIGFACE: Parkside was more Deus Ex in the Cruelty Squad formula, and I think Pigface is more Hotline Miami in the Cruelty Squad formula. This one has a similar air of jank but the level design is more respectful of the game's design which mainly just is quickly and brutally taking enemies out without much RPG elements like abilities. It was a very barebones demo but I feel like it has a solid base and I'd be interested in the finished product.
• Nexus FPV Drone Carnage: Pretty standard FPV drone game, I just picked it up because it made me think of another old FPV VR game I played at a friend's house once. It's not bad, but probably not my actual wheelhouse in terms of game genre. It is incredibly clear with what it is: you are an FPV drone and you enact carnage. You can't call it anything but honest.
• VOID/BREAKER: Notably the only FPS game that was trying to be relatively modern. Waow a roguelike FPS game where you jump from arena to arena and get gun modifiers so original... The addition of destruction mechanics made me perk up a bit and try it, and I think they're not really super well integrated but serviceable. I found the modification system actually more interesting, where you have a grid inventory and your modifiers take up slots, with some of them only pointing to other slots and enhancing whatever is in the slot. It reminded me a little bit of Noita wand crafting, which is a good thing, though the item pool is pretty thin in the demo. The visuals are a little too "we have these cool glitchy tech effects and we're going to make you see them damn it" and it makes big fights really hard to visually understand, but that might be something fixable in graphics configs. The story is pretty boilerplate but not offensive. 
• Stellar Blade: I picked it up because it seemed like a game I'd not normally play and I think that's a valid evaluation but the demo did a decent job of giving me a taste of the gameplay. These kinds of hack and slash parry/dodge/estus flask games aren't really my jam but I was sort of clicking with it by the end of the demo so I think either the formula has been refined enough in general for me to get it a little better, or this game in particular is made to be more accessible. Not sure. Either way I was surprised by it. I'd probably play it if I had it, but I'm not super likely to buy it unless it gets absurdly discounted. Okay fine I also played it due to a very tiny curiosity in if people were overreacting to talk about the character designs in it and I think it's about what I expected. I don't mind it, at least.

Some neat stuff, some complete shovelware, some in between. I think that's a pretty good next fes demo plunge experience overall. Pigface and Void/Breaker are definitely on my radar.

Instead of an inspiring, striking, or creative dream I got a dream where I realized that my left hand's middle finger was half an inch shorter than my right's (about flush with my ring finger).

I spent a while in dream comparing them from different angles because I was shocked to think I hadn't ever noticed in all my life. (In real life, they are the same length. Had to check when I woke up)

On 6/10/2025 at 8:04 PM, Gyokuyoutama said:

Of course, most people responding claim that this happened to them in real life, just when they were real young.  It makes me wonder if they are just remembering dreams though, since I've confused dreams from childhood with reality.  (In particular I remember an event where our family computer got infected with a virus that caused it to display flashing ASCII art in a golden ratio spiral.  There is no distinction in how I remember this incident versus other events from my childhood.  But no one involved remembers this happening, the virus in the dream destroyed the computer but the computer worked just fine throughout my childhood, and when I think of the room where this event supposedly took place I realize it doesn't correspond to the room the computer was in, nor indeed any room in any house that I've lived in.  So it must be a dream... but if I hadn't had investigated I easily could see myself telling someone else about a weird virus that ruined one of our computers like it really happened.)

Good to know I wasn't the only one who had "computer destroyed" dreams back then (still do admittedly)

23 minutes ago, Moby said:

Had a dream that I was writing a story. I remember there was a character log, followed by the story. Some drawn panels were added to some pages.

 

Sounds like a lot of work for me, but I wonder if I could do that. I do have some ideas scribbled.

I've been trying to get an idea together for a short comic (probably a love live fanwork but something original isn't off the table) for a while now. It's kind of daunting and sadly I haven't had any dreams where I am already deep into a project tho

I'm voting for Girls und Panzer because it occupies that space in my mind of something I know has been being worked on, but I don't know precise details and can say "well it's been so long it has to come out soon right?" Unlike Half-Life 3 and Alicianrone where I know enough to know there seems to be basically no reason for the games to be made at this point due to there not being an idea and/or the devs not having any true incentive to do it. I could see Alicianrone being developed by fruitbat factory once the original creatorss sign the rights over or something but I don't think that will happen anytime soon

The rest I don't even know about other than Star Citizen which has been memed as "never releasing type game" so hard that I just accept it as fact

Remasters increasing file size by double digit orders of magnitude will never not be funny to me. I bet a lot of the developers for those classic games think back on how they had to hack things to pieces to cut down on file size and compare it to how things go now.

That's an awesome piece, damn

2 hours ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

Sinking Feeling - At a sealed event my opponent carefully looked over all my cards and then put this on my biggest creature... which was Morselhoarder.

Ahahhahahhahahhahah what the fuck

This could probably go anywhere since it touches on common SPUF talking points (internet ephemerality, corporations being tech dumbasses, etc) but Wizards finally updated their Gatherer website and destroyed about a decade of archived card comments. Admittedly we all knew this was going to happen since they broke commenting in 2015 and never fixed it, but still, it was a fascinating microcosm of player opinions, evaluations, and even jokes frozen in time. There were even some comments from actual card designers in there which may or may not be the only source of some behind the scenes tidbits such as a designer apologizing for Archangel's Light and explaining that the card was initially something broken that they had to pull and replace with something safe that sucks instead. I still wonder what it was that was so broken, considering Innistrad as a block was kind of very high power. As of right now it seems the mobile site isn't updated, but it's only a matter of time. Hopefully the waybackmachine has snippets I guess?

Also they updated their site to reflect 15ish years of screen size upgrades but they're still offering extremely low res pictures for a lot of sets so it looks like complete ass, but that's nothing new.

I'm just glad I screenshotted my favorite comment only a few months before it happened.

6 hours ago, Rynjin said:

 

CoD popularizing "engagement-optimized matchmaking" poisoned a lot of people's brains. There's a lot of people out there utterly convinced that the matchmaking is specifically designed to fuck them and nothing else because TBF games that use EOM kind of are scientifically designed to fuck with your head.

The Finals, as far as I can tell, doesn't have any kind of EOM. But that doesn't really matter to people who have been trained to believe that if they do well, it's because the EOM threw them an "easy" match and if they lose it's the matchmaking trying to "bring them down a peg".

Yeah I've seen that paranoia now that I think about it in online card game discussions too (in MtG Online of all things, an absolutely ancient game that predates anything resembling modern matchmaking by pretty much a decade). Maybe I can consider myself lucky that I'm not a younger FPS player who maybe had their first experiences colored by that kind of matchmaking since it seems like some people start seeing it everywhere.

6 hours ago, Rynjin said:

This is exacerbated for The Finals specifically because frankly it has one of the lowest skill playerbases I've encountered in an FPS in a while. Having a basic level of skill is considered a feat worthy of people calling you a liar, I had somebody say expecting a 50% accuracy rate during a firefight was considered "astronomically high" and "absurd". It's the same source as a lot of people complaining about the "invincible" Light class. The average player of this game can't shoot for shit.

 

But as with any game, no it couldn't possibly just be that they're bad, they need something to blame! So blame the matchmaking, because it's got a hand in every match, but there's no data to specifically disprove that you are the protagonist of the universe and getting single out by the matchmaking of this game and that's why you lose 80% of your matches.

lol I sure know how to pick my FPS games. PlanetSide 2 (even ten years into its lifespan, mind you, where you'd think all the scrubs would have been weeded out) also had that kinda playerbase.

Multiplayer FPS matchmaking systems are such a punching bag for angry players nowadays it's kind of unreal. Casual queues? Full of "sweats." Ranked? Games take forever to fire and my team always sucks. There's either too much or not enough skill based matchmaking. I'm only just now really encountering this since I made the mistake of checking discussion for The Finals now and then (previously I remember SBMM on Apex Legends being a hot topic but I mainly played in a stack and avoided discussion of the game outside of important info).

I've had a pretty good solo queue experience with that game honestly. It kind of just creates this weird feeling that I'm playing the same game as these people but getting a completely different experience. It's kind of impossible to verify if they're just tilted past the moon or there's an actual problem.

When did this all start happening though is my other question - because I played 'old' matchmaking-only FPS games in the MW2/Halo 3/Reach/Advanced Warfare era and there wasn't any kind of "fucking matchmaking is trying to poison me in my sleep" sentiment that I remember (other than perhaps recognizing certain "clan stacks" that would roll matches due to being clumps of good players in a party). Or am I just remembering wrong and that was also a complaint back then?

I've tried my best to not care and play what I want. Now I think it mainly just has the effect of nobody wanting me to drive them anywhere, but hey that's a win-win in my book.

Not sure if it's the idol music or the death metal though. Probably the idol music.

stuff you recently watched is also designed to run you in circles too, you can definitely tell when it starts associating things and recommending them based on that. you can just enter a nearly infinite loop of stuff you've already watched if you click things you've already watched multiple times in a row.

I just don't really get how that would benefit "the average user" or even the site itself for these recommendation loops of stuff they've already seen to exist, rather than perhaps guiding them somewhere new but similar, but whatever they're the site owners they clearly have a plan (clueless)

Mine is just that but crunched because I have an extension that blocks shorts.

There are a few times I miss out due to actually important stuff being put into shorts (like the tenko holiholi animation) unless I specifically check for them but I'll take that in exchange for not seeing them in all other situations

2 hours ago, Moby said:

I know that it will win several spots on this year's Steam Popularity contest.

I'll make sure to vote "labor of love" for it!

God that demo music's sound. I kept expecting it to turn into Runescape music, even though I knew it wouldn't.

I remember as a kid looking at older computer stuff that always tried to display it as a physical space for organizational purposes and that always fascinated me. I've always wondered if we'd have better systems if those ideas actually were fleshed out beyond just being eye candy for marketting or features that any serious user turned off within minutes of getting their computer up. At the same time it's kind of hard to remove that inbuilt acceptance of existing UI so trying to think of a different system entirely is like trying to imagine a new color

3 hours ago, Moby said:

How the hell I have been made aware of vtuber drama against my wishes twice in the same month?

 

Are you people unwell? How does this keeps happening?

As the ancient quote goes, this is srs bsns. How can you LIVE without the scoop on streamers on the internet?!

1 hour ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

The last time I was actively browsing 4chan, /m/ had just decided that "moar" was a combination of "moe" and "gar."

Isn't it kind of fucked up that gar didn't survive as a term used by anyone but moe did?

Though I see moe used more as a catch-all for "bad thing I hate" used by shounen fans rather than its older definition (like how every FPS player uses CoD as their example of "the bad game you should go back to") so maybe gar is better off