John Caveson

I'm getting Star Wars Battlefront Collection flashbacks.

That image basically sums up the reveal trailer for me. Like I never payed attention to all the leaks that are apparently true now, and I'm just....meh about it. Ever since the Steam Deck and other PC handhelds have come out, my Switch time has dramatically reduced. There's just no point in playing 3rd party on it unless it's some novel port like the Wii version of Force Unleashed or something. The novelty of on-the-go AAA gaming is no longer exclusively there, and I wouldn't have a Switch at all if it weren't for the 1st party line up. Especially considering their frustrating, archaic business practices and their Disney-esque stances towards emulation and fan projects. Their exclusives are the only thing Nintendo has going for them as far as I am concerned.
 
The main thing going for the 2witch* right now for me is the Xbox Series-like backwards compatibility, where the only OG Switch games not able to be played will ones that heavily utilize some obscure feature that no one really used, like the IR sensor or Labo, similar to how the Series can't play Xbox One's Kinect games, but otherwise, everything else is fair game. Now I don't have to abandon/re-buy my entire library just to play one or two exclusives. Though, like the Series, this simultaneously reduces the FOMO, but it also means I'm really am in no rush to grab one. I'm also worried it might lead to the current PS5/Series problem of 3rd parties releasing ports for both systems due to the super high install base of the current Switch, thus giving off the feeling this next generation not really "starting" with another extended cross-gen period.
 
My next concern is, of course, the Nintendo exclusives themselves. Like how is Nintendo going to top themselves this time around? How is the next Mario Kart going to top 8 Deluxe with the booster pass? How are they going to top Smash Ultimate, Mario Odyssey, Wonder, Luigi's Mansion 3, Metroid Dread, etc.? Because to me, these seem like the "definitive/peak" iterations of their respective franchises where Nintendo just went all out with their ideas. Like where do we go from here? Anything other than a major re-haul in mechanics/gimmicks for potential sequels would just pale in comparison.
 
Now, keep in mind, this is all just surface-level, knee-jerk reactions and concerns I have now that we officially know it really was just "the Switch, but again and bigger and more powerful! Hooray! " I'm just like....whatever about it, really. But that's just me. Barring any curve-balls in the upcoming direct in April, I'm probably just gonna outright pass on this one. I really don't need it. Who knows, I might get the mid-gen OLED refresh to store away just in case my OG Switch dies on me, like what happened with my Xbone. But that's years away.
 
But as of right now, I predict the 2witch will be the SNES to the Switch's NES in terms of sales numbers. Definitely successful, but Nintendo is not going to re-capture the lighting-in-the-bottle that was the Switch, and they're crazy if they think they can/should.
 
*P.S. I hereby mint and coin the term "2witch". Anyone who uses it will now have to pay me royalties in the form of TF2 hats, thank you.

They definitely tried their best to tie up all the loose ends.
 
I think after all this time, I think both Valve and the community are just relieved to have the closure. Not just for the lore, but even the game itself. I mean really, what is there left to do for the game realistically given Valve's current lack of interest? The bots are mostly gone, vscript and 64-bit has revolutionized the modding scene, and the final comic is out....The only thing I can possibly think of is the Heavy update and even then, if Valve just stopped updates altogether I'd be fine with it. We could argue endlessly about this weapon needs a buff or nerf,  or that Casual needs this feature or remove that and so forth. But at the end of the day, the game is 17 years old and has gotten more support than most games could ever dream of.
 
It's time for Valve to move on and I think the comic was their way of saying that they are. Now to be clear, I don't think the game won't still get maintenance. I think the way they have been doing updates post-Jungle Inferno with the whole yearly seasonal community content is what to expect at most for the foreseeable future. And you know what? I'm alright with it.

As you know, I've followed a lot of stuff in the publishing industry.  And this tells me what you see with vtubers is nothing new, since the fiction author community is exactly the same.
 
The equivalent to buying a $2000 rig is paying an artist $500 for a book cover and then paying $1500 for ads on your first book, even though you're never gonna make that money back.  (Let's say that you make $1.5 per book, which is pretty generous on a fiction book from a new author.  Then you have to sell 1,334 books just to cross your break even point, and for a new author 500 sales in the first year is doing amazingly well.)  But people do it all the time, even though the fiction market is oversaturated, since they think that they're going to be the next George RR Martin or Brandon Sanderson.  And when they end up in the hole they figure they didn't pay enough on production costs and advertising.
 
Then in both fields you have another class of people who talk about being in the field, but realize the risks and are too cowardly to actually do things.  In fiction this is the guy who says "I'm working on a really amazing book that's going to be an instant best seller, but I just need to polish it a bit more before it's ready."  And he will say that for a decade.  In the world of vtuber this is where you get "pre debut vtubers" and vtweeters.  In fiction writing the authors want to have their first release as big as A Game of Fire and Ice, even though that's an insane goal, realize that it is impossible with where they are now, and kick the can down the road figuring that it will magically become possible later on.  In the world of vtubing people want to have Gura's debut, even though this is also completely insane, and so continue to buy new models, rigs, artwork while "building a presence" on twitter, with no plan to actually make videos.  And of course if someone did actually manage to game the system to have a huge debut this way it would be immediately apparent that the streamer had no experience making quality videos and so none of the viewers would stick around for future videos.
 
The key in both fields is the same: start by treating it as a hobby that you do not expect to replace your day job and slowly ramp your way up.  There's a saying in the publishing industry that goes "the way to make lots of money on your first book is to publish your tenth book."  That is, there's no way that your initial release is going to pull in lots of readers even if it's a masterpiece, which let's be honest it almost certainly isn't.  However if you release a lot of at least decent releases, then you will slowly get better in your craft, pull in various readers with each release who will check out your earlier readers, and at the same time you will get comfortable in the cheap but effective ways to improve your book cover and word of mouth advertising games. 
 
In the same way the best way to start in vtubing is to have a free or dirt cheap model that you use to stream for possibly single digit amounts of views, with no expectation of being a star or making lots of money.  This will allow you to practice both the technical and entertainment craft aspects of the field while stacks are basically nonexistant. If you pull in viewers on that channel, great.  If not, once you know what you are doing reinvent yourself on a new channel (heavily hinted at to your previous viewers) with a showy debut.  Even that probably won't give you enough views and money to quit your day job, but in a year or so you might be able to leverage it.  Or maybe not.  Like I said, you have to go into it with no expectation of being a star.
 
The main difference between prospective vtubers and prospective authors is the average age.  You definitely have people in their 40's who one day decide to try out vtubing, and you have 14 year olds who are convinced that they will be the next huge author.  However, the average author really tries out publishing sometime after college, while most new vtubers get interested in high school.  So you have all the problems that you get in any entertainment field compounded with the lack of life experience that young people have.  Ever since Pewdiepie got big overnight (for reasons that largely come down to chance) kids think that they will easily become the next big youtube superstar.  The only difference is that instead of doing Unregistered Hypercam 2 lets plays it's now about getting a vtuber avatar or doing dumb Tiktok prank videos.

Like I said on a previous rant of mine, THIS is one of my main reasons to hate vtubers.
 
Anyway, rant incoming.
 
 
There, all better now.

Had eye surgery yesterday for my life-long strabismus in my left eye. Went really well according to the doctor, just recovering now and trying to get past the temporary double-vision while my brain adjusts. Apparently I was a bit exceptional, since I did vision therapy for 10 years which kept my affected eye from weakening, so the muscles were still all good and I have 20/20. The doctor was also the successor of the doctor who performed a previous strabismus surgery on me when I was 2, and that guy was basically the best in the U.S., so he was very familiar with his work and knew what to expect going in.
 
Seeing my face in the mirror afterward was so weird, like looking at an alternate universe! My first thought was "Wow, I look like the people on TV or something!"

Just do like I do; don't use Twitter. Works every time.

Man, looking through that Yahoo! history is sobering. You can clearly see the point where the Web Directory, you know, the main way to search for useful information in a search engine is just pushed to its own little box at the bottom to make way for more advertisements and social media features. That year was 2004. It's completely gone by '09. Then they go completely hog wild and butcher the format for mobile phone users by 2017.
 
I swear, smartphones, social media and the web going mainstream in general were mistakes. I hate the Internet now.

Here's a cool website:
 
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/
 
Track how various sites and programs changed over the years.  Did they get better? Did they get worse? Did they peak in some specific year? You be the judge.

I stumbled across this when I was trying to explain the ways that people interacted with the web over the years, and realized that the front page of Yahoo! would be a good indicator both of web design standards and also what people expected from a "start page."  But the internet archive currently goes back to only 1999 for Yahoo, so I needed to find what it looked like from 1994-1998.  This page does that and more.
 
EDIT: Personally while I have a soft spot for the extreme simplicity of the mid 90's and think that some pages work best in that format, my favorite aesthetics on webpages come from about 1999-2004, and I think you see a clear drop in the usability of web pages after the early 2010's.  But the data is there, so you be the judge.

Well, looks like Microsoft is having a clear-out sale of Xbox 360 games and DLC before the store closes. I honestly, truly didn't think they would actually bother doing it. I thought they would just pull a Nintendo and just keep prices as they are until the end. Considering all of their braindead ideas and decisions as of late, it wouldn't surprise me. But color me pleasantly proven wrong this time. This first of three waves of sales contains 66 games, with reductions ranging from 50% all the way to 90%. The second wave will be on June 18th, and the last wave on July 16th, just two weeks before closure.
 
The full list of the first wave can be found here.
 
I would also highly recommend watching the following video that will provide additional info such as price, physical availability, platform availability, and even whether or not the 360 port is worth it compared to other platforms. For example: Trials Fusion has a port on Steam that is utterly bogged down with always online DRM that the 360 port does not need. So, it would actually be prudent to grab it while you can on the 360 otherwise your only choice would be the crappy PC port or emulation, which for the 360 is not nearly up to par quite yet.
 
 

That's a really good question.. the most objective measure would probably be the state of the game itself, which would be briefly after the Pyromania update I'd say. Casual matchmaking worked like a charm, comp matchmaking was still kind of alive, and I have to give it to Valve that, although it sucks they abandoned TF2 after pyromania, at least they left it in the most balanced state it has ever been in, mostly because of the flamethrower and airblast overhauls. 
 
Subjectively speaking I have several ''eras'' of TF2 that I look back on very fondly, mostly because of the people I played with more than the balance of the game itself. The #1 without a doubt that way was very early on, when I played TF2 with a bunch of high school friends. We'd have LAN parties and play all night surviving on kitkats and pizza, it's the super stereotypical 'good old days' but it sure as hell was the best. I'm still in contact with most of them and after everyone dispersed to college we still occasionally played TF2 together. By now, only one of them still sometimes plays TF2, but we still play other things together, so considering we're all boring 30 year olds now I really lucked out with that gang.
 
I also played 6v6 for a while which I still highly recommend everyone to try, it's basically an entirely different game from pub TF2 but it's just so fun. I've played on several teams but the team I played on the longest really was a gang of guys I all liked, and it was a blast to play with them. I have this very vivid memory of playing scout vs soldier MGE on granary last while all hanging in mumble and someone from the team strutting on his guitar, it was the absolute best. The team eventually hit some drama and team members got replaced, and not much later I stopped because I had to focus on university.
 
Then there was when mann vs machine dropped, and cmndr hosted a server on which we could all do the missions together. That was short lived but it was a really cool way to experience that gamemode, especially considering how toxic the MvM community is if you've ever tried to play a game with randoms. So that definitely deserves a shoutout.
 
To round it out, as cheesy as it is, current TF2 on Uncletopia is just... kind of everything I want from the game? I like the ruleset, there's skilled players, and from where I live there are like 20 servers that I can access. It's a shame the servers were born out of the bot crisis, and I haven't really connected much with many of the players on Uncletopia, but I can say for sure that if it wasn't for those servers I would have dropped TF2 by now.

According to Steam, I purchased the Orange Box on April 1st, 2009, meaning I played TF2 for approximately an hour every single day since then. There's definitely been times in the past where I played it waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much to get to that number; nowadays I don't have time to game that often anymore and it's just my comfort game.
 
Anyways I thought that was a good reason to start a subspuf thread, see how y'all are doing, and maybe talk about TF2 a bit

I have achieved the CEO Grindset.

Happy New Year subspuffers! I wish y'all a nice 2024

Brooooo! This looks almost exactly like mine. Though mine is is a 9-incher, while that's more like ~14 inches. It's also an Emerson brand, not Magnavox.
 
Aside from that, however, everything looks the same:
 
- Same color
- The buttons look all the same
- The RCA port is in the same position, same goes for the headphone port and infrared sensor
- Built-in DVD player
- Same looking speakers
 
I randomly found it my dad's closest one day, still in perfect condition. He said I could have it. I still have fond memories of taking that thing with us up to Lake Tahoe and watch movies every night before bed. In fact, it was at Tahoe where we used the included antenna and watched the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. I also remember playing my Gamecube and watching my brother play the first Gears of War when we first got the 360. So, upon re-discovering this thing, I've been kind of on a nostalgia trip. It's just so eerie you stumbled upon one that looks so similar to mine. It's kinda spooking me a bit.

I recently picked up a pretty little CRT for cheap. Thing's in great shape and had a good owner. So I took it upon myself to replay OOT. This was my 3rd time playing it, though my 1st time in about 15 years. You know that bell curve meme? Yeah, that's basically how I feel about the game. Throughout life you go from "OOT IS ONE OF THE GREATEST GAMES EVER!" to "OOT is overrated!" to "OOT is one of the greatest games ever.
 
There's just so much to find in this game. This was my 3rd playthrough and I was still finding secrets and areas I had literally never seen before -- partly because since then I had gotten a rumble pak, which the Stone of Agony utilizes to indicate nearby hidden grottoes. Some of these grottoes you literally will not find without it because there's no way you'd know they were there otherwise, and honestly I kind of like that, hidden secrets that are where you'd least expect them, in the middle of nowhere, right under your feet. There's also a whole secret multi-room segment of the Fire Temple I discovered, which I had never seen before in my life and most other people probably haven't either.
 
OOT just has so much shit in it. The good type. Shit that exists purely for you to discover, for the joy and sake of discovering; items that exist purely because they are fun and cool. There's an entire sidequest you can do where you unlock a bunch of masks that you can wear for neat extra dialogue, the grand prize of which being a mask that lets you talk to Gossip Stones, revealing hidden secrets and world lore to you -- and you even get a few bonus masks for completing it. You can get mobile explosive Bombchus to use, you can acquire optional spells for combat or utility, you can get hidden elemental arrows, you can dive deeper with a Golden Scale, you can buy a fuckhuge sword that breaks, you can acquire a PERMANENT version of said fuckhuge sword -- even one of the very first items you get, Deku Nuts, are optional for you to use. Every consumable item in the game even has two capacity upgrades for you to find as well, some of which I had never discovered until this playthrough. As you ever going to need that many Deku Sticks? No, but it's cool that you can now! I feel like this is something that's seriously lacking later games -- just cool, entirely optional, unique items for you to find. Instead, so many items in later installments are just a lock for a key, and have no use or reason outside of that one specific thing.
 
OOT-specific section ends here, for additional dialogue concerning the series as a whole, click below:
 
TL;DR: OOT is one of the greatest games ever it's true.

Well, I don't post much here now, but turns out this year, two of my remaining uncles got diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, one passed already and one is in pretty bad shape, gonna go visit him while I still can.
 
moral of the story, don't smoke, esp a pack or more a day.

I was looking around my emails since I've been getting massive amounts of spam these days, and I found an email from December 2010.
 
It was the original pics of the DemoPan thread.
 
 
 

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2023/08/17/xbox-360-store-will-close-july-2024/
 
God, I hate when I'm right. The final countdown is on boys, get 'em while you still can. As for me, I've pretty much gotten whatever was on my radar, aside from some Minecraft DLC and OG Xbox games that don't license transfer if you get them from the modern store. That being said, I will still keep an eye out for anything that might catch my interest from now until the closure. I'll try to prioritize non-BC games.