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Cake day: February 21st, 2026

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  • They absolutely aren’t. Their last mainline game was Starfield, and it shipped without a map function. Two of my favorite bugs include the one where if you try to open the liquor cabinet on the pirate station, the doors open inward, forcing the bottles through the walls and they fly every which way in the CIC. Or the one where a crew of spacers has taken a ship hostage, so you dock and kill the spacers to save the ship, but the spacers leader is aligned to Constellation, so if you complete the randomized side mission, you piss off your crew!

    Their other current projects are live-service money grabs (Elder Scrolls Online, and Fallout 76). So no, they aren’t.





  • To put that into context, I’m an iPhone guy who uses Android on the side. My old S10 will never have that issue (it doesn’t get updated anymore), but for my next Android phone, that’s one of the first things I’m doing. Enabling developer settings. Turning off the animation speed entirely. And that. So for 24 hours I won’t be able to sideload. After that: it’s open season forever.

    Not sure how it’ll go for existing Android users. I imagine you’ll get an update and your sideloaded apps will be disabled, then you’ll enable sideloading, and after the 24 hours, they’ll be enabled again.




  • I know who The Weeknd is (and how to spell his name — it always irks me that it’s missing a letter, but it makes his name more memorable, because it makes one think about how it’s different). I’m not familiar with his music.

    There are people in the world who don’t know who a lot of famous people are. Consider someone in Europe who knows quite a bit about association football (called soccer in the US, but they just call it football). In the US, you might know David Beckham was a soccer (sorry, football) player. You might even know what team (sorry, squad) he was on, but you might not know too many more. Someone in Europe might be able to name ten footballers off the top of their head, maybe tell you what position they play and who they play for.

    American music and movies are pretty much known everywhere, but it’s also kind of regional. I’ve moved around a lot, and I’ve met people who swear up and down they never heard of bands I grew up listening to. They’re objectively famous, they sold many millions of albums, they were on MTV, but it’s possible to have just missed them. Same with movies and games.


  • As for The Walking Dead, I agree the show sucks. I haven’t read the comic books. Where it excels is the first two Clementine games. They’re adventure and “Choices Matter” games (much like Life is Strange), so they don’t really appeal to TWD fans who want more action. The first one involves a convict being taken to prison for murder when things go sideways, and he meets a little girl who is expecting her parents to come back Any Time Now. (You can guess what happened to them, and you’d be right.) She becomes the protagonist of the next two games, but I still haven’t played the third one. Despite having a little girl as a main character, the first game is gory enough. In the second game, Clementine is a bit older, maybe 12-13. In the third game, she’s a mother, she has a little boy to protect. Anyway, the games only show Hershel and Glenn from the show, and only briefly. You never meet Rick or the others. It’s strictly a spinoff, and it’s the best TWD media I’ve experienced.


  • Sorry for the late reply. .hack//SIGN has not aged well. I first watched it in Japanese with fan subs, and I had nothing to base my expectations on. It was bad, but I didn’t know any better. Years later I watched the English dub, and it was borderline unwatchable, so I tried going back to the Japanese version, and it wasn’t any better. I don’t think it was meant to be good (in that way) and I don’t think it can be saved.

    The second season of .hack (Legend of the Twilight; also called Legend of the Twilight Bracelet in fansub) went full chibi. This actually started, I believe, with an OVA to SIGN (the first season) called .hack//GIFT, which ended with the boys spying on the girls in the bath. The whole thing was a farce, but the chibi element dominated the second season. .hack tried to take itself way more seriously with the third season, but I couldn’t get into it. I think I got 8 episodes in before throwing in the towel?

    .hack is not good, IMO. Maybe there’s a point to be made. SAO, on the other hand, works very hard to make you think it’s cool. And it is cool. As an old guy who grew up with Star Wars, I think it’s a great modern media franchise. Certainly better than any of the last three mainline Star Wars films, and arguably SAO is also better than Phantom Menace, and a case could be made for the other two. It does borrow quite a bit from .hack (or maybe they both just borrow MMO tropes; I never played MMOs), but it expands on those ideas greatly. For example, .hack//Another Story. Another OVA where one of the main girls is telling one of the guys about her first friend in the game, this unbeatable girl warrior and the sacrifice she made. So when the last third or so of SAO season 2 came out, and here comes a similar purple-haired female duelist, I said “oh I bet she’s logged in 24/7.” And I’m not going to spoil it, but while SAO took the story in the same direction, it went way deeper, and was so much more satisfying. I knew how the story was going to end because I’d seen the original. But SAO did it way, way better. Honestly, if the Mother’s Rosary (name of the book it’s based on) section of SAO were a standalone anime, it would probably be my favorite anime of all time.





  • How do you milk oats?

    I’m not trying to troll the vegans here, though I do feel a sense of sarcasm here. But it’s not because I consume animal products; it’s because I enjoy coffee and I’m wondering what… whatever “oat milk” is …adds to coffee.

    For the record, straight up milk is nasty in coffee and I don’t understand why people do it. Creamer mixes milk and cream. Hot coffee does something to milk that just makes the whole cup gross. I think the thicker, heartier cream holds its own against the coffee.

    So in my head I’m thinking you juice the oats somehow, but I’m not sure how you get cream without any cow’s milk. Soy?

    I go to a local coffee shop and they do oat milk. I’m not vegan but I’m not opposed to vegan solutions. So I am curious about the oat milk. Can anyone explain without getting political, strictly on culinary basis, what oat milk brings to coffee?


  • Art style looks cool.

    Requires Windows. My computer can’t run that (by choice, also by design — it’s a Mac). So that’s a red flag I can’t ignore.

    Anyway, it feels like this game has been coming for years. It doesn’t help that it looks somewhat similar to that other retro cartoon bullet hell game I can’t recall the name of right now. That game doesn’t interest me though; this one tentatively does if it has an easy mode or the difficulty is fair.



  • Mass Effect. I didn’t get far in the original. Played the Legendary Edition trilogy all the way through. Went back to the original. It’s the tank (Mako). It dies in like 2-3 hits and you get less XP for kills in it. It’s just not fun and they never fixed it in the original. Legendary fixes it. At the very least, it’s balanced to the game’s difficulty setting. Where in the original it’s stuck on the hardest setting, but only for the Mako missions.

    Original came out in like 2007, Legendary came out in like 2016. Might be off by a year or two with one or both.


  • First anime was .hack//SIGN.

    First impression of anime was, giant robots, fights that took several episodes, and girls way too young to show that much skin. I asked my anime obsessed cousins to show me something intelligent that didn’t have any of those three things, and they delivered — see first answer.

    Favorite series is Sword Art Online, but I prefer one season and done miniseries like Erased end Your Lie in April. Also The Promised Neverland and Tokyo Ghoul — we don’t talk about their seasons beyond the first. Favorite movies are your name. and Wolf Children.

    Only one bad experience with anime I can think of. My cousins who got me into anime were watching one when a child goes into a changing room and it shows everything. That was creepy AF. We were all teenagers so it wasn’t like “I should report this to the police” but more like “let me catch you looking at that again and I will kick both your asses.” I don’t remember what they were watching, if they told me.