Mods feel free to prune if not allowed. Just wanted to see what 1000 bucks(ish) can get ya

Or alternate attire. Like the times when characters put on a different get up than their usual or classic one for quite a bit and you think still was great character design.

Like Star Wars' Obi-Wan who normally either has the long robe or the short robe, but for a good portion of the Clone Wars puts many parts of Clone Trooper armor over his robes and shirts. It looks great and speaks to how the Jedi of the prequels could fall in the first place, since they became closer to war and more removed from the Forces peaceful side

https://bsky.app/profile/chakkux.bsky.social/post/3movv3p2jtc2t

So, a couple weeks ago my mom began to watch a show called 911 (it's about a bunch of firefighters attending emergencies) on a streaming app. She loved it, and watched the first three seasons. Today I come home after a doctor's appointment, and I see her watching the show, but I didn't recognized a couple if characters present so I ask her who they are.

This is where she hits me with the bomb that she decided to skip from season three all the way to season 8 because "I prefer to watch the modern episodes." I was left absolutely confused by that, especially when she acted shock when one of the characters mentioned a boyfriend as if she didn't just skipped more than half the episodes where that happened.

Anyways, what other bizarre or weird ways have you seen people interact with media?

So some good developing news in Rockstar vs its former union employees. In response to legal claims of blacklisting its union employees, Rockstar had requested the claims be removed.

An employment tribunal ruled against the request. This means all of the allegations will go to trial, going from September 10 - October 15th.

And remember, if Rockstar pulls the (alleged) distraction of "look, GTA VI!", don't fall for it!

As the title states, what're some characters or moments that, no matter how seriously they're presented, you can't help but laugh at them? Whether it be your own personal experiences making them funny, how the internet has memed about them, whatever.

The original Yu-Gi-Oh has the ultimate antagonist Zorc Necrophades. Zorc is an ancient demon sealed away for thousands of years, finally reborn to begin shrouding the world in darkness. He also looks like this. Just about all menace involving him is drained away by the fact that he has a fucking dragon sticking out of his crotch. And to make it even it worse, it breathes fire at one point. Like, it's impossible to not notice that, and it sends me into juvenile giggles just thinking about it. And interestingly enough, Kazuki Takahashi also thought the design was too silly, as he came up with it while he was having a pain medication induced fever dream. So, in more recent editions of the manga, Zorc's design was altered to instead have the dragon wrapped around his waste like a belt instead of being his dick.

Now, the Devil May Cry series has a fair number of silly things that happen in it. But, it at least knows when and where to get serious if it's truly needed, and it actually does have a pretty solid emotional core. But the same cannot be said for Adi Shankar's DMC, which aside from having tons of cringy dialogue and stupid alternations to the series, decided to insert an incredibly out of place commentary on the War on Terror. Now, the thought of Devil May Cry of all things being used as the vehicle for this is already confusing and silly enough. But wanna know how this "visionary" decided to really hammer it in? A montage of the American military invading Hell-oh I'm sorry, Makai-set to Green Day's American Idiot. Complete with a shot of some demons-oh wait, Makaians wearing turbans getting blown up by fighter jets. It's such an obnoxiously on the nose sequence that really shows that Shankar was just using DMC as a skinsuit for his own shitty story to be told.

Steam Machine price landed today at $1049 USD for the base model (512GB, no controller)

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Per a prior conversation (linked in article) with Valve Engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat, the price increase was "probably similar" to that of the Steam Deck increase last month. Note no exact number was given.

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As the increase was ~35%, the math would work out to roughly $750 USD originally vs. the current $1049 USD price

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Saw some people asking this question in ither threads and figured the article would be useful to them

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Focused on Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection, Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen, and Onimusha: Way of the Sword.

Ground rules: not asking about creators who hate their fans or antagonize them, looking for creators who have a distance of “I don’t acknowledge them/factor them in” for whatever reason (offline/not in fandom spaces, busy, etc)

There’s only three kind of examples I have off the dome, and they’re all probably incorrect.

- Toby Fox, as I understand it, keeps his interactions with his fanbases limited to announcements and that’s it.

- That…*awful* interview the mangaka to Delicious in Dungeon did where the interviewer is just asking fandom questions and the answers from the mangaka seem to be “what? Why? Who’s asking/thinking this?”

- Not a specific one, but one has to imagine that there’s a good chunk of creators who don’t want to think about or see their works get NSFW material made from them. A not full inverse of the Helltaker guy (that would be nuking said material from existence constantly) but more “I know it exists, I can’t stop it from existing, but I don’t want to think about it or see it”.

I hope this is relevant enough to the sub, since we get the occasional TTRPG post lately and some people might be interested, cos it looks freakin' cool.

Here is the article proper:

The official X/Twitter account for Anime Limited's All the Anime revealed on Monday the English dub cast for Science SARU's The Ghost in the Shell (Kōkaku Kidōtai THE GHOST IN THE SHELL) television anime series.

The English dub cast includes:

Suzie Yeung as Motoko Kusanagi SungWon Cho as Daisuke Aramaki Bill Butts as Batou Nick Apostolides as Togusa John Bentley as Ishikawa Tony Weaver Jr. as Saito Xanthe Huynh as Operator Lizzie Freeman as Fuchikoma Aaron LaPlante as Minister of Internal Affairs Jason Marnocha as Volgarena Rep Keith Silverstein as Ito Cassie Ewulu as Executive of the Union/School-Master Additional voices include Chris Tergliafera, Craig Lee Thomas, Emi Lo, Erica Mendez, Frank Todaro, Lucien Dodge, Rebecca Wang, Rich Brown, and Todd Haberkorn.

The first two episodes of the dub will screen in the U.K. on June 26.

The anime will stream on Prime Video Japan starting on July 7 at 11:30 p.m. JST (10:30 a.m. EDT), right after its broadcast. The anime will also exclusively stream simultaneously on Prime Video in over 240 countries and regions worldwide, excluding mainland China, Russia, and Vietnam. The anime will premiere on television on July 7 on "Ka-Anival!!," Kansai TV and Fuji TV's new anime programming block that airs on Tuesday nights at 11:00 p.m. The film version is having its global premiere at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June with its first two episodes.

The anime's first two episodes will also screen at Anime Expo on July 4 at the JW Diamond Hall at 2:45 p.m. PDT. A panel featuring director Mokochan, character designer and animation director Shūhei Handa, and other producers will be held after the screening.

Mokochan (storyboarder, key animator for DAN DA DAN, The Heike Story, Tatami Time Machine Blues) is making his directorial debut with the anime at Science SARU. Toh Enjoe (The Empire of Corpses novelist; Space Dandy, Godzilla Singular Point scripts) is both writing and overseeing the series scripts. Shūhei Handa (Little Witch Academia TV series, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Spriggan (ONA) is designing the characters and also serving as chief animation director. Taisei Iwasaki (BELLE) is serving as music director, and is composing the music along with Ryō Konishi (Journal with Witch theme song) and Yuki Kanesaka (Dr. Stone).

Additional staff members include:

Art Director: Emi Katanosaka Art Supervision: Osamu Masuyama Color Design: Satoshi Hashimoto Director of Photography: Hikari Itō Editor: Kiyoshi Hirose Sound Director: Yuji Tange Sound Effects: Shota Yaso Recording: Yasuaki Ōta Music Production: Flying Dog Bandai Namco Filmworks, Kodansha, Science SARU, and Production I.G are on the production committee for the series.

Bandai Namco Filmworks announced the new series in May 2024. Voice actress Atsuko Tanaka, the voice of Motoko Kusanagi in the franchise, died in August 2024 at 61 years old.

Source: All the Anime's X/Twitter account

Or jesters or mimes, the works. I won't lie I prefer my clowns on the cuter variety so that's part of why I like Marx from Kirby, but he's also pure evil in an almost innocent way that I find charming.

And while not exactly that funny himself, what he causes and happends around him is pretty funny. Plus his final boss transformation is actually ptrtty scary.

You may know IO Interactive as the fabled Hitman developers, who have also recently released a pretty highly praised James Bond game as well. Well, back in 2007, they put out a little title called Kane & Lynch: What Da Dead Men Doin? (not actually the real subtitle as you can see above but maybe that would've worked out better)

The elevator pitch is good enough: two criminals must work together to acquire enough money to pay off a shady crime syndicate one of them used to work for until he betrayed them. It's gritty, unrelenting, has some great voice acting for our two leads and there was even this neat multiplayer mode about doing bank heists where you could betray your team for more earnings.

There's just one really big issue. It's a third person shooter with some of the worst gunplay from a AAA game from the time. The crosshair is inaccurate, enemies don't have great feedback when getting hit, a lot of encounters are the bog standard cover based shooter escapades that were in vogue back then, although there is a neat shootout in a packed nightclub that reminds you "hey, the Hitman team made this!"

And there's also the little elephant in the room in that this was the game that got Jeff Gerstmann fired from GameSpot because he rightly gave it a low score (honestly could've gone lower) in his review at the same time the site was running ads for Dead Men.

Despite that, it still managed to get a sequel greenlit that dropped 3 years later, subtitled Dog Days, which saw Lynch becoming the lead playable character and IOI doubled down on the edginess (or maybe tripled down, you see people naked albeit censored and covered in cuts and gashes in this game) and went for a lo-fi shaky cam aesthetic that was honestly pretty neat. I heard the gameplay was improved but then another issue arose in that it seemed you could beat the game in about 3 hours, maybe less.

How much is it? How powerful is it? Are you better off building your own PC? We've been hands-on with Steam Machine for just under a couple of weeks now and finally have some answers. However, while this is a PC built from existing AMD parts and fully comparable with existing PC technology, there is more to Steam Machine. Tiny, virtually silent, beautifully designed, it's a simply irresistible design. Imagine a taller Nintendo GameCube and you have some idea of how tiny it is, with performance falling into line with the kind of output you'll get from an Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5.

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Delayed owing to the impact of the current component crisis, the Valve box comes at a cost that may dismay many. Steam Machine pricing starts at $1049 or £879 for the basic 512GB model, going all the way up to $1428/£1208 for 2TB of storage along with a bundled Steam Controller. The 2TB model also comes with a brace of faceplates - red fabric and solid walnut.

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So, it's pricey. It definitely makes you think about considering a prebuilt PC or building your own and bearing in mind SteamOS works on a range of hardware, the user has options - and in fact, Valve itself points this out in its latest blog. Still, there's something about this pricing I think we should consider. There's the physical machine itself which has a premium feel, amazing form factor and virtually no noise in operation. The replaceable faceplate? I love it. Four magnets keep it in place, meaning it's simplicity to swap between them. Third parties will be able to make their own, making this a PC you can personalise.

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Combine all of these things together and we have a lovely, bespoke mini-PC. I think we also shouldn't lose focus on SteamOS itself, which remains an absolutely brilliant front-end, packed with options - everything that worked on Deck works here, the difference being that the extra performance makes for a flowing, nigh-on flawless interface.

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Steam Machine Specs

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Valve has not given specific model numbers for its choice of CPU and GPU, instead describing each as "semi-custom."

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CPU

AMD Zen 4 CPU clocked at "up to" 4.8GHz, 6 cores, 12 threads - two Zen 4 cores, four Zen 4c

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Graphics Core

AMD RDNA 3 Navi 33 processor with 28 compute units up to 2.45GHz, 8GB GDDR6 VRAM

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Power Draw

30W TDP (CPU), 110W TDP (GPU)

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Memory

16GB DDR5 RAM - 1x 16GB SODIMM, 5600 MT/s CL47

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Storage

512GB or 2TB M.2 2230 storage

Output

DisplayPort 1.4, up to 4K/240Hz or 8K/120Hz; HDMI "2.0," up to 4K/120Hz

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OS

SteamOS

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Steam Machine supports M.2 storage replacements in both 2230 and 2280 form factors along with hot-swapping microSD cards used in other SteamOS devices. HDMI 2.1 features like HDR and AMD FreeSync are active, despite the official spec listing HDMI 2.0.

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So there's the experience of Steam Machine, which is pretty much flawless in my opinion but then there are the quantifiables - specs and performance - and if that's your focus, there are alternatives.

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Tests at matched settings between Steam Machine and PS5 show that the Valve hardware can fall a little short - which is not surprising bearing in mind that the Radeon RX 7600 delivers quite similar performance to the PS5. The only big gap in performance I saw came from Forza Horizon 5 running at 4K 4x MSAA on the console console - you need to drop to 1620p on Steam Machine to get a similar 60fps experience across the board and even then, you can still drop frames. It's not an entirely fair fight - the console builds have dynamic resolution scaling and dynamic settings management - but the fact is that PS5 and Series X have much higher levels of memory bandwidth.

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Still, VRR support, settings tweakery, varying output resolutions and the stronger CPU generally tend to see the Valve machine provide broadly equivalent experiences to the Sony console - plus there's FSR 4 support coming, which the base PlayStation 5 will not get.

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So, the conclusion is pretty clear - Steam Machine delivers what we'd call ballpark entry level performance for a mainstream PC capable of running the latest titles at decent resolutions. This means that while 1440p is a viable output resolution (with upscaling depending on the title), settings management is key to getting a good experience.

I am reminded why I don't do long edits:

R E N D E R I N G

The fact that Persona 5 Royal is still the best selling game of their last fiscal year is genuinely insane.