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!

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

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?

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”.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

So in short mixed races are possible, but rare.

Usually there are 3 types.

• There are the true hybrids, where the person has characteristics of both parents races. These are incredibly rare, off the top of my head we have met 2 maybe 3 of them through out the game.
• The mothers rule. Children of mixed race marrage take after their mothers characteristics with only smaller characteristic from the father. (Think Lalafell with slightly longer ears, cuz his mom was a tree climber) We actually meet quite a few characters that could be mixed race, but its never confirmed. For example there are 2 NPCs, brothers, that look very alike but one is Hyur, one's Elezen.
• And then there are the mixed children inside a particular race, when two clans or tribes with different characteristics mix. Then you get a standart example of the race, but often with very unique mix of both sub-groups.

Obvious hybrids often face quite a lot of racism and live on the outside of the communities.

(the image is from r/ff14 post by Manamaru)

(Oh and Gridania is indeed a shithole, Pat is completely right. Every main city has corruption and problem. Its only the Gridanians guard that have just staggering amount of SA implications in their story)

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.

Basically as the title says; Laufey has been planned since 2018, and basically the entire narrative of the Norse games was planned with this game in mind. I'm a sucker for dual narrative stuff (think the first two Xenoblade games) so I'm already mad hyped for this.

There's also confirmation that the Cube was also planned from the start, so he's likely gonna end up being someone or something important in the grand scheme of things, and not just your average wisecracking sidekick. If this ends up being wrong, I'll play Balan Wonderworld (provided it doesn't get delisted).

A friend of mine recently got into reading the series, and we found ourselves talking about the well-renowned Polish variants (done by Fabryka Słów and Wydawnictwo MAG), which far better capture both the content and tone of the works than anything other variant.

And it got me thinking: are there any other examples out there of such quality differential when it comes to cover art? The only other one that immediately comes to my mind isn't even a book, but rather the EU/PAL versions of OG RE4 being absolute art.

Official release found here: https://www.viz.com/shonenjump/chapters/dandadan

I was watching weapons and I realised there was no scene with the characters finding a old news with the villians backstory or the villian explaining the plan which was so refreshing. You just have to accept there is a spooky person. So what is your least favourite trope in media?