I’m 30 hours into Death Stranding 2 and I never want it to end.
It’s been a long time, probably since before the pandemic, that I’ve seen a movie in theaters and I was glad that I did. 28 Years Later broke that streak, that was quite the movie.
The system shock 2 remaster is so fucking good. I just love this game and to see it so vibrant and smooth just feels good. And simply hearing it again, from the ambiance of the ship to the awesome voice acting… love it!
Tonight we saw EMF and Spacehog live. EMF was great. Spacehog was… Spacehog? Their music is… not that great. But they were very entertaining: the guitarist got very mad about his equipment not working and at one point shoved his brother and lead vocalist over. Literally shoved him hard and he fell flat on his back on stage for a bit while everyone looked around in confusion, trying to figure out if it was a bit. But it didn’t seem to be a bit, and they got it together. I guess brothers fight, I wouldn’t know, having never had one.
I’m eight hours into Death Stranding 2 and it’s pretty fantastic. There are moments where you’d swear they swapped in actual filmed video because the graphics are so good.
I had a good time last night just completing aid requests and picking up random packages to try to grow my connection level to in the first area. When I played the first game, I stubbornly avoided all the side content, so by the end of the game I hadn’t even unlocked the truck. So I’m trying to avoid making that mistake this time around.
My internet existence feels so small right now. Reddit is very impersonal now, feels like nothing but bots and reposts. Hacker News isn’t particularly interesting. Shacknews chatty died out. My Discord server has been a bit of a ghost town for going on a year now, and the AI Horde server is pretty quiet. Other forms of social media, I’ve cut out of my diet basically entirely. I just don’t have, like, random people to talk to or feel like I’m talking to even if I’m not (via lurking interesting conversations). I sit down at the PC during a minor fit of boredom and it feels like… why am I here? At the computer, specifically, I mean. Or, why is my phone in my hand? I guess TikTok is, unfortunately, kind of fun when I am sitting on the toilet. Anyway… the internet feels lonely. AIM gave way to Google Talk which gave way to… nothing? I had a dream recently I loaded up an old AIM client and a bunch of old usernames I hadn’t seen in years was there. Was that a dream? Man… the internet used to be so interesting. Now it’s all silo’d away in Discord servers and Telegram rooms, where the censors are less likely to come for it. Where’s all the cool nice weirdos at?
I started to get the itch to buy a Behringer TD-3 so I could make some proper acid on stream and managed to hold out long enough to realize I should just see if there is a good iPad version of the 303. And, sure enough, this Pure Acid app kicks so much ass. I’m kind of cheating in this set as I’m just using and abusing its randomized composer button.
This setup is pretty nerdy. I’ve got the SeqTrak sending midi clock sync to Pure Acid to keep them in sync. Then MIDI is going from the MPK to the SeqTrak and through to Pure Acid to help control both. Audio from Pure Acid is going into the SeqTrak so it’s part of its FX processing and even responds to the note repeat function. It’s hella cool.
I got a new toy today. Here’s hoping I make something I’m proud of with it.
I dunno how I spent so many years without going to revolving sushi place but I am so in love with Kura now. I can eat tuna nigiri until I am broke and dead in the ground.
Boy, you really gotta feel for Ed Zitron. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t become more and more wrong. Two months ago he was saying that “in a couple months” he would be dabbing over the corpses of all the AI companies, or something stupid like that, over on Some More News. Do you think anyone will have him on their podcast so he can do a mea culpa some day and admit that LLMs actually were very useful in the end?