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Ashtear

@ Ashtear @piefed.social

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11
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165
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5 mo. ago

  • Sony Pulls Back From PlayStation Games on PC

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  • When almost half of their income comes from MTX and other services purchases, their first-party games were never, ever going to be simultaneous releases. Sony wants as many users platformed in their ecosystem as possible, and exclusivity is one of the ways you do that. This was a pretty simple ROI calculation, and when you're already losing Steam's cut, it would take solid performance to be worthwhile.

    The above comment mentions goodwill, and that's another thing; Sony burnt up the goodwill they earned with PC users (and probably then some) with the PSN nonsense for these ports. It's like how Nvidia continually gets bad press for their gaming GPU division, at some point you gotta look at how it's affecting your overall brand.

  • Featured

    How's your language learning going this week? - Weekly thread

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  • It ultimately depends on how many cards you want to do per day and how much time you set aside for it. I try to shoot for 30-35 minutes a day with 16 new cards (about 8-10 new words, usually) per day, so that comes out to 85% for me. My time's been creeping up a little, so I'm probably going to suspend new cards for a week-ish once I finish Tobira later this month.

    And grats on 5 months!

  • ELI5 Can someone explain the nuke US and Israel problem with having Iran have them? Its their country so they got uranium who are we to tell how they can use it?

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  • Aside from those in the nuclear club not wanting to share power, nuclear proliferation causes a lot of problems. It creates more flashpoints for escalating into a world-ending nuclear exchange or for non-state actors to obtain devices for terrorism, etc. The world stood at the brink for a while and decided decades ago the ultimate goal is to reduce the number of nuclear arms.

    On the flip side, this is why the recent-ish invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Venezuela, the intervention in Libya, and China's saber-rattling against Taiwan--among others--are serious matters. It teaches regimes around the world you will only be safe if you have a nuclear deterrent. North Korea applied that lesson, and they won't be the last at this rate.

  • Featured

    How's your language learning going this week? - Weekly thread

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  • Yep, sticking with it! Pretty good week last week.

    I'm using someone's transcribed notes from the grammar section in my textbook so I have them in a portable format (for use in my note-taking app, or to throw into Anki, etc.). It's not the cleanest transcription, and one thing I'm starting to notice is I'm getting really sharp at spotting typos. Typos--especially kanji conversion errors--work differently in Japanese than they do in English, so there's kind of a separate learned skill for it. It's super interesting stuff, and I'm recalling an interview with Alexander O. Smith (a video game localizer) where he said recognizing potential errors and understanding the scenarist's original intent is a key benchmark for being able to localize games well. Makes me feel pretty good about playing some more later.

    I wonder if reading through stuff with errors is an exercise worth seeking out, too, for those at intermediate-level and up. It feels like a good way to reinforce learned but not yet mastered material.

  • Insider Confirms Sony Ditching PC Ports: "You'll Be Seeing Fewer Single Player Games Arrive on PC."

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  • Disappointing, though ultimately a small part of my PC library in the end. Enjoyed Horizon Zero Dawn and loved both parts of The Last of Us. Yet they never did bring over The Last Guardian, Bloodborne, or Bluepoint's remakes (I played the original Shadow of the Colossus and Demon's Souls).

    Intergalactic is the only upcoming title I'm interested in, and that's nowhere enough for me to spend on a PS5.

  • How's your language learning going this week? - Weekly thread

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  • Yeah, just one of those things that'll take practice. I'm approaching N2 level and something like the original Legend of Zelda or robot speech is still brutally slow for me because I'm just not used to seeing full sentences with katakana.

    And dunno, sometimes there's hiccups with content federating properly.

  • How's your language learning going this week? - Weekly thread

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  • Don't know how far along you are in Japanese, but I just about universally recommend a starter class for it. The grammar structure is just too different not to have initial guidance in it, and I was glad to commiserate over the initial rote memorization. Kanji gets a lot easier as you go, but that initial period with it and the kana sucks and there isn't a great way around it.

  • How's your language learning going this week? - Weekly thread

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  • Hah, I know the feeling with gaming. It recently took me almost an hour to unlock manual saves in Animal Crossing New Horizons, and that seemed ridiculous to me until I realized it probably takes a native 10 minutes!

  • How's your language learning going this week? - Weekly thread

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  • Almost done with the Tobira chapter on haiku, I'm mostly writing it off as one that was just largely too difficult. Esoteric terminology, abstract/rule bending language that demands grammar mastery I don't have, and way too many new words thrown at the student in general. On the plus side, I did find a couple that I really liked and I'll probably look into a couple poets more down the road. Hopefully the workbook goes better.

    Everything else is pretty good. Listening is fine, flashcards flowing as normal. I'm being more aggressive dropping cards from the deck, and I think I going to give myself a nice buffer to really lock in some of these words by December.

  • Review: Ys X: Proud Nordics (Switch 2) - The Definitive Version Of Adol Christin's Seafaring Saga

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  • Reportedly sales of this in Japan were real bad and with the localization delay, announcing it so soon after the original game's release probably killed its long tail sales.

    Between that and Sky 1st's huge success, I don't think they are going to try this approach again.

  • Why Final Fantasy is now targeting PC as its "lead platform"

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  • With how long AAA dev cycles are these days, the next FF (after the final part of FF7) probably won't be out until after the hardware market normalizes.

  • Quick! I need a chili recipe. What would you add to a pound of hamburger, diced jalapenos, chili powder and bloody mary mix?

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  • Don't use bloody mary mix. Add tomatoes, whether skinning and cutting them yourself, using a can of diced or crushed tomatoes, or tomato paste. If fresh or paste, add chicken stock. I also always have onion in my chili.

    You'll also want an acid. Can be vinegar, lemon juice, or even mustard.

  • Is your life better or worse than your parents (I mean specifically your parents, not your parent's generation)? (Specify country)

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  • USA, far worse. The really insane thing is my parents were absolute shit at fiscal planning and overleveraged up to their eyeballs on everything: mortgage, cars, furniture. My mother was even at the bottom of a makeup MLM for gods' sake. Boomer bougie living at its worst.

    And yet? They still owned a home, have retirement savings, and never came close to having anywhere near as bad a debt-to-asset ratio as mine is, all from student loans. Meanwhile I'm better educated, scrimping and saving and not throwing money away on expensive dinners, wine and travel and I will still never be able to afford to have kids, let alone sufficient retirement savings.

  • BREAKING: PlayStation is shutting down Bluepoint Games (Demon's Souls/Shadow of the Colossus remakes)

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  • I'd forgotten that was on the Nvidia list. Wasn't many misses on there. Final Fantasy IX remake was another big one that never surfaced.

  • How's your language learning going this week? - Weekly thread

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  • Just had a nice victory here, I understood 100% of one of the podcast episodes I listened to today and didn't have to verify with the transcript! I've been sorta documenting my struggles with listening here for a while and it's really nice to have a clear marker of progress.

    That said, my overall pace has slowed and it's still not quite back where it was in December (not just language learning, effort in general). Could be I was just running hot for a while, could be a natural cycle. My general workflow is still relatively new, so I'm trying to give myself the grace to have hiccups here and there.

  • ArsTechnica's response to the AI generated "quotations"

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  • Well, I can see how that could happen, and in fact, copy-paste artifacts and unintended summaries/hallucinations have happened to me when grabbing output back from an LLM.

    Here's the thing though: I catch it 100% of the time because my writing has version control and I compare diffs. When dealing with something that can exist as plain text, there isn't a good reason not to have that setup. I'm no journalist, but it blows my mind that writers who deal specifically in reported facts apparently don't have systems in place to idiot-proof and preserve their sources of truth.

    I get it, at some point back in the analog days there were more editors and copywriters that actually verified these things, and those jobs were sacrificed at the altar of capitalism. I've seen writing quality on the web take a downturn as a result. But for fuck's sake y'all, maybe do the bare minimum and start implementing safeguards before you let your writers use inherently lossy tools?

  • Young gamers in Japan may not be forming the same attachment to Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest because modern dev cycles are as long as their childhood, users theorize - AUTOMATON WEST

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  • I agree this is a much more plausible reason. Not only was there less choice, there was less opportunity. Adjusting for inflation, I paid over $150 for Final Fantasy VI when it came out. Games were precious, and the good games were ones you replayed because--unless you were quite privileged--you didn't have a big library to choose from.

    That's the kind of thing that endears players, and it takes truly exceptional products to get there now. There are also far more studios that have the game-making formulas to work with today, too. I don't think that's a bad thing in any way.

  • The Only Solution Capitalism Has Is to Sell Us More Useless Junk: Ad makers will never say the quiet part loud, but they increasingly know that we're unhappy and looking for solutions.

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  • The wild thing is how this is a complete 180 for the marketing industry. They went through a paradigm shift into authenticity, or at least the appearance thereof, not all that long ago as millennials aged into their prime spending demographic.

    That demand didn't go away, but now as wide swaths of people continue settle more into a post-truth world, I have to imagine the most effective mass market communication is the kind that can successfully serve both sides of the divide at once, almost like quantum superposition. I think of the success of The Boys, which did well because it simultaneously carried a scathing critique of fascism and capitalism while presenting fascist "heroes" that some could see as validation of their beliefs.

  • Dragon Quest VIII is so charming

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  • I think it's a testament to the series's formula that DQ8 managed to keep charming me despite how dark it got. There's a late game twist with a character that I still think about from time to time.

    DQ5 is my favorite in the series by a mile--it's also rather popular in general--so that's an easy recommend for people that like the series. There's also Chrono Trigger if you haven't played it yet, as another in the lighthearted/JRPG/Akira Toriyama vein.

  • How's your language learning going this week? - Weekly thread

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  • Had my first full day of language study today for the first time in a couple weeks-ish. Felt good. I feel more settled in general after giving up some other things I was working on that can wait for a better time. Cutting out mental clutter and setting aside time for mental maintenance is so important. If you don't make time for your body, your body is eventually going to make that time for you whether you like it or not.

    For Japanese itself, I realized when listening today I still don't have a firm grasp of a rather elementary concept (demonstratives with か or も) and that's pretty frustrating considering how common they are. I'm going to drill them next month when I'm wrapping up Tobira.

  • World of JRPGs @lemmy.zip
    Ashtear @piefed.social

    Trails Beyond the Horizon Review Thread

  • ADHD @lemmy.world
    Ashtear @piefed.social

    Strategies for active listening in adult learning? (struggling with language learning)

  • World of JRPGs @lemmy.zip
    Ashtear @piefed.social

    The Legend of Heroes: Trails beyond the Horizon ‘Story’ and ‘Battle’ demos now available

    www.gematsu.com /2025/12/the-legend-of-heroes-trails-beyond-the-horizon-story-and-battle-demos-now-available
  • Games @lemmy.world
    Ashtear @piefed.social

    New Tomb Raider Games Recast Lara Croft With A Gaming Veteran

    www.gamespot.com /articles/new-tomb-raider-games-recast-lara-croft-with-a-gaming-veteran/1100-6536948/
  • Games @lemmy.world
    Ashtear @piefed.social

    The best games of 2025, picked by NPR's staff

    www.npr.org /2025/12/03/nx-s1-5627036/best-games-2025-npr
  • World of JRPGs @lemmy.zip
    Ashtear @piefed.social

    The Like a Dragon series still can’t be called mainstream in the West, developers say. “There's an audience, but we still have a long way to go”  - AUTOMATON WEST

    automaton-media.com /en/interviews/the-like-a-dragon-series-still-cant-be-called-mainstream-in-the-west-developers-say-theres-an-audience-but-we-still-have-a-long-way-to-go/
  • Games @lemmy.world
    Ashtear @piefed.social

    Alberto Mielgo defends the Marathon cinematic as "not AI," denies his team touched Bungie’s plagiarized material and calls the art theft incident a genuine mistake that was "blown out of proportion"

    thegamepost.com /alberto-mielgo-marathon-cinematic-ai-bungie-plagiarized-material/
  • World of JRPGs @lemmy.zip
    Ashtear @piefed.social

    Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter saw the biggest response on Steam, Nihon Falcom CEO says. “The Steam demo’s impact was enormous”

    automaton-media.com /en/news/trails-in-the-sky-1st-chapter-saw-the-biggest-response-on-steam-nihon-falcom-ceo-says-the-steam-demos-impact-was-enormous/
  • Honkai Star Rail @ani.social
    Ashtear @piefed.social

    Having a good time with Currency Wars!

  • Video Game Music @lemmy.world
    Ashtear @piefed.social
    Paweł Perepelica

    The Expanse: Osiris Reborn - Main Theme

  • Language Learning @sopuli.xyz
    Ashtear @piefed.social

    What's your Anki pace?