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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2467 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 3, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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A weird thing I've noticed is if you link to chess.com in a youtube comment then your comment well be automatically deleted. Also, the next level of weirdness is I posted a link without the domain and only the path and youtube also deleted that comment. But I suspect this is probably some automatic comment deletion evasion logic and maybe if I didn't make the first comment the second comment would have sailed through. The weird thing is chess.com is a large commercial entity and apparently they haven't tried to sit down with youtube and fix this. So I presume chess.com must have done something very naughty to piss off youtube into censoring all their links.

Also, this is super annoying when you want to link to games in youtube comments.

Idle thought: "doomscroll" sounds like a fantasy artifact.

You have gained +5 to neuroticism

Memory is such a weird, non intuitive thing. Something can live inside your memory for eternity, for no reason whatsoever, but if everything did that, we would not even be able to function. Why is it that I will forever know the name of, and be able to pronounce, the state fish of Hawai'i, but I can't recall my mother's middle name?

(I'll save you the google search, it's the humuhumunukunukuapuaa)

Why is it that I will forever know

As long as you keep bringing it up it'll get stored in your memory more. If you said your mother's middle name every day for a week and every week for a month and every month for a year and every year for the rest of your life, you'd probably remember that too.

Root for the Eagles today, I'm at the linc. If any of our Philly bros are in attendance hit me up for a beer. Go birds.

Just finished Passion of the Christ after attempting, and failing, to get back into the Chosen. Something about the story just doesn't click for me.

Recommendations for good Jesus-centered visual media?

Pre-19th century art. For any scene, type scene + renaissance/medieval into google. Can use any terminology related to European art, but ignore everything Romantic and onward. Or even neoclassical and onward. With the exceptions of like William Blake and Gustave Dore it’s junk. For the passion, you can type in any phrase and find accompanying art. There’s probably at least 1000 individual pieces for every sentence of the passion

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/464349

There’s a cool collection of art with descriptions by a Jewish educational fund, too: https://talivisualmidrash.org.il/en/home/

This is less entertaining than a movie, but each piece is greater than any individual frame of a movie. Religious movies just never capture reverence or awe well.

Someone should devise a website that combines the best art, music, poetry and commentaries onto one web page for every scene in the Bible. That would be awesome.

Some of these are amazing, thanks!

Religious movies just never capture reverence or awe well.

I truly wonder if this is it. My thinking is that the Jesus story is just...difficult in its totality if you don't already believe. Individual story beats can make great stories but the totality of the god-man and what he has to do is just...odd (the closer we get to suicide by cop the less interested I was in The Chosen). It is, after all, consciously a subversion of expectations

I guess I'll have to find some Old Testament films to compare.

Old Testament, but The Promised Land is fun and free on Youtube:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HSI04-1oLwg

The travails of Moses and the Israelites in the desert, done in the style of the Office. Funny without being a piss-take.

Thanks, actually pretty funny. I hope it takes off like The Chosen.

Just finished Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

Pretty good music, amazing voice-acting, so-so story, gameplay that massively overstays its welcome and goes from okay to tedious near the end. Having to replay the first half multiple times to get the full story is especially unforgivable.

I could write a longer review but I feel like Fire emblem is a series where you're either a fan and have played them all or are not and are not even remotely interested.

I used Eden, which is a sort of unofficial continuation of the Ryuji emulator. Excellent performance, no bugs or issues to speak of. Nintendo should really be paying these people to port their games and selling them on PC.

As someone that has played them all (other than 1 and 2, which were made obsolete by their remakes), 3H is probably the Fire Emblem I'd be least likely to every try to play again, and I only finished 2 routes. The guiding principle of modern FE is that every single playable character is potentially the self-insert's husband/wife, and it severely handicaps what they can do in both story and gameplay. The majority of the cast were prevented from having any meaningful role in the second half of the plot, and the ability to always recruit the best characters from each house couldn't have helped the balance design. 3H tried really hard to get the Persona audience when the SMT spinoff they should have emulated was Devil Survivor, where playable characters will happily tell you to fuck off if you choose a route they wouldn't agree with.

Devil Survivor

I looked into this one very briefly and it sounds like "Three Houses but better". Thanks for the accidental recommendation, I'll check it out next!

+1 for Devil Survivor, pretty unique and well-designed.

Despite its flaws, I love this game. I think it has the pieces to have been a true masterpiece but got pushed out the door a year too early. If I could make just one change it would be to make the first half the game roughly 15 chapters and have you rotate classes for each chapter so you spend about 5 chapters with each class. That's probably enough time to get the students started on their specialization routes and grow emotionally attached before killing 2/3 of them in the second half. Let students who bond with you audit with other classes as the recruitment mechanism. Have the last chapter act as a checkpoint before the branching paths so you don't have to replay the first half every time. I'd also probably axe the Church route and incorporate its story elements into the Deer and Lions routes, get rid of the class system and just have [level] x [1 movement type] x [up to 2 physical and/or 1 magical weapon type, with tradeoffs for going past 1 weapon type], make the proficiencies/deficiencies more influential on skill growths so each unit feels unique.

But it is what it is, and still manages to be my favorite Fire Emblem game. Six years later, I can recall every student's name and story. By the end, I found something to like about all of them (except maybe Leonie) and remember the bittersweet feeling when I killed each of them. I couldn't give you more than 4 names from Fates and literally 0 from Engage. Neither's advantage in map design or graphics was really enough to get over how thoroughly off-putting the characterization was. Despite the interesting gameplay mechanics in Engage, by the halfway point I was desperately rushing through in the hopes it would get slightly more tolerable (it didn't). I think I would have replayed (many times over) a version of that game with everything about the strategy gameplay the same but with the story cut out and the characters reduced to faceless chess pieces without dialogue. The only other thing to make me feel so viscerally disgusted was probably James Cameron's Avatar (another piece of media where I haven't been able to pinpoint exactly why it elicits so much hate in me).

Yeah, I agree completely. We were this close to greatness, the devs just stumbled in a few minor ways which ultimately turned a magnificent game into one that is merely pretty good.

I think Three Houses is good but overambitious. The idea of multiple story routes through the game is neat, but having to do four playthroughs to get the full story is just absurd. In my playthrough, I did the church route and the story with the people pulling the strings completely fizzles out (apparently it gets handled better in the Golden Deer route, but you should resolve the main villains competently without requiring multiple playthroughs). And as you said, it's not like the routes differ enough to make them interesting every time. I hope that in the future they don't try the multiple routes thing again, and stick to telling a single coherent story.

I did the church route and the story with the people pulling the strings completely fizzles out

Yeah, agreed. For me, this part went like this: everyone arrives at the huge and mysterious underground city and gapes in wonder. What could await us down there? Danger? Treasure? Answers?

Followed by electronic music of all things. And then the battle starts and Warp -> unlock door -> kill the end boss in literally <1min. And that was it for TWSITD, apparently. A thousand years of scheming and all that buildup for what?

Why are LLMs so bad at wordplay? I asked them "What is the favorite sex toy of Linda Load and Diana Doll?", explicitly stating that it's a wordplay riddle, and none of them got it right.

Yeah LLMs are notoriously weak at anagrams due to how tokenizing works. Here's a fun little demo of how LLAMA's tokenizer breaks up an input sequence: https://belladoreai.github.io/llama-tokenizer-js/example-demo/build/

Hence the famous example of LLMs failing at "how many times does the letter R appear in the word strawberry" until the training data for newer models was contaminated with the answer.

Some domains they struggle with wordplay for tokenization reasons, especially for matters like rhyming, counting syllables, so on. Dunno if this is one of them.

This may be an artifact of the LLMs you're using being trained to avoid the idea space you're working around, although like SubstantialFrivolity I'll admit I don't know the 'right' answer, either. Nevoria, which is trained on a lot of sexual chat, gave ""A Peter Puffer" and "A Rod Rocket", which doesn't seem awful even if I'd have gone with something like "Fred Fluffer", but I get the feeling that there's some specific domain knowledge that I'm missing.

After staring at it for fifteen minutes, I realized that both names are an anagram for "anal dildo" and it's only the rule to be charitable that makes me call this a wordplay.

In fairness I have no idea what your riddle is getting at either. But the answer to all the "why are they bad at X" questions is "because they aren't actually intelligent".

Vidya thread.

49.4% of players have the "Defeat the Paintress" achievement. 49.0% of players have the "Go back to Lumiere" achievement.

0.4% of players have quit the game mid-cutscene and never launched it again.

On that note, please help sell me on Clair Obscur. I'm not this much of a contrarian to just discard the chorus of glowing reviews, I know the game is good, and I think I recovered from Automata and am ready to get my shit totally rocked by a videogame again; but I don't have limitless time anymore and when I see a JRPG (FRPG? EuRPG?) my gut immediately pegs it as a 50-60hr commitment at the bare minimum. Sadly my fried brain finds it much easier to consoom roguelike number-go-up slop rather than commit to a proper game.

((On that note, Balatro was so good some madlads made Balatro 2: slot machine boogaloo. Cloverpit is amazing, I love it. Do not play it.))

If it helps, it's more like 30-40 hours. I don't know if you'll "get your shit totally rocked" though -- I think some of the reception is due to lowish expectations (previously unknown studio etc), but it's definitely a fun time.

It's not this long. I've been playing it for 30 hours, according to Steam, and according to the other commenters, I have probably five hours of plot left.

when I see a JRPG (FRPG? EuRPG?)

It's "JeRPG". Well, mechanically it's pretty much a standard JRPG with a few "must keep the player engaged" changes that I'm not a fan of, the big draws to me are the setting and the writing.

Japanese games are much more adventurous with their settings, but even they are prone to defaulting to X-buts ("it's basically X, but...") these days. CO is completely alien and weird, it's like you're trapped in a surrealist painting. The only annoyance is the lack of structured exposition. You start the game in the middle of an important weird ceremony, and you have no idea what's going on. Your PC knows what's going to happen, everyone around him knows, but you don't. You have to piece everything together from bits of dialogue. I know the reason, but it's a cheap narrative trick, especially in a video game.

The writing is very... French. You know what beats an American story would have, what beats a Japanese one, you can peg the archetypes of the party members right after meeting them (with a few subversive X-buts in the mix). Well, not in CO. Well, partly. Sometimes a brooding guy with a deep dark secret is just a brooding guy with a deep dark secret, it must be a universal trope. But the way he's positioned in the overarching story is different.

Having tired of Hades 2 for the moment and stirred by mentions of Synthetik and Ruiner downthread, I tried Hell Clock to get my ARPG/top-down action fix. The premise seemed solid enough, and the Curse of the Dead Gods-esque artstyle feels fresh.

About 6 hours in I must surmise it is... not good, i my humble o. In brief, Hell Clock feels distinctly like a game made by someone who really likes ARPGs generally and PoE specifically (with a touch of Hades, ironically), with zero actual understanding of what makes these games work.

Un-briefly:

+ I found the artstyle quite nice, although the levels themselves are fairly barren and the style makes projectile spam really blur together as a side effect.

+ The character controls well and movement is responsive, Hades-tier is the highest praise I can give it. WASD really oughta become the new standard for ARPGs going forward.

+ Voice acting sounds good, although a language I do not understand.

- Its most glaring con is that many game systems were evidently made by someone who does not understand how roguelites/ARPGs and metafaggotry optimization works. Examples galore:

- The levels are static, never changing throughout runs. It actually took me a few runs to nootice because that's like, the most basic expectation for a roguelike, but once I noticed my enjoyment fell off a cliff; I have no idea how you sustain interest in such a game without at least a token effort at procedural generation. This alone is a black mark on the game in general.

- The starting skill variety is far too limited, and more skills only open after beating Act 1 (which took me most of the ~6 hours), at which point your interest may or may not be gone. Mine certainly was.

- Gear is permanent and you do not lose it between runs, but the only things it gives (as of Act 1-2) is flat stat bonuses - HP for body armor, base damage for weapons, movement speed on boots etc. There is no variety, every slot is literally one stat, and the only upgrade is number go up. For an ARPG this is a fatal shortcoming; they even know how to do it, Sanctum relics (your other kind of equipment) are properly random and roll affixes! Maybe this gets better later, but with no actual stash for gear (how?!) I highly doubt it.

- The skill tree contains passives that increase dismantling yield and make upgrading relics/gear cheaper - forever dooming your autism to respec every time you upgrade your shit or clear out your stash if you want to make the most of it. For extra aggravation, the only respec option is to reset your tree entirely instead of deallocating points one by one.

- [cw: autistic rage] Mechanics are extremely hit or miss, due to the limited skill variety you are more or less corralled into a few working builds early on. Bleeding specifically is an outright scam: the mechanic is lifted straight out of Last Epoch so I quickly figured out how to work it, but I noticed I am not doing nearly as much single-target damage as I expected to. Bleeds just didn't seem to stick to bosses despite gazillion small hits per second, and at the Act 1 boss (and after a bit of googling) I finally realized why: bleed damage is unrelated to the hit that applies it, but bleed chance somehow still directly depends on it - bleed chance is greatly reduced the less damage you deal relative to total HP! My only damaging mechanic is directly countered by an affix-less wall of HP, the kind that bleeds are supposed to be good at killing in the first place! Spending literally 15 minutes to plink the boss to death due to my main damage source ceasing to work was the final straw, I alt-f4'd out of the game shortly after.

This actually gave me painful flashbacks so if any mottizen ever makes an ARPG, carve this insight into your psyche: any damage mechanic that can plausibly be played as main DPS must never be entirely negated by things outside the player's control! Leave damage immunities in 2000 where they belong! None of that "500% bleed resistance for undead" muh realism bullshit! Even Chris fucking Wilson Jonathan fucking Rogers, the king of player-hostile game design, figured out this part immediately following PoE2's release!

- The admittedly novel setting of 19th-century Brazilian badlands appears to mostly cash out into incessant glazing of the Canudos, victims of the eponymous massacre. I suppose alt-history is a perfectly cromulent narrative device, but by the time I encountered... checks notes Head-Cutter (in actual, literal hell!) I completely checked out of the narrative, it is impossible to take seriously. This kind of hamfisted political narrative never fails to give me the ick regardless of subject matter; I know nothing about the Canudos but I will be entirely unsurprised if they were actually some sort of horrible militant sect with plenty of chips on their shoulders that required direct gov't intervention to root out.

((Out of curiosity, does somebody know of a game extolling the virtues of jingoistic imperialism and brutal colonisation? Off the top my head I only recall Broforce and New Vegas: Sneering Imperialist edition.))

In short, I did not entirely hate Hell Clock but it wore out its welcome remarkably quickly and I am glad I picked up the uh, extended demo version from the high seas instead of buying it. Just play Tiny Rogues or something instead.

I generally share your assessment, though I don't think I hated its flaws quite as much as you and stuck it out slightly longer, getting halfway through Act 2 before dropping it.

The permanent gear does get a tiny bit more creative in Act 2 with occasionally having an affix, or having a different boost (a belt that increases the duration of your status effects instead of boosting your max damage), so there are tradeoffs. But with no storage for it you kind of have to commit to a build long-term since swapping can only be done when you find a new piece, which is stupid and makes the game more repetitive (which it already was). They should have stuck to the main skill tree for straight stat upgrades and used the Relics as gear.

You know, I've never liked that pre-final chapter in JRPGs where you get to fly around the world map and collect ultimate powerups before tackling the final dungeon and the BBEG. The only one that made it interesting was FF6, where you were putting the team back together.

Well, I am not enjoying it in Clair Obscur, it's just a boss fight after boss fight that all hit hard enough that you have to perfect that dodge timing. I kinda want to skip to the final boss, but FOMO is keeping me back.

You can do the side content after finishing the story, and unless you want to absolutely rinse the final story boss you should.

My advice is to just go to the final area and finish the side content later, it's a better curve that way.

Anyone knows good games with top-down action gameplay like Last Stand Aftermath, Ruiner or The Ascent?

Synthetik for a sci-fi gun-optimizing roguelike.

And hey, there’s always Foxhole if you’re more into WW1 logistics.

Once a week or so I come by /r/foxholegame subreddit to harvest the crying and the bitching.

Coincidentally, this is how long it takes for your facility to produce anything worth shipping.

Len's Island

Amorphous Plus (downloadable as part of the Flashpoint Archive)

be me, Dark Souls 2 fan (though I haven't played it in several years)

enjoy using Heide Spear, which has innate lightning damage, on a character whose dump stats are attunement, intelligence, and faith (which are useful only for magic)

notice that a new wiki has been created for the game

idly check out the page on scaling

mfw lightning damage scales with faith

mfw the meta tryhards say that there are "low returns on melee weapon scaling", so you're supposed to go for weapon upgrades and temporary buffs instead

Maybe I'll start a new playthrough with a character for whom faith is not a dump stat.

I really enjoyed my Agape Ring run of DS2.

In short, you run a particular sequence at the start of the game, get the Agape Ring early on, and permanently lock your progression at the lowest tier of matchmaking (<40k souls collected).

I found it much better than new game+ for a good challenge.

Yeah, the Dark Souls game mechanics are very counterintuitive. In fact, arguably much of the games' difficulty is rooted in the fact that players don't know how the games work. In Elden Ring, you can one-shot (up to phase transitions, which are often hardcoded) every boss in the game by doing the correct buff incantations, which basically renders the entire game trivial. And it's not like this is some glitch or exploit -- it just falls out of basic understanding how buffs stack and doing the obvious thing.

Then again, this is hardly unique to Dark Souls. Basically every single-player game is like this, in the sense that actually knowing how the mechanics work is a game-breaking superpower, rather than the baseline expectation.

I've never really found this complaint really compelling. In fact, I'll top it: You can beat most parts of all DS games by summoning another (often ridiculously overlevelled) player and letting them do everything for you. You don't even need to know anything.

DS is imo very clearly, very deliberately designed to accommodate large differences in player skill without resorting to outright different difficulty levels. That's also the reason why I usually say that DS games are better grouped as high casual, but not quite hardcore.

In fact, arguably much of the games' difficulty is rooted in the fact that players don't know how the games work.

That's mostly an inversion of reality in practice; Plenty of bad players who don't know how the game works follow some online guide for an OP build to do exactly the stuff you're complaining about. Better players deliberately avoid the OP things bc they don't need it and just do a run with some weapon/spells they like. Even better players deliberately use gimmick gear (not me, sadly) or other limitations.

I agree with much of this. My issue is that Elden Ring is saturated with mechanics that compound unnaturally well in favor of knowledgeable or skilled players and are either useless for casuals or actively counterproductive for them. Take Bloodboil Aromatic: it's extremely expensive to make (requiring an Arteria leaf), meaning you can only use it sparingly. Yet it increases your damage taken by 25%! As a casual player, by far your number one concern is bosses killing you before you have a chance to heal, which this item (and many others, e.g., Fire Scorpion Charm) exacerbates. So what exactly is the point of this item? "Well, if you're good enough to not need it, it makes the game a lot easier!" Yay?

If I were the designer, I'd just remove the penalties on these items. Similarly, the Great Rune system is only useful if you're good at the game and don't need it anyway. I'd just remove rune arcs entirely: once you have a great rune, you can just set it and it's active. These changes make things easier for bad players, while not changing anything for skilled players (and if you want to rebalance the game around this by increasing boss HP, the net effect is the game is the same difficulty for casuals, while being harder for good players).

Even potions (ahem, Flask of Crimson Tears) run afoul of this. Good players don't need these at all: just don't get hit, yo. But for bad players, attempting to use a potion often causes you to get hit, as the animation is painfully long and many bosses are coded to input read it. Again, this could be trivially redesigned in a way that's better for everyone: make potions fast or even instant, and increase boss HP to compensate. For casuals, potions would actually feel useful; for better players who weren't using potions anyway, the game gets harder.

Sorry for the late reply. I understand where you're coming from, but I find your perspective a bit one-sided. On many of these, the DS devs (and many players) simply have a different view, and they would be less happy with the game you would design. Which is fine - imo games, like most art, should be designed first and foremost to your own vision, with as little accommodation to others as possible. But it wouldn't be, strictly speaking, an improvement.

Take Bloodboil Aromatic: it's extremely expensive to make (requiring an Arteria leaf), meaning you can only use it sparingly. Yet it increases your damage taken by 25%! As a casual player, by far your number one concern is bosses killing you before you have a chance to heal, which this item (and many others, e.g., Fire Scorpion Charm) exacerbates. So what exactly is the point of this item? "Well, if you're good enough to not need it, it makes the game a lot easier!" Yay?

"Increase damage inflicted at the cost of increased damage taken" is a common design choice in DS games. As you say, these actually mostly make the game harder, but they allow you to do content faster if you're good enough. It's intended as a reward for skill, as I see it.

Similarly, the Great Rune system is only useful if you're good at the game and don't need it anyway. I'd just remove rune arcs entirely: once you have a great rune, you can just set it and it's active.

DS already has pretty minor penalties for dying unless you're really careless. Again, rune arcs are a reward for skill.

Even potions (ahem, Flask of Crimson Tears) run afoul of this. Good players don't need these at all: just don't get hit, yo. But for bad players, attempting to use a potion often causes you to get hit, as the animation is painfully long and many bosses are coded to input read it. Again, this could be trivially redesigned in a way that's better for everyone: make potions fast or even instant, and increase boss HP to compensate. For casuals, potions would actually feel useful; for better players who weren't using potions anyway, the game gets harder.

That would be pointless, you might as well just increase player health if the potion is instant anyway. And since increasing boss hp is one of the most awful ways of increasing difficulty, the logical next step is to remove that extra player HP AND the extra boss hp to make the game more fun again.

Also, potion usage is a skill test, yes, but a fairly minor one. Generally speaking once you've passed beginner level in skill, potions are imo fairly satisfying: You get hit often enough to need them, you are good enough at timing to usually be capable of using them, but it's always risky enough to keep you on edge, and it's definitely better not getting hit in the first place. It incentives you to git (even more) gud. At the highest skill lvl, you'd just convert all flasks to mana, which can be viewed as another reward for the skill of not being hit.

Overall, imo you need everything in a good game: Some items/mechanics directly help bad players. Some are low lvl or medium lvl skill test, encouraging you to get better, but once you can reliably pass that threshold, they help you clear higher-lvl challenges. Some are just pure rewards for good play and outright require high-lvl skill to use, but allow feats not otherwise possible. Some are memes that actively gimp you, so that simply using them serves as a way of showing off your skill.

In general, I also like the DS aesthetic choice of being able to simply take a short look at another player, and I can usually tell quite reliably whether they're a complete noob, a loser, a tryhard, a "simple" good player, or a total monstrosity.

As you say, these actually mostly make the game harder, but they allow you to do content faster if you're good enough.

Well, Bloodboil Aromatic in particular does not allow you to do content faster: it's a huge pain in the ass to farm the recipe and materials! There is no world in which doing a boss 20 seconds faster is going to make up for 15 minutes of farming.

Bloodboil Aromatic, as far as I can divine, has exactly one use: doing nuke build tricks. If they'd make my adaptation and just get rid of the damage-taken penalty, it would have lots of uses! You'd have to do this arcane farming routine, but it would indeed give you a big boost that might help you beat a boss you were having trouble with.

Now, damage-gamble talismans (as opposed to consumables) like Fire Scorpion Charm do have a much more common use: they're good for level 1 challenge runs. If you're going to die in one hit anyway, then it makes no difference if you take more damage, so equipping something like the Fire Scorpion Charm is all buff and no downside. And unlike Bloodboil, skilled players do use it since, it's not a consumable so you don't have to farm it each time you want to use it--you just pick it up once and equip it.

Anyway, I do agree that having a variety of items with weird cost/benefit analyses can make the game more interesting. But even here, what you'd want is "complicated" items for skilled players to not require farming (as good players will just skip it if it does), and all-good-no-downside items for unskilled players to be the sort of thing you'd be able to craft from naturally exploring the world and having an inventory full of materials. Bloodboil is the exact opposite of this principle.

Finally, you have to compare these things not in a vacuum, but to other stuff that exists in the game: compare Bloodboil Aromatic to Flame, Grant Me Strength. The latter is a spell, meaning you pick it up once (right from the start of the game, if you know where it is) and use it as many times as you want, it grants +20% to both physical and fire damage, it occupies the same "internal" buff slot as Bloodboil Aromatic (meaning you can't use these two at the same time), and there's no damage taken penalty!

Again, rune arcs are a reward for skill.

Agree with much of what you say, but strongly disagree with this. Great Runes are my reward for killing an actual demigod, master of their domain, and stealing a chunk of the fundamental force powering the universe from their corpse. And then finding their rune tower and beating whatever bullshit is guarding it. The whole plot was about how the Elden Ring's shattering and Queen Marika's disappearance sparked a power struggle trying to grab hold of these things! They should be an actual serious meaningful upgrade to reflect my ascension to demigodhood or super-super-demigodhood, and at least one should be permanently active.

Elden Rings isn't Dark Souls, it's epic fantasy. You are on a journey to become God-King and your acquisition of power should reflect that IMO.

That said, Elden Ring is very inconsistent with power levels. I remember beating the really hard boss who owns the second half of the secret Haligtree medallion to open the secret path to the Haligtree and being really surprised when one of the first mobs you meet is a zombielike aristocrat trudging through the snow who dies in two hits. Like, you can barely stand, how did you get here? Did I spend ages finding the key to the front door, a quest which got an entire village and several named NPCs killed, only to find that everyone else was happily getting in and out through the back door? I suppose he could be left over from before the path closed, but then why isn't he in the Haligtree brace toasting crumpets over the fire?

actually knowing how the mechanics work is a game-breaking superpower

See The Power of Ten for an exploration of that. TL;DR of every book in the series: The MC is a gamer dropped into a (real) world that runs on that game's logic. By using their (relatively modest) starting boost and (absurdly OP) mechanical knowledge, they grow powerful, save the world, and ascend to immortality.

I'm not sure about recommending that series based on its merits, but it absolutely 100% demonstrates that point.

My first introduction to Soulslike games was Bloodborne. And it was a very short introduction due to me selecting the cane starting weapon and trying to make sense of it for several hours. Cane is an ASS of a starting weapon for someone not familiar with the gameplay. I was very pissed that day. Especially when I complained to a friend and he basically said "Yeah, everyone knows the saw is way better starting weapon, DUH".

Yeah, this kind of game design annoys me (although I'm not entirely sure what to do about it). On the one hand, Souls games show you numeric stats -- in fact, you quite literally select which number to increase when you level up, which is a huge amount of freedom in control over numbers. So it looks like you're supposed to care about numbers. But on the other hand, the numbers often behave counterintuitively, and further, the games often hide numbers from you where the value of the number is the only thing of any relevance: e.g., you get an item that "boots fire damage". Ok, boosts by how much? Is it a 5% boost? A 50% boost? Double? It's like the game wants the player to think this is irrelevant, yet even 2 seconds of thought shows it cannot possibly be irrelevant: whether the item is good or not is entirely determined by how big that damn number is!

The especially silly thing is Souls gameplay in particular would be fine with all of this drastically simplified, or even eliminated. The fun part of Souls is learning boss routines and experimenting with new weapons and skills. You could almost get rid of the numbers entirely and still retain what makes the games fun.

It's like the game wants the player to think this is irrelevant, yet even 2 seconds of thought shows it cannot possibly be irrelevant: whether the item is good or not is entirely determined by how big that damn number is!

I think it's a credit to the games' balance that ultimately I almost always find the answer is "just big enough to make a noticeable differencr without unbalancing the game". An item that adds fire resistance will add enough resistance that if you were struggling with an enemy that does fire damage it will be noticeably easier, but usually not enough to trivialize anything.

Elden Ring (and other DS games, afaik) isn't balanced, though! That's my point! You can literally kill the bosses in 1 hit with the right setup (modulo scripted phase transitions)!

And this is especially interesting because the buffs at first glance don't seem like they should be that strong. For example, the Fire Scorpion Charm only gives like +12% to fire damage, and it increases your damage taken by 10% as punishment. Compare that with, say, the Flame Staff in FFXII, which gives +50%. The latter feels much stronger, while the former feels like it barely does anything and probably isn't worth using at all as a casual player.

The reason buffs are so overpowered in Elden Ring isn't because they're so strong; it's because there are so many, and they stack multiplicatively (when they stack at all, which they usually don't). This gives them a synergy that has a net effect far more powerful than the sum of its parts, most of which don't feel particularly powerful at all in isolation.

Here's an example setup: put your stat points in strength, choose a heavy weapon (eg, Giant Hammer), set the Royal Knight's Resolve ashes of war (+80% to the next attack), equip the charge attack talisman (+10% charge attack), set your physick to strength tear and charge tear (+15% charge attack), set an aura buff (e.g., Golden Vow, +15% attack), set a body buff (e.g., Bloodboil Aromatic, +30% attack), equip Red Feather Branch talisman (+20% damage when hp low), wave the Commander's Standard (+20% damage). When you multiply all these out, it's an almost 500% boost! That is a ludicrous, game-breaking amount of damage.

There are lots of variations, especially for fire or holy-weak enemies, and you can freely tweak it around for your convenience -- I mean hey, if you do it suboptimally and it takes a whole two hits to knock the boss into the next phase, will it really ruin your day? You can even do a half-decent version of it using only ingredients from Limgrave (greataxe+6/charge talisman/charge physick tear/determination AOW/golden vow AOW/Oath of Vengeance/exalted flesh). It will take 2 hits to knock Margit to phase 2, which I'd say is sufficient to call imba and say it trivializes the boss.

For what it's worth, the reason this is so counterintuitive is that you cannot just stack buffs arbitrarily, despite the fact that it probably sounds like you can from the above. For example, if you try to use Exalted Flesh and Vyke's Dragonbolt at the same time, this will not work, because these two buffs occupy the same internal "slot" (called "body buff"). To me this is highly counterintuitive, as one of these is a consumable item and the other is a spell, and they don't have effects that are remotely similar. In contrast, you can stack Flame, Grant Me Strength and Golden Vow, despite these both being incantations and having almost the same effects. There is, of course, nothing in the game that explains any of this.

Anyway, my point is the degree of trivialization you get by actually knowing the game mechanics is not normal. Contrast Elden Ring with, say, Kingdom Hearts: there is no amount of game knowledge that will allow you to kill Sephiroth in one hit, or even get remotely close. Knowing the game mechanics does not trivialize the game.

It just feels like an excuse for FromSoftware to develop crazy anime-jumping-all-across-the-arena bosses with crazy moves. "Oh no, the player has so many bullshit combinations now, we need to create more bullshit bosses to combat this." And that way we have dlc with bosses dancing all over the floor, goddamn sunflower. The worst part of course is that even with the stakes of Marika you will spend 2 minutes buffing yourself and after a certain point I started to despise this cycle.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the DLC, aesthetically or gameplay-wise, and even the base game's combat often felt "overdeveloped" to me. There were multiple occasions where a boss uses what is obviously a finishing move (e.g., Tree Sentinel raising his weapon and smashing it into the ground) only to PSYCH! ITS NOT ACTUALLY A FINISHER LMAO with some physically-nonsensical follow-up attack to smack you in what obviously "should" have been a punish window. Also, lots of bosses have input reads, where if you try to do anything (in particular use a potion to heal) outside of a designated punish window, they'll immediately intercept your action with a fast attack. I found this extremely crass design.

It feels like FromSoft is annoyed that good players are too good at their games, but the ways in which the developers are trying to raise the difficulty are pretty lame. Though in some sense, I do understand their frustration: Souls games have a skill window that is far smaller than most other games, in the sense that beating them as a casual is quite hard, but learning to play at a near-pro level (in the sense of doing lvl 1 challenges, no-hit challenges, etc.) is surprisingly easy. It really is too difficult to be mediocre at the game, and too easy to be good at the game.

What razor do you use? And what is the process for shaving that you use to cut yourself the least?

I used to shave every 2 or 3 days in high school. I didn't use any shaving cream, I just got in a hot shower and then either shaved afterwards, splashing hot water on my face, or shaved while I was in the shower. These days, I just use hair clippers to clip my face. It works okay, but I should do it more often. But I think I should probably start getting close shaves again.

Sometimes straight razor, but most of the time Leafshaver. Think of it as Mach 3 with replacable blades for which you use safety razor blades broken in 2. It is brilliant for head, armpits and other stuff and nice on the face (do disinfect if you use only one)

Safety razors. The original ones.

use to cut yourself the least?

Just don't make a cutting motion. Superficial cuts that close in 5mins are unavoidable.

I use Gillette three blade (safety?) razors. Probably a Mach 3 Turbo or something, not that I notice the difference between them. I don't use shaving foam, I just rawdog it with water. I don't have sensitive skin, so it's not an issue, and I haven't gotten a cut in more than a decade.

Also Mach3 (or whatever other identical 3-blade I can find). I always use cream. I vary between cheap-as-chips shaving foam and more expensive lather with brush etc. I don’t think either gives me a better shave, but I feel better after the brush and lather exercise. It just takes a bit longer, so I don’t do it all the time. I rarely, if ever, cut. Can’t remember the last time I had one of any significance.

I don't. Have completely given up just about when the "pandemic" came and the world ended. Told myself I'd start shaving again when things get back to normal, but they never did. Not to that normal anyways. Thus caveman.

Have you at least joined the Ostbayerischer Bart- und Schnauzerclub?

I use a Norelco battery-powered shaver I found lying in my driveway one day when I was getting fed up with my older Norelco corded shaver. The battery ran for two weeks, long enough for the new charger to arrive from Amazon.

God provides.

Same. I used to shave myself every week with a Gilette Mach 3 (Fusion is a gimmick, and Schick Quattro is worse than a gimmick, its blade guards kept snagging on my stubble). Hated the unshaven look but was too lazy to keep my cheeks smooth. Then one summer I got some severe bronchitis and spent a month on sick leave. My wife was away at the cabin; she saw me with a beard and declared I was now complete.

My hair isn't exactly my source of pride, facial hair included, so I can't really style it into anything fancy. Just a scraggly-ish chinstrap (that I keep trimmed to avoid sporting a full-on neckbeard) and a mustache. The cheeks and the neck have sparse enough growth that a few passes with a bare trimmer keep them presentable.

Hey, I use the Fusion ones, probably out of a lack of familiarity with other options. So good to have this thread.

The best thing about Fusion is the prescient Onion article.

Mach 3 Gillette razor. Shave in the shower usually about once a week. 2-4 full shaves per razor. Only go about an inch at a time, by then the razor is clogged with hair and I need to wash it out. If I've waited longer than a week I'll use a trimmer to shorten the hair and make the shave easier. I use to do this at the sink instead of in the shower. Shower made cleanup easier and faster. I've been shaving for 20 years this way. Cuts are rare.

This is actually my identical routine. Trimmer if too long, then Mach 3 in the hot shower, blowing on or tapping the blade to get the clog out as needed. Can't remember the last time I cut myself.

Can I mention - I used to switch blades once every couple of uses. When I told my Dad he was mortified. Manufacturers recommend a couple more uses than that though it's personal. I find the first 2 shaves uncomfortable and go up to around 10.

Back when dollar shave club started online ads, I did some research into them and found out their razors were made by doroco and bought a box of refills from them. I still have 2 retail packs left.

Back when I shaved my face I used a straight razor; now I use an electric to trim it how I want it, and keep it relatively close to my face with scissors.

Double-edge razor, brush/soap; cheap stuff (found a brand of blades I like and bought a hundred pack; no fancy scents). I used to do it very regularly, but the wife likes a beard, so now I just do my neck less often. I follow the standard with-the-grain/across-the-grain/against-the-grain pattern for three passes. I almost never cut myself anymore since I got the hang of it.

I've played around with a lot of shaving stuff, but have not done straight razors because I'm a scared pussy.

For the safety-razor cartridge hardware, I used Gilette like everyone else. Then I used Dorco (DSC supplier) to save money for a bit. Even bought women's razors because pink plastic is cheaper than blue. Quality dropped off for some reason, though, and I knew I couldn't buy Gilette products again after they told my gender to go fuck themselves forever on national television. I ended up buying Harry's razors and recylcing a couple of promo codes to get essentially 3 years worth of razors for $35. I use them on my face till they wear out then put them on a different handle for my body.

For shaving creams, I dabbled in the boar-bristle brush + soap part of straight razor shaves. I wanted to sort of pamper myself a bit, and tried to relax and take my time with shaving. Over time, soap pucks ended up lasting for so long that the scents were no longer enticing and I just have too busy of a life. I tried other fancy creams, and none of them were able to compete with the convenience, price, and nostalgia of Barbasol. So now I just alternate between OG and + Aloe variants of that.

One thing that is is worth splurging on is a nice aftershave. A lot of irritation I end up getting is removed by using the right one. Harry's is OK and what I travel with. The best I've tried is Art of Shaving's (available cheaper elsewhere). For $40/$50 you might be correctly thinking "Holy shit" but I only just killed my first bottle after a decade.

"Safety razor" is the double-sided type that Harry's uses. The other stuff is just cartridge razors. I got a Merkur safety razor a while back after getting fed up with the cartridge ripoff pricing and inherited a couple of vintage Gillette butterfly safety razors from my grandfather. I use the Derby blades which are cheap and good. Shortly after I switched to the Commander Riker beard with shaved cheeks and sides below mouth. I then got a Weller trimmer to keep the length at about half to 3/4 inch.

I don't use soap, and have found that just soaking my face in hot water for 30 seconds provides a good shave with minimal irritation.

TY for the correction

Commander Riker beard

I call it the circle beard myself. I also call it a Van Dyck, but now I realize that's where the goatee is separate from the moustache.

It's not a circle beard, because you keep the sideburns (but trimmed, to keep the cheeks clean shaven). It's closer I think to a normal full beard, but with clean cheeks, shorter length, and shaving the left and right spots under the mouth but leaving the middle to create an "anchor" shape.

Great advice. I also don't want to screw around with straight razors, both because I'm a wuss, and also because it sounds like a big fuckin' waste of time learning how to sharpen it and shit. But the irritation was something I also struggled with. If you put on cologne or something, it would sting like hell. I think I have a boar bristle brush, too... Thanks.

Back when I used to shave, I used a straight razor. It was amazing. Some days I used shaving cream, most days I just did it straight out of the shower with a room full of steam. When I'd freshly sharpened it, it was like a magic eraser for hair.

It does take some practice for getting into the nooks and crannies around your jaw line. But there are really only two things you need to do in order to not cut yourself. Never, ever, no matter what pull along the blade. You will instantly slice yourself. Probably not deep if it's just sloppiness, but you're getting cut. Second rule of thumb is to go with the grain at least once, and then do another pass against the grain if you want it extra smooth, but I rarely found it necessary. If you are having trouble, ease off on the angle.

The other nice thing about is over disposable razors was I got a lot less skin irritation. Since it lifts the cut hair off and away, instead of gumming up the 3-5 blades and grinding it against your face, it felt a lot better. You can also keep it sharp, so you use a lot less pressure, meaning your doing a lot less damage to your skin attempting to scrape the hair off your face.

pull along the blade

What does this mean?

A slicing motion as opposed to a scraping motion.

Anybody see the film One Battle After Another yet? I’m curious if it’s as a big a piece of agitprop as the glowing reviews paint it to be.

I love Paul Thomas Anderson, but this had the same fatal flaw "Inherent Vice" did - his original stories are mostly about characters in control of their environments these stories very much aren't. (But kudos for being the only filmmaker ballsy enough to adapt Pynchon novels, in the first place. And the direction was superb, even if the screenplay wasn't - same as Megalopolis, last year.)

Saw it today. Wellmade but the politics were kinda schizophrenic and it felt surprisingly happy to parody people on the Left as well.

I did. A friend suggested it to me, I should have known just based on the cast (much less a 90+% RT Rating) what it'd be like.

It was essentially watered-down Tarantino with implausibly organized leftist violence being celebrated. I regret pumping up the ticket numbers. It was still better than many other movies I've seen in the past couple of years, and was genuinely funny at points, so if you can tolerate it, at least there's that.

Honestly I'm confused what the point of Leonardo Di Caprio's character was. The movie essentially doesn't change if you just cut him. Maybe the funny phone call scene is lost but nothing much else.

I heard a theory that his character was about the inability of the old guard to communicate with the new wave of leftism, and the latter's insistence on specific language as a prerequisite for collaboration. See also his confusion at pronouns etc.

Honestly I'm confused what the point of Leonardo Di Caprio's character was.

The character had no point. Leonardo Di Caprio did. And it was getting consumers to actually show up and consoom.

True but dude had fuck all bearing on the plot.

I regret pumping up the ticket numbers. I’m planning on waiting till it’s on streaming for that reason (obv that still counts, but it’s diffuse enough that I can lie to myself).

with implausibly organized leftist violence

The book it’s loosely based on, Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, was set in the 80s. The revolutionaries were ex-Weatherman/Black Panther types. Which makes a lot more sense than an organized leftist domestic terrorist group who used to engage in direct action against... the Obama administration circa 2010???

Space King 3 is out

The "Did you know" memes on twitter are glorious. Truly the peak of culture.

This and the Barbarian from Dungeon Soup are my favorite https://youtube.com/watch?v=817E64rtzj8?si=LtWw7xAHo5gKIjM8

I lost it when Hatemonger was talking about per capita.

Very structurally competent, but not as good as episode 2, better than episode 1. They leaned into the "little boys" characterization to the point where it feels like South Park.

If this is the motte, then what’s the bailey?

The stubborn 10 pounds that's spilling out of my pants. (╥﹏╥)

Big dick problems?

just the belly (╥﹏╥)

10 pounds? Those are rookie numbers, son.

Unfortunately.

This is year I get fit. (he said for the 5th time.)

No but really. I look great at 185lb and look fat at 200lb. The 15lb makes all the difference.

I've started doing cardio again. I'm cautiously optimistic. (What is this, wellness wednesday?)

(My Rothfuss-esque pathological need to reveal my inner monologue in brackets is unbecoming of a middle aged man. But, such is life)

If using an excessive amount of parentheses is wrong, I don't want to be right. (They're cool)

Parentheses are fine, you just don't want to have parentheticals inside each other lol. The ACOUP author does that and it gets really hard to follow sometimes.

LISP programmers of the world unite!

When in doubt, get fucking jacked. I suck at losing weight. But if you can't shrink the waist to keep that classic V shape, you can increase the chest, back and shoulders.

That's the plan! Been alternating between weightlifting and swimming. I'll report back end in December.

It used to be a podcast, don't know if it's still going on.

Last one was April 2024. I was talking with Ymeskhout about trying for one in late March of that year, but even when we fired up the Discord call it didn't really go anywhere successful, and then his last post on the motte was last April, and he deleted his x twitter account somewhere around the same time frame. Still active on substack, so doing... well, I won't say okay, but still typing.

Mildly interesting court opinion:

  • A woman and her daughter allege the following: In the middle of the night, they are about to get out of their car in front of their house. They look out of the car's window and are terrified to notice a cousin of theirs standing outside the window and pointing what appears to be a pistol at them, with his finger on the trigger. They hear two clicks, but no gunshot occurs. The two alleged victims flee to a nearby alley. By the time they return to their car with a police officer, the cousin has disappeared.

  • The cousin is charged with possessing a gun as a felon, possessing an instrument of crime, assault, and reckless endangerment. A search of his residence turns up no gun. Nevertheless, at a bench trial he is found guilty of all charges and is sentenced to 26 years of prison (with the possibility of parole after 13 years). The appeals panel vacates the conviction of reckless endangerment since there is no proof that the gun was loaded, but affirms the other three convictions, and leaves the 26-year sentence untouched since the trial judge imposed no penalty for the reckless endangerment.

Don't forget that you can be convicted of serious charges in a "he said she said" case, on witness testimony alone, if the jury (or the judge in a bench trial) finds the witnesses more credible than you are "beyond a reasonable doubt"!

Mildly interesting court opinion:

  • While driving around in the middle of winter, a police officer observes a woman crying and yelling as she bangs on the front door of a house while wearing only a bathrobe and a pair of slippers. When the officer stops and inquires, the woman states that her romantic partner pushed her out of the house after an argument. The romantic partner exits the house and talks with the officer. The officer advises the woman of her state-law rights to seek a restraining order or press criminal charges for domestic violence, but the woman refuses to do so.

  • Several minutes later (after, among other things, using her car's computer to review the department's training on domestic violence), the officer returns to the house and talks again with the woman to advise her even further of her rights under state law. The woman still isn't interested in doing anything. However, since the police have been called to this house five times in total, the officer tells another officer to contact a detective for further investigation.

  • Later on the same day, the woman is found dead in the house. The romantic partner pleads guilty to manslaughter. The woman's estate sues the officer for negligence, arguing that the officer was obligated to arrest the romantic partner because there was evidence that the romantic partner had perpetrated domestic violence (pushing, which constitutes the crime of assault) against the woman. The officer moves for summary judgment, arguing that state law grants absolute immunity to liability for any failure to make an arrest. The trial judge denies the motion.

  • The appeals panel reverses. The law says that an officer is obligated to arrest an alleged perpetrator of domestic violence if the alleged victim "exhibits signs of injury". Here, the officer observed no such signs. And, in any event, that domestic-violence law does not override the separate law that grants absolute immunity to liability for failure to make an arrest, which applies in all cases where the officer acts in good faith. The woman's estate will not be getting any damages.

Not-so-fun fact: While both the federal government and the New Jersey government allow random members of the public to access all the documents in a case docket online, it appears that the Pennsylvania government does not! Rather, electronic access to Pennsylvania judicial documents is restricted to lawyers and case participants "for legal and security reasons", and members of the public must request documents manually by submitting a form to the court clerk.

Microsoft has a convenient list of controller manufacturers that are sufficiently high-quality to be trusted with the official Xbox license.

Has anyone made a controller yet that accurately mimics the dead zones and response curves of the original N64 one?

Steam's "Controller Layout" settings menu (also applicable to non-Steam games, such as emulators, that you launch through Steam) allows the user to customize deadzones and response curves on a per-game basis in excruciating detail, including deadzone shapes and response curves.

(It does not appear that 8BitDo's "Ultimate Software" settings application has the same granularity of control.)

Thrustmaster

Risky click to see if that was a specialty controller maker.

Risky buy, too. Their T150000 are famous and infamous for Discount Brand Build quality.

Reading through the first case, while it is only the appealate court's decision rather than the actual criminal case, it seems to be far less alarming then first glance would have you believe. Unless I am missing something, the defendent seems to have admitted to brandishing a "black semiautomatic (as opposed to a revolver) handgun", and pointing it at the two women (his cousins). This is, broadly speaking, rather antisocial behavior, especially from a felon who is a prohibited person, and frankly seems like grounds for restricting their liberty for a substantial duration. The appeal does not appear to dispute these basic facts, and relies on technicalities such as "the witnesses could not have known it was a real gun" and "a real gun wouldn't click twice [ignoring the obvious issues that a real DA hammer fired gun would in fact click with each trigger pull]".

the defendent seems to have admitted to brandishing a "black semiautomatic (as opposed to a revolver) handgun"

I don't see any such admission.

You probably have seen the joke that goes something like: "I didn't kill him. And if I did it wasn't intentional. And if it was intentional it wasn't premeditated." IMO, here the defendant (as summarized by the appeals panel; as noted above, I can't access the legal documents, since they're in Pennsylvania and I'm not a lawyer) is only saying: "I didn't point anything at the witnesses. And if I did it wasn't a gun. And if it was a gun it wasn't an operable gun."

Right, thats where having the original ruling would be very helpful. But going by:

Green raises the following issues for our review:

  1. Did the trial court err in overruling the defense’s objection to [Taylor’s] lay opinion about whether [] Green held a genuine firearm in his hand where that opinion was based on improper speculation?
  2. Was the evidence insufficient for a conviction under [section] 6105 where the object described by the complaining witness could not have been a genuine firearm?
  3. Should the [section] 6105 charge have been graded as a misdemeanor of the first degree where there was no evidence at trial that [] Green had been convicted of a disqualifying felony?
  4. Was the evidence insufficient for a conviction for recklessly endangering another person where all evidence showed that [] Green’s purported gun was not loaded?

I read as an established fact by the criminal trial that the defendant pointed something at the witnesses, and now we are just arguing about the technicalities of what it was.

Don't forget that you can be convicted of serious charges in a "he said she said" case, on witness testimony alone

That's scary. Though the cousin being a felon and the accusers being women probably paid a serious role. It shouldn't have, but I am sure it did.

Microsoft has a convenient list of controller manufacturers that are sufficiently high-quality to be trusted with the official Xbox license.

Not remotely surprised SteelSeries isn't on the list. The one I got is a piece of shit that immediately began suffering from joystick drift.

I've been really tempted to get a GameSir for my laptop. I hear the back bumpers are surprisingly intuitive, and have a coworker who swears by them.

I have a Microsoft wireless Xbox360 controller I bought to use with emulators on my PC. I very rarely game so it sat around for a couple of years, and when I came to use it again the dongle was dead. The giant dongle. The giant dongle with the ~2m wire (why?!). I have a wifi dongle that is barely larger than the USB port it plugs into and that can handle bi-directional network speed data transmitted to the other end of the house, but a receiver for what amounts to little more than single key presses sent from the chair towards the screen has to be the size of a 240V wall plug for some reason.

Anyway after a little reading around I prised open the giant dongle's case and replaced the microscopic fuse component (why use such a small component when there's so much space?) and restored it to working order. Apparently this is a common fault. Imagine how many people have resorted to just binning it and buying another. Probably not many at the price they charge, the size they make it, and the frequency with which it breaks.

A 'blade'-style automotive fuse housing costs 50-75 cents at scale, and a glass vial-style fuse holder costs 30-50 cents, and the fuses themselves cost money on top of that. A single 0606 500ma fuse is cheaper at unit one digikey prices; at scale, they're basically free. They're probably only included at all because they're part of the USB standard -- overdraw could and does kill older motherboard USB ports, and rarely even entire motherboard USB controllers! -- not that it stops designers in other cases.

Ideal answer would involve a PTZ self-resetting fuse (though they're not great options for USB devices people are likely to leave plugged in indefinitely, and usually end up 5-10c), or a through-hole conventional fuse that could be fixed by anyone with a soldering iron and patience (though mixing SMD and through-hole parts gets stupid expensive, esp for boards with SMD on both sides). But it's not as nonsensical as it looks at first glance.

Ideal answer would involve a PTZ self-resetting fuse

These at least used to have a failure mode where they failed short when abused often, and I've typically seen them paired with a real fuse that handles that case.

Fair. I'm assuming a USB device going into a computer has a power supply has enough current limiting to prevent wires or PCBs catching on fire, but that was an actively bad assumption back in 2005.

IIRC, the usb spec has always required that any compliant usb port can withstand an infinite short circuit of any pin to any pin without damage.

It started with that (well, 24-hours continuous short), but it compliance with it was sketchy even from the name brands, and it was eventually reduced to just recommending it for the specific VBUS to D+ or D- in 2008, see "5V Short Circuit Withstand Requirement Change". This used to matter only for hackers, but in the modern day the risk of putting a USB-C plug into a USB-A port makes it relevant again.

Appreciate your sharing some details of the manufacturing trade-offs. It's more the size of the thing that baffles me, although it did make it much easier to work on. Okay there's a large antenna in there, but that just raises the question of why the antenna is larger than the antenna in a wifi dongle? And why add a 2m cable for a wireless dongle? Anyone who needs the extension could use an extension lead.

I'd also be interested in any speculation for why the fuse failed. As you say I had left it plugged in when I wasn't using it (I don't anymore), and even though I now have 9 extra spare fuses on hand I'd prefer to avoid any need to repeat that type of soldering. Other than loose connections I've never had any other USB devices fail whether they're high draw like charging a battery or low draw like a USB stick, or a wired controller.

Okay there's a large antenna in there, but that just raises the question of why the antenna is larger than the antenna in a wifi dongle? And why add a 2m cable for a wireless dongle?

They badly overengineered it. Both these things significantly improved reliability, because all other things being even a larger antenna will have much better signal characteristics than a smaller one of the same general design, and being able to place a receiver on the front of a computer rather than the back had a pretty massive difference. Some of those decisions weren't even crazy for the time -- the 360 released in 2005, where a lot of people still owned big CRT and plasma TVs designed for play from 6+ ft and built into furniture, and even for desktop computers CRT hadn't completely gone the way of the dodo yet, and especially major vendors will still big fans of making PCs (even gaming PCs) cases big thick piles of steel

There's a lot of more subtle goofiness like this : it uses a custom wireless protocol that was a lot less funky than bluetooth of the time in order to reduce latency from retransmits, for example.

The fuse existing is mostly a problem downstream of how the USB standard evolved. Originally, there was a hard 500mA@5V limit per USB port in the standard, but this was held more in principle than the breach; even by 2000 you could find cheap USB chargers that would put out 2A@5V ish, gfl. Wireless dongles were only supposed to use around 400mA, but even slightly sketchy source (eg, powered usb hubs) could push enough voltage to get at the fuzzy edge, and even if the dongle could tolerate that wider range, the wires (and some sources) wouldn't be able to supply it permanently without damage. As time went on and those skuzzy chargers became more common, it was just accepted (and saved money) to use fuses a lot less or with a much higher tolerance than the official rating, under the presumption that devices which could be damaged by sourcing more power would have safeties against it.

Why it failed is unfortunately probably more boring. While there are some potential weird cases (Five Below-brand USB hubs, badly implemented cell phone chargers, putting it on top of a wireless pwoer charger), chances are pretty good it's just time and entropy. Fuses, especially older SMD fuses, are both temperature sensitive and relatively fragile devices, since they work by breaking. Over time, a 500 mA fuse will become a 470 mA and then 450 mA, until eventually the intended current passing through the device will bust it. That's worse on wireless devices, since the antenna is basically an inefficient hot plate, and worse still with big PCB antenna like that particular dongle made, and worse still on devices like this that were pretty close to the edge of their power envelope to start with. The new fuse, especially if you bought it recently, is almost certainly going to be much more reliable, even under the same conditions. If you want to be extra-safe, I'd unplug it when you've got long periods where it's not in use, but it's probably going to be good for another 10 years.

Right, I hadn't considered how old the xb360 is. My last console was a PS1, after that I tuned out of the console scene entirely and largely out of PC gaming too until I picked this up around 2017. And my wifi dongle benefits from over a decade of improvements to wifi tech in an era when almost everything including the kitchen sink gained wifi, so not a fair comparison. Makes sense.

That's reassuring about the new fuse. I did match the original spec (250mA) despite some commenters on the fix-it page I was following suggesting using a higher rating. Better safe albeit with another blown fuse than sorry with a fried receiver.

I own an 8bitdo controller. It's Bluetooth, runs off a rechargeable internal battery, and does everything I ask of it. For £17 (I think), can't really ask for more. The build quality seems decent

Of course, I'm a diehard m+k user, so I must admit I've used it literally once for a session of Forza before never using it again. Money well spent.

I'm a m&k guy myself, but unfortunately some games just suck with that control method. The Yakuza series is one good example, with the games having had a tongue in cheek "real Yakuza use a gamepad" splash screen on the PC for many years. My controller of choice on the PC is a PS4 controller, as I have them around already and they work well via USB.

I own an 8bitdo pro 2 controller. I learned that I hated controllers, but my son uses it every day and it's still going strong after several years of abusive gaming.

Possibly the funniest controller ever is the 8BitDo Lite 1, which has three directional pads and zero analog sticks. Unfortunately, it appears to have been discontinued in favor of the Lite 2, which has two analog sticks as usual.

I can get it new on Amazon UK for £33, though I have little interest in another controller I won't use, let alone one without analog sticks. Why would anyone want that???

For retro or retro-like games, there's some advantages -- trying to play something like Megaman X or Legend of Mana on the standard Nintendo layout means either fighting with an analog stick that's either too eager to have you go diagonally or nonresponsive to small movements (or both!), or offsetting your left hand to get to the dpad and feeling a bit like a crab a couple hours later. There's even a few specialized retro handheld consoles that will let you switch what layouts are present for this specific use case (and to support six-button controllers like the Genesis on the right hand side).

But dunno if there's that much on the Switch market that's actually focused toward those games.

Why would anyone want that???

The advertised purpose is "ultra-portability". Note that the thickness of the Lite 1 is only 16 mm (0.6 inch), versus 35 mm (1.4 inches) for the Lite 2.

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