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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Yup.

    I was vaguely interested in Dark Souls for years, but every time I tried, I bounced right off it. I went through a cycle where every year or two, I would pirate one of the souls games, try it out, give up on it after an hour or so, and do it all over again the next time I was sufficiently compelled to give the series another shot. This happened until several years ago when I tried Dark Souls II, and for some reason it finally clicked. I played my pirated copy of Dark Souls II for about 10 hours, before a random crash corrupted my save file.

    After that happened, I immediately bought the game on Steam and proceeded to play it for the next month and a half, until I eventually beat it. I’ve since purchased every souls game plus Elden Ring on Steam, and recently imported a copy of Bloodborne GOTY edition after spending $700 on an exploitable PS5, just so I could play it at 60FPS. None of these legitimate purchases would have ever happened if I hadn’t been able to repeatedly pirate Dark Souls for about five years.



  • No, it was inaccurate, even at the time. The Famicom was built to cost and and mainly used cheap off-the-shelf components that were already obsolete when the system first released in 1983. The NES released in North America the same year as the Commodore Amiga, a system that actually was cutting edge, and represented a big leap forward in what home computers could do graphically. By the time Mega Man released, the Amiga was on it’s second revision and other home computers were rapidly catching up to it’s capabilities.
    While Mega Man was one of the best games on the NES, it ran at the same resolution as every other game on the system, and was stuck working within the same limited color palette and low sprite limit that were more than five years behind the curve when it released.




  • Do they even need to replace him though? There’s a 25-year back catalog of recorded voice lines to recycle, and most of those consist of “Let’s-a-go” and “Yahoooo!” I think the most complex sentace I’ve ever heard Mario speak in game is “Thank-a-you so much for playing my game”. Combine that with AI voice recreation, and there’s literally no reason to ever hire a replacement. Just cut Martinet a big-ass check for perpetual use of his voice, and they’re golden.


  • Unironically, yes. Multiple studies dating back years have found a link between high intelligence and various mental health issues.
    There was one particular paper I read about a decade ago, where researchers surveyed a bunch of collage students to find demographic trends based on their preferred operating system. From what I recall, the demographics of Windows users were not too far off from those of the university as whole, and Mac users were similar, aside from women being significantly over-represented. Linux users on the other hand, were almost all men, and nearly every mental health issue imaginable was over-represented by a huge margin.





  • Hard to say. Linus has always made it sound like his investment in Framework is a personal one, not one made by LMG. If that’s the case, then I think any potential issues could be largely sidestepped by just having someone else do all the laptop reviews.

    If that’s not the case and LMG is directly involved with Framework, then it gets a bit tricky. To their credit, they’ve done a good job of disclosing the Framework investment whenever the company is brought up, but I don’t watch most of LTT’s review content, so I’m not sure if it’s being mentioned in the context of other laptop reviews. If not, it needs to be.
    The whole point of having that kind of disclosure though is so people know that the information being presented is potentially biased. At a certain point, it’s on the audience to take that bias into account and cross reference other sources before making any purchasing decisions. I’m not sure there’s anything LMG can really do to alleviate the perceived conflict of interest, unless they just stop reviewing laptops altogether. Whether or not it’s ethical to continue reviewing laptops in that context, even with a full disclosure, is a question I don’t have a good answer to.






  • I see several people have already mentioned Soulseek, the one other place I’d recommend is rutracker. You have to sign up, and it’s in Russian, but it’s probably the easiest place to grab entire discographies, and you can occasionally find things there that aren’t on Soulseek.

    Of course if you’re really serious about music piracy, getting into the private tracker scene is the only way to go. redacted.ch specifically, is probably the most comprehensive music archive on the Internet right now.

    Edit: I just realized no one has mentioned stream rippers yet. If what you want is on a steaming service like Deezer or Qobuz, and hasn’t been shared elsewhere, there are tools to download it directly from the streaming service in full quality. Getting these set up can get a bit technical, and they often require a premium account, but there are Discord and Telegram bots that act as a fronted for these tools running on a server somewhere, which is the easiest way to use them.