I bought a (used) PS2 towards the end of its life mostly for DQ8 (and later Personas 3 and 4).

When DQ11 arrived on PC, I actually asked for it as a gift at near full price rather than waiting for the inevitable 75% off, but somehow I never got very far on it.

It manages to not age well even as a new title-- the tropes are a bit too tropey (Sylvando, dear, I went to the freaking Castro and saw less flamboyance) and the storyline doesn’t seem to give a rewarding feel of forward motion, just bouncing from aimless episode to episode like a shonen anime that went 500 episodes beyond its original vision.

It does have a unique nostalgia as a franchise in that it was basically EVERY American’s first JRPG, due to the first installment being given away by the millions as a “subscribe to our print game magazine” promotional item, so whenever you look at someone trying to produce a “8-bit/16-bit RPG” homage, it’s going to smell a lot like Dragon Quest.

I think it’s not even 100% a superiority thing, but the loss of position, purpose, place.

Stable jobs and healthcare would do so much to defuse the “I need to outcompete/hobble everyone else to WIN” grindset hustle mentality.

In my field (a “successful” one in the modern economy), the conventional wisdom is to intentionally change jobs every two years or so to get a bigger raise than loyalty yields. Other fields have either intentional high turnover or mismanagement that sabotages long-term employment. Nobody develops a pride of position and it creates more easily replacable workers. Of course this ripples to “nobody even stays in the same neighbourhood anymore” as we Grapes of Wrath ourselves across the map looking for opportunity.

If you aren’t forced to chase the ever-moving brass ring, maybe you can find satisfaction in being part of long-lived communities which encourage mutual support. If you know your needs are going to be taken care of, different faces and lifestyles are less of a risk to destabilize your world.

The only appropriate family hauler is a 20-year-old Camry with 850,000 km on the odometer and the obligatory rear bumper dent.

Can we bring back George III? Or at least poofy powdered wigs?

The Nando’s menu is a document that’s both still relevant, and successfully binds the powerful.

Unfortunately, most of our non-poultry-related problems can’t be fixed by threatening to call Corporate and get their franchise yanked.

Trident TGUI9440 on a VL-bus card. Surprisingly peppy on a 486/66 overclocked to 80.

(Frantically smashing “himbo harem” button)

Well, it can’t be Bosnia.

I know nothing about the history or culture, but the flag, by design, looks like it was cut off partway like someone tearing off a half-finished printout from an old dot matrix.

There’s also the strangeness that they continue to have a currency pegged to the Deutsche Mark, 20 years after that ceased to exist.

Although you can make the case that the current dominant reserve currency channels the ghosts of Spanish colonial 8-real coins the same way.

I feel like there’s a bit where they try so hard to keep a honeypot going-- funding the mutual-aid requests, providing useful resources to keep the audience tuned in-- that they end up as revolutionary heroes.

Of course, some of the Entrapment Specialists would probably have to make room next to the medals from Al-queda they earned for the last 20 years of antics.

Can we start calling Amazon “AliExpress with American characteristics” now?

I can’t see how this won’t further undermine the value proposition of Prime, as yet more of their inventory is ineligible for “free 2-day shipping.”

The Science Museum is pretty great.

If you want to gawk at artifacts but not necessarily think about the history, maybe the Inperial War Museum or the Maritime Museum. The Bank of England also has a nice exhibit if you want to view history through a financial lens.

If you have a rail pass, take the day and go to York for the Railway Museum.

Beautiful but a nightmare to keep running.

It uses a nonstandard needle cartridge where replacements can cost hundreds; conversely other quality turntables tend to use a standard cartridge that can be replaced for anywhere from $10-20 to the moon.

As with a lot of consumer grade hi-fi, late 70s/early 80s turntables are the sweet spot: older ones tend to use less standard cartridge mounts, idler drive designs that can deform, and complex changer mechanisms that are no longer widely used. By the late 80s, the quality is plummeting as the turntable is just a pack-in item for a system devoted to tape and/or CD; you see a lot of flimsy kit, linear tracking designs with new failure modes, and custom (100% bad idea) or P-mount cartridges (good idea, but comparatively few choices in 2024)

For me, it just seemed like lazy model design. We’re not rocking Voodoo2 cards, you have enough graphical performance to play with to make a reasonably complex torso.

It’s the Arataki Itto Noodle Arm fiasco all over again; they tried to make a muscular character with the same basic model that was designed for twinkier ones.

I was legitimately very disappointed to see how flat-chested the Norn (muscular Viking-coded faction) male model is in Guild Wars 2. With the right outfits, you can look at the sideview and it’s a freaking straightedge.

I want an escape-from-reality fantasy where it looks like I spent 8 hours a day in the gym instead of in front of a rotting codebase.

Because robot engineering requires we can see that their eyes light up red when they turn evil. You need a high contrast background.

Did you even study Asimov’s laws?

I figured systemd is a 90s-JRPG boss with multiple phases taking over more and more of the screen.

You hold up a Slackware CD like some sort of vampires-and-faith-objects bit.

ISTR some amazing pictures of the rail yards at Wuhan, like https://i.imgur.com/XnD53bA.jpeg (edited for nondead link) More high-speed passenger trains in one photo the entire North American continent.

The signs here say “75 foot limit/limite de 75 pies.” Can we convince them to bring pastry for everyone?

If you srill have your e200, Rockbox makes it smooth and you can run Doom.

The wheel went bad on mine so I swapped it for a later wheeled model and 2x the price of a generic MP4 player of similar size, but it wasn’t the same; I found it in my box of dead phones a few weeks ago, the soft-touch coating all sticky yuck.

Amazed thry didn’t pull the evil censorship card: “I was minding my business in an exchange programme, nobody told me they killed 420 billion people 3 blocks down the street!”