Mega mega THREAD THREAD

The real dark knowledge is that the “Power Level” is actually just turning the water boiling light on and off

The duty cycle! It’s used in countless applications, but the one nearest and dearest to my heart is getting different timbres out of the Game Boy’s square wave channels (that whole video is excellent btw)

Counterpoint:

hot damn you weren’t kidding

Hell yeah, strong work! Always good when you can build that momentum at the beginning of the semester.

Bunch of new scanned and OCR’d magazines up on the Video Game History Foundation archive including EGM² and P.S.X. (predecessor to Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine)—you can see the highlights in this Bluesky thread.

Timestamped YouTube stream (context starts at 3:59:20 if the timestamp doesn’t work, and the actual joke is at 3:59:34)

Alternatively, the Twitch VOD (which will expire in ~60 days))

Without having any context, I’d guess that I’ve also never heard the song on account of being terribly out of touch.

I now know what my mom feels like when I play her some song from when she was out of college and go, “How have you not heard this? This song was HUGE back then!” Meanwhile, I’m guessing I’ve heard maybe 10 of the 2024 Billboard Top 100 (and that’s counting the Christmas songs!).

Not only can they not read another book, they can’t even write another book! Truly beyond parody.

Also,

A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject. (October 2019)

The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia’s notability guideline for academics. (October 2019)

lol. lmao, even

And, possibly demons:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9938787/

Really hoping I can get hold of the Novavax vaccine in my neck of the woods.

Nexon co-edited a volume titled Harry Potter and International Relations, published in 2006, that applies international relations theorizing to the world of Harry Potter and the politics of Harry Potter in general.

no fucking way

Oh, absolutely. As a kid, I didn’t notice—I was absolutely enraptured^[1]—but looking back there’s a whole lot of jank, especially when you consider that the ones we got outside of Japan were the improved ones! Or should I say, “improved”, because that’s definitely debatable. The one that immediately comes to mind is Blastoise:

Look how they massacred my boy…

I think the Caterpie, Nidoran♂, and Abra lines are all solid

but the Jigglypuff line really got the short end of the pink blob stick:

There’s a few other standouts for me

…but yeah, not too many other bright spots. Goddamn, though, they really got a glow-up in Gen II. I remember being blown away by how vibrant those games were.

(oh yeah, I grabbed all the sprites from here)

I just wanna say that whenever I see your little Red/Blue Dratini sprite it sparks joy for me

Here’s a few neat Pokémon sites you may or may not be familiar with:

The Cave of Dragonflies - This is one of the OG Pokémon fansites, and it’s still getting regular updates! Being the kind of nerd I am, I really enjoy her technical breakdowns of things like Gen I capture mechanics (all the time I wasted as a kid bringing Pokémon down to a tiny red sliver of HP!) and the R/S/E roulette, but I also really enjoyed her essay about the genesis of the Mew trick and there’s something really cozy about her movie reviews.

Dogasu’s Backpack - Another active OG fansite that is an incredible resource for basically everything besides the games, with all kinds of original translations and footage that you won’t find elsewhere as well as synopses of episodes/chapters. One of the highlights is probably his treatment of the Electric Soldier Porygon incident which has translations of a ton of contemporary Japanese coverage of the event including subtitled news broadcasts and even fan letters.

Blue Moon Falls - Not an OG fansite, but you wouldn’t be remiss for thinking it was! It doesn’t have nearly the quantity of content as the other two on account of only being around for about 4 years, but I really dig the vibes and there are some neat projects like this simulator for the distribution station in the old NYC Pokémon Center and this breakdown of why Pokémon Stadium 2’s Pokémon can have odd colors.

yah yah yah, yah-yah-yahwey
yah yah yah, yah-yah-yahwey
yah yah yah, yah-yah-yahwey
everything’s yahwey!

Mega mega THREAD THREAD

I see your drunk MuBae and raise you drunk BaeRyS

HUAC 2-ah

For those of you less interested in the nitty-gritty, the main points are:

• Single Core emulation is now the default for non-mobile platforms (Dual Core had been for the longest time, since it used to be necessary to get games running at full speed, but it causes all kinds of instability and is not necessary on modern hardware)
• Performance issues in the Disney Trio of Destruction have finally been solved with game patches
• General Bluetooth Passthrough performance improvements + specific support for a chipset used in many modern Bluetooth adapters
• Improvements to custom texture pack management and performance
• Low-level DSP emulation regressions have been ironed out
• Option added to reduce time drift caused by lag (apparently useful for online Mario Kart Wii as well as speedrun timing accuracy)

I always love reading these updates. As the core emulation and additional features have become more and more refined, the scope of the additions has become less earthshaking, but it’s amazing to see the continued passion and dedication developers have for continuing to push the limits of accuracy and improve the experience for people using Dolphin across the spectrum, from mobile gamers all the way up to reverse engineers. By this point, I imagine there are contributors who weren’t even born when Dolphin was first released in 2003!