I’ve played a bit of the Pokemon Adventures Red version romhack, but never completed that as it wasn’t particularly interesting. What ROM hacks would you recommend? I’d like a challenge but nothing crazy.

Gosh, I’ve realized I don’t finish games lol. I’ve put many hours in Forza Horizon, Factorio, Pokemon, Cities Skylines, and incremental games but here are the ones I actually beat in 2023 so far, although I’m about to beat Pokemon Scarlet so I’ll include that too.

1. Pokemon Sun (cartridge). (4/10). Why am I rating this so low? It’s my least favorite Pokemon game I’ve played. I finished it this year, but started it in 2018. The game leans way too heavy on the story and not in the gameplay. The game felt like a huge downgrade from OR/AS. It also plays incredibly slow. Not touching Gen 7 again. The battles were nice and intense with enough difficulty to excite me though.

2. Chip Defense (8/10). You can find it on F-droid, and it’s free. It’s a little tower defense game with a theme on CPUs and instructions. It took me a few hours to beat all the levels and it hooked me.

3. Pokemon White (emulator), limited pokemon center challenge. (9.3/10). I absolutely love Gen 5 and I did a challenge a lot like a Nuzlocke but more interesting and far less stressful. You can only catch the first pokemon on each route, and any non-forced heal would cost 5000*2^(number of prior heals done) poke dollars. That way, I could have a pokemon faint and not have it be the end of my 40 hour playthrough. I actually (unintentionally) lost to Ghetsis at the end but I planned for that and had enough money for one more heal, and then beat him the 2nd time.

4. Factorio Bob’s/Angel’s (hardcore Factorio mod). (9.5/10). Do you like Factorio but want 10x more complicated recipes that include lots of byproducts to deal with? Then this mod is for you! It took me 123 hours to launch a rocket, and apparently that’s pretty quick. The base is one huge pile of spaghetti with a 90 lane bus split into three.

5. Pokémon Scarlet (cartridge). (8/10). I haven’t quite gotten to the credits yet but I’ve beaten the Top Champion so I’m very close. This game is one of the most fun pokemon games imo despite being extremely flawed. The open world is a huge breath of fresh air after the last 4 gens being 4 big lines. The frame drops are not the really annoying thing about this game, it’s the cutscenes and long battle animations. (Gen 7 was even worse with this). The exploration isn’t groundbreaking but I love how random encounters were ditched for overworld pokemon (even with the lamentable draw distance), that you could run into and instantly fight without a 10s cutscene playing. Trainers are finally all optional. I don’t play for the story but it’s one of the better ones for pokemon games. Having multiple arcs at the same time keeps things interesting for me. The game isn’t the most difficult (probably average+ for pokemon standards) but I made it satisfyingly hard on myself when forcing myself to comply with set mode, no items in battle, and trying to win while underleveled. Also the music is a masterpiece, bravo Giacomo.

How is this even legal? So now suddenly every chromium extension has to go through a play store style review? How is Google entitled to do this on their competitor’s browsers?

Weird. I have a Ryzen 9 5900HX (about Ryzen 7 3700 performance), Radeon RX6800M (15% slower than RX6700XT), 32GB DDR4 RAM, and a 2TB 970 Evo Plus SSD, which is 40% filled right now.

I know a lot of the recent increase in the launch and shut down time of Steam has to do with this stupid splash screen. It waits for the network for about 8s even though I have good Internet, and takes a long time to do other stuff as well.

I read the article, and the direction Honda is going worries me, scares me even.

I wish all the best for electric-powered motorcycles. I can’t wait to see them become cost-competitive with gas motorcycles. I think Honda would do quite well with an e-grom.

But, Honda doesn’t seem to just focus on switching the powertrain to electric. They emphasize connectivity and tech. Don’t get me wrong, I like high-tech motorcycles, look at the Yamaha R1. But there is one clear line I draw where the tech becomes detrimental: The point where the addition of new tech gives the manufacturer more control over the bike.

With the Yamaha R1, all the tech is either to make the motorcycle safer to ride (cornering ABS), or make the ride more customizable (power modes). These settings don’t frequently change unless you tell it to and it can all be turned off.

But I’m seeing that Honda wants to copy Zero’s “make the customer pay to unlock the feature that the hardware already supports,” plus adding features enabling the collection and selling of user data. This is especially scary if insurance companies buy the data. It takes away the freedom of motorcycling, as you are metaphorically being ruled by greedy companies.

Not all ICE motorcycles are like that. Some people straight pipe their motorcycle to make it obnoxiously loud. But my Suzuki GZ250 is fairly quiet, even at full throttle at 8000rpm you couldn’t hear it from a block away

Interesting. I’ve only had Steam since 2017 but currently it’s the slowest it’s ever been.

It takes 20s to start and 5s to shut down on fast hardware. This is 6x slower than the electron-based open source Heroic launcher. It’s also 20x slower than opening a web browser, considerably slower than opening Word, LibreOffice, unmodded Factorio, Kdenlive (a full-featured video editor), Cities Skylines 2 (known for poor optimization lol), or even the 11GB Quartus Prime (used for programming FPGAs) It’s not far off from Windows itself.

The only apps slower to open than Steam are large games, some pro-level software, and the absolutely horrific MS Teams desktop app and Epic Games Store.

1. Perhaps 2024 will be the year of the girlfriend

2. Making money over the summer and upgrading to a faster motorcycle

I’ve had assignments that involve editing a PDF template. So far, LibreOffice Draw has worked for me.

This community is about mildly infuriating: The little stuff that triggers us.