i can’t remember the specific details, but there was definitely some stuff going round a year or two back, where a lot of people were convinced a regular 4chan poster was Pynchon
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pynchon could be any one of us, when you think about it
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i think my sense of belief in the possibility of the message board might have been permanently shaken by the time i saw some somethingawful guys discussing whether jay z read their forum since he had the word goon in one of his songs
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wait is it called gooning because of SA
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As corny as all that was to read in Bleeding Edge, it felt really truthful and largely because it was so corny lol. I liked that book.
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…
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his kids were teenagers or so around that time, so there is also a chance he picked it up from them (this is known because his one kid had a friendster profile that almost had a pic of him in it and yeah that was a weird time on the internet but pynchon nerds love trying to find him). I maintain that it was a shoutout to Kojima because Pynchon knew MGS3 is just Gravity’s Rainbow fanfic, and was returning the favor like he did with Buckaroo Banzai in Vineland.
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do you all have any idea how good a mason and dixon open world game would be? it is my ideal. they could have a bunch of funny historical cameos like an assassins creed and they wouldn’t even have to invent any quests that weren’t in the book. they’d just need an astronomy-based combat system.
the paragon - renegade system could be a Pennsylvania - Maryland system
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…death stranding 2?
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“Banana factory?”
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against all better judgment i have this unwavering belief that the Japanese movie “Funky Forest” was somehow inspired by or named after my ocremix track “Da Phunky Forest” which came out a few years before the movie.
i say this partially because those oc remix tracks esp back in the day made it a lot farther across the internet than i ever thought. for example someone in my high school who i had never met before recognized me across the cafeteria and wanted to be my friend only shortly after my first remix (which was “Da Phunky Forest”) was posted there. this also happened in my college dorm a few years later, in addition to my older brother’s college roommate purportedly being a fan of my ocremix music. i was pretty taken aback by all of it. i didn’t talk to my irl friends or family at all about stuff i did online. and i was def not one of the bigger names on that site at all. i thought it was a lot more of a niche thing than i guess it really was.
all i’m saying is that you never really know who is reading or listening to or engaging with something. it’s also very rare (esp back before social media but even now to some extent) that people often think to reach out or say anything when they are.
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This episode of the Devil Summoner TV series about a kid from St. Hermelin (clearly an ersatz Protagonist from Persona 1) who can summon Vishnu and has been going around murdering people. There’s even a stand-in for Maki. I would’ve loved to see the Devil Summoner video game series sort of experiment in this way with having you deal with different, sort of alternate reality, takes on events from other games in the franchise. Re-visiting Persona 1 in a Devil Summoner scenario sort of but with the Pierced Boy as an antagonist would’ve been super cool.
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I just had the idea of writing a blog post entitled something like “The loading-screen era of videogames (1997-2020) and why it’s ending”. That’s a timely narrative that no one’s pushing yet as far as I know? Based on the positive reaction to my two one-sentence posts, a longer post would resonate with people I bet?
(I wish the blogpost era of the Internet had not also ended so I could have some expectation of a bigger readership if I invest the time to write a Good Post though…)
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Another concern is that I’m too far too remote from game development nowadays to have an actually informed opinion if AAA studios are planning to really do things differently in the SSD world as I’m guessing they will.
My vision of a new world of brisk, light-feeling AAA games might be wishful thinking, and there’s immediately a similar bottleneck, and actually nothing much will change. That’s a big thing that might make my thesis wrong so maybe I can’t really write a good post without soliciting expert feedback first.
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Would love to read something on this. I thought felt strongly that the elimination of the loading period between deaths in PS5 Demon’s Souls probably effects some real felt psychological difference by depriving people of a cool-down reflective moment or a moment which just frustrates them further. I know it would be different for me if I got the chance to play that version.
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Absolutely, the loading screens in PS3 Demon’s are egregious. Ridiculously long and I remember them vividly, especially in my first playthrough where I died a lot.
Among other things, it punished reckless play, you couldn’t even be reckless at the very beginning of the level because you already invested the loading screen wait time. It also made the blacksmith in 2-1 much “further away” than you would think given Demon’s has fast travel
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Isn’t it a pretty straightforward formula? Naively, load times = RAM size / media speed.
So things are well-balanced for the next decade, at least.
Well, that’s the starting point, but the “real” performance problem from my personal experience loves to defy your initial expectations. There’s bus bandwidth, say.
More fundamentally, SSDs are only ~10x faster, not ~100x, and the latter is the rule of thumb for truly revolutionary infrastructure change. (As an example of this rule of thumb, PC → iPhone was possible due to an at least 100x accumulation of Moore’s Law.) In videogames, “only” 10x is more liable to be swallowed up into the arms race of visual polish, like the DVD → HDD transition was.
Ah, you believe it won’t get swallowed eventually, that the race for techniques like streaming and load balancing will end loading, forever? They certainly got very good at the most unbalanced, the PS4/Xbox One generation. Naughty Dog stuff was amazingly seamless and open world techniques are very good, except for initial load (new ‘suspend’ features would have helped that out).
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