Forums / Discussion / General

Been watching a 4k upscale of Transformers: Animated because it's the only version i could find that doesn't have audio issues. Unfortunately the AI doesn't really understand the simple artstyle and will fuck up the details half of the time.

Also i am very much disappointed we never got that 4th season.

I'm sick of people on this got damn website acting like we trans folk (or LGBT folk as a whole) are some got damn borg like hivemind. For some fucking reason it's always with the LGBT centric topics, certain folk (especially certain users whom I will not outright name) keep acting like a few idiots on sites like Twitter represent the community as a whole. Yet I bet if I said some shit like "all white people are bad because of the KKK or Hitler" I'd RIGHTFULLY be called out as an absolute idiot for judging an entire demographic based on a handful of assholes.

I legit feel like this site is slowly (emphasis on slowly) becoming more hostile to folk like myself, mainly in the primary comments sections where the up-to-downvote ratios on certain comments that are explicitly about LGBT topics are becoming increasingly more and more concerning. And I do wonder if it could be because even on this website folk like myself are an even bigger minority than we are IRL, like I REALLY REALLY hate to say this sentence because it makes me sound absolutely arrogant, but I legit feel like because there's not many other users like myself on this site, there's too many non-LGBT folk who have no idea what struggles people like me go through who are doing a poor job properly empathizing with people like me. I am a firm believer that everyone should have a voice and I'm not going to say non-LGBT folk can't have a say on certain topics (like I once spoke to one user who even outright told me something along the lines of "I live in a country where LGBT issues are rarely ever talked about so I don't get the big deal"), but I think the lack of empathy that does result from not being part of a minority group is what is starting to bother me. Like all I really want is some love and understanding, to be treated fairly, even if paradoxically acknowledge I technically still have my own culture.

Fuck… I also absolutely hate, hate, hate saying this but maybe asking for empathy is too much and I should just "go be with my people," segregate myself from much of the internet at large. Maybe trying to be part of "the whole" is simply too much for me, I'm only exhausting myself.

I went to Miku Expo in LA. I originally had tickets for San Jose, but sold them for a huge loss after they suddenly added an LA show. It was surprisingly packed for being a last minute addition and on a weekday of all things which is annoying. I had fun, but this will forever be marked as the infamous expo.

There was considerable controversy over the tour forfeiting the typical "hologram" performance in favor of using a giant led screen. The staff touched it up the lighting a bit and pushed the screen further away over the negative feedback, but it's still sticks out like a sore thumb, killing the immersion. Granted, they're some advantages over using a screen, but now seeing it in person, it pales in comparison to earlier concerts. Even in the vip seats, It's just not as good to put it bluntly. I sincerely hope this doesn't become a trend with Crypton going forward. Curiously, they also didn't use their in-house band, MKP39, but local talent for the live music. Not that it mattered, they were great, but something off I noticed. I think they're biting more than they can chew with performing in Coachella + 17 cities which forced them to make these compromises.

Set list was also kinda meh.

I'm very tired of various official bot and staff accounts mass-posting tons of r/All grade A reddit slop. A popular subreddit is not a meme, it has no spread or evolution of the idea.

I got banned from instagram recently. Probably because their AI mods (lol) didn't like me logging into a different computer.
There is absolutely NO WHERE to contact support. And because I didn't link my phone with instagram, I basically have no options other than to make a new one.

I am so sick of cheap ass megacorps making customer support labyrinthine or downright non-existent.

A few months ago, I tried to log back into an old IG account, but because I logged into it from a different state, they wanted me to verify through the associated gmail that no longer exists. Instagram's "suggestion" to me was to change the email while logged in. Y'know, the one I can't access in the first place..

Okay, I can just contact Google's customer support about getting the email reinstated so I can get the IG account back, right?Nah, they don't have a customer support either. The closest thing they have to it is a community forum that pretty much just parrots what you've already read for whatever issue you were having.

Utterly fucking useless.

The older I get, the more I find the concept of group identity to be existentially horrifying, and the less comfort I find in ideas such as a body of like people or being a part of a greater whole.

This is very "edgy depressive 14 year old" of me, but I hate being antisocial… or at least, I hate feeling wrong for being antisocial?

I always thought that I was unhappy and a loner just because I didn't know how to socialize. And now that I know how to interact with people, do small talk, big talk, body language, sound confident… I made lots of new friends… and it makes me wish to go back in being a loner again.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to realize this, and I'm no longer sad for thinking I'm some lonely loser… but now I just have this feeling of "being wrong" whenever I am alone, like I just keep thinking "why are you here alone on a friday night, you can hangout with any person just by calling them", and I could, I really could.. but I just much prefer having a "me time" overall.

Maybe this feeling is a bit clichê, but still, I just can't accept that I'm happy being lonely. I'm """sad""" for being happy lol.

It's perfectly fine to prefer enjoying "me time" over hanging out with friends, there isn't a mandate or an obligation to only enjoy "alone time" as a last resort. On a positive note, think that you now have the option to choose between friends and being by yourself, which is a choice you didn't have before.

I have said something similar to this before, but I will say it again. 

I love Hololive, but I hate their game selection. I hate how they specifically go for safe and mainstream titles and would almost never touch an indie or any lesser-known game with a ten-inch pole. But I specifically hate it when it's made very obvious that the game has been practically forced on them by the staff. I am referring to those "meme" games, which are often times janky and poorly made on purpose or are made with a specific goal to create frustration for the players, like "Getting Over It." And no, you are not convincing me otherwise on this. The very fact that literally all the members have played it proves that it was practically forced on them, and for no other reason than to get funny reactions out of them and generate quick revenue out of something that has been repeated so many times. And now another game has been forced on them, this time "Bunny Garden," a completely barebones, boring dating sim whose only value here seems to be to force the members into awkward situations and them reacting to all the "so lewd" stuff in the game (which are nothing truly special as far as NSFW content in these types of games go) and constantly screaming "yabai!." Don't get me wrong, even though I still love them a lot and would never abandon them (Hololive is one of, if not the best, YouTube companies), but this really annoys me.

I went to comic shops and Barnes & Nobles to look for some cool manga at their manga sections and what I mostly find was either aisles being full of isekai or the most popular Jump manga. It wasn't frustrating at first, but when I want to read mecha manga, my only choice is to order online or check out scanlation groups.
But what really gets me is that It's hard to find many Toku or Mecha based manga, it's not that they don't exist but because scanlators won't touch many of them.
There's tons and tons of different manga about SD Gundams with complete volumes for example, yet none were picked up. Meanwhile some manga adaptation of an isekai light novel gets picked up the day chapter one gets published with the most boring copy-paste artstyle and synopsis that's in a lot of Light Novels.
I don't mean to hate isekai or anything, people can be free to enjoy them. It's one thing for folks to sleep on an anime, at least fans can still enjoy them, but manga and novels be damned if they never get translated because they aren't a popular genre like isekai or owned by Jump.

I guess I need to vent.
I lost my dog a year after my father died of Diabetes. My dog died of an ear infection we couldn't cure. I saw both my father and my dog convulse and die in-front of me. I thought I was desensitized to death or gore, but seeing them die like that broke me. Its been really hard to recover both mentally, physically, and financially. We had set up a donation page for my father, but only received 20 dollars. That would be fine, but he not only left us in debt, he had done horrible things throughout his life that I really don't want to get into. I keep asking myself, why do I grieve for someone who never loved me, abused me verbally and physically, and ruined the lives of my family.
Yet I miss him.

Vent threads are sorta cool.
When I was in elementary school I was using the bathroom. I don't remember how old I was, but a woman had entered the bathroom. She started checking the stalls, I guess to see if anyone else was there. I didn't think much of it because I was a kid and she seemed nice. She walked up to me and started talking to me about school things, nothing really specific. She then told me that she had a present for me and that to see it we had to go into one of the stalls. At the time I didn't have friends and never received gifts, so I was excited! I followed her into the stall and she locked the door behind her.

I asked about the gift and she told me to take a seat on the toilet, so I did. She proceeded to unbutton my pants. At first I was worried, but she told me to calm down and not talk. She started touching my penis without my permission. It was uncomfortable, so I told her to stop. She hit me it the face and told me to stop talking.

She then proceeded to rape me. I don't remember how long it was or why she choose me, but she did horrible things to me. When she was finished with me she told me to stay in the stall and not speak to anyone about this, or else she would kill my family. She left and I sat in the stall for what feels like forever, hoping she would not hurt my family.

After that I never spoke to anyone about it out of fear, until yesterday when I was talking to a close friend about it. They laughed and said I should have been stronger, and that I should have fought more. I felt so hollow after they said that, like it was my fault for being raped. I told them to get out and spent the night crying. I ended up breaking my phone out of rage/sadness.

I don't know what to feel or who to turn to. I've tried therapy and nothing seems to work. I have no friends, two family members, and no drive in life. I'm stuck mentally in that bathroom stall. Its affected my life and relationships. I can't use public restrooms, I don't trust being alone with women, and it has ruined the idea of sex for me. She stole my virginity in elementary school and I have nothing left.

I'm useless.

The Long 2014 meme fucking stinks specifically because it's only ever used by people who are and still are on one side of the issue and dislike it simply because of the memes directed against them, and if something appears that is directed against the opposite side, they will never bring it up.

I stopped browsing this site around the end of last year. As much as I like the funny memes I didn't notice how much all the constant bad news, culture wars drama and endless internet celebrity BS was starting to affect me negatively. I get it's increasingly difficult to live outside of the cesspool of social media, but if you're terminally-online like me, don't forget to come out for air at least every once in a while. I know I will.

I think i can finally say with full confidence that Eurovision has officially jumped the shark.

Ok, yesterday I told you Eurovision had jumped the shark. After seeing the finals, it turns out that that statement was an understatement. They didn't just jump the shark; they jumped it, grabbed it by the tail, and flung it all the way to Saturn. 

Like, ok, I have heard multiple times about accusations of bias and rigging in Eurovision, but this one was definitely the most blatant one. With the winner being Switzerland and its boring pop-rap, and the third one being France and its equally boring ballad, the truth is that most songs qualified as boring, but at least one managed to qualify as downright hideous and offensive in its shittiness, that being Ireland of all places and its very obviously anorexia-inflicted female Marilyn Manson wannabe. Not all of the songs were shitty, though there actually were some pretty good ones, around seven in fact, which was a huge step forward from the previous context, which had only three. Those being Armenia's, Austria's (I legit can't wrap my head around how this one ended up being disqualified so early for me; this was the best one), Cyprus's, Estonia's, Georgia's, Luxembourg's, and Croatia's, which actually got second place and seriously should have been the winner. 

What a shitshow!

I've bitched about it before here but the "Wow! Cool robot!" meme is shit. Utterly despise it.

"My [subjective] opinion is the correct one"
"I'm better than everyone else because I understand subtext/'''media literacy''' "
"A [political/racial/etc] perspective is the only/most correct one"
"Subtext trumps all, including entertainment value"
"I want this media to be about ____, so I'm going to declare it's about _____"

Sure, you can use it beyond the aforementioned ways. But frankly that's rare in practice.

I hate that I cant escape people's political opinions. Yeah I know that is hipocritical of me to say I still mean it.

There are times I just want to laugh at some memes in some other website and often…you cant, some asshole is taking the opportunity to start preaching their ideology.

Any meme reddit that hasnt been taken over by the left will instead have a bunch of rightwing assholes taking the opportunity to spread their own gospel instead, sometimes I just want to laugh at dumb shit and not deal with people's bullshit.

I really hate the consequences smartphones have had on society and technology.

Nowadays you're expected to own a smartphone and have it with you at all times. For most jobs or services it's all but mandatory to have both a phone and a valid phone number. So you're pretty much expected to be available at a moment's notice. Social media platforms love this because they know how addictive it is for people to constantly check for new notifications. A ton of sites use bell icon or bell sounds for notifications, almost like an ironic reminder of the Pavlovian conditioning they have on people.

The rise of smartphones also allowed Apple and Google to become the monolithic tech giants they are today, with all the negatives about it. Google Chrome became the dominating browser at around the time smartphones became mainstream, now they're trying to use that fact to push their agenda and do shady things like neuter ad blockers. Who could've known that having the company that serves you ads also making your browser could cause a conflict of interest?

Web designers are often willing to break a perfectly good web design on PC to make it more "mobile friendly", even at the cost of functionality.

And of course there's the effect of smartphones on the gaming market. Need I say anything about it?

But personally, to me the worst part is how extremely creepy how it's been normalized to have a device that watches and listens to you at every moment and sends that data to who knows where or who. And if you point that out most people will call you paranoid or just say "eh, whatever" and keep browsing whatever brainrot slop TikTok or Instagram is feeding them at that moment.

After watching a left leaning but also very sex positive take on Stellar Blade (it's a video by a person who enjoys games like Bayonetta, Nier Automata, Oneechanbara, and Senran Kagura, and whom also highly disagrees with Anita Sarkeesian) the more I'm like "so wait, why exactly was THIS game suddenly the one the anti-SJW grifter crowd decided to gravitate towards and not games like the aforementioned Bayonetta?" The person in question did say they do think Stellar Blade is indeed a good game, but said they found EVE to be a really bland character and the game doesn't even have fun with her sexuality in the same way Bayonetta does, nor does it sound like EVE grows as a character in the same way 2B does, so it feels like a game where people are ultimately left going "so what was the point of propping this game up as the bastion of sex positivity in modern gaming when the main character is the game's weakest aspect?" Like I don't doubt there are sex negative people who complained about EVE's character design (I did indeed see a few), but I'm starting to feel it was really only places like Kotaku that bitched and moaned the loudest and this created a "mountain out of a molehill" situation. Why the fuck are we still giving Kotaku any relevance to begin with? Just let them die in obscurity.

Now I do still fully plan on buying Stellar Blade once I see it on discount as I do want to experience it for myself, especially for the combat and world design, and tbh I do want to play dress up with EVE even if it sounds like she's not a very interesting protag (I saw one goth/emo looking outfit that made me go "YES YES YES GIVE ME RIGHT NOW!"), but it sounds like all this culture war shit was all for naught with this game.

I also hate how smartphones have made zoomers and young people technically illiterate and ruined their attention spans. Lot of them don't even know how basic stuff like how folders work and don't know how to use and install any more complex programs when Play store lets them install anything with one click. I am pretty sure that physical media and torrenting will die in my life time when all young people use streaming services.
I really don't think kids below 15 should have access to tablets or smartphones without parental guidance at least, I got my first smartphone in high school and I'm glad for that. I can't imagine how fucked up gen alpha is going to be.

Also I am starting to believe that SEO was the worst thing to happen to the internet, this shit is killing independent websites and every time I try to look up something on Google I get either something from reddit or AI generated garbage.

It's been confirmed that one of the playable protags in the newest Assassin's Creed game, Shadows, will be Yasuke, a retainer to Oda Nobunaga who is often sited as being the one and only time a person of African descent became a samurai (or close to one). While I think it's pretty cool to see such an historical figure in Assassin's Creed (and it kinda mirrors how the first Nioh had the protag be a fictional take on William Adams, one of the only white Europeans to earn the title of samurai), just constantly remembering this is a Ubisoft game makes me worry the game will have something about it fucked up badly. Plus my interest in "Assassin's Creed but set in ancient Japan" was basically satisfied with Ghost of Tsushima so it's hard to feel much, if any, hype for this series I used to absolutely love, which of course sucks.

I'm frankly surprised anyone is even considering buying an Ubisoft game at this point.

I think Ubi is genuinely talented, when they want to be and their post-launch support is generally commendable. But they ruin so much goodwill with their myriad of monetization strategies and cookie cutter complacency when it comes to game design. But when they break out their mold, they are capable of genuine hitters. I was one of the fans really liked the new direction they took with AC with Origins after the series was run into a brick wall of stagnation. But then they just ran the new AC formula once more into said wall with Odyssey and Valhalla they course corrected with Mirage after fans complained of the excessive bloat of the former. Hopefully with this upcoming Shadows, Ubi finds a new balance that is once again refreshingly fun. Well, before they inevitably run that too into the ground.

I don't have a problem with the creative part at Ubisoft, I think even the generic open world design it gets so much criticism can be enjoyable to some extent. It's the greedy corporate part that puts me off. Not just the microtransactions. Things like removing games from people's accounts even after they become unplayable is incredibly scummy. At least to me the company is in my "don't give them a single cent" list right next to companies such as Konami and Blizzard.

My discord account got disabled for no apparent reason. I must of tripped some automated system. I will be waiting god knows how long until I get unbanned