All I know about the mobile game Azur Lane is that it’s causing a new flood of shipgirl cheesecake. That’s not a complaint.

[oddly, this image has been deleted from Pixiv, so I can’t link back to the creator. Unfortunately, my SQLite cache doesn’t have author IDs in it.]

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After the latest mildly-hyped upgrade, how is No Man’s Sky? It’s an early beta of a half-decent $20 indie game, currently marked down to $30 on sale for $60. With some mods (Faster Walk, Faster Scan, and Reduced Launch Cost, at a minimum) and the save editor, you can work around most of the remaining design flaws and bugs, making it possible to see the originally-promised game off in the distance.

Still plenty of deliberate user-hostile design decisions, including some brand new ones (like stretching out the limited quest content by adding real-time delays between each step in a chain, ranging from 1 to 6 hours (!)).

Modding is still possible, in a fragile, clunky way, but one early mod that I liked hasn’t worked for a long time: changing the suit audio to Japanese.

With some hints from one of the forums and a copy of Sony’s PSARC tool, I was able to come up with a crude but functional method to generate a working mod for any of the supported languages. All of the other languages seem to be quieter than the English voice, but that’s actually a bonus, given how annoying the damn thing can be.

Edit to set the location of your game data and psarc, choose your standard language and what you want to replace it with, and run the script. It will chug for about 5 10 minutes extracting the language-specific audio from the right PAK file, then repack them under the localized language patha. The resulting mod is about 4 8 megabytes.

Releasing it as a batch file not only avoids the copyright problem that helped sink the original mod, but also allows you to apply any of the 14 supplied localizations to any other, so someone playing the game in Korean could have a Polish space suit, for instance.

[Update: Oh, FFS, NMS! You changed the paths for all the audio files between 1.55 and 1.57? Are you all descended from the surviving deck-chair-rearrangers on the Titanic?

…and now replaced with a more robust version that will be easier to fix the next time they move everything around.]

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I wasn’t aware that “self-help” included shibari, but this wouldn’t be the first time your recommendations got a bit kinky…

Fun with dust jackets:

Left to right, that’s:

• Orihime And Juliet
• Naked Old Man
• I Am A Girl
• Run, Dog!
• Matasaburō Searches For Mama

(that last one is a bit incoherent, because the mashup is 3000 Leagues In Search Of Mother (featuring a Sheena Easton theme song!) and Matasaburō Of The Wind)

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Mecha-musume: you’re doing it wrong.

I refuse to leave those Antifa mugshots as the top picture any longer.

Names when I get a chance, as usual.

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Berkeley PD posts unmasked pictures of communist shock troops arrested at their latest violent protest.

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You know how extremists, wackjobs, and conspiracy theorists use claims of persecution to attract new followers?

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Maybe encouraging giant corporations to publicly prove them right is a bad idea? Setting aside the betrayal of our society’s principles, it’s just tactically unsound.

“First they came for Alex Jones, and I said nothing, because I knew they’d attack anyone who defended his right to speak nonsense.”