“I have, to some degree, underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written.”
— Nicholas Negroponte explains the new funding model of his Government-Owned Student Laptop projectAll 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.]
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.]
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:
(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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I refuse to leave those Antifa mugshots as the top picture any longer.
Names when I get a chance, as usual.

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

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