After the litany of fuck ups Bungie did, nobody should want to be the next Destiny.

According to this, the US imports $421B worth of goods from Canada every year.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports/canada

30% of it various oil related products.

One of my favorite artists has his gear list on his website:

https://smither.com/etc/gear-bag/

"Pickup
Who knows what they put in those things?

DI
Who cares?"

LOL.

It’s part of the creative process, but it’s also it’s own rabbit hole. 😉 I do like having 42 simulated amps and 56 simulated effects pedals on tap without spending 10s of thousands of dollars, but fiddling with them is it’s own deal aside from playing and is, apparently, never ending. LOL.

But OTOH, if I want to try my hand at a specific song, I can get there without having to research every last bit of tech that went into it.

You’re right though, locking in “my own sound” is still do-able. The manual selection is all still there.

There is an AI angle that COULD work it’s just unfortunate that nobody is using AI in this way.

Instead of replacing creatives the way it does now, it could be used as a tool to inform creatives.

For example, not linking the product because they aren’t paying me to shill for them, but there is a brand of AI enhanced guitar amplifier. You use the prompt in the app to tell it what sound you’re looking for and it will do all the amp and pedal settings to make that happen.

“jazz guitar tone with a touch of reverb” or even specific bands and songs.

You STILL have to be able to play the guitar, it’s not going to do that for you, but it will save you hours of knob twiddling and pedal swapping to get the sound (or an approximation of the sound) you’re looking for.

Applying this to other creative fields, a novelist could use it to generate character names, or an artist could use it to come up with a color palette. I don’t think either of those would be objectionable because the creative still controls what happens after the fact.

It’s when the slop starts writing, painting, or playing for you that it becomes a problem and that’s where we are now.

The question I put to management is “What do you want me to use AI for?”

I can’t get a consistent answer. Lots of stuff unrelated to my job duties. “Well, it’s so easy to make Facebook ads!” - “You know that’s not a thing I do, right?”

I’ve said this for years… There was no “gaming crash”, people just started playing games on the C-64.

800 Euros is $930 US which is probably close to reality, but the problem is gaming pricing as a rule looks at the number as being comparable without conversion.

So you get sillyness like the PS5 Pro launching at $699 US but £699 and €799. Even though that conversion comes out to be $699 $937 and $930.

I could see them launching at $1,000 US and then trying to go “Well, that’s the same as £1,000 or €1,000” when it’s not.

The Steam Deck is $650 for the 1TB OLED version.

The Steam Machine reportedly has 6x the power and a 2TB version.

Why is $950 out of the realm of possibility?

Happened with me in FFVII back in the day… Doing well, had to take a 2 week business trip, got back… “Wait, did I just GET to this town or was I LEAVING this town?” No clue what I was doing, I may have just started over…

For real! And you see all those comments about “Why isn’t it priced like a console?” and I’m like “My brother in Christ, have you SEEN console prices lately?” $600, $650, $700, $750, $800?

Handhelds are even worse.

I love all the articles going “It’s going to cost more than you expect!!!” and I’m like “Really? Because I ‘expected’ around $1,000…”

It’s like people haven’t been watching pricing in the last year or so…

Even in the days of memory cards you could back up saves to other memory cards…

Yeah, but you don’t give pirated goods as gifts. 😉

I still have the OG Advance Wars carts for my GBA.