1. This is one of the most shower-related shower thoughts of all time. Kudos!

2. A lot of people clean their bathrooms regularly. CLR or generic knock-offs are great for mineral buildup on faucets, drains, handles, etc.

3. My local water company regularly takes the main treatment system offline for maintenance and switches to the backup system. I don’t know all the details but every time they do it the water is heavily chlorinated for a week or so, and this happens roughly every 6 months. So until I can afford to get a full-home filtration system installed, I bought a shower filter that goes between the water pipe and shower head. It needs changed every 6 months so I might as well clean everything while I’m at it.

Oh yeah I have as much respect for him as I can have for any other celebrity I’ve never met or interacted with at all. I just wanted to get ahead of anyone responding to me pointing out that he’s not particularly qualified on this subject.

The reason I referenced him at all was not because of his qualifications, but as a way of establishing how popular these conversations were on the internet at the time. In that sense, the fact that he’s not an AI or finance expert and doesn’t specialize in such content speaks to how widespread the topic was at the time.

The last one standing or the last one left holding the bag?

This can result in support for hardware and software being upwards of two to three YEARS out of date. Which for gamers for example is unacceptable and causes issues more often then not.

I think your perspective might be a bit biased towards your own bubble here. People are still buying Nintendo Switch’s. People are still buying Steam Decks.

I am getting close to 600 games in my Steam Library, but only 2 were released this year. Both were Indie games (Fragrance Point and Tower Wizard).

Ram is costing hundreds of dollars. GPU’s are costing thousands. Desktop gaming, heck desktop ownership in general, has been falling off. If people are still on x86, they are more likely to be on laptops.

For the average person, the idea that you need your OS to be updated every couple of weeks so that you can check your email and play Minecraft with your kids is insane.

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Kind of gross how this article seems to be trying at every turn to say, “no ai is actually good! It helped us catch the bad businessmen that happen to be in the AI industry!” By focusing on a tiny trading period on November 20th.

Because I remember casually watching Hank Green talk about this same thing more than a month earlier.

Hank Green isn’t a finance bro or an AI guy or even really a tech guy. He’s just a guy reacting to things that are trending, and I remember I had seen the main graphic he was talking about floating around the internet for a while before I watched the video. People have been calling AI a “bubble” for much longer.

I am old enough to remember the report that 95% of generative AI companies failed to see returns from using it. That was back in August.

I don’t like giving credit to “trading algorithms” for things that humans figured out a long time ago.

Once again, their marketing team uses the word “remaster” but the problem you’re complaining about is new assets.

The meme is specifically comparing these to PC Ports, so I’m limiting my scope to games that have PC versions. So no Nintendo games either for example.

And if there are lore changes then I would call that a “re-make” or “re-imagining”. Part of the problem is that marketing teams have just chosen to go rogue in terms of what to call what. “Re-master” itself is a term that came from the mastering process of the music industry, to differentiate from “remix” or “re-recording”, so I suppose you could argue that we need a better term overall for videogames. So this means I generally ignore whatever words they decided to slap onto the title screen and focus instead on what the changes actually are.

You can say the exact same thing about PC ports though. The mere act of changing from a console experience to a PC experience means that you are changing the medium and changing that experience. Most PC ports have always had options to support different resolutions, frame rates, color modes, aspect ratios, and more. Not because of some grand artistic vision from the creator, but because the hardware was not standardized the way TV’s are and the developers realized that those options were insignificant details that were best left to the player to decide. Even a lot of console games had options like Widescreen or high-resolution modes in the 90’s and early 2000’s as widescreen HD TV’s transitioned from rare enthusiast items to ubiquitous.

One of my favorite PS1 games growing up was Moto Racer, a pretty generic and unremarkable arcade motorcycle racing game. It originally released on PC, and the PS1 version released a month later. Which, for the 90’s, was basically a simultaneous release. a couple years ago I bought the original PC version on steam because it was super cheap- it sucks and it’s completely unplayable. The controls are just too twitchy. I went and emulated the original PS1 version and… It’s fine, just like I remembered it. The game also had a re-make for its 15th anniversary, but I haven’t played that version.

For games that originally released on PC as ports, I think that the publishers should leave those available. I really hate that Rockstar took down the original PC versions of GTA for example, and replaced them with what they called a “remaster” but was actually a port of the Android versions of the games, which I would say crosses over to “re-make” territory.

In order to get the full, original experience of when PC games first came out I would have to sit at a tiny desk shoved in the corener of my mom’s living room and stare at a shitty CRT monitor that had washed out colors and warping around the edges. The room would be filled with cigarette smoke and there would be other children outside playing with lawn darts.

Even when I emulate games, I usually try to mess around with resolutions, original textures versus HD texture packs, locking at different frame rates, different filters or shaders, etc. I always thought Armored Core was a clunky mess of a game as a kid but as an adult I was able to emulate it and

I appreciate trying to preserve parts of history and culture, but that endeavor will always be limited. We cannot perfectly store an infinite amount of information indefinitely. Society and culture change over time, so we need to be careful when considering the context that art was made in versus the context of when we are experiencing it. I’m not going to learn Olde English and travel to England to handle the Norwell Manuscript to read Beowulf in its original form- it’s not worth it.

Idk I still think it’s way more common for remasters to be good. There’s been a handful of bad ones, but they’re the outliers. What’s way more common seems to be bad PC ports in general, which affects both remasters and new games.

Just looking around for some examples: the Phonekx Wright original trilogy was great for me on PC, and the PC remasters are pretty well-received overall. The Sonic remasters from Christian Whitehead were so good that Sega let him make an original game. The BioShock games aren’t really good to replay, but I didn’t really notice anything different on the PC remasters compared to how I originally played them on the PS3.

Ones that I haven’t played yet but have reviewed well: the Legacy of Kain series, the Last of Us 1&2 (you can argue that the remasters were not needed, and specifically the PC ports of those games had rough launches, but the console versions reviewed well and reportedly the PC versions have been mostly fixed). The Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters are widely considered to be the definitive way to play those games.

The examples I can think of for bad “remasters” weren’t really remasters. The Grand Theft Auto series might be the most notorious for this, because they removed the original PC ports and released “remastered” prior Android ports instead of remastering the original PC or console versions. Silent Hill is another case- Konami lost the original source code so it was, by definition, a remake that they just chose to market as a remaster instead.

It seems incredibly nitpicky to differentiate between a remaster and a PC port.

“No I don’t want the option to run it at 4k 60fps, I demand to be forced to run it at the original 720p 30fps it was released at on the PS3!”

Are you suggesting that women are such dainty and delicate creatures, they can’t handle a man’s internet? They need protected from the smarter and meaner 14 year old boys from 4chan?

Maybe the real solution is to just keep everything separate but equal? That famously works out well for everyone and never leads to any issues /s

Well I’m watching my own Blu-ray and dvd rips on my own Jellyfin server.

And it’s like that in theaters too- parts of things are way too dark, but also with HDR parts are way too blindingly bright. Which causes my pupils to constrict and males it even harder to see the dark parts. When I turn HDR off at home it’s better, but the dark parts are still too dark.

I think it’s an overall obsession with hyper-realism and spectacle. Make the bright lights seem as bright as possible. Make the loud parts seem as loud as possible. There are trillions of dollars fighting for your attention and movies want to do what they can to get a piece of that. So dynamic range, in all ways, is being pushed past the point of comfort, and even further past the point of realism.

Your teenaged nephews may do the same thing, but my teenaged nieces do not. The internet is a gigantic place, and it’s dangerous to extrapolate our own limited perspective onto the whole.

Relevant xkcd.

That’s quite an “if” that you’re starting with.

9gag

Really? I don’t even remember the last time 9gag was known for anything other than being uncool and irrelevant.

Sounds like you’re in a bubble of a lot of sexist communities. That’s real unfortunate- you should maybe try to get out of that.

I spent a couple of my teenaged years there too. I remember I printed out the “rules of the internet” post, which includes that “rule” and had it on my desk in high school. “For the lulz”. It’s important to grow and change, both as individuals and as a society. My friend group back then was a bunch of supposedly straight cis teens who threw around all kinds of slurs, and we thought it was okay as long as we weren’t actually being mean to other people and we kept it amongst ourselves. Largely, it was. But a lot of the same people who loved to throw the F slur around back then have boyfriends now. At least one person transitioned.

But my broader point is that it’s very easy to convince ourselves that something common in our own bubbles is ubiquitous across the internet and across time. Other people close to my age had very different experiences with the internet because they were in different communities. I’m sure that the youth today, with TikTok and Roblox and whatever else they are doing, have an entirely different culture. The older people on Facebook have a very different culture. I’m sure non-English speaking communities have different cultures.

And that’s also part of why I’m against segregated spaces. They create an echo chamber and reinforce societal divisions.

Any time some bigoted anti-trans law about bathrooms is proposed, progressive people advocating inclusivity point out that it’s impossible to define what a “woman” is in a manner that both excludes all trans-women and includes all cis-women. And I fully support that, which is why I have a hard time supporting exclusionary policies on the internet too.

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Was it a common saying or were you just on 4chan too much?

I find myself dreading watching anything made after 2010.

I’m not saying everything is bad, or that everything that was earlier was good. But dang…it seems like a good 90% chance the modern movie or TV show is just a bunch of flashy and disruptive CG, incredibly fast editing to try to compete with cell phones for attention, tons of with clips and one-liners. Everything is poorly lit, the dialogue is inaudible, and all the other sound is way too loud.

And I don’t think it’s just “things were better back when I was a teenager” bias. I can still find older movies with those some annoying traits earlier, 2010 is just the arbitrary cutoff I’m using here. And I can look back at movies from before I was born, like Hitchcock movies, and see how much better they are at handling a lot of those things.