I just can’t believe I’m seeing references to the Pink Panther cartoons in current year 2026

Actually good advice for me, who mostly dabbles in playing old GBA games and have had this recommended to me. Haven’t had much time recently to play but if I have the time I’ll check out number 2 (assuming I don’t just pick up another Pokémon ROM hack :p)

Hold up is that guy from the Pink Panther cartoons?

Both of those are absolutely true, and I apologize for being a dumb american and forgetting the first.

A description I heard from Conrad Zimmerman that I think is apt is that Nintendo is a toy company. They largely aren’t following the tactics of the other big movers in the gaming space because their strategy is fundamentally different.

Personally, I cut ties with Nintendo after what they did to Bowser (no, not that one (no, not that one)).

I won’t launch into a rant no-one asked for but I think you’d be in the minority of pirates if this news is what changed your mind.

I mean, the reason it won’t hurt sales is because piracy doesn’t actually hurt sales, and studies have shown piracy can increase sales.

Basically, most people willing to pirate games weren’t going to buy the games in the first place^[1], but there are going to be a percentage of converters who like the game enough to buy through official channels.

And there’s a cultural currency that comes from being a popular piracy target, too, as that means more people (who have played it) are talking about the game and are likely to convince others to try it, which is going to bring in more customers. Basically what happened with Game of Thrones, when they (I think it was the director?) boasted about being the most-pirated show in the world. In that way, you can get sales out of people who never even purchased your product.

EDIT: fixed costumer typo

I actually want to take this seriously for a moment and point out that this is why so many people end up falling down conspiracy theory and hatesphere slopes. Of course when so much of their outside stimuli is about how wrong they are for one reason or another (even when it’s obtuse sources like all the bad-faith op-eds about “millennials”), people are going to latch on to sources that build them up.

Like I wouldn’t be surprised if a decent %age of people who do have ethical objections to genAI still interact with it because it’s one of the few places they feel like they can go without being judged to high heaven.

ʕっ• ᴥ • ʔっ maybe a hug will help a little.

Not that I’ve shared anything I’ve attempted to write for the last… probably decade, but I feel you on that. It’s especially trying when something unrelated comes up and just steals any momentum I had in a project – most recently is was a transmission going out that took all the winds out of my sails for a piece I’d already made good progress on with a few thousand words.

Sorry, it never even occurred to me that anyone (especially anyone versed in memery or tumblr-isms) wouldn’t know what AO3 meant.

I am uncertain whether you mean that like “oh, wait, you’re serious – let me laugh even harder” kind of way; or if you’re more playing along with the joke in a “oh, that’s cute if you think I’ll even break three words” kind of way.

Oh, hey, I’m pretty sure this is the game Punchy covered a while ago! I’m sure he’ll be glad to be yet again proven wrong that the game he thought would never get an English translation did in fact get an English translation.

I literally haven’t used the subscribed feed in over a decade ever since they first started doing that shit. At one time I was subscribed to 300+ channels, now I’m only subscribed to one singular channel I never check (Tomii11, a young boy who at the time had brain cancer and wanted to be a youtuber so there was a grassroots effort to help him find success) because they thoroughly enshittified the subscribed feed (and no I’m not going to click the fucking bell I don’t want notifications, I want a functioning feed).

I don’t doubt that happens to people but I’ve been curating my feed for over a decade, I don’t get any of that – for my main feed it’s a mix of video game analysis/essays, speedrunning, science videos, and RWBY, and I’m in the process of re-curating to get RWBY to show up instead of science because I never actually interact with the science videos beyond watching and I have an entire other feed for edutainment.

HEY YO XBOX AHOY IS BACK?

Hold up I’ve missed how many videos?

Why hasn’t youtube been pushing them to me I used to love their vids

110% this is the way.

I still have friends of nearly 20 years whom I met on the official Wizards of the Coast forums back when those still existed and I’ve managed to meet a handful in person once or twice. I’ve made friends through Discord, fanfic sites, even youtube whom I’ve also met IRL (usually at cons), even if I have been terrible at sticking around sometimes. I’m even making friends on here just by posting and generally being nice and being around, which tbh I wasn’t expecting both because of the low traffic and because of the depersonalized nature of this inherited-from-reddit interface.

I don’t want to oversell my understanding of the topic, but I think at least the big corpo chatbots have the resources to run them entirely separately like that. I’m not sure how smaller models are compressed down or if they’re able to staple some of these specialist models into the main ones to make the One Big Model That Can Do Everything. Apparently text-based models are capable of doing image now so maybe they can?

As a lay person with a modicum of interest in how these work, I’m vaguely aware that the modern paradigm (like with the cat farted) is to have multiple “specialized” models working in tandem called by the main thinking model.

There’s probably a model doing the transcription, one doing a summary of the transcription, another being fed the summary to rephrase it according to the recruitment office’s instructions, et cetera. That’s on top of what I count as at least 5 models working in tandem for the interview itself (voice, video, “thinking”, emotion, memory).

Lol “the darkest memes”

I think autocorrect undercut you but I get what you mean. Videos like from P.M. Seymore or Oz Media or Matt Rose present the choicest posts from places which are already curating such lists (e.g. Reddit) so you get the stuff that’s practically guaranteed gold.

Something about that explanation has me rolling ahaha