Category: Media

This is a container category for media reviews and related drivel.

Rascal Does Not Dream of a Sister Venturing Out

Say you’re a high-school-aged boy, and for whatever reason you’ve turned out to be a kind of magnet for really weird stuff going on with various people around you. Like, pulling an example purely out of thin air, there’s a girl who wanders around in a bunny-girl outfit to prove that nobody can actually see her… except you, of course, or there’d be no plot to this story.

This is basically the core premise of the Rascal Does Not Dream light novel series that later became an anime series followed by a string of theatrical release movies. Most folks refer to it as the “bunny-girl senpai” show, since that’s the first novel installment from which the anime series takes its name.

Following on from the televised show that covers the events of the first handful of novel installments and an absolute tearjerker of a film dealing with the contents of the paired novel installments after that, Sister Venturing Out is… almost anticlimactic.

It’s still very good, though.

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21 December, 2024
Satisfactory: FICSMAS Takes Its Toll

Well, this is moderately embarrassing.

Insert “record scratch” meme, here.

There I was, minding my own business, preparing a new site for a couple of electronics products (Remote Control Units and High Speed Connectors) when I saw something shiny.

We all like shiny things, right?
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12 December, 2024
Satisfactory: FICSMAS 2024

With the 1.0 release of Satisfactory comes the first “true” version of the annual FICSMAS event. The inaugural rendition came in December of 2020, right at the time I’d just bought the game… which made for a slightly odd first impression, indeed. The developers tinkered with it a bit once or twice since then but mostly it was just a low-priority side-project amusement for the team.

This “northern lights” effect is a new addition for 1.0, and I love it. I want it all year ’round, now.

Now, though, it’s fully fleshed out and polished to a higher sheen. Let’s get into it.
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8 December, 2024
Satisfactory: Water Reclamation

When you break past the point of sending the Phase 3 shipment up the Space Elevator in 2024’s Golden Joystick Award Game-of-the-Year-winning Satisfactory, what you’ve mainly done is unlocked the twin titans of the mid-to-late game: Aluminum and Uranium. I have a couple of posts about nuclear power in the archives, and yes I’ll need to revisit that topic at some point because things have changed with the advent of Version One Point Oh. Today, however, I want to talk about waste water reclamation, a key part of the Aluminum production process.

Let’s get into it.
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24 November, 2024
Satisfactory: Waste Management

The core focus of Satisfactory is on automating the production of things. Iron products, steel products, aluminum products, all of these things need factories to extract the raw materials and turn them into fun and useful objects. In the process, however, you end up with leftovers and other unwanted fillers of inventory, such as plant matter and the remains of hostile creatures. Once you’re past the early game stages and no longer need biological gunk to power your empire, nor do you need spare ingots and whatnot, what do you do?

You sink them for Awesome Shop tickets, of course. And the best way to do that is with a fully automated waste management factory.

I later changed the sign’s text to “Trash 4 Tix” because I’m clever like that. Also please note that this bin faced the wrong direction at the time of this screenshot. Whoops.

I completed such a build this weekend, and here’s how it went:
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17 November, 2024
What did you (anniver)say?

Some games come and go with the seasons, like most of the “gacha” type mobile games. Others fit a very specific niche in one’s life and can stick around for ages. Case in point for the latter: Gems of War, which is celebrating 10 years in operation. I started playing shortly after it launched, which means two entire residential addresses ago.

Dang.

Unfortunately, the team behind the game seems to be phoning it in lately. The “improvements” tend not to be such at all, they’re getting more obvious about just wanting people to pay them money for no meaningful reward (in or out of game), and… well, then there’s the quality control:

“Anniversay” Week, eh?

Come on, y’all. At least try.

Adding insult to mockery is, of course, the fact that this reward system relies on a bunch more in-game grinding to get absolute scraps of “rewards.” At no point have they done something like, say, gift the playerbase a nice chunk of in-game currencies to thank us for ten years of loyalty. Nope, it’s just “glad you’re still here, now grind for a pittance. GRIND, WE SAY.”

Or “we anniversay,” if you will.

5 November, 2024