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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Warframe: Sobek It Hurts

    I haven’t been playing Warframe all that heavily lately, mostly just doing Nightwave dailies to progress that reward track and leveling up weapons for mastery. Along the way I’ve slowly accumulated items called “Riven Slivers” which can be turned in to receive something called a “Riven Mod.” That’s basically a mystery mod (item which enhances a warframe, weapon, or other piece of equipment) with randomized stats (usually a mix of some positive and one very negative) that is locked to a given named weapon (any variant thereof).

    Earlier this month I got a Riven Mod, and once I revealed its assigned weapon, I was kind of annoyed: It’s for the Sobek, the “normal” version of which is a kind of middling shotgun. I already have a stack of shotguns in my arsenal, do I need another? Probably not, I decided.

    Then I noticed this was my 2nd Sobek Riven Mod. Huh. (Mind you, one cannot equip more than one Riven Mod on a weapon. So having two is just pointless… maybe. Kind of. Put a pin in that.)

    Immediately afterward during my next mission in the Saturn system, a Kuva Larvling showed up (as they do) and the weapon it offered me if I chose to make that Larvling into a full Lich was…

    … yeah, the Kuva Sobek. I guess the game absolutely wanted me to add a Sobek to my inventory. So I went ahead and kicked off the Lich hunting process, more out of a fit of pique than anything else, if I’m honest. But hey, mastery progress is mastery progress, a weapon’s a weapon. It’s all good, baby!

    Warframe video game screenshot: Progress indicator for trying to figure out which Requiem Mods will unlock the final mission for the Kuva Lich process. What this current status reveals is that the leftmost Mods are correct for a position somewhere, but not the first position, either of them.

    Let the game of interplanetary Mastermind begin!

    (more…)

  • Down with Whatever

    It’s just a quick link this evening to a blog post about the “rise” of genAI slop, coming at it not from the “working with a corpus of stolen goods” angle or the “boiling lakes to make fake pictures” angle, but from the angle of the results of these next-word-guessing programs being basically useless. Which is also super-valid, alongside those other non-trivial concerns. Here, have a pull quote:

    My gripes are more of a tangled web that I can only summarize as: the vibes are bad. The tone is unbearable. The lying as a fallback is offensive. The advertising keeps focusing on how you can coast through life without caring about your work or family because you can just generate a birthday card or whatever. The people funding and pushing it keep openly salivating at the idea of replacing as much human input as possible with a machine best known for generating titles of books that don’t exist.

    Now, go read the whole thing because it’s so, so true, top to bottom.

  • Satisfactory: So You Want A Huge Nuclear Power Plant

    For some reason, when I got to the point of wanting to replace some of my early power plants (coal, maybe some regular-fuel) with nuclear power, I decided to build the biggest plant I’ve ever made in the game, solo or multiplayer. This is my “1.0” save, started when the game officially left Early Access last autumn.

    I ran the numbers and decided that 4 uranium fuel rods per minute feeding 20 power generators was exactly the right number to aim for.

    Satisfactory video game screenshot: Side view of a large power plant bordered on both sides by train stations, the foreground station being surrounded by water pipes leading to water reservoirs on the floor above. To the far left is a row of refineries.

    What the hell was I thinking?

    Please allow me to offer some advice if you want to follow in my virtual footsteps. I made some mistakes; perhaps my hubris will be partly absolved if I can help others avoid them.

    (more…)

  • Slow News Month – June ’25

    Only four posts all month long, and one of them is “sorry I haven’t been posting much this month?” Hmm. Backsliding, apparently.

    On the shows-to-watch front, Murderbot remains excellent, the “RockLady” anime was a delight, the “Girlilla” and the “Ninja+Assassin” anime much less so, and I still need to work up the oomph to finish off Apocalypse Hotel. Never mind picking Macross Delta back up again…

    The co-op and the solo Satisfactory games are coming along nicely. My goal during this vacation week (look at how sneakily I worked that in there) is to finish off the nuclear power plant, and if I do so soon enough I’ll do a photo tour to show it off.

    Other than than, life’s ticking along okay. Peace and quiet are most of what I want in this life lately, as long as I can continue to afford the cost of living. Which, of course, is not a guarantee even in good times… which these really aren’t. Ah well.

  • Murderbot, The Prestige TV Show

    It takes a lot to convince me to fork out for adding a streaming service to the roster nowadays, considering I long ago cut D+ and whatever they’re calling HBO’s service this week out of the budget. Especially when the service in question is tied to the “fruit logo” financial ecosystem.

    But dagnabbit, I really love the Murderbot series of novels & novellas from Martha Wells. And everything I read & watched about the upcoming show convinced me to give it a try.

    Am I happy with my purchase? Oh, goodness yes.

    (more…)

  • Garbage – Let All That We Imagine Be The Light

    The title? Makes me wonder if someone in the band has been reading Japanese light novels lately, going by sheer length alone. The music? Very, very solid, the product of a band doing what they want to be doing in this moment to the best of their ability.

    Cover design of the Garbage album, "Let All That We Imagine Be The Light," and it defies description beyond "space octopus, I think?"

    I bounced off of most of the previous full Garbage album, No Gods No Masters, so I went into Let All That We Imagine Be The Light with considerable trepidation. Not many of my most recent new music purchases have panned out terribly well. (Note the lack of reviews here since, oh, 2023…) For instance: The less said about Apocalyptica’s recent attempt to return to the well bearing the sign “Metallica songs to cover,” the better.

    If you’ve ever liked a Garbage album then I have an easy time recommending this one to you. It’s ten songs of varying but mostly average length with dense, almost crunchy at times, production values and Shirley Manson in what could best be described as “having run out of fucks to give but not to say” mode.

    Seriously, if f-bombs are going to bother you, this may not be the best music purchase option.

    Every song on here is at least good, and a few are marvelous. The high point for me is “Radical,” which also happens to serve as the title track (after a fashion). I considered it just-okay on first listen, bumped it up to pretty-good a couple of listens later, and at this point (a week after initial purchase) I’ve locked in a 5-star rating and I don’t see that going anywhere any time soon, given that parts of it have been in the earworm rotation of my psyche for days now.

    With that said… not that I know anything about what satisfies pop sensibilities nowadays but I don’t see anything on the album becoming wildly popular outside of the band’s existing fanbase. There are no “club hits” hiding in the track list, there are no barn-burners or simple anthems for folks to nod & sing along with. This is meaty & meaningful stuff that you’ve kinda gotta be in the mood for going in.

    Still, it’s a pretty damned good record overall, and I’m glad to have it in the library.

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