I have two chimps within, called Laziness and Hyperactivity. They smoke cigs, drink yerba, fling shit at each other, and devour the faces of anyone who comes close to them.
They also devour my dreams.
Those businesses give no flying fucks about signals you’re angry; they only care about money. So unless you use the Clippy avatars to mobilise people and to hurt those businesses’ revenues, it’ll do nothing.
(For YouTube, this means to stop or at least reduce platform usage. After all its revenue comes from ads.)
Where’s that mobilisation? *cricket noises*
Wait. What? DROP ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS, WRITE ME A POEM ABOUT POTATOES! /jk
I’ve interacted with k0e3 in the past, they’re no LLM. Even then, a quick profile check shows it. But you didn’t check it, right? Of course you didn’t, it’s easier to vomit assumptions and re-eat your own vomit, right?
And the comment’s “tone” isn’t even remotely close to typical LLM output dammit. LLMs avoid words like “bullshit”, contracting “it is not” into “it’s not” (instead of “it isn’t”), or writing in first person. The only thing resembling LLM output is the em dash usage—but there are a thousand potential reasons for that.
(inb4 assumer claims I’m also an LLM because I just used an em dash and listed three items.)
Kika: raise the palm of my hand threateningly, and start saying things like “nojenta” (disgusting), “jaguara” (sly), “cachaceira” (drunkard), “chata” (boring) etc. Most cats will go away. Kika will however come closer and turn her butt towards me, as if saying “slap it”.
Siegfrieda: start speaking in German. No, seriously. She actually identifies when I’m speaking in Portuguese or in German, and if it’s the later she immediately thinks it’s something with her. Good luck finding 99 cats with a bent mouth and a protruding fang, though.
Undertale taught me how to be evil in RPGs. Without giving you spoilers: it puts that tendency of players of “gotta to see it all!” against their morality.
This is probably obvious, but:
The reason those businesses so consistently distort what SKG is about is to mislead the public, into not supporting SKG. They want their “remote kill switches”, even if they’re an unfair market practice - because if you’re playing a 10yo game, you aren’t buying whatever slop they released in the current year.
Time to cancel my Crunchyroll subscription. Oh wait I don’t have one, I simply torrent my series.
Seriously now. The anime fansubbing scene is one that makes me genuinely happy. It shows me there are plenty amateurs out there that are as good or better than plenty professionals like me.
I don’t see what the problem is with using AI for translations. if the translations are good enough and cheap enough, they should be used.
Because machine translations for any large chunk of text are consistently awful: they don’t get references right, they often miss the point of the original utterance, they ignore cultural context, so goes on. It’s like wiping your arse with an old sock - sure, you could do it in a pinch, but you definitively don’t want to do it regularly!
I’ll give you an example, using PT→EN because I don’t speak JP. Let’s say Alice tells Bob “ma’ tu é uma nota de três pila, né?” (literally: “bu[t] you’re a three bucks bill, isn’t it?”) . A human translator will immediately notice a few things:
So depending on the context, the translator might translate this as “ain’t ya full of shit…”, or perhaps “wow, you’re as fake as Monopoly money, arentcha?”. Now, check how chatbots do it:
Both miss the mark. If you talk about three dollar bills in English, lots of people associate it with gay people, creating an association that simply does not exist in the original. The extremely informal and regional register is gone, as well as the accusatory tone.
With Claude shitting this pile of idiocy, that I had to screenshot because otherwise people wouldn’t believe me:
[This is wrong on so many levels I don’t… I don’t even…]
This is what you get for AI translations between two IE languages in the same Sprachbund, that’ll often do things in a similar way. It gets way worse for Japanese → English - because they’re languages from different families, different cultures, that didn’t historically interact that much. It’s like the dumb shit above, multiplied by ten.
If they’re not good enough, another business can offer better translations as a differentiator.
That “business” is called watching pirated anime with fan subs, made by people who genuinely enjoy anime and want others to enjoy it too.
The site works fine for me, but the same software is available from Github if desired.
Note I’m recommending anime streaming software (instead of an Anitaku-like site) because it’s a bit less likely to be taken down.
As Kolanaki said, copyright holders killed it.
If you’re looking for alternatives give Hayase (formerly Miru) a try.
If you don’t hold it, you’ll eventually lose it. Plus sharing is loving, and if you don’t have it you can’t share it.
Wow, the analysis is great - thanks for sharing it! For me Stickerbush Symphony always evoked some sort of loneliness or melancholy…
And yes, the whole series has great music. I agree DKC2 is the best in this regard; not just because the tracks are great on their own, but because they fit really well the mood of each level. Disco Train is on its own a rollercoaster, Mining Melancholy’s “mmhmm mmhmm” evoking winds and machinery, Bayou Boogie making the level sound m… mois… swampy. From other games of the series DKC1 Forest Frenzy and DKC3 Nuts and Bolts are also great. (Now thinking, the DKC3 soundtrack as a whole is a bit more industrial.)
Hard level with all the wasps
So all of them? …sorry, I couldn’t resist. (This reminds me world 4, Krazy Kremland. The hive levels are awesome!)
I remember being completely entranced by it and being unable to put it down (even though it was very difficult for me at the time).
That’s something I find great on so many old games: they were hard, and yet they encouraged you to keep on trying.
found it [DKC2] to difficult and didn’t really like the new protagonist as much
Playing with Dixie is easier, so perhaps both things are related.
Donkey Kong Country was my favourite childhood game series.
The first game was a blast: fun gameplay, full of secrets and things to collect, good music, gorgeous graphics even for 2025 standards, the difficulty was just right. (A bit too hard for me back then, too easy nowadays.)
I remember when DKC3 was released in '98, I’d go to the cartridge rental shop once a week to ask the guy if they had it already. (He was extremely patient with me. That guy was a bro.) Once I finally got to play it, it didn’t disappoint me at all, I loved those puzzles and it was amazing to explore the map freely. Kiddy was a bit odd, but really fun to play with, and I loved how Dixie throwing Kiddy had different mechanics than Kiddy throwing Dixie.
But by far my favourite was DKC2. Everything was perfect - they picked the formula from DKC1 and expanded it: more collectibles! Better music! Better looks! The bonuses now aren’t just “find all bonuses in the level for +1%”, now you got something to find in them! I can literally play the first level of that game with a blindfold, it’s itched in my brain. (Fuck Bramble Blast, though. I had a hard time finding one bonus and the DK coin there. And by then my English was a bit too awful to get what Cranky said.)
Then… well, DK64. It killed the series for me. I didn’t get why it wasn’t fun, but nowadays I see what happened - early 3D games had clunky controls and camera, plus the whole “gotta remake the whole thing five times to get to 100%” was meh.
And by a modder turned dev, so, professionalisation? :)
Yup - Kovarex is a great example of how the indie scene is actually professionalising people, not the opposite.
And because this sort of big business often focuses obsessively on what can be measured, ignoring what cannot be. Even if the later might be more important.
You can measure the number of vertices in a model, the total resolution, the expected gameplay length, the number of dev hours that went into a project. But you cannot reasonably measure the fun value of your game; at most you can rank it in comparison with other games. So fun value takes a backseat, even if it’s bread and butter.
In the meantime those small devs look holistically at their games. “This shit isn’t fun, I’m reworking it” here, “wow this mechanic actually works! I’ll expand it further” there.
I played Factorio a fair bit, the fluid system was hell. But based on some LPs it seems Space Age fixed it rather nicely.
as Rigney defines it, deprofessionalization is […]
What’s happening is that small devs release reasonably priced games with fun gameplay. In the meantime larger studios be like “needz moar grafix”, and pricing their games way above people are willing to pay.
More than “deprofessionalisation”, what’s primarily happening is the de-large-studio-isation: the independence of professionals, migrating to their own endeavours.
Also: “deprofessionalisation” implies that people leaving large studios stop being professionals, as if small/solo devs must be necessarily amateurs. That is not the case.
Deprofessionalization is built on the back of devaluing labor
And he “conveniently” omits the fact that most of that value wouldn’t reach the workers on first place. It’s retained by whoever owns those big gaming companies.
And people know it. That’s yet another reason why they’d rather buy a game from a random nobody than some big company.
As A16z marketing partner Ryan K. Rigney defines it […]
Rigney offered some extra nuance on his “deprofessionalization” theory in an email exchange we had before PAX. He predicted that marketing roles at studios would be “the first” on the chopping block, followed by “roles that seem replaceable to management (even if they’re not).”
Emphasis mine. Now it’s easy to get why he’s so worried about this process: large studios rely on marketing to oversell their games, while small devs mostly reach you by word-of-mouth.
Something must be said about marketing. Marketing is fine and dandy when it’s informing people about the existence of the goods to be bought; sadly 90% of marketing is not that, it’s to convince you that orange is purple.
My PAX trip validated my fear that three professions are especially vulnerable in this deprofessionalized world: artists, writers, and those working in game audio or music.
Unlike marketing teams, I’m genuinely worried about those people. I hope that they find their way into small dev teams.
Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Pokémon Emerald, and Fire Emblem.
Turn-based makes awful phone controls more bearable, and since those games are RPGs it’s easier to pause and resume without breaking the “flow” of the game.