As a kid, Sonic and his friends were my favorite video game characters. I had all the Genesis games, and Sonic CD, and I collected merch and read the comics and watched the TV shows and drew bad fanart. (I didn’t have an OC, I just made Sonic cross over with other characters I liked, like Mega Man.)

Sonic Adventure 2 Battle for Gamecube was the last official Sonic game that I thought was really good all the way up until Mania released, which was a LONG drought. I have a complicated relationship with mascot characters these days because I resent that they’re owned by corporations and primarily exist to weaponize my nostalgia, but the honest truth is that it works. I can’t help but still love Sonic and his friends, even though I’m acutely aware that they mostly exist to sell me stuff I don’t need.

I’m very curious to know if this shift coincides with the MH games getting less interesting to me (approximately around the release of World).

This seems to be a smoking gun:

Researchers say the most convincing evidence came from measuring how the cell expanded during charging.

When a battery charges, ions move into the anode, causing it to expand. Graphite anodes have a unique expansion pattern because of changes in graphite’s layered structure. The Donut Lab cell showed this exact pattern.

This finding matters because sodium ions are too big to fit into graphite the way lithium ions do. According to investigators, the graphite expansion pattern clearly shows that lithium is the active ion in the battery.

There are quite a few of them for learning languages. For example, Learn Japanese RPG: Hiragana Forbidden Speech is a game focused on learning to read hiragana.

I have one. I use it to play fighting games and old arcade ports, mostly. I like it because I learned to play those games on arcade hardware as a kid, so it has the right feel for me.

Mmm. Lost 85% of the matter in the observable cosmos, Master Obi Wan has. How embarrassing! How embarrassing.

I suspect the claimed “99.98% accuracy” is counting out of all faces scanned, which is a bullshit way to make the tech look good. Most faces are not marked as shoplifters in the database. A system that literally does nothing would probably still have greater than 99% accuracy.

What we really want to know is what percentage of reported matches are accurate, and I bet it isn’t anywhere near 99%.

Pokémon Infinite Fusion is really great! It’s Pokémon but you can fuse two monsters together to make a new one. A lot of the fusions have custom art! (The other ones are like that old Pokémon fusion creator that pastes one monster’s face over the other one, lol.)

Look for their Discord if you want to download it. All websites that profess to have download links are unofficial and may be malicious.

the obligation to retain the original product logo (Section 7(b));

the denial of any rights to use the copyright holder’s trademarks (Section 7(e)).

Uhhh is it just me or is it impossible to follow the first requirement without violating the second one? The logo requirement seems engineered to make sure that you can’t actually fork the project: if you include the original logo, they can hit you for trademark violation, and if you don’t include the logo they can say you violated their license terms.

What does she mean there was a “generational shift” that led to people burning CDs? Back in the floppy disk days, everyone was copying floppies—I remember when my grandfather bought a Mac to use at home, and immediately his friends at work loaded him up with copied disks. Which generation is she thinking of that wasn’t pirating a ton of software?