I remember people discussing hardware and one of the best advice comments I've ever seen was:
"Turn off that little FPS counter and just enjoy the damn game."
People get so wrapped up in the hardware hobby they forget why they care in the first place, which would be fine if it wasn't just fuelled by hardware marketing to make everyone else feel like they're "missing out."
Those were pretty cool. My dad had a single one in a hard plastic case, I want to say it was like 100 MB or something? I loved how chunky and solid it was.
I do feel like it'd be cool to have a storage medium that at least feels like that again. Like sliding a big hot-swappable SATA SSD into a slot and getting a satisfying "kaCHUNK" and a little busy light.
For one, I'm just happy to see a hardware stat that isn't rapidly and constantly enlarging for no other reason than being incrementally released to pressure constant sales.
I mean it's a small thing, but neat! I did wonder why cache sizes tended to stay small even between generations.
Something I was able to do with my old OnePlus 3 phone, was use it as a Linux USB. It was a pretty neat trick!
It was really convenient to just snag a work laptop and boot it into Puppy Linux (which lives entirely in RAM) to browse around and such without my job looking too closely and being creepy about it.
I'd argue art is a communication medium. You can communicate minimally, or you can communicate with vast detail, both require skill.
Art museums are full of work that says nothing, but passed a few gatekeepers with clout keys or shock value.
Skilled rendering with nothing to say is as unimpressive as deep ideas communicated by random spatter. The viewer isn't getting anything from it, no matter how trendy their turtleneck is.
I take a bit of issue with this idea that "the amount of skill involved doesn't matter", because that's the exact logic used to say artists shouldn't be able to afford a living, or could be replaced by algorithms.
(And yet we easily spot and mock visually exciting Ai renderings for how soulless and empty they are.)
Yes, we've seen impressive high-skill ultra-real pencil renderings that, in the end could sadly be replaced by a photograph, because there was no interpretation involved.
And we've seen awards presented for sticking bananas on walls as a "critique of modern society."
Art is a skill. It's a hard skill, because it's not a solitary pursuit solely anchored in visual perfection. If nobody can understand or appreciate your point, it falls apart.
I almost wonder if they intentionally screw that sort of thing up so they're not "ripping off" real soldiers' customs.
... But I'm being way too optimistic I think LOL.
There's so much like this in media where I'm like "You could have just asked? Like so many people could have happily walked you through making this authentic!!"
THIS. And the trope is always about some ultra popular game that the entire world is obsessed with, too.
I mean yeah it might even be like that if knowing the game was the only method of discovery but, pah! Hardcore fans? They do RAM dumps and decompiles and all kinds of wacky analysis to find obscure stuff, and then they post it in the "trivia" section on a wiki and the thing hasn't even been out a year! Lol
I swear this show invented a lot of what we now think of as "analog / internet / creepypasta vibe/aesthetic horror"
It was so unsettling. The farmhouse was unsettling, the relatively few glimpses we got of the outside world in town was unsettling.
And yet it was also hilarious. It was so satisfying when Courage would figure out the monster's weakness or lore, and go kick the crap out of it, or Muriel would ignorantly just whack it with a rolling pin and call it a day LOL.
Something only brilliant cartooning could achieve.
I also remember the intro is absolutely awesome, and only recently learned it was a Beethoven composition. There was a neat Microsoft ad that used it too, and I was like "THAT'S THE STARSHIP TROOPERS INTRO!" lol
I noticed watching the DVDs that it felt oddly toned down in some places and not others, even when the plot would get serious.
Often their rifles sound really silly-space-lasery and they're aiming weirdly upwards instead of at their targets, for example.
I loved those early CG shows like this though. Heavy Gear, Voltron (before the excellent Netflix one), Beast Wars...I wonder if Max Steele was any good because I never watched that one for some reason...
That was a bizarre one. My friend was obsessed with it and I was so freaking confused...
The airsoft episode was a really fun time though hahaha.
...oh geeze didn't his grandpa dress as a nazi for that one or something? Man this is going back like 15+ years I just remember guitars getting pulled out of foreheads and flying irons and a weird live-action moped PoV outro...
I always thought it would be so damn fun getting an entire neighborhood in on an airsoft game though.
But I only watched it when that friend was over, because I always had at least one parent home and didn't feel like trying to answer "what the heck are you watching?" LOL
I remember people discussing hardware and one of the best advice comments I've ever seen was:
"Turn off that little FPS counter and just enjoy the damn game."
People get so wrapped up in the hardware hobby they forget why they care in the first place, which would be fine if it wasn't just fuelled by hardware marketing to make everyone else feel like they're "missing out."