V’s apartment has a lot of very large square rooms. Squares have the maximum internal area for a given perimeter. I can totally buy that that apartment is 1,350 sqft of area. It’s just a lot of it is dead space in the middle of a room. Her “center” room looks like it’s probably close to 25*25, which would be 650 sqft…

The thing that bothered me most about that apartment wasn’t the size. I, like you, did the corpo backstory and thus just assumed V stayed in the apartment they were already renting, just having to pay for it themselves now rather than it being paid for by the corp. This is somewhat backed up by the fact that your…

On the technology side, this robot is almost every single robotics college graduate’s final project (a robot arm mounted to a mobile platform that needs to navigate autonomously to a location and manipulate some object for some purpose), so I don’t see many hurdles there.

I think this statement was more meant to be “why would I want to have to leave my car at a place other than my house to charge.” Like, I can’t think of many who would want to leave their car at the gas station overnight.

Not with any of the current metal-based processes. The way lazer metal fusion works is basically there is a store of powder next to the “working area.” A roller pushes a flat level of powder one “step” thick onto the working area. A laser then “draws” the profile of the part in the powder, causing it to melt and form…

FWIW, “additive manufacturing” has always been the technical name, as opposed to “subtractive manufacturing,” I.E. CNC machining. In the former, you start from nothing and the tool “adds” in order to create the part. In the later, you start from something (generally, a solid billet), and the tool “subtracts” in order…

I mean, the problem is that long form journalism and reporting simply is much larger risk, for not a proportionately higher return. Those prestige articles don’t actually bring in more clicks than a listicle or a recap of another’s reporting, but they sure as hell cost a lot more to produce.

There’s an immense irony in…

Looking at the specs, you probably could have made the chip in 1992 from a pure technological standpoint (there were 50MHz clocked parts as far back as ‘89), but there’s no way in hell it would have fit inside a SNES cart, both physically and from a power draw prospective, with the manufacturing processes of 1992. And…

This was a great writeup. It seems Kotaku is on a bit of a bend the last week or so publishing articles that form a bit of a treaties on critically examining fandom and its relationship to reviews, and this is another great entry in that canon.

The problem here is: how do you get the data?

Ah, thinking about it some more, there is a 3rd person section, you’re just not in it. They’re talking about the BD camera.

They actually make a talk-radio joke about your first case in the game. A superfan of a famous Bishonin idol modifies herself to look exactly like him. And then the company that produces the show he is in sues her for violating his image rights.

What’s weird is that there are control settings for “3rd person view.” So either you were supposed to be able to do that and it got cut, or I just haven’t come across some on-rails 3rd person section.

The even more amusing thing is that there are still spam emails for penis enlargement in the game, and non of them (that I’ve come across so far) actually leverage the fact that if you have a robot body why not have a robot penis. They’re all the same gels and pills from today.

.... Given the inventory screen is 3rd person, I’d be pretty surprised if players only saw it once.

I think that’s kind of the point though. It’s the disconnect between “what my eye is looking at in the frame” and “where my camera is pointed.” This effect is particularly pronounced in VR headsets, where you continually have to remind yourself that you can’t move your eyes to see more, you have to move your whole…

Yes, that’s the generally correct understanding of motion blur. There is basically a sweet-spot relationship between the frame rate and effective amount of motion blur that gives a specific visual cadence. When you have zero motion blur and a relatively low frame rate (24-30FPS), you get a “stop motion” like effect.…

As said above, those games almost never had “trash visuals.” They had visuals limited by the medium, but their entire art direction was based on the limits of that medium, and thus the game still looks high quality.

The problem is no one can actually see what a PS2 game was _supposed_ to look like any more. Most PS2 games were mastered with the expectation that you’d run them on a 480i CRT or _maybe_ a 480p monitor. The entire art direction was based on the softness that such low resolution would provide. When you display a game…

I think you are confusing what “bad visuals” means. It does not mean that the visuals are of a low technical quality. It means ones where the limits of the technical quality are exposed frequently, in in-your-face ways, such that it becomes a distraction.