thephantombelow

[thephantombelow]

genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital

[thephantombelow]

replayed mega man 5 and it is really odd how this game has the best second half of the nes games, all things considered. the first half is really lame with pretty easy robot master stages and bosses besides crystal man's stage, and then you get like actually fun set of stages in the second half. the bosses throughout the entire game are incredibly easy though especially compared to what came immediately before and after it but 5 has such a good set of stages in that second half that it makes up for fairly boring bosses somewhat. it is a good game to recommend to newcomers all things considered as besides crystal man's stupid crystal drop section that sucks ass the game is rather easy and really really generous on giving out etanks + was the introduction of the mtank that fully restores health and all weapon energy (hilariously slowly but still). if the weapon selection wasn't the worst in the entire series, it would be a bit better overall though. not a single weapon feels worth using that isn't beat, and during my entire playthrough I used buster besides the boss rush. the charge shot feels too powerful in this game, a real overcompensation of how 4's was too weak, with it not being until 6 where they finally figure out the perfect middle ground which becomes that standard for the rest of the series, with that fun exception of 8+ &b's goofy gimmick buster upgrades. 5 is so interesting to disect. a lot of good ideas here, really interesting difficulty curve, unique and fun version of rush coil that I wish was a toggle or upgrade into ala 8 and 11's shop upgrades that feels stronger than normal rush coil overall for a lot of reasons, a fun selection of theming, and just that really strong second half. 5 is better than i remember it being, even if that first half is still pretty weak.

[thephantombelow]

bluesky is a fairly alright site, pretty fun to scroll through for the most part but has this really obnoxious issue of, for the lack of a better way to explain it that I can think of, every person on there being incredibly the libbed up democrat ever. and like look man these next four years in the us of a are going to be pretty shitty and it very much won't just be these four years as the consequences of these four years will extend throughout my entire lifetime but holy shit it sure would have been nice to see the democrats to do more than post and every one who is a democrat to be not only seemingly fine with the way the democrat party is the reason we are here with their complete failure to give us anyone or any possiblity of getting anyone that wasn't a candiate that never was going to win especially with less than half the time of most candiates but be very very annoying about it all. do action please or shut up because bitching about it in liberal echo chambers didn't work 2016-2020 and if you think it suddenly is now then I Don't Know What To Say Other Than Kill Yourself and Stop Asking Me To Donate In Text and Email Fuck You, You Lost Horribly, Fuck. fucking liberals kill yourself and please actually do fucking action please shut up shut up do something contribute to society because I know things suck but man you can make it better if you put in the work it really isn't hard nowadays to at the bare minimum email your senators and shit, you can automate that shit nowadays fucking hell ughhhhhhh okay thats all

[thephantombelow]

Bluesky and enshittification

NEXT WEEKEND (November 8-10), I'll be in TUCSON, AZ: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I would like to use Bluesky. They've done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I've got lots of friends there who really enjoy it.

But I'm not on Bluesky and I don't have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/

When a platform can hold the people you care about or rely upon hostage – when it can credibly threaten you with disconnection and exile – that platform can abuse you in lots of ways without losing your business. In other words, they can enshittify their service:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

I appreciate that the CEO of Bluesky, Jay Graber, has evinced her sincere intention never to enshittify Bluesky and I believe she is totally sincere:

https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-enshittify-ads/

But here's the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were all started by people who swore they'd never sell out. I know those people, the old blogger mafia who started the CMSes, social media services, and publishing platforms where I find myself trapped. I considered they friends (I still consider most of them friends), and I knew them well enough to believe that they really cared about their users.

They did care about their users. They just cared about other stuff, too, and, when push came to shove, they chose the worsening of their services as the lesser of two evils.

Like: when your service is on the brink of being shut down by its investors, who demand that you compromise on privacy, or integrity, or quality, in some relatively small way, are you really going to stand on principle? What about all the users who won't be harmed by the compromise, but will have their communities and online lives shattered if you shut down the company? What about all the workers who trusted you, whose family finances will be critically imperilled if you don't compromise, just a little. What about the "ecosystem" partners who've bet on your service, building plug-ins, add-ons and services that make your product better? What about their employees and their employees' families?

Maybe you tell yourself, "If I do this, I'll live to fight another day. I can only make the service better for its users if the service still exists." Of course you tell yourself that.

I have watched virtually every service I relied on, gave my time and attention to, and trusted, go through this process. It happened with services run by people I knew well and thought highly of.

Enshittification can be thought of as the result of a lack of consequences. Whether you are tempted by greed or pressured by people who have lower ethics than you, the more it costs to compromise, the fewer compromises you'll make.

In other words, to resist enshittification, you have to impose switching costs on yourself.

That's where federation comes in. On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server. If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can't endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you're back up and running on the new server:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/04/pick-all-three/#agonism

Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call – like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.

That not only helps you steer clear of rationalizing your way into a bad compromise: it also stops your investors and other people with leverage over you from pressuring you into taking actions that harm your users. These devils only sit on your shoulder, whispering temptations and threats, because they think that you can make things worse without spoiling their investment. They're not cruel, they're greedy. They will only insist on enshittification that they believe they can profit from. If they understand that forcing you to enshittify the service will send all your users packing and leave them with nothing, they will very likely not force you to wreck your service.

And of course, if they are so greedy that they force your hand anyway, then your users will be able to escape. Your service will be wrecked and you'll be broke, which sucks for you, but you're just one person and your pain is vastly outweighed by the relief for the millions of people who escape your service when it goes sour.

There's a name for this dynamic, from the world of behavioral economics. It's called a "Ulysses Pact." It's named for the ancient hacker Ulysses, who ignored the normal protocol for sailing through the sirens' sea. While normie sailors resisted the sirens' song by filling their ears with wax, Ulysses instead had himself lashed to the mast, so that he could hear the sirens' song, but could not be tempted into leaping into the sea, to be drowned by the sirens.

Whenever you take a measure during a moment of strength that guards against your own future self's weakness, you enter into a Ulysses Pact – think throwing away the Oreos when you start your diet.

There is no such thing as a person who is immune to rationalization or pressure. I'm certainly not. Anyone who believes that they will never be tempted is a danger to themselves and the people who rely on them. A belief you can never be tempted or coerced is like a belief that you can never be conned – it makes you more of a mark, not less.

Bluesky has many federated features that I find technically admirable. I only know the CEO there slightly, but I have nothing but good opinions of her. At least one of the board members there, Mike Masnick, is one of my oldest friends and comrades in the fights for user rights. We don't agree on everything, but I trust him implicitly and would happily give him the keys to my house if he needed a place to stay or even the password for my computer before I had major surgery.

But even the best boards can make bad calls. It was just a couple years ago that we had to picket to stop the board of ISOC – where I had several dear old friends and comrades – from selling control of every .ORG domain to a shadowy hedge-fund run by mustache-twirling evil billionaires:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/how-we-saved-org-2020-review

Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I've entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky's roadmap for as long as I've been following it, but they haven't (yet) delivered it.

That was worrying when Bluesky was a scrappy, bootstrapped startup with a few million users. Now it has grown to over 13 million users, and it has taken on a large tranche of outside capital:

https://fediversereport.com/on-bluesky-and-enshittification/

Plenty of people have commented that now that a VC is holding Bluesky's purse-strings, enshittification will surely follow (doubly so because the VC is called "Blockchain Capital," which, at this point, might as well be "Grifty Scam Caveat Emptor Capital"). But I don't agree with this at all. It's not outside capital that leads to enshittification, it's leverage that enshittifies a service.

A VC that understands that they can force you to wreck your users' lives is always in danger of doing so. A VC who understands that doing this will make your service into an empty – and thus worthless – server is far less likely to do so (and if they do, at least your users can escape).

My publishing process is a lot of work and adding another service to it represents a huge amount of future labor:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

But I would leap into Bluesky and gladly taken on all that extra work, every day – if I knew that I couldn't get trapped there.

I don't know why Bluesky hasn't added the federation systems that would enable freedom of exit to its service. Perhaps there are excellent technical reasons to prioritize rolling out the other systems they've created so far. Frankly, it doesn't matter. So long as Bluesky can be a trap, I won't let myself be tempted. My rule – I don't join a service that I can't leave without switching costs – is my Ulysses Pact, and it's keeping me safe from danger I've sailed into too many times before.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pacts/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

[thephantombelow]

worried that far too much of what i do and the way I act has been the result of an obsessive need to seem normal, well kept together, and just soooo comforming to society sooooo well and this thought has been in my head for a while but I havent like doooone annnnything about it and I probs should put more of an effort in there but I cant figure out many solutions other than drop the pretense to seem normal around the homies as the home dogs know what i am etc bare fucking minimum. then of course the inevitable thought comes of why is it i do that. Is it others? Is it me. Cant answer that ome yet. Dont think I want to

[thephantombelow]

brief bluesky thoughts

actually gave bluesky a proper look because every look I have gave it so far has just been a "man this is just twitter but again what is the point" and closed it so went in with the intention of actually trying to see what is different

Bluesky is, UI wise, fundamentally the same as Twitter, however, it is like, just different enough that it has its merits. The fact it is not Twitter is good enough for most people but that has never been enough for me as like Twitter's UI sucks ass, it has to be that and then more to be worth it.

Bluesky, upon a further examination, has surprised me as clearly they have added quite a bit to it / I just have not looked at it well enough as there are numerous QoL features for the user that are fairly decent. For one, block lists are just... built-in to the site. So are follow lists! This is soooo nice. Very quickly I saw someone built a list of every AI/NFT account out there and I can just say I want to block everyone on this list and every time someone gets added to the list I have them blocked. Nice! This rocks. Seems like the increased the character limit to 300 at some point too? Not too sure why it exists, to be frank, that said, but it is fine, small indie social media or what have you. On the note of the follow lists thing though, a lot of it has to be done by the users, which is an bit of a compromise but probably better than the site itself doing this. It is a unique approach to how you have to deal with this site, but it works. I can't think of anything better, and it works anyway, so not bad.

A lack of trending tab and seemingly fewer amounts of algorithm bullshit than other sites is interesting and promising. My quick scroll through, following accounts that I like, following friends from other sites, etc., has shown like... No posts I dislike yet. Interesting. No overly negative posts, seems like. I can't tell yet whether this is a bit from the user base or if it is something different about the way the site itself is designed. Maybe a bit of both. Seems like there are a lot of users have practically been begging people to be normal, so probably seems like a bit from the users. A lack of trending tab is based, also.

Also on the topic of odd user based things that give some level of QoL, there are labels. Massive fuckass big lists that just you have to scroll through to find the thing that applies to you, but it works. It works well but does have that problem of being controlled by users, so can be a little scuffed at times. Very good and nice their backend allows for just liking posts from account adds a label if an account has been set up correctly though. Seems like Bluesky's backend is quite extensive on that bit. Any issues about this bit are created by the users of the label systems not Bluesky though, ie delays from liking a post to a label being added aren't from Bluesky's backend being slow but from the user who created the lists' system being slow.

I am a bit interested how exactly they are going to monetize it as there apparently is no ads and the most they got is selling domains which is a good short term solution but the site is growing fairly rapidly. I am assuming they are just going to sell user info, because of course, but like outside of that what long term monetization do they have? Is it going to be another Cohost situation or is this going to be a site that truly is *different*, somehow. I have my doubts how long the site is going to last, but then again we have been saying that about this hell site for years now, so who knows. This is the one bit I am scared about.

Are these features worth it though? Eh. Probably. Seems the fact is people are actually using the site now, which is cool. I hope it stays popular as a replacement, and the shitheads of Twitter instead go either to here (lol), to Reddit, or like, idk man, Threads? Do people use that app? Seemed like it got a big boost on the Google Play Store, anyway, so idk man. Probably some shitheads did. Seems like there is not that many weird right-wing weird fuckheads on Bluesky anyway, and the general userbase is like, weirdly normal or least not annoying about it.

I hope it goes places, man. I think the current state of social media is very fucky with there just being like... TikTok, Instagram, sort of Twitter but not really it is on fire, so now sort of Bluesky, and the rest of the sites are also on fire in different ways and that sucks. There are no healthy sites right now that can be counted as social media so probably at least one more that actually has an user base is a good thing. I have been begging people to use Tumblr but no one wants to and hey, the CEO of this site is having an Elon tier meltdown as we speak and getting sued by like 8 different groups and sueing 7 as well. There is like a 60% chance this site actually dies this time for real this time I swear so having a site that might also die in a year or two because it has no funding but at least seems *fine* is nice.

Better than fucking using Reddit, at least.

[thephantombelow]

I think there really is something deeply dissapointing to see that what is ultimately a pretty tame offensive of Twitter to be the thing that finally gets people off the site. The block functionality change is almost certainity going to be reversed near instantly as soon as it attempts to go into effect; It is against EU regulations, against Apple's ToS, and against the Google Play Store's ToS. To make this change would be to get rid of most users *without them leaving on their own.*

This is all to say, man, there have been a lot worse changes. Elon's control over the site has led to his own posts being artfically boosted, to having far-right conspiracies being promoted by the algorithm, and generally speaking it has just functioned worse. Furthermore, just being an user on Twitter gives value to the site, both in the form of ad revenue and data from the users. That is money that is indirectly funding Elon Musk, who all during this potentially (and currently allegedly) used the site to promote Donald Trump's 2024 campaign by suppressing anti-Trump messaging. How was it that some increased AI grabbing that already was going to happen because that is how gen-AI has to work, and a block button functionality change that absolutely will get reversed is what finally is getting people of the site?

It is just odd to me. You all should have left and stayed away a long time ago. Twitter has been a terrible site since before Elon took over and it has only gotten worse since, with the only exception being the pretty good addition of community notes, which all sites probably should have, they're funny.

Also Bluesky is lame loool it is just twitter 2 whats the point, man loooool

[thephantombelow]

It's so weird talking to people who's view of "here's the way life is for everyone" is shattered as soon as they talk to someone with disabilities (physical, mental illness, any). Like you'll say you'll have a problem and instead of helping you they'll argue with you about how you're not actually facing that problem. Like,

Me: Hey, I'm really struggling to find a job and a part of it is my resume. I was depressed & psychotic during highschool so I didn't do anything to gain skills or achievements to put on my resume. I also don't have anyone to put as a reference. What can I do?

Them: You can add your skills, hobbies, clubs you're in, and different volunteer work you've done! You can also get your teacher as a reference.

Me: I already know what to put on a resume, my issue is that I don't have things that I can use. Also, I'm in my mid 20s so I don't know if I can put my highschool teacher as a reference.

Them: Well if you're a part of a church or an activity group, you could add that. Also, think of any projects you've worked on in the past.

Me: I already know you can put these things on a resume. I'm not looking for suggests of things I've already done, I'm looking for what I can do now if I haven't done anything.

Them: There's no way you didn't do anything during highschool?? What about some odd jobs you definitely did for extra money, like babysitting or mowing the lawn?

Me: I spent all of highschool either in modified classes or in bed doing nothing - not even hobbies, what about that do you not understand?

And then you talk to someone who's also disabled and they're like "Here's a bunch of jobs you can do from home that don't pay much but look good on a resume, here's some free online courses that also look good on a resume, here's how you can be making small amounts of money in the meantime, here's some things you can put besides a professional reference, and here are your rights if your future employer tries to take advantage of your disability - which you probably shouldn't tell them about unless you need accommodations."

And suddenly my will to continue trying returns!

[thephantombelow]

The Internet Archive is fighting back against Hachette Book Group right now

Add your signature and show your support!

[thephantombelow]

Please sign this petition. Almost all of the 500k books that they removed are actually no longer in print and inaccessible to many.

The publishers did not care about those books in the first place but they did this anyway because they have vendetta against open access.

[thephantombelow]

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/4/24090357/nintendo-yuzu-emulator-lawsuit-settlement

I am no longer asking for you to download as many roms and emulators as possible. Get a cheap 2 - 4TB HHD off of amazon or something for like 60 bucks and download the entire no-intro collection and I mean it now. This is not to raise a panic, but you should be concerned.

Over 85% of games cannot be bought legally.

Emulation is game preservation. Do not let the games industry say otherwise.

https://myrient.erista.me/ Further reading/ sources: 1) Phil Salvador. (2023). Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States (1.1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8161056

[thephantombelow]

bro if matt doesnt fucking resign I might just become a digital nomad at this fucking point and at most use discord. like dude what the fuck is going on. take the fucking phone away from that guy. he is going to get sued to the fucking ground.

i hope people start using cohost. it seems a little scuffed and has some weird ui problems but it is still new so I can manage lol. I am not fucking using bluesky but did create an account there as a just in case kind of thing. here is a link to cohost. please use cohost now I guess.

depending on how things go I might delete my tumblr in the next while. it really fucking sucks that it feels like this site actively hates my own friends for their very fucking existance. this shit sucks man. matt fucking resign and then kill youself

[thephantombelow]

Every January I check in on which emulators are currently #1 🏆

I reviewed Emulation Wiki and updated my "Top Emulators" guide with the latest & greatest emulators.

So are there any updates from 2023? SameBoy is now #1 for GB/GBC. Other than that, there are no changes in the top emulator for every other system.

Note that the graphic I attached is simplified for social media. If you check out my guide, I offer different recommendations for advanced users and people with old/slow machines.

I put (*) for RetroArch since it's a multi-system emulator. Different cores power its video game emulators. And my guide states which core is recommended per system.

[thephantombelow]

brief thoughts on a few days of using nebula

nebula is like, a really weird service. Fundamentally, what you are paying for is a streaming service of youtube videos that you can watch a week early with a handful of original videos as well (every nebula original by lindsay ellis in particular I want to shoutout here as being top tier video essays and some of her best work, along with the recent special by patrick h willems). but the more I think about it, as a service, I have to keep asking myself, "is it worth it?" and like, yeah kind of?

nebula is for a very specfic kind of person, and that person is probably me right? 50 bucks a year for content that I already watch a lot lot lot of and get to support the creators of these videos I love to put on while working on things. there are nothing wrong with like, any of the videos and yet for some reason I keep coming back to that question of is it worth it even though most of the time I can very easily say "probably, yes!"

so, why is this? well, first, all of the creators backlogs are up on nebula, along with their side channels, etc., perfectly unchanged, perserved, same descriptions, same everything, outside of a link to discuss the video on the nebula subreddit if it is a new release. this is good, right? there is no problems with this outside of really just minor kind of things to nickpick there. why do these videos still have all of their adreads for example? I have been recently rewatching a few older hbomberguy videos I havent seen in years, and one of them had ad for a competing subscription service, curiositystream. which, for a long while had a bundle of both services, it no longer does, and thus is now back to being a competing service. it is pretty hard to scrub all of these ad reads and the like but little things like that for many many many videos makes it far too obvious these are youtube videos first that at most get a chance to release earlier on the platform.

the service is like buying a patreon sub to every creator on the service, as you get mostly the same benefits as giving a creator 5 bucks there -- maybe that is part of the reason why it is only 5 bucks a month. this is a good service with good people and great content but it is a service of paying to watch youtube videos. it's ultimately a hard bargain but if you want to support creators it is a good solution. I am not sure how my sub money is spread, how licensing, residuals, etc., work for the creators, but my general vibe I get is that "hey, these people wouldn't want to be on the service if it didn't benefit them at least a bit, right?" so I am going to assume the best there.

there is nothing wrong with nebula in the same way there is nothing wrong with giving 5 dollars to someone you like on patreon. my only issue I have with it is the most of the videos on it still feel like youtube videos with only a few exceptions. those exceptions arguably make it worth it. difficult recommend, but it is a very cheap service that is good and cool I think. solid 8/10 kind of thing.

also I signed up for it through some deal that supposedly was "pay 30 for a year instead of 50" but it still charged 50 and I have no damn clue and it annoys me a bit LOL

[thephantombelow]

(i forgot to mention this but also there is a funny thing about bands of if you actually want to listen to them you have to mute ingame music so you can listen to them. fucking silly.)

long annoying rant about a niche topic sorry

ffxiv "concerts" are all really impressive in what they do but also fundmentally ffxiv as a platform really really really struggles this really simple concept called "audio mixing", at least for the bard "musicians". for some reason thesec "concerts" and "bands" will go out and can be bought for like 10s of millions of gil for even a small venue and like I get the appeal for RP venues and the like but holy shit it sounds sooooo bad. all of these bands, due to the limitations of how it all works -- and like, the instrumentation that the bard performance mode gives is just, hm. off key? out of tune? utterly tone deaf? not sure. the way these bands work is just putting midi files into an auto performance bot and even when these bands all make a lot of compromises with the songs they choose it is all like, this sucks, right? it speaks to a larger truth of the issues with ffxiv rp venues, housing, and general non PvE or PvP events within ffxiv. they all have to take a real obnoxious amount of compromises for them to work. even with a really impressive amount of work put into making these songs work within these limitation and adjusting the instrumentation to work with these song bots it just doesn't sound good at the end of the day no matter how much effort is put in it. the stark contrast of the fully composed songs throughout the game to the literal midi renditions of pop songs, popular game songs, etc. that people port into these bands is like, really, really staggering.

and again -- these songs are all fucking covers. the original versions of every single one of these songs covered just plain sound better. why would I listen to a cover of wonderwall performed in midi form by a travelling gang of lalafells when I can just, I don't man, listen to wonderwall? it still sounds like shit either way but that is besides the point the good sounds covered sound like shit too.

so in summary: - people are paying tens of millions of gil for bands of bots that play midi covers of songs from pop rock, various other RPGs, etc and they all sound at best passable covers but at worst just aggressively mediocre and just plain rough covers that you can really feel that midi instrumentation in

the audio mixing is nonexistent, oftentimes helping to ruin the quality of the songs even further than the midi instrumentation will already do so.

none of this is like, surprising, right? holding on to limitations and poor quality is the essence of the general housing scene in ffxiv.

the limitations are what have made the housing, rp scenes, etc., feel as jank as they feel.

unlike the housing scene and the rp scene, the bard orch bands cannot even be "fixed" with plugins and mods, or even optimized. they just have been automated with them.

this sucks.

[thephantombelow]

long annoying rant about a niche topic sorry

ffxiv "concerts" are all really impressive in what they do but also fundmentally ffxiv as a platform really really really struggles this really simple concept called "audio mixing", at least for the bard "musicians". for some reason thesec "concerts" and "bands" will go out and can be bought for like 10s of millions of gil for even a small venue and like I get the appeal for RP venues and the like but holy shit it sounds sooooo bad. all of these bands, due to the limitations of how it all works -- and like, the instrumentation that the bard performance mode gives is just, hm. off key? out of tune? utterly tone deaf? not sure. the way these bands work is just putting midi files into an auto performance bot and even when these bands all make a lot of compromises with the songs they choose it is all like, this sucks, right? it speaks to a larger truth of the issues with ffxiv rp venues, housing, and general non PvE or PvP events within ffxiv. they all have to take a real obnoxious amount of compromises for them to work. even with a really impressive amount of work put into making these songs work within these limitation and adjusting the instrumentation to work with these song bots it just doesn't sound good at the end of the day no matter how much effort is put in it. the stark contrast of the fully composed songs throughout the game to the literal midi renditions of pop songs, popular game songs, etc. that people port into these bands is like, really, really staggering.

and again -- these songs are all fucking covers. the original versions of every single one of these songs covered just plain sound better. why would I listen to a cover of wonderwall performed in midi form by a travelling gang of lalafells when I can just, I don't man, listen to wonderwall? it still sounds like shit either way but that is besides the point the good sounds covered sound like shit too.

so in summary: - people are paying tens of millions of gil for bands of bots that play midi covers of songs from pop rock, various other RPGs, etc and they all sound at best passable covers but at worst just aggressively mediocre and just plain rough covers that you can really feel that midi instrumentation in

the audio mixing is nonexistent, oftentimes helping to ruin the quality of the songs even further than the midi instrumentation will already do so.

none of this is like, surprising, right? holding on to limitations and poor quality is the essence of the general housing scene in ffxiv.

the limitations are what have made the housing, rp scenes, etc., feel as jank as they feel.

unlike the housing scene and the rp scene, the bard orch bands cannot even be "fixed" with plugins and mods, or even optimized. they just have been automated with them.

this sucks.

[thephantombelow]

the more I think of my current life and how I interact with my friends I am realizing I am the bisexual in that one tweet who goes home and plays games with the weird discord transsexuals or however it went. Maybe I should try dating at some point. Many of my friends in their relationships seem happier because of it. I waa considering asking that guy I played a lot of games with a while back out but they just got taken which made me sad and confused in a series of emotions I wasnt quite expecting. Regret for not taking the shot earlier? Maybe. I dont know. It doesnt really matter. Maybe I am just lonely and want to talk to people more. Probably that is it. That guy didnt even get taken really either we still talk and game just as much so it just was over nothing. I feel like I should have had these experiences earlier in my life and just never did, for some reason. Deliberate avoidance, odd life conditions, whatever. I am almost 21 whole ass years old. I am at this point fully an adult, even if I am still trying to transition away from being with my parents financially. I think I am just longing for something that I can replace pretty easily or something. I both want to talk to people more and less.

I dont know what I want.

I am at least happy. Just unsure where to go from here. I think I want this year to be a year of growth.