smoothbrain coldtakes

why would you take anything you see on the internet seriously?

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I think it’s prudent to be on an older node, using stock that’s more abundant, even if it’s older - especially if it still performs the duties well enough. You’re 100% on the cost side of things, especially considering that Nintendo has never had any consoles that were crazy expensive. Everything was always supposed to be family friendly and therefore family attainable.

    I still think battery life is a higher concern for them than sheer power when in handheld mode though, and that’s a key differentiating factor between a Deck and a Switch, besides the Nintendo first-party library and chip architecture. It’s really cool that the Deck is flexible enough to do both high performance and low performance tasks with toggles for the draw.


  • The performance was never the consideration for Nintendo. They want a handheld that can last a long time, so they will always clock their chips down. You can’t compare 30 watts all the time to 30 watts plugged in, let alone 5 watts in handheld mode.

    Steam Decks are great, but lets be real; when you play a big AAA title, even on moderate settings, you might get two hours out of the machine pushing it to the limit at full TDP.

    This is kind of a nothingburger story. We always knew Nintendo were not going to scale their machines up to the level of PC gaming handhelds.



  • It’s an atomic variant of Fedora that satisfies all necessities for gaming with Linux, like coming with built in drivers and the option to install stuff like Steam and Discord during initial startup.

    Atomic varieties of Linux are really cool, they are much less prone to breakage because all updates happen at once or not at all. They are just generally more stable and you can rollback easily if necessary.

    Personally I just like Fedora, so my preconfigured options are either Bazzite or Nobara. I also prefer the stability of atomic variants. It’s just a solid base to work with, regardless of if you’re using a desktop or a handheld.







  • I wouldn’t say mishandled but I would say both Disco and Picard’s first two seasons were incredibly sloppy due to a clear lack of planning, vision, and the difficulty of transitioning to a fully serialized format.

    By contrast Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds were really able to find their footing quickly because they had season-wide arcs but outside of that they were generally episodic and allowed for a lot more exploration of the core of the universe. This is just a better format for the franchise in my opinion.

    I find Kurtzman is occupied with making the series more cinematic than it needs to be. Overly cinematic Star Trek results in eye bleeding lightshows like the finale of Disco S2, while grounding the shows a bit more allows for more character growth and development. You can’t just always have Sacrifice of Angels all the time, you need to cut it with some Take Me Out to The Holosuite. I find that SNW and LD have found that balance for me.




  • I think putting the face onto the source is what made it lose the value, unfortunately.

    My comparison is what they did with the Borg and the Queen. Wolf 359 is a terrifying, tragic ordeal, made all the more serious by the fact that it was done by one cube that could not be negotiated or reasoned with. As soon as the Borg had a way to negotiate and reason, they became less scary because they had understandable motives and goals that could be bargained with, as excellently demonstrated by Janeway.

    Ultimately, I agree with you that it’s kind of more of a TOS-y sort of plot device. I do feel like back then they really followed the science being indistinguishable from magic logic, and we’ve progressed over time to wanting more hard and serious technobabble. I think that’s kind of a disconnect for me, personally, is that they had to dip into a serious explanation for something that effectively functions like magic.






  • I tried Citadelum, which is a Roma-era city builder.

    It’s a bit janky given that it’s an early demo, but it’s a neat premise given that the last Roman city builder I was aware of was Caesar 3 from '98.

    I give it points for concept and setting, but I think Anno 117 is going to be my preferred Roman-era city builder when that drops, because I already know and love the Anno mechanics.