I’m getting an impression that Jordan Rudess has not been up to the task for years now. This song could be carried by Kevin Moore easily despite how boring Petrucci is now.

You are perfect as you are.

It’s a voice-over translation that’s being presented as if it was a dub. We call it „lektor” and it was more popular back in the day due to budget constraints. We got so used to it though that nobody even mentions it.

What I find most interesting about it that it’s done in a way that makes original dialogue kinda audible while the lektor does his impassionate voice-over so you preserve a lot from original acting. Some of the voice-over artists became household brands for particular types of content.

As an example, Tomasz Knapik voiced over loads of stuff that polish TV bought from US in the early 90s so he’s associated with 70-90s TV series. When Kung Fury came out some guys hired Knapik to voice it over to underscore that 80-90s aesthetic even more. You can check it out here.

Perfectly fine reason to pirate, just enjoy your childhood games! If you want authenticity then get OG hardware with mods/flashcarts or an FPGA based platform. Game copies are still 1:1 and you can print manuals if needed.

I’m happy enough with the discourse being „how would we chop Google into pieces”, I know my dream is probably just a dream haha.

YouTube is probably the biggest streaming service out there. They’d have no issues negotiating a sweet deal with some ad company, former Google or other. As of now most YouTube users are products sold to advertisers so we’d benefit from adjusting this a bit too.

I have this radical idea that Threads users are people too.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to move to a server that federates with Threads so that you’re not at a whim of Meta but still able to talk to people there? The point of social networks is communication with friends and those might not be so eager to jump. They might even hear from you how other servers and apps are better and move eventually :)

It really isn’t. Lots of weirdos came out during the pandemic. It’s pretty much a cringier Facebook now. The only difference being you have to be on FB for some neighbourhood groups and you have to be on LI for your unimportant job at a multi-billion dollar company.

All of them do this to some degree unless you quotation mark the shit out of search terms but in my experience Qwant is better than others at this. If they didn’t do it at all many common search terms would be very hit or miss. This is my obviously just my opinion and your mileage might vary.

The biggest downsides you need to prepare yourself for in every other search engine are lack of Google Maps integrations (they’re so far ahead of everyone :/) and no Reddit results. The first one is offset by just how shit Google is now. The other is more tricky but I believe Reddit is so astroturfed that it’s no longer useful except for some niche communities. I do Reddit searches via Redlib so that spez gets none of my data.

It wouldn’t fly anywhere but I’d laugh my ass off if some tech giant did it and then got bailed out by the state in return for controlling stake.

Take a look at what Epic is doing and why - companies that are rich and salty enough are great allies against even bigger tech giants. Whatever remains of Google would still be able to afford lawyers and argue that the same should happen to Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft :)

There’s plenty of good, free and non-invasive search engines. Give Qwant a try!

I think that’s on your adblock. Works here without ads fine.

sounds just a tad paranoid.

Yeah, I would say that some years ago. Now it’s just waiting for more of the same to happen.

the android situation is not really comparable to desktop linux.

google has a monopoly over the distribution of all apps, android has never really been independent of the playstore.

Doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. In Poland we had a telecom monopolist that was never anything else than a phone company. Yet, we split it into infrastructure provider and service provider. Miraculously internet got faster.

unlike desktop linux which has an established ecosystem already

Google took that open ecosystem and built a walled garden out of it. That’s what Valve is doing.

they can lockdown their steamdeck & steamos but there is no point in running steamos unless it comes preinstalled.

Steam OS is so good people install it on Steam Deck competitors. In time it will be preinstalled there too. This amount flexibility would suit Valve and is exactly what happened with Android. Remember people installing it on HTC HD2 and such back in the day?

and they cant really make the installation on other distros more “fidly”, because the package manager handles installing software.

Once they’re at the point described above it becomes very easy to introduce minor annoyances that push you towards their services.

There’s so much to chop off there. They’re an ad monopolist, cut that. Their YouTube business is self sufficient, cut that. Android and Play Store? Chop chop chop. Cloud Services? Chainsaw goes wrrr. Google, Chrome and assorted services could stay with Google for brand recognition. All of them would be still very big and dangerously influential.

Adding to the other reply - I don’t have a VPN based Adblock on my iPhone, just Wipr and superagent for Safari, and this seem to be working in Voyager internal browser view as well.

Pretty much most of the big tech needs it.

Holy hell, is it bad. Oliver says it’s like early PS4 game but that outdoor lighting is straight out of Switch game. I’d say it’s better to run previous gen version so that at least it looks consistently bad. And it still drops to 40fps? They even managed to break VRR on Xbox which is pretty much free on that platform. LOL

Also, is it just me or is this thing just too hard too read? Those fonts at such low contrast just make my eyes bleed (take a look at MP values for player character).

Hopefully this is fixed by Metaphor: ReFantazio: ReFantazio’ed. I can wait.

First one was commercial (supported via Patreon), the other two are not even mods.

Those cases are consistent with their approach to current gen emulation. You’re not going to play those without emulators or mod chips they went after. Nintendo drew a line that was not crossed before.