Amazing novel but this is neither a direct adaptation nor faithful to the novel's message and ideas. It's a modern walking simulator with a the most surface level veneer of what we now consider retro futurism but otherwise modern in its messaging. I'd rather they kept the core and modernised the paint.
It's a perfectly valid point of view IMHO. The game is called The Invincible and marketed as being based on the Lem book, which builds up certain expectations which the game doesn't deliver.
It's a decent game / visual novel on its own, but it has absolutely nothing in common with Lem's Invincible except the name and that one core idea (which by now has become a common science fiction trope anyway - like most of Lem's ideas).
It also pulls a future Cold War scenario out of thin air which (as far as I remember) isn't even remotely mentioned in the book (which is more like a whodunit scifi crime novel which then becomes a tech thriller).
Also the decision to use a retro-future lollipop art style similar to The Jetsons is 'controversial' to say the least.
All in all, interesting and decent game (or rather "interactive graphics novel"), but marketing it as being based on Lem's book when in reality it's something entirely different (not just a book adaption with 'artistic freedom', but something entirely different) is a bit too much IMHO.
I played the game and didn't like it, you're welcome to disagree and engage with me by showing examples that disprove my assertions from my original post.
I think I'm on safe grounds calling it a walking simulator. The gameplay is limited to walking down a linear path and clicking on things until all combinations are exhausted - western equivalent of a visual novel (but with less branching).
Making pixel art is not about low resolution. AI is finally getting close to being able to do it. If you could do it with a crystal it wouldn't have taken 30 years of trying to automate pixel art creation.
Base SDXL can't do it but with some Loras you can get something that after putting through Photoshop to regularise pixels and palette would pass the pixel art Touring test.
I got into woodworking so I could renovate my house. Ended up building a workshop in my garden and furniture for our house. Can't wait to retire from SWEngineering.
Stereotypes reflect statistical reality pretty well - I did bouldering for a long time before I gave up due to fears of injuries (met so many older people there who kept doing it despite acquiring permanent injuries!).
Speaking of memes: get Japanese chisels and hand-saws, just trust me on that one, it's a meme for a good reason. A less known Japanese set of tools that is worth getting is measuring tools instead of ones made by woodpeckers - the monster cable of woodworking world. Their average measuring tools are basically the same standard as our premium brands.
Need someone to create a platform agnostic sponsorblock for any podcast app, just for the convenience of automatic skipping. Perhaps like a proxy for the RSS feed that spits out edited audio files? Edit: looks like someone has thought of this, if the podcast is hosted on YouTube: https://github.com/ericmedina024/podcast-sponsor-block
But yeah, I'm fine with using the skip x seconds in my podcast app as well for now.
The challenge with that is that unlike those things that sponsorblock is skipping, most podcast ads these days are dynamically inserted at time of stream/download. This means that some listeners get them and some listeners don't.
They are also dynamic based on geographic location from which you download, which results in drastically different ad loads based on where you live. This is probably one of the reasons that a sponsorblock-for-podcasts has not yet happened.
Modern beer, even the industrial lager you despise is much better that what 99% of people drank in the past. There is almost no bad beer, the standards for water quality and hygiene are high, the process and technology is well understood and we can replicate the same beer batch after batch, year after year.
Then why is an organisation based on opposition to that industrial lager, and improvement of beer quality more generally, probably the most major/successful/historically important single-issue consumer organisation, to the point that most other ones have modelled themselves on it?
I don't have to read the article to know it's Toyota. That's the kind of brand awareness only years of great track record can buy. If you're playing the long game, money invested in reliability gain you more than marketing.
I would hazard a guess that Toyota and Lexus have very similar real-world reliability - most of them share platforms. However this article shows that Lexus owners perceive their cars to be more reliable than Toyota owners.
>However this article shows that Lexus owners perceive their cars to be more reliable than Toyota owners.
Maybe they get better maintenance than their Toyota cousins on average?
BMW often ranks high but there's a bias when asking a BMW owner -who often likes cars- how good their car is, compared to a Dacia owner who often just needs to get from A to B and see a car as strictly transport.
Lexus is Toyota’s up brand, like Acura is for Honda and Audi is for VW. They share parts, designs, often factories, but just better interiors, higher end engines, exterior trims, etc…
