Did a remix awhile back and printed to a cassette using a Tascam 414 Portastudio. Brought it back into the computer at about three quarters of normal speed twisting the dial occasionally. The other side of tape was Fleetwood Mac “The Dance” my dad dubbed for me in the 90s. The imperfections of that old hissy tape with backwards Stevie Nicks bleeding through collapsed the stereo field in a nice way. I welcome this trend!
I trained myself to take a power nap to track “2/2” on that record. After a really hard workout, getting cleaned up, having a bite to eat and drifting off for 30 minutes so many times it has a warm spot in my heart. I like that music can serve as “functional”. I also recommend Mindspring Memories if you have nostalgia of the personal computing boom for a unique ambient. To me it evokes what trying out a Phillips CD-i at my local department store felt like in 1991. YMMV
I wonder if the comments will demonstrate responses that often reference an effect, theory, law, truism, named phenomenon, or some other thing that people excellent at pattern recognition would surface to explain or model the topic at hand. “What you’re describing is Jevon’s Paradox.”
With vinyl warmth is the result of a deliberate process. Professional masters are done specifically for vinyl to accommodate its quirks which truly changes the sound. They have to clamp down the dynamic range and tidy low frequencies or the needle will skip. Recordings with lots of busy high frequency information also can’t be physically captured properly in the cut. The resulting master is a version that purposefully doesn’t have as many volume swings and harsh highs or boomy lows. Smooth, cohesive, warm. There are also track ordering strategies which is why ballads tend to be at the end of one side and the high energy stuff up front where there is “resolution” to serve it. The mastering engineer is adjusting each song with all this in mind.
I can't think of an industry[1] more deserving of being left high and dry and less able to garner public sympathy than NYC banking and we let them get a bailout.
But everyone hates CA, hates big tech, etc, etc, so maybe the political stars align and this will be the ones who finally set the "no bailout" precedent.
[1] Well actually I can now that I think about it and it's the beltway bandits but that's beside the point.
I feel modern game design as the exact opposite problem: It's all show and no substance. It looks spectacular on video, but it doesn't feel spectacular when you play it, since it's non-interactive script driven gameplay, barely more interactive than a cutscene.
A bit of juice is fine and necessary, but the moment your juice starts to look like interactive gameplay, but isn't, it went way to far and just becomes noise. I rather have some less spectacular debris I can interact with, then just a particle system filling the screen with non-interactive nonsense.
TotalBiscuit was ranting about it ages ago[1]. 2kliksphilip also has numerous videos[2] on the lack of interactive physics in modern games.
I think you might be better served seeking out counterexamples. There are presumably more game makers and games now than there were yesterday. (Even if AAA studios consolidate.) So surely some are bad, some are too focused on visuals and not nearly enough on "the gameplay loop."
But games come out that break the mold of AAA style over substance, and sometimes they are great. Games like Stardew Valley or Valheim or Factorio had very small teams, and rudimentary graphics, and yet offered up countless hours of addictive gameplay.
Reminds me of this interactive demo (created by the lead of Dead Cells) where you can adjust the juice amount in the menu: https://deepnight.net/games/game-feel/
Fantastic watch thanks for sharing. I realize now how a favorite game of mine, Wario’s Woods on SNES, juices up a twist on match 3 puzzle and how dry early versions of Tetris were (succeeding despite that).
Same, Vlambeer were extremely good at "juicing" their games. Just look at Nuclear Throne and Luftrausers, games that would only be half as fun without all the action and chaos going on after every shot.
This one talk is the reason why all of my small game projects feature copious amounts of screenshake. :)
I had to take a long distance road across the US for work in the spring. I planned my hotel for the night to be around a Chipotle along the way. It’s one of the few options that isn’t synthetic and doesn’t make me feel the awful “I’m traveling for work trash diet” feeling. Some actual vegetables and protein at least. Didn’t have time to seek out local places and delivery is hit or miss. Is it possible their prices are up because the cost of “actual food” has gone up? Beyond that you’re eating low quality borderline carnival food (sugar, cheese blob, deep fried) and mono sodium glutamate loaded Christian faith based chicken sandwich offerings.
One thing I can’t find anyone mention in reviews - does inference screech to a halt when using large context windows on models? Say if you’re in the 100k range on gpt-oss. I’m not concerned about lightning inference speed overall as I understand the purpose of the spark is to be well rounded / trainer tuner. I just want to know if it becomes unusable vs reasonable slowdown at larger contexts. That’s the thing people are unpleasantly surprised to find about a Mac Studio which has prevented me from going that route.
Claude Code is still good but I don’t TRUST it. With Claude Code and Sonnet I’m expecting failure. I can get things done but there’s an administrative overhead of futzing around with markdown files, defensive commit hooks and unit tests to keep it on rails while managing the context panic. Codex CLI with gpt-5-codex high reasoning is next gen. I’m sure Sonnet 5 will match it soon. At that point I think a lot of the workflows people use in Claude Code will be obsolete and the sycophancy will disappear.
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