cerebralhawks

I said Magic: The Gathering but I was thinking of Weiss Schwarz, a less popular card battle game that uses anime characters. Sometimes called Waifu Wars because, well, waifus. Part of the gamble there was that the game would last, whereas Magic was a more established property.

I didn't mean to shit on Magic. I got plenty to not like about it. When it came out, Wizards of the Coast was competing with TSR (who made D&D). Wizards ended up buying TSR out entirely. But, I think they've been good to the franchise, so I've cooled off on Magic. Even tried it. Got a starter set five, six years ago, tried playing, I was running forest or whatever you call it (all my lands were trees/forest, so I ran the related cards). Never really went anywhere. But I'll tell ya what I love about Magic... the troll cards. So I was playing Weiss one day, guy comes up and asks for a high five. I bet you know where this is going — He Who Is Left Hanging or something like that. Had I denied him, he would have gotten some bonus in combat? And the card that forces you to set the whole game aside and run a sub-game out of your discards? Love it. So aside from the nice artwork, there are some really interesting game mechanics. I kinda wanted to get into Commander, but didn't really have the patience/drive at that point. I know a guy with like a dozen Commander decks and we played a game, it was fun.

There isn't one. Certainly never has been with baseball cards. It's all the same though. Except you can't win anything with collectible cards. Maybe you get one that's worth something down the road... IF you took care of it.

Feel like I saw this on a video game once. The kind of thing that works in a game but not in real life.

Everyone saying loot box toys should be illegal should ask themselves if Magic: The Gathering should be illegal too. Or baseball cards. "Blind box"/"blind packs" have existed for decades. It's only a problem now because they're toys instead of cards? Or were they always a problem? Please clarify.

I personally think Labubus are fucking ugly as hell. But we have blind bags in the anime fandom, pretty much any big franchise gets them. SPYxFAMILY, My Hero Academia, Chainsaw Man... probably Dandadan and Demon Slayer, though I haven't seen those yet. Anyway, you buy a bag and there's a figure inside. The one you probably want is rare. It's nice with SPYxFAMILY because Yor (the mother) is the rare one, not Anya (sort of the mascot of the show, the dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks four-year-old telepath with the pink hair and horns who is just so friggin' cute). If they made Anya rare, the fans might be in trouble, but it's just the ones horny for Yor that end up wading through a pile of Loid (the dad), Anya, and Becky (the friend) to get to the one hot chick they want. And that's what it seems to be, the hot chick the horny young guys are after is the rare one. If you like the cute character or one of the guys, you'll probably get your figure or you can trade for it, or buy it off someone who doesn't want it. Then again, if you're horny and not dumb, you can spend the money you're spending on blind bags on a figure that has more detail.

But again: baseball cards have existed for decades. Where was the outrage then? And baseball is just as dumb to a lot of Labubu fans as Labubu is to jocks. What's the diff?

As an iPhone guy who doesn't mind the limitations, it's really sad to see Android losing everything that made it different from Apple. Headphone jacks, memory card slots, and now sideloading, with an honourable mention to Nova Launcher.

If Android is going to be just like iOS, you better not still be paying iPhone prices for Android phones, being that the original intent of Android (as when Google bought it) was to harvest more user data (than Gmail could) to be sold. You're getting a weaker phone that collects your data and sells it to the highest bidder AND you're paying iPhone prices AND you can't sideload anymore (or, after such date in the future)? Nah, fuck that. At that point you should just get an iPhone, right? Seriously, take a good hard look at the iPhone 17 (the base model, not the Air or the Pro). $800 gets you privacy first, 256GB of storage, it's the second most powerful phone out there (the Air and Pro have more cores), two cameras (so not as good as Pixel 10 at the same price in that regard but better video recording). Samsung has some advantages but they sell your health data. Apple Health being private is now a feature that the others do not have.

Obviously we need a third option because if Google/Android won't compete with Apple, who will? And if nobody's competing with Apple, why should Apple improve? Hell, the 17 series is a joke... not that the 16 series was a huge improvement over the 15 series. I feel like my 16 Pro Max will go ten years, won't need to be replaced unless it gets physically broken.

Yes.

I think Mistborn would make an awesome HBO-type series, even though the series is mostly PG-13. There's fantasy violence but no sex. The series was inspired by Star Wars (specifically, the Force) and has a similar target audience, though it's medieval, not space.

I'd love to see The Dark Tower series get adapted as an anime, specifically by the studio that did Attack on Titan. The series would be unfilmable, even for HBO. Japan wouldn't flinch though. The only thing Japan really flinches at is sex, though they've let up quite a bit over the years. And LGBTQ+ stuff — and yes, I'm aware yaoi/yuri (same-sex sex stories) exist. I also know that they're taboo in Japan, big time. Even shounen-ai/shoujo-ai (same-sex romance stories) are heavily censored, like in Yuri on Ice when the two guys kiss, the camera pulls away. They couldn't actually show two cartoon dudes kiss, but you 100% knew they kissed. Genitals can't legally be shown at all (they use light most of the time, like a stray beam of light covers it up) due to Japanese censorship laws. But all kinds of violence? Fair game. And the act of sex can be shown from a distance and without certain detail, so the scene where someone bangs a demon to keep the others safe? Perfectly fine as long as it's not shown up-close and in intimate detail. Rest of it would be fine for Japan/anime and in line with what that studio has done (particularly with that series).

I don't know if they're CPU or GPU intensive, but I've heard Call of Duty Warframe pushes the phones to overheat. I dunno, never played it. Also, iPhone 15 or 16 and later can play a handful of AAA games. Nothing good, just some Capcom and Ubisoft slop. Assassins Creed and Resident Evil stuff. The new ones, too.

Pretty sure the last couple generations of iPhones are more powerful than the Switch 2. Pretty sure most phones from the last 5-6 years are more powerful than the Switch 1. The Switch 1 was just a reworked Nvidia Shield tablet... from 2014. It had more RAM than the phones of its time, and the Tegra GPU hit a little harder, but the whole Switch 1 was quickly outclassed by every flagship phone on the market after a couple years, and the Switch 1 came out in like 2016 or 2017. Basically if you have a good phone from 2019 or 2020 or later, it's more powerful than a Switch 1, and Switch 1 ran Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom (with cel-shaded graphics and heavily optmised).

A lot of us in tech are guilty of underestimating ARM64, but it's been doing great. Apple has used it exclusively in their desktop and laptop computers (the M-series Macs) since 2020. I have an M2 Pro on my desk, it can run Cyberpunk and you probably know how small it is. Whole computer is like 7.75" square and maybe an inch tall?

I'm not saying Washington/the US is better than China. But, the devil you know. Also, the devil we know (the west) has probably lied to us in a few ways about China. I remember as a kid I believed children in China were starving. I also remember hearing that they kill female babies (and often not humanely) because of their one child policy. My dream when I was a kid was to save all those girls and educate them and teach them basic fighting skills... may have been like a Charlies Angels kind of thing going on in my head.

I suppose I should have updated my information before saying that... last I checked, there weren't, but I don't know how old that information is.

I've never heard of Trekkies as a generational term. I've always understood that Trekkers were people who enjoyed the show as a show (they're on the Trek) whereas Trekkies enjoy the show as part of the show (they're in the Trek). Like they believe Trek is real, or it's our actual future, and that Klingons and Vulcans are out there somewhere. Gene Roddenberry preferred this term because the show is about hope, that things will get better to where the show is, and that when things are bad on the show, hope that they will be better or that it will all work out in the end. But me? I just like it as a show. It's not "real" to me.

Though, I suppose everyone's relationship with Star Trek (or, any other franchise) is unique and personal to them and you can't just divide the fans into two categories. Still, that is what I always understood the difference between the two types was, as we are a franchise that has two names for its fans.

Regarding what you said about them having a generic space show and naming it Star Trek. That has happened before. Deep Space Nine exists because the guy made Babylon 5 pitched it to Paramount and they ran him off and stole his idea. Yes, Deep Space Nine is awesome and we love it, but it would not exist if not for Babylon 5, which we should all be thankful we also got. To this day no one who wasn't involved knows exactly how much DS9 took from B5, but DS9 was not originally Star Trek, and it was widely criticised for not being Star Trek being that they were not exploring and that they were on a space station. I imagine a lot of episodes of TV started out as something else, some unconnected idea that was shoehorned into that show in the writers room. So while I don't doubt that Discovery may have not been an original Trek idea, I do not care because neither was DS9 and I love DS9.

I'm not disagreeing with you, though, and I agree with some of your clarifications, particularly in point 1.

Shazam couldn’t ID the track. It’s typical for a song made for an anime OP/ED to come out like a week steer the anime debuts, but at least they usually tell you what it is… anyone ID it from the kanji?

Yes and no. It's not about the price of the phone, it's about the capability of the modem and the material between the modem and the sky.

About ten years ago, I went to visit family in another state, and I blew my brother's mind with the speeds my iPhone was getting. He thought it was an iPhone thing. I said nah, much as I'd like to brag about having the more powerful, more private phone — I just had a newer modem. I think he had a Galaxy S3, which was a few years older than the 6s I had. I told him if he had the latest Samsung, he'd likely see comparable speeds.

Apple is getting into making their own modems, and the jury is still out on whether that's a good thing. I think the 17 series still use Qualcomm for 5G but they use Apple silicon for WiFi and Bluetooth. Maybe LTE as well, not sure about that. The Apple modem will almost certainly sip less power, but I'm not sure if it will be "better". Probably not.

I've been all over the smartphone debate and I've argued on both sides (for Android and for iPhones). I've never heard anyone seriously defend one having better network connectivity. iPhones are almost always universally faster. Right now the Galaxy S25 is faster than the iPhone 16 series, but the iPhones lose less power to thermal throttling, which is to say the iPhones are better for gaming since they lose less power, but if you're not a gamer, the Samsung will be faster. Camera is subjective. iPhone almost always has the best video recording, but their photos are oversharpened. Samsung oversoftens, and Pixels hallucinate details they can't see, with AI. (Zoom in on something far away with text, take a picture, then zoom in on the text and look at the AI-generated text that looks like it's from Animal Crossing. So what other details is it hallucinating?) But network connectivity? We don't get into that. Because it really boils down to "it's all the same but each generation improves upon the last a little."