kfwyre's recent activity
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Comment on Just Kids (2025): a documentary following three families affected by gender-affirming care bans in the US in ~lgbt
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Just Kids (2025): a documentary following three families affected by gender-affirming care bans in the US
4 votes -
Comment on Game Pass was supposed to save Xbox – instead, it’s killing the company in ~games
kfwyre LinkWith this as the backdrop, it’s no wonder one man had an ambitious vision: what if you paid $9.99 a month for access to a whole cornucopia of games? After all, if it could work for film and television, why wouldn’t it work for video games? Back in 2017, former Xbox head Phil Spencer’s novel idea felt like it had arrived at just the right time. So how did Game Pass go from being Xbox’s innovative new spark to setting the company on fire?
The Activision-Blizzard acquisition began a series of cataclysmic financial consequences for Xbox. 2024’s Black Ops 6 is the highest-grossing game in Call of Duty’s 23-year history - but 82% of all sales came from PlayStation. While Xbox had the smaller share, Game Pass scuppered Microsoft’s chance to make a fortune in COD’s most financially successful year ever. According to an anonymous Xbox employee via Bloomberg, the company lost $300 million in console and PC sales as a direct result of placing its latest mega-shooter on the service. Why would anyone pay $70 for a game that they could pay $15 to access alongside 400 others?
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Game Pass was supposed to save Xbox – instead, it’s killing the company
19 votes -
Comment on CGA-2026-07 🕹️🔥⚔️ REMOVE CARTRIDGE ⏏️ Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals in ~games
kfwyre LinkCGA Announcement: We have officially ejected the cartridge for Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals. This topic is for people to share their parting thoughts and experiences. Spoilers are NOT required...CGA Announcement: We have officially ejected the cartridge for Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals.
This topic is for people to share their parting thoughts and experiences. Spoilers are NOT required to be hidden for this topic, so if you're reading this before you've finished, be careful about reading any comments here.
If you would like to be added or removed from the Notification List, please PM u/kfwyre.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
kfwyre (edited )LinkReturnal Holy hell this game is fantastic and also demanding on both myself and my computer. I have it running on the lowest settings, at 1080p resolution, with 80% resolution scaling, all so I...Holy hell this game is fantastic and also demanding on both myself and my computer.
I have it running on the lowest settings, at 1080p resolution, with 80% resolution scaling, all so I can keep a consistent 60 FPS. Even then, the game, each time I boot it up, warns me that my hardware is insufficient. And, even then, it still looks great. The art direction, sound design, and lighting in the game do such an incredible job of immersing you in the game's alien environment.
Seriously, the sound alone is SO good. Play it with headphones and turn the volume up.
In terms of difficulty, it's definitely challenging. I'm 5 hours in and have made it to the second world twice. Part of that is my fault though because I keep trying to avenge my fallen comrades (i.e. trigger minibosses) and also I'm a sucker for the push-and-pull of the game's parasite and malfunction systems.
It is very possible that I'm going to hit a skill wall with the game and won't be able to progress further at some point, but I'm genuinely not bothered by that as I'm having a ton of fun with it anyway.
This was one of those "this looked really cool as a kid but I never got to play it" games that I'm finally getting around to as an adult.
The game is sort of Squaresoft does Resident Evil, though I'd say it's aged considerably better than the OG RE. Parasite Eve doesn't have tank controls (which is great), and the auto-aiming active battle system is much better than Resident Evil's clumsy shooting (though, admittedly, that's a big part of the way that game builds tension).
Story-wise, it's a schlocky yet high-effort sci-fi/horror cop drama about a
personbeing terrorizing New York through the power of......mitochondria.
Like I said, it's pretty schlocky, but it's made with 90s Squaresoft’s undeniable talent. It's got a simplified RPG system for your weapon and armor, and the battles are turn-based but let you control your positioning to target enemies and dodge attacks. It all works pretty well, and I'm having fun with it despite my one major criticism of the game:
Ava runs too damn slow.
It's like some dev accidentally set the run speed to 50% and they didn't catch it before publishing. In the opening scenes of the game she legitimately looks like she's running on a treadmill on some of the screens, with the animation of her legs going so much faster than her overall character movement, which can feel glacial.
This is made even worse because the game has a lot of set pieces with long paths that take forever to run through. It's to the point that I'm considering changing the speed on the emulator.
That said, outside of that one criticism, I'm genuinely enjoying the game. It's a solid retro throwback that's giving me fond memories of the PSX era.
This is my play-while-walking-on-my-treadmill game, and it's great because I'll get SO into a run that I won't notice that I've been exercising for two hours.
I've played a lot of bullet heavens, and this is the most mechanically robust one that I've played. There are a lot of good design choices that help it rise above the traditional Vampire Survivors formula, the biggest being that it's got a Slay the Spire-inspired overworld map with paths and events rather than dropping you on a single stage for 30 minutes (though that is an option as well if you prefer it).
There are like, a dozen different fronts for metaprogression, and the game does a really great job of slowly introducing new cards and concepts so that you're not overwhelmed upfront and that the game stays fresh for longer.
If you don't love the bullet heaven formula, this won't change your mind, but I'd put this up in the S-tier of games of this type. It's one of my personal favorites.
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Comment on GOG confirm they are working towards GOG Galaxy on Linux in ~games
kfwyre Link ParentTIL! Thanks for the tip. That's very handy.TIL! Thanks for the tip. That's very handy.
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Comment on GOG confirm they are working towards GOG Galaxy on Linux in ~games
kfwyre Link ParentI was legitimately baffled for a bit, because I could not for the life of me find the post numbers you were talking about. Turns out they show up when hovering your mouse over the posts, but I was...I was legitimately baffled for a bit, because I could not for the life of me find the post numbers you were talking about.
Turns out they show up when hovering your mouse over the posts, but I was on mobile. Wasn't until I was back at my laptop that I finally found them.
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Comment on GOG confirm they are working towards GOG Galaxy on Linux in ~games
kfwyre Link ParentYeah, the unified launcher thing was a cool idea but it didn't really work out. Third-party stores would break the integrations ALL the time, which would then make it look like Galaxy wasn't...Yeah, the unified launcher thing was a cool idea but it didn't really work out. Third-party stores would break the integrations ALL the time, which would then make it look like Galaxy wasn't working. I think it's still technically possible to do with Galaxy, but it's definitely not the focus any more. Galaxy is really just GOG's launcher at this point.
For anyone that does want an all-in-one launcher, Playnite is excellent (with the caveat that third-party integrations will end up breaking as well, though they're generally updated pretty quickly). This one is also Windows-only currently, but, just like GOG, the dev has said that he's working on a Linux version as well.
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Comment on GOG confirm they are working towards GOG Galaxy on Linux in ~games
kfwyre Link ParentConvenience + cloud saves + playtime tracking + achievements (for games that support them). Those are my personal likes about Galaxy. A Linux build isn't a must-have for me or anything given that...Convenience + cloud saves + playtime tracking + achievements (for games that support them). Those are my personal likes about Galaxy.
A Linux build isn't a must-have for me or anything given that Heroic exists (and is fantastic), but I'd prefer the first-party experience if I can have it. Plus, a native Linux client meshes well with GOG's DRM-free and preservation-forward values.
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Comment on Three Cheers for Tildes: App updates and feedback (July 2026) — Version 1.7 detects expired login sessions in ~tildes
kfwyre Link ParentI think that's a limitation of the site discarding data on you and not the app specifically. Someone more familiar with the code correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that, after 30 days,...I think that's a limitation of the site discarding data on you and not the app specifically.
Someone more familiar with the code correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that, after 30 days, the site gets rid of your personal behavioral information -- for example, what you've seen and voted for and whatnot.
Thus, when an old post gets bumped, and it's been past 30 days, the site legitimately can't tell you what the new-to-you comments are because it genuinely doesn't have that information.
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Comment on GOG confirm they are working towards GOG Galaxy on Linux in ~games
kfwyre (edited )Link ParentFor what it’s worth, GOG’s owner did offer what I felt was a meaningful response and apology. It came after the initial news cycle about the email, however, and was a forum post rather than an...For what it’s worth, GOG’s owner did offer what I felt was a meaningful response and apology. It came after the initial news cycle about the email, however, and was a forum post rather than an official release.
It’s available here.
I can’t link to the specific comment, but it’s most of the way down that page in blue text from user Mikee (Michał Kiciński).
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Comment on GOG confirm they are working towards GOG Galaxy on Linux in ~games
kfwyre LinkYou can all thank me for this news. Two days ago I got a survey in Galaxy and mentioned in the comments that I’d love a Linux build since that’s where I do the bulk of my gaming. Clearly they read...You can all thank me for this news.
Two days ago I got a survey in Galaxy and mentioned in the comments that I’d love a Linux build since that’s where I do the bulk of my gaming.
Clearly they read my feedback and decided to officially go on the record with their plans.
You’re welcome, everyone!
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Comment on What pre-NES games do you still recommend today? in ~games
kfwyre Link ParentI always see the parameters on my questions as guidelines rather than hard rules, so feel free to give your strong Famicom-related opinions as well if you wish!I always see the parameters on my questions as guidelines rather than hard rules, so feel free to give your strong Famicom-related opinions as well if you wish!
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Comment on French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time in ~enviro
kfwyre (edited )LinkFor anyone who wants additional info, here are some good rundowns on pyrocumulonimbus clouds from John Vaillant's Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World. The book primarily looks at...For anyone who wants additional info, here are some good rundowns on pyrocumulonimbus clouds from John Vaillant's Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World.
The book primarily looks at the 2016 Fort McMurray fire in Alberta, Canada, but it includes a lot of good information about modern wildfires in general.
It is excellent, and I cannot recommend it enough. It helped me understand just how large, destructive, and unprecedented our current wildfires are.
Excerpt from Chapter 14
There was none like it since Canada became a nation, either: the exodus of May 3 was the largest, most rapid displacement of people due to fire in North American history. It took the form of an unbroken ribbon of vehicles crawling in ranks, like army ants, northward and southward out of the city while fire raged along the highway, in some cases right up to the breakdown lanes. Visible in every rearview mirror was a monstrous plume where their city should have been, as if the city itself had erupted. Many who saw this sight speculated that the entire city was lost. The fire plume, which was growing steadily larger, was actively changing the region’s meteorology. No longer simply a ground-level interface fire, it had become a force of Nature. As temperatures rose past 1,000°F, the air at the smoke column’s center rose ever more rapidly, driving upward, like smoke up a hot chimney. As this superheated air rose higher and faster, it created a vacuum into which cooler air was drawn from all sides at greater and greater velocity. Operating like a recirculating fountain, storm systems this large also generate powerful downdrafts along their outer edges, which, in the case of a wildfire, can cause it to burn even more intensely, like an atmospheric turbocharger.
Smoke columns behave like fountains in other ways, too: suffused within that swirling vortex, inconceivable in the face of so much fire, was a colossal amount of water—not just from moisture bound up in the forest, but also from melting ice, broken water lines, and fire hoses. In order for fuels to burn as explosively as they did in Fort McMurray, any residual moisture had to be removed by evaporation. All that water has to go somewhere, and it does: what looks from a distance like “smoke” is really a combination of soot, combustive gases, toxic chemicals, and steam. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water vapor were being carried skyward though the smoke column, ten, twenty, thirty thousand feet above the fire, where it condensed and then froze. There, miles above the city, hurricane-force downdrafts hurled fusillades of black hail back to earth, just as they had done in ancient Egypt. Reduced to their most elementary ingredients, these carbon-infused ice pellets were all that remained of the trees and houses so recently devoured by the fire.
As the fire intensified, ash and glowing spruce needles grew into firebrands the size of work boots, and then branches, treetops, fence panels, and entire garden sheds—all flying through the air, on fire. Some of these were carried thousands of feet into the smoke column, just as they would in a tornado. Pilots flying over large wildfires have reported charred tree branches bouncing off their windshields at twenty thousand feet. A photo taken from an airplane window late on the night of May 3 shows a vast and luminous smoke cloud where the city had been while, high above, the northern lights blaze across the sky. In another age, this might have been an omen worthy of formal record, but that night, it was just one more illumination from the twenty-first century, captured in this smartphone-crowdsourced record of apocalyptic visions.
Other anomalies appeared as well, and, from this vantage, they sound more like details from the Old Testament or Greek mythology than events reported from one of the twenty-first century’s wealthiest industrial centers. Among them was a fire-borne thunderhead. Known to meteorologists as a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, or pyroCb, these massive formations can be two hundred miles wide and reach into the stratosphere. A fully developed pyroCb, like the one shrouding Fort McMurray on May 3, is so huge and energetic that its behavior is influenced by the coriolis effect—the rotation of the earth. In the Northern Hemisphere this will cause such a system to spin counterclockwise, just like a hurricane. Because of their size, particularly their height, pyroCbs are Nature’s most efficient delivery system for high-altitude pollutants, including carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and vast amounts of carbon and other particulates. Once these smoke columns reach the lower stratosphere, between thirty thousand and forty thousand feet above the earth, the aerosols and particulates within them can be carried around the world on the jet stream, which circles the poles like a high-speed conveyor belt.
Breakthroughs in aerosol-sensing satellite technology have revolutionized scientists’ understanding of these phenomena. As recently as the 1990s, hemisphere-spanning aerosol clouds generated by enormous wildfires were mistakenly attributed to volcanic activity. In part because they were so rare, wildfire-generated pyroCbs have only been formally identified and studied as such since 1998, the dawn of this new era of twenty-first-century fire. One of the most exhaustively studied pyroCb events to date occurred during the Chisholm Fire, the same one American satellite data analysts initially suspected might be a nuclear bomb test. The plume it generated obscured an area of more than fifty thousand square miles, roughly the size of Greece. While they remain an atmospheric rarity, pyroCbs have become significantly more common over the past two decades, occurring around the world, in places they have never been observed before.
In addition to hail, pyroCbs can also generate their own lightning. “Pyrogenic lightning” has been described since ancient times, but almost exclusively in the context of large volcanic eruptions. While ember-generated fires are relatively easy to predict (they appear downwind, typically less than five miles from their source), fires caused by lightning can be ignited virtually anywhere within a fifty-mile radius of a pyroCb, where they are accompanied by all the hazards associated with electrical storms—tower strikes, power outages, and electrocution. By 4:00 p.m., as tens of thousands of citizens were making their slow escape, Fort McMurray was experiencing the same “darkness at noon” phenomenon associated with apocalyptic events recounted throughout the world’s histories and mythologies. With the forest already primed to burn, a pyroCb, combined with wind-driven embers and lightning, changed this fire from a localized conflagration into a perpetual motion machine of destruction operating on a regional scale. Given the long-term forecast, this fire could burn as long as the fuel held out, and, in these conditions, the boreal forest was nothing but fuel.
Excerpt from Chapter 22
From 2016 onward, the fire seasons in both hemispheres have been relentless. In 2017, British Columbia, a huge coastal province bigger than Alberta, bigger than Chile, and more than twice the size of California, set a new global record. On July 7 alone, 142 separate wildfires ignited; by the end of the day, the province was in a state of emergency. A familiar combination of high heat, drought conditions, and wind caused many of those fires to grow rapidly into uncontrollable blazes. A month later, many of them were still burning. On August 12, four of the larger fires, along with one across the border in Washington State, erupted almost simultaneously into pyroCb thunderstorms, a phenomenon never observed before. David Peterson, a meteorologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California, speaking to the CBC, declared it “the most significant fire-driven thunderstorm event in history. Nothing else even comes close.” Once in the stratosphere, the mass of particulate was swept into the jet stream, where it circled the globe for four months.
The only mercy shown British Columbia that summer was that most of the fires ignited in sparsely inhabited areas. Even so, more than forty thousand people were displaced across the province, firefighting costs alone exceeded half a billion dollars, and almost five thousand square miles of forest burned. Though it was hundreds of miles from the biggest fires, the sky in Vancouver turned a burnt-orange color for weeks, and the air quality was rated some of the worst in the world. British Columbia’s historic aerosol injection, which has come to be known as the “Pacific Northwest Event,” was more than twice the size of any previously documented pyroCb.
But if twenty-first-century fire has taught us anything, it’s that there is no top end. It wasn’t long before the Pacific Northwest Event, “the mother of all pyroCbs,” had company. In 2020, the—once again—record-breaking fire seasons in Australia, California, and Oregon generated similarly volcanic pyroCbs. Australia’s, however, was—how many times can one say this?—unprecedented. Most readers will be familiar with the horrific fires that appeared to envelop that country in December and January of 2019–20, and with the shocking number of animals that perished. But high above Earth, something else was happening, too. An abstract describing it in the journal Communications Earth & Environment reads like a scientist’s description of a cataclysm from the Old Testament:
The Australian bushfires around the turn of the year 2020 generated an unprecedented perturbation of stratospheric composition…The resulting planetary-scale blocking of solar radiation by the smoke is [three times] larger than any previously documented wildfires and of the same order as the radiative forcing produced by moderate volcanic eruptions. A striking effect of the solar heating of an intense smoke patch was the generation of a self-maintained anticyclonic vortex measuring 1000 km. in diameter and featuring its own ozone hole. The highly stable vortex persisted in the stratosphere for over 13 weeks, travelled 66,000 km and lifted a confined bubble of smoke and moisture to 35 km altitude.
In other words, ferocious heat convection drove a climate-altering quantity of ash and particulate eight miles into the stratosphere, where it then formed an aerosol blob, six hundred miles wide and two miles thick. Because it contained so much water vapor and black carbon, it absorbed solar energy, which caused it to heat up and rise still further—en masse, like a black balloon the size of Texas—until it was more than twenty miles above the earth, twice as high as any previously known pyroCb injection. Once there, this half-million-cubic-mile pyrogenic carbon blimp drifted for more than three months around the Southern Hemisphere, covering forty thousand miles before finally dissipating.
In the 1990s, pyroCbs were a disturbing but exhilarating novelty wondered at, and discussed by, a small group of meteorologists. Now, they are not only a signature of major wildfires, they are actively growing in size and frequency—to the point that they are mimicking volcanoes, previously Earth’s most rapid and powerful climate-changing agents. PyroCbs are now being observed all over the world in places they have never been reported before. As these events multiply, they are altering, in significant and measurable ways, the chemical composition of what atmospheric scientists refer to as the “stratospheric overworld.”
This is the power of atmospheric CO2. It expresses itself through heat retention, and its “vocabulary” appears to be growing, most obviously through variations in weather, fire, and related phenomena, but in other, less visible ways as well, most notably in the oceans. The oceans absorb approximately 30 percent of all emitted carbon dioxide. Over the course of the Petrocene Age, this global system, home to more than half of the world’s species, has grown 30 percent more acidic, signaling the most rapid shift in ocean chemistry in the past 50 million years.
What the atmosphere and oceans are telling us is that carbon dioxide doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Others have been saying this, too—for a long time. Roger Revelle said as much to a congressional subcommittee in 1956. Eunice Foote said it to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856. Any climate scientist or environmental studies teacher will tell you every chance they get. Until very recently, most of them have been tuned out, brushed off, or appeased in ways that bear a strong resemblance to the experience of people reporting incidents of sexism or racism: “Where? I can’t see it.”
The conclusion arrived at by the Communications article’s dozen authors is that a big enough pyroCb “eruption” could inject enough carbon into the stratosphere to alter the planet’s climate, just as large volcanic eruptions have done in the past. Pollution and air quality aside, the carbon dioxide generated by events of “planetary scale”—like twenty-first-century wildfires—exceeds the annual CO2 output of many states and countries. To put this in perspective, the CO2 emitted by the Australian bushfires of 2019–20 more than compensated for the global reduction caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
It hardly needs to be said that more CO2 leads to more heat retention, which leads to more fires, which leads to more pyroCbs…We are, right now, witnessing the early stages of a self-perpetuating and self-amplifying feedback loop, accompanied by myriad “cascade effects.” In human terms, this has been a long time coming, but in geologic terms it has taken place overnight—roughly seven human generations, or two life-spans. So limited are we by the brevity of our lives and, lately, by the kaleidoscopic swirl of technological advancement, further amplified by a twenty-four-hour news cycle, that it’s hard to appreciate how far we’ve come (and gone) in such an extraordinarily short time.
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What pre-NES games do you still recommend today?
Either because the game itself is still good, or because you think it's able to be appreciated for more historical/didactic reasons (e.g. Game X is the origin for a certain trope). Or any other...
Either because the game itself is still good, or because you think it's able to be appreciated for more historical/didactic reasons (e.g. Game X is the origin for a certain trope).
Or any other reason really -- you're not limited to the two.
Importantly, why do you recommend them? What appeal do they have to modern audiences?
The reason I'm saying "pre-NES" (Nintendo Entertainment System) is simply because I imagine that a good number of us here started gaming with the NES and don't have as much of a pulse on what came before it. I imagine even more of us started gaming well after the NES and would appreciate insight into that period of gaming history.
30 votes -
What are you looking forward to?
A milestone, an event, a vacation, etc. Tell us all about it and why it means something to you.
28 votes -
Comment on Save Point: A game deal roundup for the week of July 26 in ~games
kfwyre Link ParentThe modpack is free! I’d say that’s the best kind of deal.The modpack is free!
I’d say that’s the best kind of deal.
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Comment on Introducing XBOX backward compatibility on PC in ~games
kfwyre LinkWhat are some XBOX games that people hope to see re-released? Its game library is a bit of a blind spot for me, as I never owned one (also I'm hoping they expand it to include 360 titles as well)....What are some XBOX games that people hope to see re-released? Its game library is a bit of a blind spot for me, as I never owned one (also I'm hoping they expand it to include 360 titles as well).
I'm personally tempering my expectations, but Jet Set Radio Future would be sublime.
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Comment on Introducing XBOX backward compatibility on PC in ~games
kfwyre Link ParentYeah, the announcement had me questioning my understanding of what technically constitutes "backwards compatibility." Nevertheless, I'm still happy to see old games getting official love.Yeah, the announcement had me questioning my understanding of what technically constitutes "backwards compatibility."
Nevertheless, I'm still happy to see old games getting official love.
I just finished with this and am not yet fully done crying. It's equal parts heartbreaking and inspiring. I highly recommend it.
It's available on Prime Video in the US -- not sure about other countries.
Trailer here