World Bolding!

The Tumblr home of Alex Rowe's games and tech writing, and other writerly shenanigans! Yes I’m that guy you might have seen on Medium. No, I no longer use the evil bird web site.

[superkawaiimothman]

little mushroom guy

[worldbolding]

Happy Switch 2 launch day to all who celebrate!

[superkawaiimothman]

Wizard staff stuff :3

[superkawaiimothman]

Party Weasel Time :3

[superkawaiimothman]

Time to summon a familiar!

Ooze imp

Blood imp

Frost imp

Mud imp

Mold imp

Rag imp

No imp :(

Voting ended onJul 7, 2023

[superkawaiimothman]

Puppy would like snack please give snack to puppy

[worldbolding]

I can confirm that Final Fantasy XVI contains at least one chickeny thing.

[superkawaiimothman]

Behold Jorts Kobold

[worldbolding]

I can already see where Diablo IV’s content ends for me personally, and that’s a huge bummer as someone who normally invests over a thousand hours into these. I’m going to get all the console achievements but I don’t think I’ll enjoy it that much. The endgame content is built entirely out of mediocre open world side missions and not the fun procedural dungeon rift worlds of 3 and Immortal. It’s like Blizzard fell in love with their world and assumed players would as well. I come to Diablo to play random content for random gear not to run through a bespoke world.

The graphics are pretty though.

[superkawaiimothman]

Sauropod time :3

[worldbolding]

I finally got my Diablo IV horse, and it looks like it unlocks account wide, so I won't ever have to go through the wait again. It's pretty interesting that they make you play half of this huge game to get the mount system unlocked, but also the fact that they then unlock it for all your characters makes it seem like a different part of the team thought it was a burden players shouldn't have to go through more than once.

One of the many strange design conundrums at the heart of Diablo IV, which still turned out to be great in spite of itself.

[faelapis]

that part in spiderverse where gwen says that her spider mask is like her cop badge is the most unintentionally revealing line in any superhero movie ever

[worldbolding]

I suddenly feel really good about not yet seeing Spiderverse 2.

[worldbolding]

The Diablo IV Sonar Profile is Good

SteelSeries collaborates with game companies to make "official" EQ profiles for different games for their sonar software.

A new one for Diablo IV is out now, and it sounds good. Looking at the EQ graph, I actually fully believe it was made by their sound engineers. Only a sound weirdo would roll the sub bass off like this and gently accentuate the detail regions the way this EQ does. A sub bass roll off followed by a bump like that makes some amount of sense both for the target gaming headset devices and the fact that it helps accentuate the more common bass frequencies.

Contrast that line with the absolutely bonkers one supposedly made by the Atomic Heart people. It adds nightmarish peaks across the sound range for no real reason?

I think even if you've never used EQ before you'd look at those two weird valleys in the middle and know something was up. This is a broken EQ profile that no one should use for anything. It's more ridiculous than the awful writing in Atomic Heart was.

[alagaisia]

Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?

[alagaisia]

It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!

[alagaisia]

It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.

[watermelon-converse]

Hey. Hey. Tumblr. Ides of March ppl. We can do this

[worldbolding]

Street Fighter 6 Is So Good and So Delightfully Stupid

So. Street Fighter 6 has this massive single player story mode in it where you create a character and basically run around in a big stupid world based on the Final Fight franchise and do goofy fighting-related things. You can fight mimes and eat pizza. You can talk to people to hear nonsense and buy clothes. It's probably the most enjoyable game I've played so far this year?

I have no idea why a big company like Capcom produced something so gleefully silly inside one of their biggest franchises but I am all the way here for it.

[worldbolding]

I talked myself into buying the Razer Basilisk V3 X, which I recently said "seems like a terrible deal." I was curious and I write about these things on the internet!

I will say that, in a vacuum where the previous version of this mouse wasn't cheaper, and where Razer made fewer great mice in this same $70 price range...this thing would be neat. However, it's replacing a ~$45 market priced mouse with a more expensive one, and in exchange you get an additional button, some slightly better glide feet, a slighter better sensor, and a very brilliantly lit scroll wheel.

Razer often likes to charge extra for their RGB, and I don't think that's super awesome but---the light does indeed get quite bright and looks weird in real life. The second picture here shows more what it looks like to a human eye vs a camera. Still, if you've looked at marketing images of this thing and wondered if it really gets that bright, it absolutely does.

If this had come in at the same sixty dollar launch price as the ancient model it replaces I would never have thrown a fit. And it may get discounts. I know tech is all about price increases but--none of this technology here is new. Except for the engineering behind the transparent lit-up scroll wheel.

Razer, if you could direct all of that ten dollars extra I paid for this to the person who designed this light up wheel, that'd be great.

In unrelated news I have played a bunch of Diablo IV. It is very good. SF6 is also good. It's a great time for sequels to games I liked when I was 12.

[worldbolding]

Rather than continue to post links to my stories here that people don't really click on, I'm instead going to write more bespoke Tumblr-style content.

Following me on Medium is the best way to get access to all my stories quickly, and you can email updates there as well.

I used to post lots of screenshots and stupid garbage on the site that Elon ruined and I think that's a good path for my content here.