The Giant Beastcast: Episode 302

Video games!

Cast Brad? Lol Alex getting shamed.

Thanks for the show!

Harvest Moon is bad and has been bad ever since Natsume fucked over the Story of Seasons folks. Not just the reasons Vinny said but like also for technical reasons. Those games are shovelware using a name to sell to people who don't know better. Actual Story of Seasons is fantastic still and Rune Factory is even better. Vinny you should check those out if that's what you want.

Out of all the coverage of Maquette I haven’t seen a single person reference A Fisherman’s Tale. Maquette is a blatant ripoff of that game.

@royalghost: Yeah he knows, didn’t you hear his extended explanation of the split?

Alex is the blockbuster

Woah getting deep. Real chats. I appreciate the debate. 1:30:00 to 1:50:00.

Also here in Brisb, Aus for regional phrases, I say:

Drunk - Smashed, Wrecked
Vomit - Have a spit,
Big Dump - Destroyed the toilet

:)

I loved Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life on the gamecube! It's such a shame to see how downhill the series has gone. At least an incredible game like Stardew Valley was able to take its place as the king of these sorts of games.

Vinny's pulling in the Millenial love of Moody Blues with his Fights in Tight Spaces rendition! I keep hearing Nights in White Satin whenever I hear the title, too.

Beastcast is starting to have Eric Andre Show-type energy, except every week's guest is Alex. And I love it.

Building bespoke keyboards for $200+ is one of those “ooof” type of hobbies to me but all the power to Bakalar for learning some cool soldering skills along the way

Hey, how about non-fungible tokened podcasts? We'll be rich!

"Cast: Brad, Vinny, Jeff B."

👀

@depecheload: It seems to me like the lack of efficiency is the only way for blockchain to have any value, no? Don't worry about it though, I'm positive whoever sold this Gucci ghost gif for 4k (buy it now for 16k) is going to build a windmill

@depecheload:

Agreed.

And the aspect of Artists Being Paid (as an artist who has been ripped off more than a few times on commission and compositions, who also releases creative commons music to help people without cash for art in projects/in general) is nonsense once you get a sense of scale, too.

The problem is the monetary system we have to work in. Money is more important than life in it. And one of the (smaller, but spoken of) issues which causes the lack of support for the right of smaller creatives who aren't involved in things like the grotesque Disney sphere (to mention one of a few) once you follow it through.

It is awful. And as @michaelpeterson said I don't begrudge people wanting to "own" things, but (again, as an entirely digital artist at this point) there is no non-author based ethical or physical ownership of digital things if you share them around, unfortunately. Like Jeff said, even most of our IDs can be found, websites exist to create databases on where we've lived all our lives with contact info etc, so nothing else is off limits either. There might be what amounts to an exclusive license as is the case here, but those aren't worth a damn outside of a court of law (but rarely outside the mega rich corps), and that speaks to how fucked the copyright industry is (see: Disney and similar monopolies).

Paying your favourites some money in a new way may seem great, but you could pay them any other way which isn't as inherently fucked up and destructive. Most payment methods are also fucked up and destructive of course, but not on the same publicly researchable level as whatever this is nowadays. No good comes from this, and if a person believes there could be given the precedents set in recent history, then their naivety, insincerity, and/or ignorance speaks volumes.

There is only one Harvest Moon game as far as I’m concerned. Back to Nature, for the original PlayStation. Which is the one HM game they do keep developing remakes of. You can get a remake of Back to Nature for the Nintendo Switch! They call it Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town, but it very much is still that playstation game, for better and worse.

@depecheload: Thank you. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Just waiting until the internet requires a login to use and everyone gets assigned a permanent ID number that is left behind on anything you interact with and then we can fully embrace the future digital dystopia

So, blockchain only needs a ton of energy if you do like the cryptocurrencies. There are tons of blockchain systems that don't need ever-increasing amounts of power. I've worked on a couple applications that focus on the decentralized ledger aspect for non-cryptocurrency use.

@nantukoprime: Yep, blockchain doesn't equal mining. They are interconnected, but different. I look forward to next weeks corrections.

Pinball soldering drumming cod all the things i want to hear about

@depecheload:

Addendum:

Coin mining cannot use less energy. Even if dedicated hardware becomes more efficient, there will just be more mining done per unit of energy. It will always use all energy available until the cost of energy isn't justified by value mined and this is unlikely to happen ever. If it goes completely out of hand, we will have household energy rationing all around the world. Actually a mandatory steep progressive energy price is justified already (and it could help solve other problems too).

@nantukoprime: The number of people in chat who clearly don't understand this, yet felt entitled to literally tell Jeff to shut the fuck up for discussing future potential was infuriating to see. GB mods did a terrible job keeping things civil.

Not that I'm here to white knight for Ethereum or ar an expert on these matters or anything, but tbf to them they have decided to move away from mining over the next couple of years. I've watched a couple of interviews with the founder and whilst I didn't agree with everything he says and it does seem he thinks about stuff like environmental and social impact etc.

One of my favourite things about being Scottish is the unique idioms we have.

Drunk - mad wae it (mad with it)

Vomit - boak (pronounced as in oak)

As far as I know, there isn't a slang term for taking a dump, but you could say "he's in the cludgie doing a jobby" in place of "he's in the toilet taking a dump".

Language is fun.

Just so thankful that there was a Metallica GH game with drum charts. Songs are a blast to play.

Friendly reminder because chat was acting awful during this stream - you can disagree with people's arguments and still be respectful to the people.

Watched that Tom Cruise thing just now and it's pretty scary how convincing it looks. I guess I shouldn't be personally worried just yet, because the only video footage of me out there consists of me just walking past some security cameras and I doubt that's enough to get a good deepfake going. But I have to imagine it's going to be a problem for someone sooner or later.

I'm glad comments mentioned blockchain != mining. That was bad.

So, on that note, it's a concept of virtual vs. physical which I'm just going to say....Diversification!

@depecheload: fantastic summary of a topic I'm already tired of hearing about as an "investment opportunity". A grift that has the added bonus of hastening the destruction of the environment--what's more to hate?!

That's a TS100 soldering iron, those are really good.

The launch of the Beacon Chain for ETH 2.0 last December and the plethora of cryptocurrencies already using it or something similar begs to differs.

In any cases, the Blockchain tech is a Pandora box that's already been opened and no matter how much people hate it, can't be closed back. We might be in a giant bubble caused by people desperate to make a quick buck but the reality is that even if the price of every cryptocurrencies crashed in the next 5 minutes, the whole system would still be working (even better actually). Thinking that the goal of the tech is to create an ever increasing price rise is just a sever lack of understanding of what the Blockchain actually is.

That being said, of course the whole thing is about money. It's what it was created for. Whether people think that money is a good thing or not is obviously debatable, but it's an undeniable part of modern economy. What the Blockchain allows (in theory) is to take the whole money management infrastructure away from private entities and put it in public where anyone can see it and use it without anyone's permission. And this is something I personally can very much understand. Just look at the whole Robinhood debacle when they blocked users from buying Gamestop's shares to protect privates interest. In a decentralized exchange based on the Blockchain tech (which are already out there), that is something that simply could not have been possible.

Edit: I should note that, personally, I am very much happy about the whole environmental backlash that we are seeing right now. Like I said, I think this tech is here to stay and it's absolutely necessary that we put as much pressure as possible on the devs out there to fix the ridiculous waste of energy their priority.

@depecheload: I agree. It's one of those things as well where I think Jeff thinks his take is purely informative and objective but when he's also saying "it's complicated" when discussing its criticisms and saying things like you can't have a black and white stance on the issue like he did - those things benefit the people pushing this and perpetrating it. I'll stand with Alex quietly on this from here on out and just hope we don't see Jeff fall too deep into it.

As a 90's/00's kid i have a really hard time placing Metallica, hearing someone say they are influencial sounds like it makes sense but i don't think i've heard any band and thought "there's a Metallica influence right there", maybe that means they're unique but i wouldn't call their sound particularly groundbreaking, for me they were the band that always came up on music tv you had to wait for the song to end to hear the good music again.
If they influenced bands in the 80's then that's what i missed, maybe they were doing something unique and powerful back then, but it's super hard to see it now.

"Butt Rock from a heavier butt" is the best worst take ever.

Homeowners advice: Have a full set of replacement parts for your toilets!

@haneybd87: A Fisherman's Tale was just gorgeous.

I can't wait for the first lawsuit from a NFT "owner" of a piece of digital art that is used by someone else and they want to get paid.

HDMI: weird thing I had with both the PS4 and PS5 is that if I used too high of an Audio quality then it would randomly (once every couple of days) go black (flicker a bit before) and only way to get it back was either switch signals and go back or unplug/replug the HDMI cord back in. dropping the audio signal down made that stop. Only thing I could think of was too much data going through the HDMI would make it loose signal.... so weird (new cables changing ports did not help.)

Unless I'm wrong this NFT stuff, while baffling to me (digital scarcity is dumb), doesn't require mining and therefore power in the way that some tokens do. Also most crypto projects don't either. I can understand the vitriol toward BTC and its power usage, but most of the coins are more worthy of an old man shrug than actual anger. Unfortunately they're all more or less tied to BTC in this weird bubble.

I think Grimes beat Kings of Leon to NFTs. Though she's selling her artwork instead of music, for now.

@fnert_bjerglen: It does require the same amount of ridiculous energy as mining does.