Brandon Hal Kaufman's home timeline
Notices
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I think this website has actually been one of very few places that I actually felt any real sense of engagement
Thursday, 30-Nov-23 07:57:36 UTC from web -
My final boss in Lost Judgment is Poker. I'm in a chain of side missions that need me to win in Poker (Texas Holdem). Sad thing is that I get always the worst cards and have not even got a dumb pair in 20 games.
Saturday, 25-Nov-23 22:00:16 UTC from web-
@adiwan good that I had only to win once. Poker sucks so much. I swear I will throw the towel if I have to play a game of Shogi or Mahjong in a side story.
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@scribus AFAIK there is no Go in the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series. There are other equally unappealing games like Koi-Koi, Oicho-Kabu, and Hanafuda.
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I’ve been carrying foreign currency in my wallet for a bit too long but you have to actually go to the airport to exchange it so it stays with me
Sunday, 19-Nov-23 23:23:40 UTC from web -
Today was the day of the bomb disarming. They found a second bomb nearby and disarmed it as well. Nothing happened except for stupid people who were entering the evacuation zone. It happened a few times and delayed the whole operation. People who are caught in the evacuation zone (also in their apartments hiding) get a fine of up to 5000€.
Sunday, 12-Nov-23 20:16:06 UTC from web-
@adiwan Looks like you've had more practice cleaning up your post-war cities. Or maybe it's just the legendary German efficiency.
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@scribus It took about 4 hours to evacuate about 5000 people out of the area. Then it took another 3 hours to get rid of the bombs including interruptions.
The legendary German efficiency is more a legend now. Living here you'll see that there is a lot left on the table when it comes to efficiency. The biggest and most visible joke are the trains that are always late or don't work when there is any kind of weather.
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still only on chapter 2. I got distracted.
Sunday, 12-Nov-23 00:04:47 UTC from web -
I couldn't resist and bought LAD Gaiden yesterday. I'm almost like a fanboy at this point towards any game RGG Studio releases. I'm 12 hours in at the moment and it feels like a Kiryu Best Of.
Friday, 10-Nov-23 15:14:03 UTC from web -
I'll probably buy Lost Judgment (+ DLC) as soon as there is a major discount. I ain't gonna pay almost 100€ for a game no matter how amazing it is.
Friday, 03-Nov-23 22:25:46 UTC from web-
@adiwan @adiwan That neither Judgement game is on Xbox GamePass is why I haven’t played them yet. I’ll buy Judgement, but $60 for Lost Judgement is a bit insane considering as of next week there will have been two further games in the series out since LJ’s release (and one of them isn’t even full price!)
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@zeldatra Yeah. It's somewhat unfortunate. Last time I saw Lost Judgment on sale on Steam was about 60€ with the Kaito Files DLC. That price also stings. I don't know if I buy LAD Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name on release. I would like to but 50€ make me think twice, especially when I don't get it on a physical disc.
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Knew I was in for a fun time with this new transfer when I asked which store she came from and she replied “that’s personal information I’m not answering that”
Monday, 23-Oct-23 20:16:02 UTC from web-
@scribus update on this: apparently she had somewhat successfully lied her way into the position she was in. She’d been hired as a deli clerk and was transferred to my store after basically becoming to much for the previous store to handle (thanks for that, guys!). Then when she got here she concocted this plan to basically act like she’d been promoted with the hopes that we’d give her the pay of an assistant manager for at least a while before we found out. Her refusal to answer most of my questions was because she didn’t want me finding holes in the story, like her refusal to tell me what store she came from was to stop me from contacting her previous manager and finding out that she was just a deli clerk - before the whole thing went down I had already figured out what store she was from because… it was listed under her file, which I genuinely can’t believe she didn’t think I would check. Before I was able to ask the manager there about her though, she’d already been fired.
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Got the new Cities Skylines, fun times fun times! Got a weird fixation on a six-sided grid as opposed to the regular right angles and all. It's obsessive, I can't stop. It's like some kind of curse. Or maybe even a hex!
Wednesday, 01-Nov-23 18:47:03 UTC from web-
@scribus I have hundreds of hours in the first one and the second one is driving me absolutely insane because of how much more in-depth it is, I can’t approach things the way I did in the first game because the first game didn’t have apple like air pollution, so now I gotta not put my factories upwind of a suburb. This is a good thing, I get sort of complacent in how I game, it just surprised me how much the game tries to kick old players’ asses in some regards.
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@zeldatra I spent half an hour relocating a water pump and even the road leading up to it, trying to get better than 10% efficiency. Then I found out that it actually needs to be fully staffed to be fully functional :o
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voting on Halloween because adulthood is tedium
Tuesday, 31-Oct-23 18:34:35 UTC from web-
@scribus Virginia. Kentucky. Louisiana. Only three states in the entire country where this is an annual thing. Can you imagine the junk mail volume? It’s a lot.
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the kosher section of the store is expanding into the halal section and it’s causing some problems
Sunday, 29-Oct-23 21:34:30 UTC from web-
@scribus true story: the fact that my store only has a kosher SECTION, rather than a kosher AISLE, resulted in me being called an antisemite by some elderly Jewish lady, like a) I was the one who decided this, and b) the section wasn’t as large or larger than the halal, latino, Italian, Japanese, German, etc sections on the same aisle
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Friday, 20-Oct-23 23:37:51 UTC from web
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It's almost like I'm good at this and not at all that I watched YouTube videos of people winning and ever-so-slightly might've cheesed the strategy just a bit <_<;
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@scribus Is watching a YT video so different from reading up on a strategy guide back in the day? I try to avoid guides but there are times when the game isn't fun and I want to get to the fun again without the road block.
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@adiwan Not quite so different, except maybe the video has a more obnoxious host than the written word, lol
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But I have yet to watch the circus cartoon so that's unrelated
Saturday, 21-Oct-23 19:41:45 UTC from web-
@scribus it sort of feels like if Mondo Media was told they had to keep it PG and not everybody was on board with it
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In Yakuza Dead Souls, one of Majima’s substories involves dressing Tojo Clan Sixth Chairman Daigo Dojima in drag and pretending he’s your girlfriend so that you can lure out three zombies hiding in Kamurocho Hills. He hates this, but is honor bound as the Tojo Clan’s Sixth Chairman because he already said he would help you in any way he can. The entire mission is escorting Daigo around in heels. Why didn’t people like this game?
Friday, 20-Oct-23 10:30:57 UTC from web-
@zeldatra Maybe because first/3rd-person shooter on consoles suck. I'd like to play it for the wackiness but it's a hard sell for me demanding to use the controller for that kind of gameplay. Also it's not very cheap to purchase as ebay prices are way up and higher than original retail price.
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So is it just me, or does the word "ret*rd" seem to be coming back around on the ol' euphemism/dysphemism treadmill?
Wednesday, 18-Oct-23 15:47:13 UTC from web-
@scribus i noticed not only this but also the usage (or implied/cut off usage) of offensive words for shock comedy has also been back on the rise since wound 2021 or 2022, and very little complaints about it unlike before. Not certain what the cause of he change in attitudes was.
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Oh boy I hope the Thai place doesn’t racially profile me again
Monday, 16-Oct-23 22:05:13 UTC from web -
In Yakuza 7, there’s a particular endgame boss with a one-hit KO move that you need to prep for in advance by using one of Ichiban’s defense moves to tank the hit. I did not know this until after the fight was over, because he attempted it once on my healer, missed, and then apparently got embarrassed because he never tried to use it again after that.
Sunday, 15-Oct-23 00:42:07 UTC from web-
@zeldatra You were so lucky. I had to fight that boss probably a dozen times. I had to switch up my whole party because of him. Without I couldn't get over that difficulty spike.
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@adiwan with that longass dungeon just before the fight, if I had to go back and change ANYTHING about my party I’d have probably just rage quit and not come back to the game for a couple of days.
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aww damn Dick Butkus died
Friday, 06-Oct-23 00:58:58 UTC from web-
@scribus I know it's disrespectful to laugh about other people's names and dead ones but I've read that as "Dick Buttkiss".
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@adiwan Yeah; I'm sure it had nothing to do with his reputation as a "mean" player on the field....
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@scribus not that I really followed his career, but “probably deserved it” is one of my all time favorite replies to any angry tweet ever
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Somebody at Sega is going to hell for designing UFO Catcher
Tuesday, 03-Oct-23 04:57:38 UTC from web -
this site needs to get about 20% cooler
Sunday, 01-Oct-23 03:51:09 UTC from web-
@liquidusmira ah, that should be fine then, i guess
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@scribus scriiiiiibusssss
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Silksong Never
Monday, 25-Sep-23 01:07:20 UTC from web-
@scribus boo
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@liquidusmira the real silk song is the friends we made along the way
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@mushi that's the FAKE silksong
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Put 15 hours into Yakuza 7 without realizing it and I only just got my fourth party member
Thursday, 28-Sep-23 04:16:45 UTC from web-
@zeldatra I think I've spent about 80 hours with that game finishing all side quests that are reasonable to finish. The any% speed run is at 3h 11min. You have a lot of game in front of you. Have fun.
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Yakuza 6 is disappointingly lacking in content (if you’re not a fan of RTS gameplay or baseball management simulation)
Sunday, 24-Sep-23 19:48:42 UTC from web-
@zeldatra I tried the baseball management and the clan builder and I share the same opinion, they are the weakest mini games. The clan builder is too simple, and the baseball management is too obtuse and lacks more involvement during a match. The chat room mini game is also quite lacking. There is some novelty but there is no reason to play it more than once. I enjoyed the undersea fishing a lot, but only when playing with the PC mouse. The gamepad analog stick moves the reticle tooo slowly.
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Kiryu has what
Wednesday, 20-Sep-23 14:55:39 UTC from web -
Yakuza 6 is fully voice acted. This is a blessing and a curse, I like that I can actually hear the characters in sub stories and the like for once, but the animation during the more talky cutscenes (like exposition dumps) is basically nonexistent, I might as well be listening to a radio drama during those parts. This happened in Yakuza 0 too but the expository dialogue is SUPER out of hand in this one, it’s everywhere, and now it applies to sub stories too. Might have to start skipping through dialogue with this one once I’ve read the subtitles instead of at the end of the voice line like I’ve been doing throughout 5 and 0.
Wednesday, 20-Sep-23 05:27:02 UTC from web-
@zeldatra Yeah. They listened to all the critics that were complaining about all the reading and didn't think that animating all the scenes is eXpEnSiVe. Still 1000 times better than the fully voice-acted Oblivion or Skyrim. For what they did it was an adequate job using canned animation clips. Y6 was probably the only game in the series where I haven't mashed though the dialogue because of the voice acting. I tend not to skip voiced dialogue (even when I don't understand Japanese). Written dialogue is quicker do digest and thus mashable when nothing really happens.
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Sunday, 17-Sep-23 00:44:43 UTC from web
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@scribus Unity is in the red for years and buying Weta wasn't cheap so they were grasping for the most stupid decision to gain (repeatable) revenue by choosing to get paid by the amount of installs of the games. The problem is that indie game developers have very little profit and it can cost more in the long run than it gained profit. Also the way to determine the amount of installs is not clear. The last information I heard was that Unity wanted to use a heuristic to guess the amount of installs. Also Unity did that decision out of nowhere and tried to cover their tracks by sneakily removing paragraphs in their license that would hinder that license change. Unity had image problems (being used for asset-flip games, taking a lot of time for updates and being behind on the technical side) before but that was a huge kick in the balls to devs and all people who bought games made with Unity.
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@adiwan their president also sold 2000 shares just before the install thing was announced, adding up to about 50k in the preceding year. seems bad
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@zeldatra Him being at EA before that goes great with that... I read that that amount of stocks was only a very small percentage of his stock holdings. Still looks scummy.
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Very cool and normal that you need to limit your game to only use two CPU cores in order to do the fishing minigame, SEGA.
Friday, 15-Sep-23 02:50:56 UTC from web-
@scribus game crashes if it has access to too many resources on this one minigame in this one version of the game so I have to throttle it to keep from going insane while I’m fishing.
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Weird thought I just had: do you think someone who doesn't know sign language would have an easier time understanding ASL or something improvised by another non-ASL-knower?
Thursday, 14-Sep-23 04:43:53 UTC from web-
@scribus Typed an entire response about how ASL would probably be the harder one only to realize that my reasoning applies to braille, not ASL. I found ASL somewhat easy to learn (could not use it today, though) and I’m crazy bad with foreign languages so maybe the answer’s in there somewhere?
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@zeldatra According to 2 people on a discord server I'm on, one of whom has a non-verbal child, improvised is easier (and the ASL sign for "Hallway" and "Focus" are the same except for the eyebrows)
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If you played all the Yakuzas as they were coming out, starting from Yakuza PS2, by the time you get to Yakuza 0 it probably starts to look like Kiryu actually died and the games that followed (in order, a samurai spin-off starring a real life historical figure with Kiryu’s face grafted on where he meets other real life historical figures who look like his friends and enemies, a prequel set in the 80s, and a remake of the first game with stuff that didn’t happen in the original release) are just his brain coming to terms with death
Wednesday, 13-Sep-23 19:54:28 UTC from web -
There are no restrooms in Washington DC metro stations. I had to venture into the city on Saturday to find a bathroom. Found a Macy’s. It was close enough. What I’m mad about is that in DC you get charged your fare when you leave the station rather than the way it works in Europe where you pay for a distance up front, so I basically paid $2 to use the bathroom.
Tuesday, 12-Sep-23 13:35:35 UTC from web-
@scribus In my city there are some but you have really look for them, as most of them are hidden. I used google maps today to look up where they are and I'm surprised that there are more than I thought. Even a place I regularly drove by had one and I didn't know until now. There are no big signs or like that. Most of them are near parks and they are hidden behind bushes.
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@scribus Haha. Nah. I think they are there to reduce the eye sore of the out of place looking buildings.
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