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Meatba'al

@vance.bsky.social
301 followers 138 following 5.6K posts

Writer/Irish-born American dumbass. Working (very slowly) on a reference book about the 3DO. Voted funniest man on the northbound Metro Blue Line.

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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 8m
Pretty simple stuff, but there's a profundity to growing the first seeds you harvested from a living plant yourself. With a little effort, I can keep a closed loop of insanely suicidal habanero plants going until I die.
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Reposted by Meatba'al
The Onion @theonion.com · 19m
Dennis Hastert Dies theonion.com/dennis-hastert-dies

“From the first couple sentences I’ve read about him, he sounds like an impressive guy.”

Shane Kress, Medical Restocker
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 3h
We've recently seen far right conservatives value freedom of speech over their clearly fake anti-pedo stance with AI generated CSAM, so I'm predicting we're going to circle back to 2002 with distinctions between proper and improper (gay) child molestation.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 3h
Probably better then the average driver in my town.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 3h
Ahem.
youtu.be
Chu-Chu Rocket Commercial
YouTube video by The Joys of 2D
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 3h
static.klipy.com
The Tick Says Neat!
ALT: The Tick Says Neat!
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 3h
Looked at a new apartment today, had to get in a locked cage before they'd tell me the price. Good vibes, think this landlord might be "one of the good ones"!
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
By the end of the first game there's an airfield level where you better be a master sniper because a squad is bum rushing you and there's no cover. Taking them down with unassisted shots is enough adrenaline to be classified as a failed suicide.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
The SE series is a strange duck. The first game defaulted to hardcore simulation and I loved it. The next game was a remake, and felt too Xbox'ed to me. But with each new game, they've done incredible things. Co-op on max difficulty is a rare thrill.
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Reposted by Meatba'al
Vinegar Syndrome @vinsyn.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
"...may well lay claim to being the only shot on Super-8 giallo to emerge from Long Island, NY" --VS product page
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Hi, I have questions about the journey this article took from concept to execution.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I'm gonna say not racist. Those proportions are horror movie stuff and a lot of the faces look like death masks. Definitely the kind of thing that hits different as a kid. I also remember being terrified of similar art that wasn't of black people.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I suspect... though this may be relatively apolitical as well... that this quandary results in a copious use of men's fragrances, often to the point of overkill. Mine is a small, personal sampling, but is largely based on the general foreman who worships Elon Musk and smells like date rape.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
My dog is on a permanent lean diet so I'm here to tell you I live and die by the candy thermometer.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
The combination of no instructions and my natural contrarianism say I get to have a girl breakfast of pills
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Playing that game, I always wondered if there was a radically different design concept for it. Something about it felt like it was either a game version of somebody's D&D character or a gameplay compromise to get it onto a cartridge.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
This is legitimate cartel behavior. Like I'm pretty sure it's straight up illegal, but then again so are so many things about AI that have led up to this moment.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
As a former bus driver in the city this happened in, this feels insane to look at.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Like you do
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Somebody get the stomach pump, I might OD
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
I gave this a brief look and it's pretty damn good. Try it out.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
That's somewhat fair, the N64 was an absurdly powerful machine that was bottlenecked severely by the cartridge format, but I also depends on what kind of wizardry went on behind the scenes. Al Lowe managed to fit a huge maze in Leisure Suit Larry 3 on about 50b, if I recall.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
They've got a regular named Ross Silifant who often comments and adds a shocking amount of context. He's not in the comments there, so you truly have something obscure
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
IT'S OCTOBER AND PEOPLE WERE OUT PLAYING VOLLEYBALL IN THONGS
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
THE SUN HAS BEEN DOWN FOR OVER AN HOUR AND IT'S 86 DEGREES SOMEBODY BETTER BOMB A DATA CENTER OR I'M GONNA LOSE MY SHIT
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Right, and the thing that constantly smacks me in the face like an unexpected bird on a roller coaster is how creatives sometimes think AI is fine for any craft that isn't theirs. I'm an introvert but I can still find artists to collaborate with.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
I'm currently going through Usenet posts from the 90s and KT is about to get released, and people who have tried it keep saying "Once they get the frame rate up it's gonna save the console!"
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Sierra Saturday Gaiden will continue with the 1996 Myst-like, Lighthouse: The Dark Being. The stream will start just a bit late and probably won't run long because of the heat wave and it still being in the 90s here, even as the sun goes down. Sierra Saturday: I'm melting.
twitch.tv
ViolentAperitif - Twitch
What's the current grift? Videogame historians? Sure, we can do that. — ViolentAperitif streams live on Twitch! Check out their videos, sign up to chat, and join their community.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
I have a dear friend who does voice acting, and he had AI create an original Harry Potter story for him to narrate. The pained rictus I was wearing throughout him proudly playing it for me was intense.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
I have friends who go nuclear on any remaster, but as a guy who had this game back in the day, stabilizing the frame rate was a godsend.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
I remember tweeting at ziprecruiter years ago about all the scam offers I was getting and I got the most canned bullshit answer, like they have to respond to that all the time. And it's like cool, you're a middle man for scammers victimizing desperate people. That's your actual business model.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
You've probably already checked the standard bearer for this stuff but just in case. www.unseen64.net/2008/04/04/j...
unseen64.net
Jest [N64 - Cancelled] - Unseen64
Preserving Details, Screenshots, Videos & more Lost Media for Jest [N64 - Cancelled] Help us to remember cancelled video games!
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Reposted by Meatba'al
Chris Person @papapishu.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Saw a Wardogs clip that was a streamer making gay rainbows out of colored smoke signals and it soft locked a bunch of guys in the building because they didn't wanna be gay.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
It's a good sign for the economy that I'm getting emails from Indeed pushing clearly fake jobs, right? Shit's real good right now, right?
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Starting Earthbound right after Mother makes you want to insult the first game, despite it being a good experience in the context of it's time. The sequel has bigger, much more colorful sprites and the music really pops.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Looking at the AI recomp wasteland on Reddit, the capital-G gamers are screaming that they don't care, they just wanna play fun games. And like listen, subhuman whores, we live in a time when more games are released than ever before even before "vibe coding"
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
No kink in DKC, Stush. Despite the fact that it's about one guy wearing only a tie and the other guy wearing only a cap and shirt.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Finally beat the first mother game and it has one of those final areas that feels like a practical joke, just a brutal last slog followed by a puzzle battle.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
By comparison, underwater levels had slowly waving plants get really choppy, which felt like an honest to god thing that would happen early in development.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I'm not great with technicals, but the way early version number didn't make sense to me. There were a lot of graphical glitches where about a fifth of the background on one side would glide into a solid mush, and that happened across several different situations. It felt more intentional then a bug.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The DKC recomp was baffling, and looking into it I realized it was an AI project. I'll do more research in the future
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Decompilations, or creating native PC ports of console games, has been an interesting bit of retro gaming. Recomps are a recent offshoot of that, promising even easier ports. But now everybody's filling the space with AI ports of varying but typically dubious quality. Let's try Donkey Kong Country.
twitch.tv
ViolentAperitif - Twitch
What's the current grift? Videogame historians? Sure, we can do that. — ViolentAperitif streams live on Twitch! Check out their videos, sign up to chat, and join their community.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
static.klipy.com
Ray Stantz Surprised in Ghostbusters
ALT: Ray Stantz Surprised in Ghostbusters
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Reposted by Meatba'al
Ciaran Martin @ciaranm.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I was wrong. It’s happening
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Which is to say some people think he's a huckster but I just think he needs outside structure.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I know there's a lot of controversy around it, but my pedestrian take is that Chris Roberts really needs to not be able to pick his own production team, more needing an experienced management structure to reign in his impulses a bit.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I like that people have "back in my Star Citizen days" memories and my vague awareness is that the game has never really meaningfully launched? I could be mistaken.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I could verify this in massive detail, but you all don't have three hours to spare and I don't want to get so worked up that I break your furniture.
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Meatba'al @vance.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Yeah Ron, it started off as a threesome but uh... I'm not supposed to say anything about it until after the inquest. What? Yeah, of course I finished, what kind of question is that?
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