But Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii is a notorious exception to this. Even though Super Mario Sunshine was the first game of the series with a clear theme around the game world, Galaxy and Galaxy 2 are the games that fully embraced this concept, particularly the first game.

The stories of both of these two games is very similar: They tell the story of becoming separated from a loved one. However, the first one portrays this in a much more somber and straight to the point than the second, and in my opinion, in a better way.

Normally I wouldn’t care much about Apple’s announcements at their keynotes and other events, but this one has brought me many concerns about what they were thinking when they came up with this.

If you’ve been recently playing online games, you may have noticed that a bunch of games have switched to what’s called “kernel mode anti-cheat software” for catching cheaters: League of Legends switched to Riot’s Vanguard AntiCheat, and most notoriously, GTA Online also switched to BattlEye.

These updates, while they do bring a lot of major improvements to anti-cheating, they also bring with them a lot of controversy: From tech experts showing a lot of concern over them, to people DDoS’ing GTA V Online services in protest for this change. But why make such a fuss about something that should, in theory, make things fair for all players? Or is there a danger lurking around?

As it turns out, kernel mode anti-cheat is a powerful tool, but it may be too powerful. In this post I want to give a layman explanation without the technical mumbo jumbo.

Sometimes, my blog will have some texts displayed in east Asian languages (mostly Japanese).

In the Legacy version, said posts will display an alert box, warning that if you’re browsing the site with an old operating system, strange text may appear. But if you can browse this version without any issue, you have nothing to worry about, since your browser has full support for East Asian languages already.

This post will continue assuming you’re running an old operating system (e.g. Windows 9x, Windows XP, or Mac OS Classic).

Once you’ve installed support for these languages, check the About ruby text section of this post to check if the text is displayed correctly.

Throughout October, archive.org has been the target of numerous DoS attacks, and the data of roughly 31 million users has been exposed.

At the time of writing this post, even though the Archive has been reportedly restored in a read-only manner, some of its main features still have connection timeouts, meaning they are still having some unresolved outages.

Worse still, it’s been reported that some of its content has been erased, although we still don’t know the scope of the damages.

Being one of the largest digital libraries in existence, its recent history has been a close parallel to the Great Library of Alexandria, with this event being probably the counterpart of the fire that burnt a large part of the library, although not completely.

Hopefully, it will soon be restored and remain relevant for years to come. Still, this should serve as a lesson for the future to prevent history from repeating.

Whoa, it’s been nearly a year since I promised part two of how I made the Legacy version of The Yonic Corner! The thing is, I wanted to complete the majority of the features of the version in order to fully cover the whole story.

And now that it’s finally feature complete, here’s the long awaited second part!

In part 1, I discussed about what visual style I wanted to use for the Legacy version of this blog. This part goes through the technicalities of making the design a reality.

What if the famous Windows XP wallpaper was made in the 1990s?

Lately I’ve been getting myself into making retro-styled renders from the 1980s to the early 2000s. This is a recreation of the famous wallpaper for Windows XP made with Blender 4.3 with the Cycles renderer.

I also have a 1024x768 standard wallpaper for old computers to use.

On last year’s retrospective on game development, I predicted that the gaming industry layoffs wouldn’t stop this year. Sadly, I was right on the money: We’ve surpassed the amount of layoffs from 2023 back in June.

And it’s not just the big studios that are suffering. The indie industry is struggling with a completely different kind of situation.

If you were to browse the Internet in its early days, you will encounter it very different from what it is today. Several websites would offer the possibility to customize parts of your own profile, allowing you to express yourself in the way you wanted and be creative in your personal web space.

But that is now a shadow of the past: Standardization and a “more corporate look” are seemingly now the norm. But why is this? I will explain it in depth in this post.

The performance of the blog might not be on par with when it was on the cloud, but I’ll be working on optimizing it little by little.

If you’ve seen books about astronomy, you may have come with a passage similar to this: The Moon looks upside down in the southern hemisphere compared to the northern one. But what about the equator? Clearly there must be something in between if it’s in the middle of the two hemispheres, right?

Against my predictions, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was officially announced at the June 2024’s Nintendo Direct, and is slated to be released sometime in 2025.

While in my head I promised myself not to spoil myself by watching further trailers for this game, I also took the chance to scrutinize the reveal trailer and speculate over the details of both this game and the successor of the Nintendo Switch.

I originally wanted to cover a week per part of this series, but I realize now that writing these posts can be quite the ordeal, so I’m going to keep them about 3 to 4 days long.

Aside from the 6th day, these days were probably some of the most full of activity, moving around and doing all sorts of stuff in the whole trip.

There’s no denying that YouTube has become increasingly addictive over the last decade, and in the past few years I’ve begun to become increasingly more distasteful of the platform as it becomes more and more harmful to my wellbeing and my lifestyle.

However, recent changes in their platform and its “algorithmic shifts” have pulled my last straw, and have forced me to finally take definitive actions.

The Internet used to be a free willed, more independent place. If you wanted to check information about a topic, you had to actively search for it on Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine around at the time.

Nowadays, everything seems to have been turned the other way around: Everything boils down to websites and apps selecting that information for you, “recommending” you things to watch or read. Sure, it’s convenient, but up to a point.

Overly relying on this method (and companies will design to ensure you become addicted to being recommended stuff) has a lot of negative effects on you and everyone around, which I will get onto in future posts.

For now, I want to show you something that can give you back a bit of independence over what you want to see. Something that has been around for quite a while, but it’s still relevant to this day.

Last night I set out to try and photograph Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, also known as “The Devil’s Comet” that’s been approaching the Sun since March.

It was a very faint comet, so with my limited gear I could only make it be seen very slightly when zoomed in. It was clear that I would need to upgrade my equipment if I wanted to make clearer pictures of these thingies. However, it also made me think about other things that eventually bubbled into a theory that astronomy, the oldest science —dating back to ancient times and even prehistoric times— may be in danger of becoming a shadow of what it was in the past.

But this fate could be avoided if we solve at least two of the major problems astronomy is currently facing, both in the short and long term.