Xenoveritas

It’s amazing how meaning streaming services don’t allow you to mark episodes of shows as watched. Apple has figured out an even more annoying thing though: it *does* let you mark as watched, except it doesn’t work and then moves the show to the top of the “watch next” list.

So after the whole “your LG TV is listening to you and anyone within range of its mic” thing, Apple updates both the Apple Watch and the Apple TV with new models that do the very same thing. Way to read the room, Apple.

Haven’t played FFXIV for a while and it’s impressive the degree to which they’ve absolutely destroyed the game during Dawntrail. They “removed friction” which means the only “friction” left is massive time-gated grinds that are absolutely no fun to do.

Click to turn off computer, turn off wireless mouse. Turning off the wireless mouse changes USB devices and causes Windows 11 to immediately power back on. I am so sick of this crap.

Why do the FFXIV devs insist on only ever making the game worse?!! Duty Support is basically worthless now.

There’s nothing more annoying than watching iOS refuse to use the functioning LTE connection because it sees a nonfunctioning 5G tower that it can’t actually talk to.

I am so so sick and tired of “but we’ve always done it this way” as an excuse for never changing things, especially when the way it’s “always been done” no longer works thanks to other things changing.

It says a lot that anytime Firefox updates my immediate reaction is annoyance because updates never bring improvements, at best they bring security fixes. And holy crap does Firefox 157 prove that with the new “Nova” look. Set browser.nova.enable to false in about:config to fix.

You know, I think I’m going to start referring to the little FFXIV mechanics that differ only in name as Taskmaster mechanics, because I can totally see Little Alex Horne chuckling at someone missing that this time it said “larboard” and not “starboard.”

The thing that most annoys me about FFXIV right now is how pretty much all of the actual difficulty comes from the camera being bad, to the point that there was a major “cheating” scandal that involved a raid group using a mod that simply unlocked the camera. Suddenly they could see mechanics.

It’s hard to be excited about FFXIV’s new expansion when the game has fundamental flaws that it’s clear will NEVER be addressed. Including the netcode, which requires impossible to achieve pings to be competitive.

I really hate how in the modern Internet it’s nearly impossible to find the actual website for a restaurant. Which one is the one with the real info and which ones just place an order on your behalf at a higher fee? Good luck finding the real one! Google sure won’t help!

I really should have read the Mogpendium more closely before losing over a million mettle trying to do a CE when you could also just do any treasure map. #FFXIV

The 27 series of Apple OSes is out, with such features as “more AI” and “even more AI” and “we’re doubling down on Liquid Glass no matter how much you hate it.” Also dropping support for older models to force you to buy new ones if you want to continue to get security updates.

It’s always kind of depressing seeing the pictures of protests against Trump in other countries and knowing the same thing won’t happen here in the US. No one seems to care anymore, everyone seems resigned to just letting him do whatever with no resistance.

The next Apple watchOS update drops support for a ton of older Apple Watches (mine included) and the new one constantly listens to everyone nearby, beaming that data to Apple-controlled servers. Great.

You’d really think a 13 year old game that constantly runs a “hey, you should keep playing during the patch lull!” event would have learned to NOT give you random uncompletable tasks during it. My “weekly objective” is something I haven’t unlocked. FFXIV won’t tell me what it is to “avoid spoilers.”

There is something deeply ironic about GamersNexus reporting on how LG TVs are always listening to everything anyone says anywhere around the TV, and Apple immediately announcing that your new Apple Watch will do the exact same thing.

Wow. I don’t think anyone predicted the foldable iPhone would look quite so bad. #AppleEvent

“Console level graphics” hits differently when the most recent console is the Switch 2. Yeah, of course iPhone has “console level graphics,” the Switch 2 is over a year old now. #AppleEvent

I hope people realize the only reason Apple Maps hasn’t updated Lake Ontario to read “Lake America” yet is because Apple is incredibly slow at updating their map data. They otherwise follow the same policies that Google does, meaning it will read “Lake America” any week now.

Windows 11 constantly rerunning the “out of box experience” to yell at you for opting out of junk you don’t want is annoying enough, but not quite as annoying as demanding you set a 6 digit PIN for Windows Hello to be allowed to continue using your own computer.

Apparently Discord has a secret “affinity score” for people you interact with and will send you push notifications about things your “close friends” do based on this secret score. There is, of course, no way to tell it it’s wrong or disable said notifications without disabling ALL notifications.

I am so sick and tired of the answer to “how do I turn off this obnoxious feature that was added” being “you don’t!” Don’t want to share ETA with contacts in Apple Maps? Tough!

I was just going to complain about ChargePoint enshittifying their app by making you need to log in every time it opens, but then it turns out they ALSO broke the ability to start a charge session via the app. Hope you have a tap to pay credit card, because ChargePoint no longer accepts ChargePoint.

I was thinking about Car Talk and realized you simply couldn’t make a show like that today. Not because no one listens to radio or because NPR was defunded, but because you can’t repair cars at home any more without specialized equipment to placate the computer.

You can tell Discord Mobile uses the same UI for the “what’s new” pane that it does for “gift Nitro” in that they broke the “close” UI on it so you can neither swipe it down or hit the little X, leaving you to force kill Discord to get rid of it.

I see Discord moved the “gift Nitro” hotspot and also made it enormous so it’s now trivial to hit. But wait, it gets worse! If you receive any in-app notifications with it open, it becomes impossible to close because the app notification UI blocks the close button.

Turns out there is a thing more obnoxious Apple can do than have CarPlay open to Apple Maps showing a route to someplace you’re not going and that’s opening to the summary screen showing a route someplace you’re not going, adding an additional menu level to clear the map.

I’m really curious if Square Enix just isn’t paying to disable ads during what’s effectively an ad for upcoming FFXIV content, or if Twitch just doesn’t let them anymore. In any case, having the keynote constantly interrupted by ads makes it unwatchable.

Me: I’d like to do the Apple News crossword. Apple News: You are not connected to the Internet. Umm… pretty sure I am, since everything else it working.

Oh, they’re not kidding, it’s around 23:20 and serves as the set for the Driftwood.

Nothing like finding out that the open source library your program relies on is now being vibe-coded for the latest updates, and that the first alternative you find is ALSO vibe-coded.

I am really sick and tired of drivers who drive LITERALLY HALF THE SPEED LIMIT and somehow manage to do it in such a way that they’re impossible to pass. You aren’t a “safe driver.” You’re a jerk.

“Anyone can speedrun!” Guess I disproved that by completing NONE of the speedrun challenges at SGDQ. Forget par, I couldn’t even finish them at all.

Welp. Bought a controller before SGDQ and then promptly lost it at the event. Hopefully it’ll turn up mixed in my stuff or something but I’ve been through everything and it’s just gone.

“MacOS is Unix!” Cool, so how do I open a terminal program in the macOS debugger? “You can’t!”

There’s something kind of amusing about your Apple Watch reminding you that you still have time to achieve the fitness goal of “standing up” today. (The actual goal is “sufficient movement during at least 12 hours” and it’s reminding me of that goal because the other two are already met.)

I can kind of understand why for things like TVs and laptops Amazon won’t show you the price until you add to cart. For Starbucks, on the other hand, the fact that the price of a cup of coffee is secret until you add it to your order…

The main reason EVs will never work in the US is because no one has yet to solve the problem of people leaving their goddamned giant ass SUVs parked in the EV charging spots for literal days at a time.

I know I shouldn’t be surprised by now, but it always amazes me to encounter a basic “how do I do this very basic task you can do in the web version in the app version?” and learn “you can’t” and have that DECADE OLD ANSWER still apply.

I’ve always known Apple used generative AI to make the emojis for their “Emoji Game” puzzles, but WTF is this crap? And why wouldn’t “🇺🇸🥤” have worked?

I remember when you used to be able to fix iOS locking up because of a single stuck socket by entering and exiting airplane mode. But Apple “fixed” that. Now, when its network stack gets stuck behind a blocked queue, you have to wait for everything to slowly time out.