Brandon Sheffield

@brandon.insertcredit.com

22390 Followers 1379 Following

Director of @necrosoftgames.com, panelist on the @insertcredit.com show, recovering journalist, and resident of the city of Oakland California.

Now we have the rat bag. I am holding it against a white wall. The bag is black leather with a gold zipper, and looks like a chubby rat with a small tail and two handles on top. It's about 10" long and 5" wide.

From the Gamesradar article: "Necrosoft Games creative director Brandon Sheffield also highlights a cultural divide. "I think we are witnessing an attempted assassination on the very concept of creative work, especially in the West," he says. "While I'm anti AI use everywhere, at least in China and Japan people aren't getting fired with the intention to replace them with AI as that's legally difficult. There it's being used to supplement the work. I've seen Chinese companies express amazement at how Western studios are firing folks in order to have 'fewer devs do more' with AI. Why fire all your good people?"

Sheffield says Necrosoft will never use gen AI. "I feel sick about it frankly," he adds, and he would love to see the tech "be treated like a pariah." In his view, "once you let it infect your studio, [it] creatively bankrupts that studio."

"We've also seen that companies outside of games have had to hire back their engineers because AI couldn't cut it – or they're finding that all their tokens are getting spent by execs on 'convert this PDF to a powerpoint' which is cheaper to just have an intern do! So it may be slightly faster, and a lot worse, but it's also more expensive? Neat ... We're dismantling the entire industry in the interest of short-term shareholder gains and it's just a terrible plan.""

The bloody zombie from Castlevania symphony of the night, with greenish armor and brandishing a bloody sword, is using a hastily made speech bubble to quote post the below text.

A black denim. Jacket with three junji Ito panels sewed into them with red thread, including stuff from Uzumaki, cat diary, and another one I can't remember. Looks nice!

A photo displaying crunchyroll's hidden gems discovery carous. It includes shows like samurai champloo, blue exorcist, assassination classroom, my hero academia vigilantes, and black butler, among others

Four chunky chibi characters stand near a box of a desk, on a mosaic tile floor, while a shoujou manga style blonde character smiles in portrait.

A cute happy princess with blonde hair, a crown that's very much atop her head (the paint is a bit scuffed out), and a pink, white and blue dress.

From the Japan times:
Seven & I is seeking to recast itself as a focused global convenience-store operator after years of pressure over its sprawling retail portfolio. The key challenge for CEO Stephen Dacus is to turn last year’s defensive restructuring into a convincing operating story. Japan’s 7-Eleven stores are still getting help from higher spending per shopper, but traffic remains uneven, while the North American business shows softer merchandise momentum.

“The first quarter showed steady progress, driven by the disciplined execution of our strategy to transform the company,” Dacus said in a statement.

First-quarter operating profit more than doubled on an adjusted basis, helped by gains in Japan and improved fuel margins in North America.

A sepia toned illustration of a young lady in front of a weird industrial looking structure. She's carrying a brown bag, has a bkur skirt, and Angel wings. The name of the game is P.I.S. File.

I'm holding the cover for namco's video game grafitti volume 2. It features blue-hued characters from dragon spirit and a sword wielding fella. In the background you can see my Sony boombox.

I'm holding bits of used firework, tan cardboard and white powder of three different sizes.

It's a scene from return of the living dead. A diverse friend group of punks and preppies are walking by a warehouse, led by the preppy lady in white with a pink belt sash thing, the punk lady with red hair and a red and black leather jacket who gets eaten by zombies later, and the punk guy with camp pants and an olive sleeveless shirt (and jheri curl hair)

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One dark, nearly black boysenberry with two red ones behind in lower focus. There are various berry and leaf-looking things in the further background.

I'm holding the case for the power dolls fx, with a stylish rounded white mech with a big gun, and the power dolls ost, which features a monochrome photo of a lady lady from the midsection down, standing in high heels with her legs apart, wearing only underwear.

I'm holding a pale green ceramic frog with a huge open mouth and big black eyeballs on the top of its head, with small white pupils.

I'm holding the blu ray for "my heart is that eternal rose" in front of shelves of blu rays and DVDs. It's illustrated with a sad woman in blue in the foreground, a determined (and also sad) orange man wearing a green and orange Hawaiian shirt looking at her through a window and a blush of pink on the right side of the whole thing.

An illustrated poster for the iceman cometh, red text on white icey background showing yuen biao with a big sword in front of a mysterious structure, with ice all around, and Maggie cheung and a bunch of others further in the background.

I'm holding three versions of the movie Nirvana from 1997. A reddish us dvd, a white and blue German digibook blu ray, and an Italian blu ray with the iconic blue, kind of racist Kali-looking character over black.

But some people online criticized the game for having “gone woke” by creating a Black samurai named Yasuke. Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur, said Shadows was an example of how “D.E.I. kills art,” using an abbreviation for diversity, equity and inclusion. Ubisoft reminded players that its games were works of fiction, even as Yasuke was an actual historical figure.

A blurry yuen biao does a complex acrobatic jump in a locker room wearing a grey outfit in game of death.

He’s also looking into a potential sale to an artificial intelligence venture. AI companies scan texts to train their algorithms, but this practice has prompted copyright lawsuits, and the process of destroying the books that are uploaded has come under scrutiny.

The cover of the game great football, which has a gold border and red lettering saying "gold cartridge" and 1m mega. There's an illustration of a pile up of American football dudes, in blue and red respectively, with a Sergio Aragonés style vibe. The blue dude at the top of the pile is catching the ball. The sound effect this makes is "SPLURP!"

In high res pixel art, a blonde, white reporter (wearing white with a blue cyber eyepiece) is asking a question of gunsort player Issa, a black woman wearing a purple collared shirt with gold suspenders and gold bracelets. Issa is saying "If you're watching, baby, I love you, and I'm gonna do you proud, and..."

These images are in comic frames that are layered over images from prior parts of the conversation, including her teammate, etc.

The full screen version of Futuresport showing the wanted boss of the "free Hawaii" movement on an in-world screen with tribal tattoos on his face. His name, Eric Sythe, is fully visible at the bottom of the screen.

A dark blue VW SUV is on the freeway between a white big rig and a beige retaining wall overflowing with green foliage. The VW's black and yellow customized license plate reads "BANGIEB" - b Angie b was her stage name during her career, and the name of her album.

The fund will be run and dispensed by United Videogame Workers, a union benefiting game developers. They are local 9433 of Communication Workers of America, and a 501 (c)(5) organization. Due to the nature of their jurisdiction this fund will be dispersed to developers in North America (the U.S. and Canada).

Likes and reposts of something I reposted are shown in my main feed. There's a little greyed out play button - a rightward pointing grey arrow inside a transparent white circle - overlapping some of the text, but also the bottom 20% of it is cut off.

A photo of a business called "Chai Shai", with a pink sign and a beige storefront and several people sitting at a white table. There's a yellow sandwich board and a fancy pull cart out front.

It's a page from Junji Ito's "lovesickness" collection. The first panel takes up 60% of the page and shows a young boy walking with his father at a small festival at a shrine. The text says: "It was at a fall festival when I was still a boy."

"in among the booths on the shrine grounds..."

Panel 2, much smaller, shows the boy in silhouette looking at a festival stand. The text says "... I discovered something unbelievable."

Panel 3, a bit larger, shows four realistic looking pairs of two poop logs, one laid over the other, each on a piece of paper. Their price is 400 yen. Above you can see large insects (presumably toys) for 200 and 300 yen each.

A screenshot from star wars zero company, with an xcom-like action wheel and similar field of view. There's lil droids and storm troopers standing around

A British female police officer is wearing a white shirt with black shoulder thingies, checkered neckerchief, and a police hat with a checkered band and an officer's badge in the front. The downturned brim looks much like the code Veronica gamecube cover.

A collage of 6 game screenshots, including shape shifter (106 colors), anesan (106 colors), princess minerva (103 colors), godzilla (90 colors), and fatal fury special (117 colors) - but the one that uses the most colors is the relatively drab, very green-looking screen of tokimeki memorial, which uses 120. It has the least color contrast of all the images.

Stephen King posts: A VIOLENT MASTERPIECE, by Jordan Harper: If you like horror/suspense/mystery, with a hanging that parallels the Jeffery Epstein "suicide," pick this barn-burner up now. The only book that equals it for sheer terror is THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.

Jordan Harper, the mentioned author, replies:
I first read Salem's Lot in fourth grade so really this is all your fault. Thank you for reading.

I'm holding the pink-hued book in front of some blu ray shelves. It says Justin Decloux on top in a neon-like cursive yellow and pink, then "radioactive dreams - the cinema of Albert Pyun" in the same colors below. There's an illustration with Pyun, with wild pink hair, at the end of a road along which you see characters from his films, like JCVD from CYBORG, captain America, Christopher lambert from mean guns, etc.

A still of Angela Mao with two braids and fluffy bangs looking seriously to the right of the camera as she does an eagle claw looking pose with her hands. She's wearing a lavender-ish simple Chinese collared dress. The subtitle is her saying "Everyone please consider, Chinese martial arts have thousands of years of history."

Text clip from the Harvard Gazette article:

He continued, “Whatever your chosen profession is, please don’t let AI rob you of the fun part of it. Your generation’s upcoming battle won’t be humans against AI; that’s at least two months away. … It’s going to be people with substance versus people with shallow knowledge. It’s going to be mastery versus faking it. It’s going to be people with good taste versus tacky. I trust you will put in the work necessary to be on the right side of those battles.”

In a parking lot, a burgundy Chrysler 300 with dual exhaust and black emblem has a black and yellow CA license plate that reads: MOTWNO1

A scene from the mediocre film "old Kung fu master." on a hillside, a man in black holds the leg of a man in white who grimaces in pain and flails around. A young child, having just used a giant nail to spear the man in white in the testicles, runs away. The subtitles say, in brackets, [balls destroyed!]

Cribbed from the ign cheat code archive:

Achieve a high score and input one of the following initials: ".LK", ".AS", ".HU", ".SD" then allow the continue timer to run out. When the title screen appears, hold Left + I + II and press Select to enable the code. The codes do this:

.AS allows stage selection.
.HU gives 7 credits.
.LK allows easier use of the special moves. Push pad in direction of enemy and press SELECT to throw a fireball. Press pad away and press SELECT for Hurricane Kick. Press pad D and towards enemy to do a Dragon punch.
.SD does all of the above.

The poster for national lampoon's vacation. It's a frazetta style image with a musculare chevy chase standing in the middle holding a tennis racket and fishing rod aloft, while his daughter and wife (the latter of whom is wearing ripped jean shorts) cling to his legs. The family dog fights a snake in the background, and further in the distance you see the family station wagon at the edge of a cliff.

A black and white shih tzu is scratching her ear in a Honda prelude. Her head is arched all the way back.

A photo of my TV. There's a smiling man with stubble in a red shirt next to a smiling woman with dark curly hair and a tan shirt. The name of the program is dime cómo hacerlo. It means "tell me how to do it" but "dime" meaning "tell me" is spelled the same as "dime," the ten cent coin in the US