EvilBit

“Wait did you say Martha??”

I mean, you’re right, but I guess I can enjoy the weird plot advancement and character posturing and sort of “buy in” on the movie’s world long enough to get by. I mean, I actually enjoyed Prometheus and The Last Jedi while I watched them at first, but once I left the theater and turned my brain back on, I got angry at how offensively stupid and disrespectful those movies are. I see BvS as just kinda inoffensively stupid and simple in comparison. I’d rather watch BvS 3 times over than either of those garbage fires.

No, I never saw that movie. But if those kids did that to politicians, they’d probably just be arrested and imprisoned for mumble mumble cough.

I mean if not getting shot was so important to them, why aren’t they out there funding some campaigns?

If you can turn your brain fully off, like shut down, hold the power button ten seconds, wait for it to stop blinking, and unplug it from the wall, it can be a reasonably enjoyable dumb action ride.

What it sets out to do, it executes with a reasonable amount of technical prowess. There are scenes that are fun. Sometimes it’s nice to just watch shit explode or someone punch a car through a wall or whatever random thing happens. But it’s easy to lose the zen and find a million reasons to (rightly) hate the movie. I’m glad you like it. I generally enjoy it myself, when I’m in the right mood.

I remember them boasting that an architect contributed to the level design. Turns out, real world environment design didn’t map to early 2000’s game design very well.

Now designing a modern VR game or something, that might be a different story.

Guarantee he hasn’t realized shit. In his mind, it was the best idea in the world when he had it, and now it’s the best idea in the world to walk it back. He’s so brilliant, he was right twice about the same thing.

Whoever wrote this headline hasn’t met a true narcissist.

I forgot that yeah, a lot of these don’t have lights built-in on order to reduce the distance from the pen tip to the display layer. The Elipsa does though.

As for display quality, you’re right that the handling of gradations can be affected by firmware, but lots of them are all working with the same base display hardware. So if you drop some kinds of custom firmware or system on, you may be able to change how it’s handled. I’m not completely sure. I suppose it’s possible that there are display controllers that could vary between devices. That said, Kobo will likely be tuned for a variety of content by a bigger company that’s had a lot more time to dial in the quality.

The ReMarkable is a very nice device but one of the reasons I went with Supernote is that the nibs are ceramic and never need replacing. But yeah, there’s no frontlight on it, so it behaves a lot like paper for better or worse.

"Well, it's not all going to be rainbows and path tracing."

Isn’t that like exactly why anyone would buy this thing in the first place?

They just figured out they can say “we won’t do a thing” and then get elected and then do the exact thing and people somehow will blame the Democrats.

Oh hey, didn’t see your very thoughtful and informative reply. Thanks for jumping in! I didn’t realize KOreader was something you could put on a kobo device. That’s wild.

The Elipsa is, like almost all >8” screens, designed specifically to be an e-note rather than just an e-reader. For that reason, I’m pretty sure it too lacks physical buttons. The two use cases are pretty distinct, as you wouldn’t want to accidentally change pages while writing or drawing.

That said, I have heard that the Elipsa line does a pretty good job of still functioning as a reader because of the Kobo pedigree. So it’s probably one of your best options. I’m pretty sure the software is going to be very similar to that of the Sage or Libra lines. In fact, I suspect that apart from screen size and such, it’s identical to the software on both the Sage and the Kobo Libra Colour since they both support pens too.

Image quality should be roughly as good as anything else out there. The number of e-ink screen makers is small and almost every common black and white e-ink device uses a Carta screen. But reviews say good things about the quality overall. Your concern with ghosting is common to most screens, which is based on the fact that an e-ink “pixel” is actually a bubble of suspended black pigments that can be magnetically oriented to the front surface of the bubble, making it show black, or to the back surface, showing the white solvent instead. That process isn’t complete and perfect though, so quick changes can leave a ghost image. The remedy is to do a “refresh” that flashes the whole screen in order to fully orient the pigments again. It’s slower, but it ensures a good clean image. It depends on the device firmware how often and when/why it triggers a refresh. Now I just checked on my Libra Colour and it provides a specific setting on how often to do a refresh, which you can set as often as every page if you don’t mind the delay.

I also looked into whether you need to sign in. Apparently in 2022, kobo specifically ADDED the ability to use your device without logging in (https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2022/02/10/how-to-use-kobos-new-sideloaded-mode/), which is a move in the RIGHT direction for once. Based on that and my history so far, they’ve been a very hands-off company that will probably not do a villainous heel turn anytime soon. Now I can’t promise anything about them changing their minds (I was surprised by Roku pulling their bullshit about forcing you to accept updated TOS or stop using the devices you own), but so far kobo has been “one of the good ones” in my experience.

Now if you’d rather pay more and be pretty damn sure you’re going to be safe on all counts, you could look into a Supernote device. They cost a lot and they are definitely designed around note-taking, but the company is very conscientious, to the point that they literally insist that you not buy more devices from them than you need. They support old devices as long as possible and they don’t offer trade-up discounts in order to limit e-waste. I have one I use for note taking and it’s a solid, well thought-out device and you definitely don’t need to sign into any account to use it. There’s a touch gesture strip along the side that if you slide your finger up the bezel, you can manually trigger a screen refresh whenever you want. They are probably the closest I’ve seen to a “we’re just here to sell you a good device” company, pretty much ever.

Edit: I don’t know much about KOreader but someone else sure does!

I’m gonna be That Guy and say the answer is “never”, because no matter the technology, people don’t act like Ready Player One. The story just ignores the level of griefing, idiocy, and anonymous/low-stakes recklessness and shittiness that would overrun even a perfect implementation of the Oasis in about three nanoseconds if it existed today.