I really enjoyed Mark Cerny's "PlayStation 5" presentation today. It was very tidy, logical, and technical.

Sony's approach almost seems like a shift back to the 80s or 90s, in the sense that the PC was all about brute force, whereas the dedicated game systems had lots of game-specific, specialized silicon. While I'd still really like to see an off-the-wall system where all of the silicon was focused on something audacious like holograms or voxels versus streaming gigabytes of textures and triangle meshes off of disk, their custom controller and best-of-all-time sound chip are pretty neat.

Whereas, Microsoft's "Xbox One X" essentially takes the same route as the original "Xbox": it's just a really nice, souped up gaming PC with basically off-the-shelf components. The video chipset has more "compute units" than Sony's offering, but I wouldn't be surprised if the "PlayStation 5" provides better net framerates in some "open world" workloads especially. It's brute force, versus finesse-- sort of like the "Xbox" versus the "PlayStation 2".

Of course, all of this hardware is moot because there isn't anything interesting to play on it; I spent over seven hundred bucks on my RTX 2080 and have played like two games on it ("Shenmue III" and "MechWarrior 5"), neither of which even remotely required that much horsepower. The industry is split between the Chads and Tyrones getting their legions of wannabe Hollywood walking simulators and Dudebro shooters in one corner, and the no-chin soy boy effeminate pseudo-men indie and Nintendo fans in the other.

The only video gaming I've done in the past two weeks is playing through 1993's "Shining Force". No need for 12.5 teraflops there; probably a Pentium 133 is fast enough to emulate! And it's ten times the game anything modern I've played, especially in the most-important aesthetics department.

In other hobby-related news, H and I have been inline skating at least two hours every day. I've sort of plateued: I'm improving at the step-over turn, but jumping is still terrifying. My "Aeon 60s" should be here tomorrow, and H has a used pair of "Roces M12s" coming a few days after that. Then we'll go hit up the skate park for the first time. My hope is that having an actual object to jump onto (a ground-level rail, or a "box") will help me.

One of the most bizarre-- and incredibly refreshing-- aspects of the hobby is that the men are actually men! With video games, I became so used to every single article or YouTube video being penned or presented by either some morbidly obese, tatted-up carousel-riding white chick, or a "guy" with lower "T" levels than wifey's eighty year-old grandmother-- it's almost jarring to not have that be the case anymore! In general, the crowd is a huge improvement, and really adds to the enjoyment of the hobby.