Reid Main

I do not believe I have linked to Atrioc on my blog yet. His YouTube channel is an excellent source of news delivered in a humerous manner. Sometimes it is a bit too much on the "react video" side but more often than not I find myself learning something from his videos.

Vacationed in Japan

This month I visited Japan for the fourth time and wrote about it under the #Japan2025 tag. Unsurprisingly it was a blast with some of the highlights being Dragon Quest Island, Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios Japan, and oni ramen at Kikanbo.

But what truly took the cake this time was ChatGPT. Previously when we visited Japan I would take pictures using Google Translate and then have to manually tell it what parts of the image I believed was worth translating. Even after decades it was still an incredibly tedious and painstaking process. On a whim I took a picture of a map of the restaurants in a building using ChatGPT and asked if any served tonkatsu. ChatGPT immediately identified one of the places, translated its Japanese name into English, and even realized what floor it was on. After this revelation I was taking pictures of everything and just asking ChatGPT what I wanted to know. I honestly don't know how I could travel without it anymore.

What turned me into a true AI believer was when we wanted to order tickets to an exhibition in Osaka. In Japan they use kiosks inside convenience stores for all sorts of administrative tasks, such as ticket sales. The problem is these kiosks are only in Japanese and the process is multiple steps. Even using Google Translate we found it nearly impossible to navigate. I joking asked ChatGPT to order us tickets and it told us to head to FamilyMart and use the kiosk. We figured why not give it a shot and headed to the nearest one. We walked up and took a picture of the main screen and asked how to search for something. ChatGPT called out the button so we pressed it and immediately took a picture of the next screen while providing no prompt. It recognized a keyboard was on screen and gave us the search term we needed in katakana because that the format the keyboard was in. I had no idea that with the persistent context ChatGPT was able to give such targetted feedback. We continued onward and eventually got to the checkout process. We were very obviously on a screen that wanted us to enter a phone number. For whatever reason Japanese business almost never accept International phone numbers. Again we took a picture of the screen and gave ChatGPT no prompt. It realized we were on a screen asking for a phone number and then called out that this probably only wants a Japanese phone number. It proceeded to give us a potential placeholder number that we could use if we wanted to skip this step. It literally said that.

It is because of this that I know I need to pivot and devote my career to LLMs. While I probably can just slog away at iOS jobs for the next decade until that well runs dry, I need to pivot if I want to stay relevant for the next 20 years.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

I do not understand the universal acclaim that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is receiving. People are acting like it is ushering in a new way to make video games and the world will now be divided into the time before and after the release of Clair Obscur. If this game was developed by EA or Ubisoft it would be getting heavily critiqued. But apparently because it is Sandfall Interactive's debut game (a studio mostly made up of ex-Ubisoft devs by the way) the reviews are overlooking all sorts of awful design decisions. While I did not enjoy Clair Obscur, it is not an objectively bad game. I can understand how many other people would enjoy it. But with a 9.7 user score on Metacritic and 95% positive on Steam I am clearly in an insanely small minority.

Instead of ranting about what I disliked about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 I want to call out what I wish I knew before buying the game. It was originally described to me as a JRPG by French developers. It has the spirit of old school turn-based JRPGs with a story that heavily references French culture. I immediately went to my local game store and bought a copy without watching a single video. If I had I would have realized that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not a turn-based JRPG, but a fighting game where if you cannot perform frame perfect parries you're going to have a bad time. Again, let me reiterate that while I absolutely hate this type of combat I do not fault anyone who enjoys it. I am just absolutely horrible at this sort of game mechanic and even after 28 hours I did not get any better. If I had known this game was so heavily dependent on parrying I would have just skipped it. So consider this a PSA to anyone else who sees the stellar reviews but is also not interesting in real-time parrying combat like myself.

Also, I just wanna throw out there that the story was far too nihilistic for me to enjoy. It is easily the most French thing about this game and every time it became even more depressing I could not help but think of Robin William's bit about the French.

Monster Train 2

I want to play some more before writing about it in detail but the sequel to Monster Train, one of my favourite games, was released this month and so far it is utterly fantastic. It is that near perfect sequel where the developers understood what made the original great and focused on layering interesting things on top rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. Maybe Monster Train 3 will be a significant departure but so far I am very happy that Shiny Shoe chose to take what was great and tweak it to make it even better.

Natsu Sumo Tournament

One of the the things I enjoy most about vacationing in Japan is being able watch sumo live on TV. This Natsu Honbasho turned out to be something special as we got to witness the promotion of the next yokozuna. Ōnosato won 13 straight matches to secure back-to-back yūshōs which automatically earned him promotion to sumo's highest rank. After a couple of years of what I would say was subpar competition we finally have two young yokozunas (Ōnosato and Hōshōryū) who appear to be set to duel for championships. It will be interesting to see which other rikishi rise to the occasion and challenge them over the next several years.

Unfortunately the broadcaster of sumo, NHK, is incredibly litigious and does its best to remove all possible sumo content from YouTube. They do post daily highlights (one of which I have linked below) but they are delayed several hours after the day's matches finish. For this last tournament I was using Don Don Sumo's YouTube channel to follow along but it is possible that whenever you are reading this his channel could have been taken down like so many others. There are Patreons that post the matches so you could consider paying someone like SumoJason.

Watched Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Even at nearly three hours in length, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning was an enjoyable watch. But at this point in time it feels like the writers are working backwards from whatever crazy stunts Tom Cruise wants to do. There is an idea of a story here but The Final Reckoning feels more at home with 80s action movies than with any previous film in the franchise. They've gone full Fast and the Furious and are now superheroes running from one world ending event to another all while trying to protect their family.

Leafs continue to suck

I have to issue a mea culpa. I was wrong about the Leafs collapsing in their first round series to the Ottawa Senators. Because they knew it would be even funnier if they shit the bed against the Florida Panthers in the second round instead.

The Leafs have always given some semblance of hope at the end of every playoff exit during the Austin Matthews era. There has always been some excuse that if they run it back one more time it will finally be their year. But after another harrowing game seven loss there is nowhere to hide. The only question now is does leadership have the balls to do a rebuild or will they continue to overpay for talent who cannot perform when it matters most.

Review May Goals

• ✅ Enjoy a vacation.

June Goals

• Finish furnishing the living room.
• Unpack my home office.
• Unpack hobby room.
• 3D print various accessories needed for a Bambu Labs P1S.
• Watch (at least) 12 WWDC 2025 videos.