I know this song is about some depressing stuff (including what happened to the singer's brother, IIRC) but for some reason, this song always warms me up, makes me feel good. It's the overarching message of rising above whatever's got you down. I know what it's really about, but I tend to focus on the positive side and it reads as a feel-good song to me, despite knowing it's not. In much the same way Semi-Charmed Life (by Third Eye Blind) is about crystal meth addiction but it's just a feel good bop.

This is a wild song. I listened to it off and on for close to 20 years before I realized it's in Japanese (the name didn't clue me in). It just sounds like any other Enya song at first. Cerebral and classical with the layered voices.

So what apparently happened here is, after her previous album, Enya (the Irish singer who layers her voice dozens of times for that "chamber" sound) heard she was big in Japan, so... she made a Japanese song. Just the one. This is her only song in Japanese.

At the same time, before this album came out, she was on the soundtrack for the first Lord of the Rings film, where she sang in Tolkien's Elvish. No one asked her to do that, but she felt it was appropriate, so this autistic polymath savant and whatever else she is, takes it upon herself to learn the language and sing part of the song ("May it Be") in Elvish. But, it's not something that feels natural to this brilliant singer who can speak all these languages (she already has songs in Gaelic (Irish), English, and Latin, and now Elvish and Japanese)... so she and her songwriter make up a whole new language called Loxian, and 2-3 of the songs on the album are also in Loxian, which only they know. Fortunately, they provide translations. So that's like five languages she sings in that I know of for sure. It wouldn't surprise me if she had a song in French or Italian or Norwegian or something. She hasn't done it, but I would not be surprised in the least to hear her cover The Dragonborn Comes from Skyrim — notable for also being in a made-up language, the dragon tongue.

I went looking for Mass Effect wallpapers, and there aren't a lot of great options out there at 1080p and higher, due to the age of the game, how divisive Andromeda was, and basically a lot of the fans have scattered. Is what it is, I guess. I did find some good ones.

Among them however, I found this gem (linked in OP). On the surface it looks like you can just change the background — it's the Mass Effect Legendary Edition cover as a wallpaper. So you can make it all Paragon (blue), all Renegade (red), or the default "split". But, click on the characters and you'll find you can change them, too! So you can put your lover at the top, or your best guy or gal. So for me it's Liara on top, followed by Garrus and Wrex (because they should never be separated), then Solus, and Kaiden and Ashley together to remind you of that choice, then I got Tali and Jack. You can change the bottom background (default is Normandy flying through Citadel). I left it alone. Lastly, you can choose between the "Mass Effect Legendary Edition" and the OG "Mass Effect" logos.

When you hit save, you get an ~11MB .PNG you can use on your desktop. That should be fine for most modern computers, but if you're pinching RAM, you can probably run it through xnview or similar and get most of the quality at 2-3MB (it IS 4K after all), maybe drop the rez down a bit if you don't need 4K. I have a 1440p monitor myself, but I kept the 4K, and it just looks fantastic.

Maybe it'll be your next Mass Effect wallpaper, but if not, it at least deserves a spot in your rotation. Your Shepard's morality (you can't take off the helmet unfortunately, so no FemShep/MascShep choice here), your crew, and your love — or not. For my paragon FemShep, it was Liara all the way (and no one in ME2). For my next play, it'll be renegade MascShep, and I'm thinking Ashley, Jack, Tali. (I don't have the "get laid in all 3 games" achievement, might as well pick that one up.) (I'm also not 100% sure Tali is an option in 3, I know she is in 2 if you're MascShep.)

Mods: I see you have an "AI generated" tag option (or the greater PieFed does?). I don't think this is AI. It's hosted on GitHub, so it's scripts, but I'm not a code monkey, I don't know what it's doing behind the scenes. I don't know if the assets are human generated or not. I figure they come from the game/official art but I'm not sure. If you want it AI tagged and can't do it yourself, kindly message or reply and I'll add it in edit. But I don't think it qualifies as AI art.

Long story short, I got Mass Effect Legendary Edition (the remastered/rebalanced Shepherd trilogy) for $6 (and it goes on sale for this all the time) on Xbox, played through it, loved it. Saw they had Andromeda for $3, but I paid $4 for Deluxe. I'm not mad, I know the OG version of ME3 also had some online/loot box BS that is just straight up gone from the Legendary version of ME3. So, for those who only played the OG, in LE, you can no longer do online missions, and your readiness level is adjusted accordingly. You can max it via single player actions exclusively. It's not an online game anymore.

But Andromeda? Xbox is still selling the lootbox coins, even though the ME: Andromeda servers were shut down. There's no way to play the game online. I'm not mad, I got it for $4, but two of the Deluxe Edition bonuses are for online, so I've tried to connect, and, no luck. It's so weird because starting the Apex missions (the online stuff) is listed as a main quest and it keeps trying to get me to talk to the turian on the Nexus who runs it (or to go to the computer console on the ship that does the same).

It's just so weird that they shut down the online servers, but they didn't remove the online stuff from the game. Even if, for whatever reason — and I doubt this will be the case — I can't complete the game because of the online stuff, I still got my money's worth. For some reason, Xbox says I have zero days, hours, and minutes in the game, but I've been playing it pretty steadily since January. I should have about 20-30 hours in it.

ME2 is still the GOAT (2 > 4 > 3 > 1 IMO, and I loved the LE of 1, it's just everything after was better), but I feel like with ME:A/4, they took the Mako planetary exploration in ME1 that everyone hated (mostly, I think, because it was so broken in the OG) and made a whole game out of it. So when you drop down on the planet and now you gotta establish a colony and do things for them planet-side, people said "this isn't my ME, I play ME from the bridge of my ship, I'm out there exploring planets." And I get it. And the plant/mineral harvesting is still 100% a waste of your time. I completed the minerals and I think I got 200 credits? And I never have enough materials to craft, and I mine, I collect... but I find the weapons I like just laying around everywhere. I think you only needed mining in ME2, to upgrade the Normandy for the big fight/suicide run. The grind feels as useless in Andromeda as it did in ME1/3.

There are a bunch of dumb bugs, like the smallest root or pebble stops Ryder in their tracks, and you can't just jump over or go around, you gotta boost, and if you're gonna boost, you're gonna air dash, so get used to those sound bytes because you won't stop hearing them until the credits roll. The transmission in the new Mako being manual is also a huge pain in the ass, even though it only has two gears and it's one tap to switch between them. The fact that it can jump is completely useless and never once was it ever needed, but the little popup tutorials never end, so it keeps telling me I can jump, or tap reverse to slow down, or whatever else, over and over. I think the game's biggest sin is how you have to depart a world to get on your ship. So my krogan crew mate who is standing right next to me on the planet (albeit, on shore leave) wants to talk to me on the ship. So we get on the ship and watch the unskippable view of us taking off. I talk to the krogan, and he says he wants to meet up on the planet we were just on, so now we have to watch the unskippable video of it loading. Or the anti-AI mission where, for the peaceful solution, you have to craft an item. But to craft, you have to go all the way back to town, hoof it half a mile where the Mako can't go, go up an elevator... it's actually faster to extract to the ship and go through the cutscene. Then you have to land, go through the elevator, walk half a mile to where you can fast travel... and then you have to glitch up to the base because no road goes there, so you gotta billy goat it up the side of a mountain, Skyrim style. The game's a fucking mess and I can see why it's not popular... yet, I still love it, and I haven't even gotten into how bad the voice acting is (krogans and turians just sound human now, at least they got salarians right)... and for $4 I can't complain. (And yet, here we are.) But the online? Why wouldn't they update the game to disable all that when they shut down the servers?

I haven't finished Andromeda yet, but I'll likely be back if they ever give it the Legendary treatment. I think this game deserves more love than it got, and if you stayed away because of the hate... it has as rough a start as all the others, but once you hit your stride, it's a lot of fun. The Mako (not its name, but it's a Mako, dammit) is fun as hell to drive, and virtually everything relating to the Remnant (especially the Sudoku puzzles) is a blast. The vaults are too damn big, but the last part of them is always epic.

I think if ME5 ever materializes, I'll pay full price. I only paid $10 for the first four titles. (And I re-purchased ME1 digitally for $5. Not sure why. Nostalgia?)

It's difficult to choose a song to represent my second favourite singer, ReoNa. Her work ranges from pop to hard rock — not pop rock, but hard rock bordering on metal. It's worth noting that she is just the singer, occasionally playing an acoustic guitar.

For those only familiar with Western music, she might be similar to Vanessa Carlton or Jewel with her low singing and whispering and tomboyish, yet feminine mysterious persona.

If you dig this song but you want to know what the Japanese lines are in English, I'm not sure this one has translations. Her song "Nainai" (from the same album) absolutely does, but that song is Wednesday Addams weird — the video, but also the song itself. It was used in an anime series, Shadows House, which is way darker and more Gothic than Addams Family could have ever hoped to be. It's just straight up weird, a series about fae creatures called shadows which enslave humans that share their features (or they adapt to their pared slave? This isn't clear). It's super weird and dark and the song fits. This video has English subtitles you can enable. Beautiful music, but if you don't know Japanese (and I only know a little bit!) you're not gonna get the full meaning. So even without that — I just love the sound of her voice, and the music she makes. That whole album, HUMAN, is excellent. I listen to it at least 3-4 times a month.

A lot of people talk up PieFed, and I think I found a community I like (RetroFed, they're based around retro gaming, but they're also new, so I'm not really trying to push them per se) so I signed up with them... so, aside from looking a little different, what's really different here?

Not really looking for a "PieFed vs Lemmy" debate kind of thing, more of a "hey check this out" vibe.