I don’t have all my stuff plugged in right now, but when I did I used an AV switch or an AV receiver. For Dreamcast and Xbox, I recommend using VGA video if you can swing it, significantly improved video quality. But it’s getting difficult to find screens that take it as an input anymore.

Zip and Jazz drives had some serious data stability issues that would have sunk them anyway. I used them for school work and needed to have duplicates because it was a question of when the disk would fail, not if.

Monument Valley 1 and 2 are great puzzle games.

I had the same assumption about myself before 2020. Turns out I’m way less distracted at home because I control the things that would distract me. So I’m much more productive. Was actually a huge surprise to me.

Half Life 2. Wasn’t a big fan of the first one, but the second had tons of hype, so I gave it a shot. The physics stuff was cool, but the gameplay, story and characters were boring and flat. And the “revolutionary” storytelling method of locking you in a box to talk at you rather than making a proper cutscene still sucks.

Strawberry jam. Made from the strawberries grandpa grew in the back yard, and like 9 lbs of sugar.

Not just with every post. It updates your position every time you open the app.

None of them are free, but they all have a month free trial. After that they’re all $10-15 a month. Not sure about privacy, it wasn’t a priority when I went looking. I hadn’t heard of any of them before I went looking for alternative music services.

I actually react well to combative. Not right away, but it puts me into a “I’ll show you” mood that drives me down a rabbit hole of research. If you’re right, I come out the other side with the data and admit I was wrong. But I assume I’m not normal.

Another for Deezer. In the last couple months, I’ve tried Tidal, Qobuz and Deezer. Qobuz seems the best if you’re into music and building your own playlists. They pay the best royalties and do a bunch of human curating, including a weekly zine for current releases. They don’t have an automatic playlist that I could find. Deezer has the best recommendation engine of the three, at least for the genres I listen to.

I would believe that it only currently works in English.

Yahoo did pull this shit. I had to dig through privacy settings in my account, not just the email setting, to turn it off.

Our marketing team isn’t good enough to change consumer behavior like that. I’d love to work with a team with that ability.

Some games do that, especially at a generation border. It’s not a ton of extra effort, but it’s low-return: a game doesn’t sell better or get a lot of press for being smaller.

The majority of disc space on a game like CoD is textures, audio and FMV. There’s no compressing 4k textures to get them to a reasonable footprint without losing quality. Same for 4k FMV. It’s not management that drives the desire for high-res textures and diverse asset libraries, it’s generally the art team. Once they’re allowed to care about what kinds of shrubbery exist in Borneo and which exist in Minneapolis, you end up with 30 kinds of plants. Multiply that out for rocks, cars, rugs, etc and add in the expectation for 4k or 8k screens and individual assets get huge and the library gets huge.

You’re right that it’s possible to do “pretty good” graphics for less, but it’s telling that your examples are from a decade ago and/or heavily stylized.

It’s also about what people want to buy. If games with that aesthetic reliably sold like gangbusters, AAA would follow.

Game Dev here.I WISH we could still ship with N64 quality textures and audio. We’d use so much less disc space and probably finish sooner and cleaner.

My city does something like this as part of our homeless program and we’re at “net-zero” homeless. It doesn’t work on it’s own, but the tiny homes give people a stable place to keep their stuff safe and the elements off their bodies, it gives them an address they can use for things like mail and applications, and it gives social workers a place to find them reliably. It’s the start of a long process to help them back to their feet.

I don’t think I would stop being a human if I was part robot. Are people with artificial hips or cochlear implants less human?

Motion built good machines! I’ve got one from 2010 that’s still going strong.