42 and counting… I actually have some small hope of trying to buy a house next year though. Not in my home of America though, it’ll be as an expat, and contingent on a foreign bank extending me credit. Not a sure thing at all, but… I’m hoping? There might actually be a path forward? Maybe?

Minesweeper was to teach mouse precision, solitaire was specifically for click and drag.

Even if it was sterile, that still doesn’t mean “safe to drink”. Lots of sterile things will kill you.

Now, Bear Grylls taught us that in this case, yes, you can drink urine in an emergency. But prefacing it with “it’s sterile!” is both inaccurate and meaningless to the conclusion.

Yeah, not surprised to see the .ml after your name, tankie.

Should probably link it here: https://youtu.be/laZpTO7IFtA

At some level, it’s because each platform costs a lot of money. If a game is not available for your platform, it’s super expensive to get another platform. So other platforms having fun games your platform doesn’t can mean losing out— either you won’t get to experience the game, or you’re going to have to shell out, and either way hurts. Thus, it is actively in your best interest if the other platforms fail, thus encouraging devs to spend more effort on your chosen platform.

I loved act 1 of this game, but the rest seemed scattered and unfocused. I would have loved if the story from act 1 developed further over the course of the game, instead of ending abruptly with a boss fight and then basically never mentioning anything in the act again.

Nice rework! I thought yours was the original for a moment, and was rolling my eyes at what I thought was the rework in the comment… yours just flows so much better. I like it!

No. Enshittification has a very specific definition. It’s a business model that follows exactly these steps:

Step 1: make a product or service of high quality to users, offered for free, to gather a large user base.

Step 2: slowly optimize the platform for “business users”, aka advertisers. The service now starts to become worse for the original user base.

Step 3: make the product worse for both end users and businesses in order to squeeze more short-term profits.

It’s not a general term for “things getting worse”, it describes exactly these three steps, in this order, exactly as stated. Any variation would need a new term… except we have enough examples of this playbook that no such variations have been spotted.

It’s fascinating that they expanded the known landmass to cover the sphere instead of leaving the unknown area blank or oceanic. I wonder if Columbus saw this globe and figured it couldn’t be hard to get to India because of it, while everyone actually educated knew the planet was far bigger than that, with a much bigger gap.

Yes, TLA is a three letter acronym. A four letter acronym, on the other hand, is an ETLA, or “Enhanced Three Letter Acronym”. For advanced cases, you can get an EETLA (or XETLA) for Expanded/Extended Enhanced Three Letter Acronym.

Just so you know.

I suspected as such, that’s why I asked for clarification.

Did you mistype, employ sarcasm, or were you not aware that the genre is named after Metroid, not the other way around? Metroidvania— games employing similar experiences to Metroid and some of the more notable Castlevania games.

Because it became wildly successful. Success brings notice.

Did you know that elevator operator used to be a job that people had to be employed to do? No one says hiring a person to operate an elevator is more cost effective than installing a push button system for people to do it themselves. The cost really wasn’t prohibitive to move away from human labor here.

This is not the only case, I’m just bringing up an example. The thing is, when a job is replaced by technology, you don’t even think about it anymore. Yes, there are also jobs that CAN be replaced by technology, where the tech is more expensive… but that’s not the rule, that’s just the leading edge.

To be fair, we also heard them from the ninja turtles, and any other kids media and/or commercials trying to appeal to the demographic. Some of us used it sarcastically on the playground, but I don’t think any of us knew anyone who used it seriously. I think it might have been surfer slang that was co-opted by marketing departments?

Some key software I need to use doesn’t work on Linux, and is unlikely to be able to in the near future, sorry. I did use Linux for a while, mind you, and I more or less like it… but a computer is only useful if it runs the software you need to do the things you want to do with it.

I don’t want to downgrade to windows 11, but I’m going to be forced to. And to even do that I’m going to need to bypass the hardware authenticator, as I’m apparently ever so slightly behind their so-called minimum requirements, which aren’t really minimum requirements but just a push to get me to buy a new PC I don’t need.