All of these were already on GOG.

Buy them there instead.

US politics, often on both ends, semi-purposefully failing to acknowledge the difference between social democrats and socialists is both weirdly sticky and frankly makes it very hard to talk about politics with them at all.

Social democrats in places where this is not the case are so often considered borderline neoliberal, centrist traitors by communists and other far left people, and the distinction between liberalism and social democracy is seen as more a matter of nuance than between social democracy and communism.

Although I guess that's changing because American fascists exported their playbook and now conservatives all over the world talk about "freedom" and push anarchocapitalist ideas they've copy-pasted from the mothership, so if anything everybody else is drifting towards this nonsense now.

I mean... yeah, retailer gut checks were a major driver for the industry for ages. The entire myth of the videogame crash in the early eighties, blown out of proportion as it is, comes down to retailers having a bad feeling about gaming after Atari. I'm big on preservation and physical media, but don't downplay the schadenfreude caused by the absolutely toxic videogame retail industry entirely collapsing after digital distribution became a thing. I'll buy direct to consumer from boutique retailers all day before I go back to buckets of games stolen from little kids and retailers keeping shelf space hostage based on how some rep's E3's afterparties went.

That said, those guys really did flood the market with cookie cutter games in a very short time there for a while. There were a LOT of these.

Weirdly, Neverwinter Nights must have done extremely well for how much credit Bioware gives it for redefining the genre, but at the time I remember being frustrated by it. It looked worse than the 2D stuff, the user generated content stuff was fun to mess with it didn't create the huge endless content mill you'd expect from something like that today.

I should go look up if there's any data about how commercially successful it really was somewhere. Any pointers?

OK, this one is true until it isn't.

HDMI 1.4 and arguably 2.0 specs were straightforward enough that it was rare to encounter a cable, no matter how cheap, that did not support all the features you wanted if it listed the right HDMI spec. That... is no longer a universal truth with HDMI 2.1 if you need something that will do 4K120 with HDR. There are cables that just don't like some ports, particularly on PCs.

Length is also a way this can be wrong. Go above 2.5-3m and you may start losing the ability to hit some of the spec. I have a HDMI setup that requires a longer cable and there are basic cables that work and some that don't for the application. To get a better chance on longer cables you end up having to go for powered cables or HDMI over fiber, which are both more expensive than normal cables and it can be luck of the draw even with expensive cables whether they will like your devices and be compatible with what you're trying to do.

So console plugged directly to your 60Hz TV over 1.5m? Sure, cheap cable will do. Longer distances or higher bandwidth requirements? Be prepared to shop around and try different options, potentially getting very expensive.

"Godsend" is a bit of an exaggeration, considering how many ways there are to get the same result without even going into emulation and stuff, but alright. It's still a fun bit of history and behind the scenes info.

Oh, I read it when it came out back in June. Many times, as it kept being shared as an explanation of the first Threads backlash.

It's full of incorrect assessments and false equivalences.

Threads doesn't really have the volume (yet) to subsume ActivityPub. The process it describes for standards drifting towards the corporate actor doesn't apply to ActivityPub, which is engineered from the ground up to support multiple apps with differnent functionality (hence me writing this in Kbin and others reading it in Lemmy and being able to link it and follow it from Mastodon), the article only acknowledges that XMPP survived and kept on going at the very end as a throwaway and doesn't justify how it "never recovered" and, like I said, it doesn't acknowledge the real reasons Talk and every Google successor to Talk struggled and collapsed.

So yes, I read it. Past the headline and everything. I just didn't take it at face value. This piece keeps getting shared because XMPP wasn't ever that big to begin with, so this sounds erudite and informed while the similar arguments being made at the time about SMTP and RSS were more obviously identifiable as being wrong for the same reasons.

Who in the world celebrated that?

Like, I get the self-reinforcing bubble that Linux communities exist in and all, but... nobody did that.

The vast majority of Windows users are random people that never touch anything beyond the Start menu in their entire computing lives. What segment of the Windows userbase is out there celebrating any features, let alone command line anything? This is not a thing. At least not in numbers large enough to matter.

Sorry, I try not to get involved in these arguments. Frankly, grown adults taking sides on operating systems of all things like it's Sega vs Nintendo in a 90s playground seems very strange but I don't begrudge people finding communities wherever. It's just... you know, come on.

Pricing doesn't hurt.

But yeah, people will pay for convenience. Nobody wants to dig around for pirated links if a simpler option is available.

But yeah, I hear you on international licensing. I try to keep up with Star Trek content and man, I don't know how you can bungle up a licensig deal that much.

The latest bit of genius includes Amazon Prime listing three seasons of Lower Decks, but the third season consisting on a page that tells you they don't have that season available, despite having had it before.

There is a fourth season. It's not available anywhere.

I gave up and pirated it, knowing it will eventually show up in a service I do own. It was all getting spoiled for me in social media anyway.

If it's any consolation, LinkedIn is notoriously terrible at this, so your data was probably out there as early as 2016 and almost certainly after 2021, when they managed to get hit with similar breaches twice in the same year.

Huh. So I'm learning that people don't know about Carrero Blanco.

Ironically the bombers in question would probably have strongly objected at being memeified as "the people of Spain".

I am very neutral on this in general. Honestly, Stewart does not need Apple at this point pretty much at all.

But man, to have been a fly on the wall in that meeting. I've seen Stewart's "disappointed in you and not particularly worried about it" face and it's weapons grade old dad disappointment. There were definitely sweaty outlines on many of those chairs by the end of it.

It is absolutely amazing that nobody seems to have clicked through to the actual article.

So for all the "just use hall effect sticks" people, the patent is apparently not just for a solution to drift but also a way to add variable pressure to sticks, kinda like what Sony does to triggers.

It took me like fifteen seconds to read deep enough to find that.

For what it's worth, I think it could be interesting, especially if applied in a Nintendo-like way, bur proprietary stuff like that tends to go underutilized. You know, like the triggers on the PS5 controller.