I like your taste. These are some bangers lol.

If you haven’t, you should play Armored Core 6. It’s a FROM game, and it feels like one, in all the best ways.

But it’s also a mech game, and it feels like one, in all the best ways! Every button assaults your enemy, every motion feels fluid, fast, effortless - or huge, heavy, clunky - your mech is your mech, and many thoughtful builds can become OP. The customization is bananas. And yet - some fights will remain challenging.

With all sincerity, easy 10/10 game for me, I proceeded from NG -> NG+ -> NG++ directly, which is a first for me and I’m an oldish dude. AND I felt thoroughly rewarded by the end of NG++. It’s a literal perfect game, just unreasonably fun and well-crafted.

Seriously dangerous! I like your analogy, it’s even a little worse though, it’s like doing that but also the planes have an engineered preference to steer towards the worst places.

Right, this is simple stuff - for a 4 year old, content of any kind must be curated, and I’d argue that stays true in different ways for quite a while.

Yeesh. Before ever turning over entire decision-making power on a very uncontrolled platform to a kid, ya gotta help walk them through stuff and spend time curating / selecting content together. And also wait for them to grow up some and demonstrate readiness.

And certainly never trust YouTube’s curation, ever, agreed.

4 yo rawdogging modern AI slop YouTube shorts, solo, is wild.

I have a 12 year old. I considered YouTube unsafe for her unsupervised, when she was growing up (and largely still do, we have a healthy teamwork approach to it). The place is just magnitudes worse now. And yep, parents are super ignorant (and have been), they have no idea what the kids are even watching, many don’t really restrict the time they spend at all.

Something something about staring into the abyss, tho.

And they were cool! And it was better that way! And get off my lawn!

YEAH MF, congrats, now your brain is malwared to fuck, you shouldn’t have looked at it dead on. Limewire is best treated like a Medusa… whose effects show up later.

Guaranteed 10 years earlier dementia onset at a minimum, probably some strokes that leave you “revealing” family secrets invented out of whole cloth by the w4r3z in your now-compromised, botnet brain.

Sorry, Limewire was a wild ride. Could just be the way memories work, but looking back, I think Limewire delivered what I actually tried to download <50% of the time, maybe <30% by the time I stopped using it.

Napster was super dope (and, oddly enough, accidentally produced a solid way for me to buy drugs from the hood, lmao), and Soulseek was absolutely delicious, but - alas.

The amount of aggravating bullshit Microsoft introduced made it so I dread when my daughter asks if I can get it working for her, despite having bought it once as an OG, and at least once since. Badly tarnished maybe the game of a generation or era of gaming imo.

Yeesh. I’ve been (blessedly) away from MS for a bit now so I’m kind of catching up / watching the carnage from afar.

When you jack up veteran user workflows so much that it makes the OS feel alien…you’re really just daring people to jump OS. I know it’s not that simple for work environments, but I can’t imagine administering this sloppy mess has gotten any easier, so…gonna be fun waiting for the suits to eventually catch up I guess.

I’m really starting to wonder if they just might fuck up their products so badly it fucks up their insanely strong market position enough to be replaced.

MS used to be more careful with the corporate/ enterprise side. Some notable exceptions of course, the tiles-only “mobile-tap-first” interface of 8 was rough on users, but forcing that on their server 2012 OS was an abomination.

But the stuff outta MS lately is just nutso.

How about “lacked a VHS player altogether” lmao. My movie ingestion growing up was basically 100% up to the whims of random people, strange way to do it.

Really dig the scrappy approach y’all used tho, that’s the good stuff. Being broke taught me a lotta the most important stuff TBH.

I played a buncha Vampire Survivors around that phase lol, just need one hand for the controls. Football cradle baby, hold bottle in that same hand (does require some wrist flexibility), other hand & arm free.

That hold doesn’t help with wiggles of course (and maybe you already use it) but at least you can pause VS.

Goddamn inflation…

Yeesh, you’re exactly right that this is the right way to think about it and thank you for pointing it out that way. Absolutely disgusting, I can’t believe we all allow this. I’m pretty fuckin good at math and those timescales and numbers are just not intuitive, I’m always surprised with figures like these, even though I’ve seen em before. If people knew, really knew this stuff, I have to believe it would change.

Anyone “earning” like this while the people (and their families) propping up these fiefdoms sacrifice and struggle the way they’re forced to - anyone doing so is de facto amoral. I’d go so far as to say deserving immediate death, no further evidence needed.

But maybe that’s the 4 beers my old ass had tonight making me feel spicy, lol.

Same for our family. To be clear I saw their “inclusivity” for what it was, but I’ll still reward that over its absence, because I want to see more of it in the world regardless of motivation. My wife was all in, the stereotypical Target-loving mom who liked them a LOT and would visit sometimes just to kill time between other things.

But she has principles, so she hasn’t shopped there since all this stuff, and we won’t be going back.

Folks, give your money to Costco! There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, yes, but Costco has been a standout in the industry just for how they treat their employees, for a long time now, probably decades by this point. And they read the room wisely (or just actually mean it, but probably not) and vocally retained DEI efforts.

Guarantee this prick is furious over this, don’t worry. Like, probably even more upset than you or I would be for getting fired unfairly. These people have their entire identity and ego wrapped up in this stuff, their brains are broken.

Now this is top tier pedantry, ya love to see it.

Edit: if you would’ve subtly but deliberately screwed up that idiom, this would be elevated to a true masterpiece

Billy Mays did pass into the Great Beyond, after all…that guy could sell some As Seen on TV omnipotence to a whole pantheon of deities, I’m sure of it.

Completely useless comment here but maaaan, Max Payne, Red Faction, and BloodRayne were all easy 10/10 for me (to be fair I was easier to impress then). Seeing them stacked together like that immediately short circuited the joke and just made me worry this was a list of great games and I’d missed a bunch.

Great point of view and yet another strong reason not to just allow internet connections on every damn thing. One other huge reason - being forced to accept brand new (legally binding!) licensing agreements, long after the device has been paid for and installed.

Roku was in the news somewhat recently for auto-installing an update that required users to accept a new license agreement to continue to use the device they’d paid for and had been using up until that point. And that license wasn’t a trivial change, it required the user to agree to forced arbitration!

In other words, in a very real sense, they came into the house and modified the TV (not just the cheap little streaming devices), then turned around and said “Want to keep using this thing you’ve made a part of your daily life? That you already paid us for? Well, fine you can, but - we don’t want any of you to ever sue us, so agree not to or fuck you. Don’t think too hard about it, it’s your TV, just say yes and get on with it”.

Wild stuff! And I guarantee it gets worse before it gets better. We need high quality FOSS hardware badly, I really hope we see that start to take off in a bigger way. I’m not super optimistic though, hardware being just a lot harder to iterate on.