Rock, Paper, Scissors was one I always thought would be great to put on a TV in a bar, and let it run and let people make bets on it.

My friends and I get drunk and do this with SaltyBet. It’s based on the freeware Mugen game engine, and uses community-made characters and levels. So you can be hanging out with friends, and suddenly Shaggy is fighting Optimus Prime. If I’m at a friend’s house and nobody else is using the TV for anything (usually sports), I’ll sometimes log into my Plex burner account, and load up MXC (the English dub of Takeshi’s Castle) for people to zone out with. It has absolutely zero plot, so people can tune in and out of it without missing anything.

Yeah, SSDs are one of the biggest innovations in computer speed in my memory. That, and actual good internet. I was raised with dial-up and HDDs, though I remember my dad coding (and playing things) with MS-DOS before I was old enough to understand it. I fully remember going to a game site and loading up a 2MB Adobe Flash game. I had time to go make a sandwich while it downloaded.

I had lots of games individually bookmarked, because it saved a lot of time compared to waiting like 30 seconds for each page to load. If I only bookmarked the site’s landing page, I would have to wait for the welcome page to load, then the Games section to load, then the first page of the Action Games genre to load, then the second page of the Action Games section to load, before I could finally get to my game. Even skipping those four or five pages and going directly to the game page could easily save a solid 2-3 minutes of waiting.

OH NO brother they're RAFFLING IT!? hahahaha that's fucked

I’m actually glad to see it. A raffle is one of the only realistic ways to deter scalpers while still leaving the console eventually accessible to people who actually want to play on it. Fuck scalpers; anything that hurts them is a win in my book.

Yeah, this actually looks similar to the early concept sketches that Nomura cooked up. Back before Disney noticed he was trying to put a chainsaw-wielding character next to Donald and Goofy, and told him to chill out.

The original concept was that the keyblade was going to be an end-game weapon that you worked towards, while the primary weapon was going to be a chainsaw. Then Disney went “hey-… Uhh… We noticed you’re going to put a chainsaw-wielding 12 year old next to Donald and Goofy. Maybe fucking don’t do that?? Take it down like two notches.” So Nomura pivoted and just gave Sora the keyblade right at the start of the game.

The two states that are most conveniently located for sending people to space, because they’re closest to the equator, have access to deep water barges for large shipments, and have relatively mild weather for clear launches. Plus, congress had a large say in NASA’s decisions, and Texas had a lot of influential politicians at the time. You think NASA headquartered there because they liked the politics? Clown take.

I’m reminded of the “I Am Rich” app. The app cost (IIRC) $1000, which was the price cap for the iOS App Store at the time.

And all it did was display a floating diamond on the screen. When you tapped the diamond, it displayed the text “I am rich, I deserve it, I am good, healthy, and successful.” That was it. That was the entire app. It was just a way for rich people to waste their money and show off to their other rich friends that they could afford it.

Looks like Castle Oblivion, which was a major plot point in several games. It has a very “Escher met Castlevania, then got puked on by Disney” vibe.

Was gonna say, that first cop who goes down at the start of the video is probably dead. Looks like he was hit and tried to crawl to cover, then passed out. And if he passed out that quickly from blood loss or internal damage, he’s probably dead unless he got to a hospital ASAP. And judging by how long the standoff went, he probably didn’t make it.

Either that, or he’s great at playing possum, and was just hoping that someone else would kill the shooter. Because even if his vest ate the first bullet that took him down, he likely couldn’t draw and fire before the shooter (who was right next to him) would have time to get off a shot of his own.

I hope it was the latter, but it was likely the former.

It’s also a fundamentally different user experience. Sure you could load SteamOS onto a machine you built. But the point is that this targets the couch players, instead of the desktop players. And very few PC players will build a new PC just for their couch.

I love my Steam Deck, because it has caused my wife’s complaints about gaming to dry up almost completely. When I’m at my computer desk, she can’t snuggle with me. But by moving to the couch, we can snuggle while I play. Her complaints weren’t really about my gaming; they were about my physical unavailability. And the Steam Deck allows me to access the vast majority of my PC games on the couch, so we can both be happy.

As someone who had (and was) a work wife: I completely agree. Hell, I was in the wedding party (on her now-husband’s side) when my work wife got married.

Yeah, it’s also worth noting that “wealth tax” is the compromise. It’s the starting point for a good faith negotiation, which works within the bounds of the current systems. Because the alternative is “storm the compounds. We’d only need to livestream a mob eating like a dozen of the richest before the rest get the message and fall in line.”

My parents are reversed, with my mom tempering my dad’s conservatism. But it’s the same basic idea. My mom and I will be discussing whatever Government Atrocity of the Week^TM^ is making the news cycle, and my dad will basically go “good, I hope it sucks for {victim}. If they don’t like it, they can leave.”

Gee, and you wonder why I don’t ever want to hang out…

Yeah, I’m hoping we see game devs actually focus on optimization again. Early game consoles forced devs to really focus on things like memory usage, pixel map storage, texture sizes, etc… Super Mario Bros reused pixel maps for clouds in the background and bushes in the foreground, and simply changed the colors.

Hell, the second gen Pokémon games actually pioneered brand new data compression methods, to the point that the devs managed to fit the entire first gen region in as a post-game Easter egg. So they managed to compress the entire first and second regions into a small enough space to fit both regions on a similarly sized card as the first game alone. They literally fit two games into a card that was only originally expected to hold one. It originally started because one dev was focused on eking out small performance improvements, by compressing the game code and assets more efficiently. And eventually they got it so well optimized that they realized they could fit the entire Kanto region on the game card too. And so they rebuilt the entire Kanto region and added a secret superboss at the end. All for an Easter egg that most casual players would never see, because reaching Kanto required completing the Johto Pokédex.

The first Crash Bandicoot game brought major innovations to classic game model design, because the character didn’t have a “skeleton” in the traditional sense. They wanted the character to be cartoony, and be able to squish or flex as he interacted with the environment. If he gets rolled over by a boulder, they wanted him to pancake like a cartoon would. And traditional skeleton models (where the character model is built around a rigid skeleton, then simply follows along as the skeleton is posed) wouldn’t allow for the flexibility that they needed. So they pioneered new modeling techniques where they tracked each individual facet of the character’s model, to be able to fit within the PS1’s hardware limitations.

Early game devs had a very specific target. They couldn’t just send it out the door and let the hardware catch up later. Imagine moving an entire 5 bedroom household across the country. Modern game devs will look at the amount they need to move, and go “eh, we’ll just get a bigger truck.” There will be lots of wasted space, because they’re not even bothering to stack boxes or furniture in the truck. But early game devs were forced to make everything fit into a single 20’ box truck, so they focused on what was truly essential, and packed everything as efficiently as possible. And we’re quickly reaching the point that players won’t be able to afford a bigger truck, so game devs may actually start packing their games efficiently again.

While I want to agree because I expect I’d pass the test, this would further burden a system that is already wildly underfunded and understaffed. You think wait times are bad now? Imagine how bad it would be if every single driver had to retake their test, instead of just signing a form saying their info was up-to-date. Wait times for a simple license renewal would be measured in months instead of hours.

Weren’t there suspicions that Wish (a major Disney movie that flopped hard) was largely AI generated? I don’t think Disney has too many objections to AI use…

Exactly this. It’s the “Doctor requires you to be 20 minutes early to your appointment, then makes you wait in the checkup room for 45 minutes” scenario. You’re there to see the doctor, not the other way around. The doctor’s time is more valuable than yours is, and you’re the one who needs to see them. So they have no issues with making you wait if they’re busy. You aren’t the priority in this scenario.

Is it petty mind-game BS? Yes, absolutely. But it’s also very telling about where each country stands on the diplomatic field.

Wearing your shoes actually helps prevent this. Basically every sneaker collector has (or knows someone who has) a story like this. The soles get brittle over time, and will fall apart if they have sat for too long. But if you wear them, it helps avoid that from happening. The natural flexing when you walk helps the sole stay flexible. If it has sat for years, it will shatter into dust as soon as you try to flex it.

Sort of like how cast metal is more brittle than forged metal. Because when you cast metal, it hardens in random or crystalline molecular patterns. So there is very little actually holding the individual molecules together, because every join where two crystals meet is a potential fracture point. But forging it into shape with a hammer will create a more sturdy piece, because the hot hammering forces the molecules out of those natural crystal patterns. By moving the metal around, the molecules are able to form much stronger bonds with their neighbors.

Anyone who has accidentally shattered a cast iron skillet by dropping it knows what I’m talking about. People expect metal to bend, because they’re used to thinking of forged metals that have been mechanically shaped while it was hot. But cast iron will shatter like glass, because it is just poured into a mold and the molecules stay wherever they were when the molten metal cooled, even if they don’t have strong bonds with their neighbors.

They don’t just read license plates. They analyze faces/pets/distinctive clothing to ID people, scan nearby WiFi and Bluetooth signals to track devices, scan distinctive features of vehicles (dents, scratches, bumper stickers, etc) to track them even without a clear license plate, etc… Calling it a license plate reader vastly downplays their capabilities.

It’s like someone calling a fully automatic high-powered machine gun “a rabbit-hunting gun”. Sure it could be used to shoot rabbits, but that’s vastly understating the capabilities.

Or it did find evidence of vote manipulation, but not in the direction they have been screeching about. Every accusation is a confession, after all.

Being buried underground helps. Like unironically, as heat and cold waves continue to get worse, we may see people shifting towards underground homes. They’re already fairly common in parts of America (mostly in tornado alley where being buried helps protect against having the entire house being ripped off the foundation and thrown across town) and they are extremely energy efficient.

Your walls basically use geothermal to transfer heat directly into the earth. Like how being buried in sand at the beach will keep you nice and cool even when the beach is hot. Especially if you’re buried below the frost line, which makes winters easy too. So it’s not like it’s a new building technique that would need to be invented. It’s just that we’ll probably see more of it in places that didn’t traditionally have them.