Short of suing me for it (after finding out who I am and making sure I own the games), how would they do that for non-DRM games whose installer lives on my hard drive and that I can install whenever I want, wherever I want?

Is the “everything is a rental and you use it on sufferance until we say so” bullshit so ingrained now that people are no longer able to conceive of other ways for things to work?

Was going to post this as well. Just replayed it again, never gets old!

Nice try, Guybrush!

While I’m not entirely sure wat it actually means, the message you get on that site right now might be the reason (some kind of experiment gone wrong artificially inflating the numbers):

I was creating an implementation for the activity pub instance service transfer, but it seems to have spread far. We are very sorry to those who have experienced inconvenience.

All temporarily used data has been removed and all data has been removed. The figures in the data will soon converge to zero.

I trawled unintentionally.

99% Invisible - An excellent design/architecture podcast

20k Hz (“twenty thousand hertz”) - great show about the audio that pervades our daily lives, from notification sounds to movie special effects, passing through game sounds, sound history,etc.

Imaginary Worlds - in their own words, “ a podcast about science fiction, fantasy and other genres of speculative fiction”.

All three are done by professionals in their respective fields, exceedingly well researched, and with superb production values.

Still, El Niño happens cyclically every few years, and this dataset spans decades. There are no other years in there similar to 2023….

This takes many forms. A recurrent one is for the take place right out of college (or while still in it!), taking advantage of the naïveté of those just entering the job market, and often as a precondition to access any kind of paid job some months later. The employer gets free qualified labor, the intern eat lots of ramen… families put up with it as a natural extension of paying for college, for a few more months… it’s exploitation pure and simple.

A “joke” I’ve heard several times over the years (not recently, though) summarizes the level of assholery that’s going on (warning: some may find this offensive)

This. Inform was the language/platform developed back in the day to author/interpret Z-code, the basis for Infocom’s text adventures. It went beyond just that in more recent versions, but it is designed from the ground up for text adventure creation.

You, you can add that list. Motherfuckers will let you type a password as long as you wish, only to internally truncate it. Was driving me crazy until I tried to log in on the mobile app, where it does prevent you to type more characters…

That’s fine: I wasn’t young back then either 😛

I had one for the PS2, if memory serves, that sucked balls so hard it is a clear contender for Worst Game I’ve ever played (and I’ve been playing for over 40 years, now…)

Seem like one of the shitttiest ideas out there, done just for the sake of novelty. If you’re lucky you’ll get creases and bad touch responsiveness. If you’re not, it is the most obvious point of failure due to mechanical stress. I could perhaps get behind “rollable” screens or the like (no hard crease), if they prove reliable.

Edit: spelling

Joining would be neat but… how?

I’ve used thunderbird pretty much from the start, for the last 20 years or so. The UI was looking a bit dated, lately, so I’m really looking forward to this. The next thing we need is better performance (I may suffer more than most as I have literally hundreds of thousands of messages and dozens of folders on the imap server). Fingers crossed!

I think you touched on the main aspects where things are different. Although, yes, there are many cultural differences across Europe as well (and I see that as a strength) they don’t run as deep. I would add my worry about their treatment of the Kurd minority. To be fair, however, things do change over the years, and there are a couple more countries that have turned for the worse, IMO.

Huge democratic deficit and do they really follow European customs and values?

Apparently his price is for the EU to allow Turkey to join…

I know this isn’t popular nor what most people would agree on, but to me retro is pretty much synonym with 8 bits (maybe some early 16bit) and the arcades that were around at the time. May have to do with me being old, but I think it is more because I felt a shift in look & feel, from sprites, pixel art, side scrolling, moving room to room, etc. to a more “modern” feel, with 3d models, etc. of course now we have a bajillion more polygons, shaders, ray tracing, but it is just a change in degree of the same thing.

Of course you still get games nowadays that look retro, but it is done out of artistic choice, not necessity. The constraints of the old platforms led to truly inventive solutions.

Immediately I heard a squeaky “Let’s go!” and a “oh no!” in my head. Such a great game!

People are saying that using ChatGPT doesn’t give accurate information and fails to convey important concepts

I wish my students would care about the concepts and try to understand the answers instead of just blindly copying and pasting ill-fitting code (and then wondering why it only kinda works…).