Nintendo used to be a company that specialized in cards, although these days it’s more associated with carts. They made a very successful transition into gaming, but still make cards in Japan.

I can’t see Hasbro being as effective though. I’m sure Hasbro is just going to try to churn out shovelware that bears their IP so that they can monetize things they own.

“You can’t sue us for making opiods ‘too pleasurable’, say major drug manufacturers in response to addiction lawsuits.”

The reality is that it comes down to motive. In the case of the Sackler family, lawsuits showed that they were effectively trying to get people addicted to their opiods. They lied about them, claiming they weren’t addictive. They tried to push doctors to prescribe them for everything from sports injuries to arthritis, not just for ultra-serious pains like from cancer. They were rewarding doctors for prescribing them, even when it was obvious those doctors were just selling drugs to addicted patients. They especially liked to try to talk to doctors who were not pain specialists. Sales reps were trained in how to overcome objections from doctors, like saying “The delivery system is believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug”, even though they knew that wasn’t true. They gave doctors all-expenses paid junkets to Boca Raton, Florida to attend seminars on OxyContin.

If a developer ends up making a really good game that keeps you wanting more, that’s one thing. But, if you have internal messages from that developer talking about how they can hack dopamine releases and keep people coming back, that’s another thing. If internal messages are about the “whales” and how to get them to cough up the most money, that’s yet another one. If someone leaks internal memos where employees are laughing at idiots who are ruined after spending all their money on loot boxes, that’s even worse.

IMO, the developers who really need to be sued are the ones developing gambling machines. They seem ultra-optimized for addiction, and to extract as much possible cash from the victim. It’s amazing that that kind of thing is legal, but as long as it’s legal, it needs to be heavily regulated so that gamblers are actually having a good time, not that they’re simply being slowly drained of their blood.

That’s what we have now

Which, I think most people agree, sucks.

this would give them an option to target a different demographic

They already have that option. They could stream on cam sites dedicated to adult content if they wanted to do adult content. They don’t do that because they want to reach Twitch viewers not porn viewers. But, they know they get more attention from the Twitch viewers if they’re doing nearly-porn.

We don’t know because Twitch is owned by Amazon and they don’t give out the financial info of that subsidiary. It could well be that Amazon is subsidizing Twitch as a strategic move.

I don’t see how that would solve anything. That would just result in people streaming in the “normie” classification, but pushing the limits as far as they could go.

I wonder if this will be seen as being something like the “race card”. Oh, there he goes, pulling the “Trump card”.

Critically important in Montreal where the temperature in the winter can get to -20C pretty regularly, and summers can often hit +35C.

You also expose more walls to wear and tear from the elements, and some of those surfaces (like the exposed bottom floor of an apartment 20m up in the air) will be hard to do maintenance on.

I don’t know much about it, but I read something about epic paying for “minimums”, so it sounds like they pay a flat fee up to a certain number of “sales”, then pay per-unit (or at least pay more) beyond that. But, like you said, more “free” games claimed is more units shifted, so publishers will expect higher fees, even if it’s a flat fee.

The two new Deus Ex games were some of my favourites. I love stealth games and (aside from shitty boss battles that apparently they farmed out to an external contractor) the entire game is stealth-friendly.

I think you should grab the free games.

Epic still has to pay the publisher whenever they give away a game. So, every time you grab a free game, the publisher gets money and Epic loses money. Right now they’re losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

As long as you can limit yourself to only the free games, every free game you get causes Epic to lose money and gives money to some random publisher. I grab the free weekly game every week. I’ve never played any of them. But, if there’s a really good one I haven’t played, I might do that. The key thing is that each week I cost Epic some money.

Exactly. A blockchain is just a slow, inefficient, append-only distributed database. The only excuse for using one is if you lack a central authority, but in this case CCP has to be the central authority because everything in the DB only works with their game. So, just use a normal DB, it gives you everything the blockchain does in this case, but is much more efficient.

For a while it was a good way to get back in touch with people you’d lost contact with years ago. After that, it was still a good way to organize get-togethers. But yeah, the feed has been a shit-show pretty much since the beginning.

Simplify: Don’t use Facebook.

I haven’t used it in… maybe a decade. I don’t even remember the last time. I never used Instagram. I never used Facebook Messenger.

People are scared about what might happen if they stop, but nothing bad ever happened. I simply stopped seeing a constant stream of depressing bullshit.

Amazing that they couldn’t make something at least as good as Sea of Thieves 4 years after Sea of Thieves came out.

So, you’re unable to type with it? This kind of movement is no different from typing where you have to use the occasional word like “quick”, “active” or “zygote”.

Just an expert stickman… wait, is that right?

It underutilizes the pinky, and it’s not the home keys.

ESDF still lets you reach tab, caps lock, shift, ctrl and alt, but opens it up so your pinky can also use Q, A and Z. With WASD your pinky can only really hit the “big keys”. Everything else can just get shifted over by one. Plus, if you’re a touch typist your fingers are already good at finding the home keys so your ring finger is already used to being on “S”. That means if you have to stretch to hit a special key, it’s easier to get back to the right keys. Plus many keyboards have a nub on F and J so you can find them / verify you’re on the right keys by touch.

I am! She’s always amazed that when she leaps for the stick in my hand I somehow manage to move it out of the way and she sails right by.

If our main sensory organs were sound-based or feel-based, we’d probably have discovered a lot of things before planets and stars.

The things that took a while to discover on earth, or that aren’t yet fully explored, are largely because it’s hard to see them without getting very close, which can be hard.

Building a good telescope might have been hard, but with a telescope you can see things that are millions of km away. But, because of the earth’s curvature, you can’t see Antarctica until you’re practically next to Antarctica. You can’t see the bottom of the ocean until you travel to the bottom of the ocean, or at least until you scan it with sound waves which are then converted into something you can see.

Imagine an alien that developed in the water on a planet with sub-surface oceans with ice on top. No real value for eyes, so they’re sound / touch based. Picture what it would be like to try to explore the solar system. There’s a boundary layer at the top of their “atmosphere” (the top of the ocean) that’s solid (ice), beyond that there’s some non-liquid extremely sparse stuff, until some point where no sound travels at all and there’s nothing to touch.

I check the heft and balance of sticks I throw for my dog, not because I’m an expert stickmaster, but because it’s nice to know the weight and feel of something before I start swinging it around and throwing it.