If it makes you feel better/worse, the subscription is shared across multiple games. I was playing a bunch of Microsoft Jigsaw at one point (don’t ask), and while you could play as much as you’d like for free, the fact that they squeezed ads into it to extort you (or more likely, clueless older people) really cheapened the whole thing.

They had a lot of pretty photos which were probably not free, but come on, this is Microsoft, they have the money. I think this should’ve been bundled with Windows for free. I truly think a lot of people might even look back on it fondly the way they do with a lot of the older bundled-in games. We will take for granted how much the default option with any sort of technology around us has an impact on us as kids. Maybe not everyone, but not everyone loved pinball or inkball.

Actual textbook enshittification: what was once a space for a nice default thing to fall back on if you were bored and had their operating system has now become an “opportunity” to “generate more business.” Very sad. Computers are impossibly wonderful machines, everyone who has access to one should be able to enjoy a few basic things, packed in, for free - with no strings attached (looking at you candy crush).

I’m sure there’s a nice free or paid jigsaw game made with love out there that could satisfy that itch I felt that one week in 2020. Hm.

Edit: I have now redownloaded Microsoft Jigsaw and might just expand this comment into a full post/rant about the state of modern consumer software through the lens of Microsoft’s current casual games suite

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I saw a Phantom on the cover of PC Mag or MaximumPC in a shop in like 2011(?) and that was when I started thinking of computers as more than just machines for edutainment CDs. It was a eureka moment. Computers. Not just what’s happening inside but the outside as well. Cool computers.

(Don’t get me wrong, I think society would be in a better place right now if we were still making quality edutainment CDs. Those games were made with love and I want to give everyone who worked at DK Multimedia a hug.)

But yeah. It wasn’t just a box, it had this striking blue-on-white alien design and decorative LEDs. I’d lowkey love to find an original Phantom and restore it (and remove most of the non-structural metal and replace it with mesh). I remember cases becoming obsolete with old front panel IO but I think worrying about the front panel IO is obsolete in itself now. Unsurprisingly there are no classifieds for a Phantom or a PC inside a phantom in my country right now.

It was that specific case for me, from that specific company. Enshittification is even here for every memory of every magazine cover your remember.

Unlike these days when it looks like 3000$ will get you a GPU and a water block for that GPU, if you want to spread your budget as thick as possible.

Wasn’t the original Titan like 1000$ and considered a ludicrously expensive piece of luxury tech?

I see a lot of links here and there to this domain but I haven’t really read anything from there. I’m literally just scrolling through these comments to see if anyone has a comment like yours.

My impression was that it’s just a blog but you calling it “a reddit post” is also interesting. What’s with this site? It looks like a decent amount of people think these takes are interesting. I have to deal with a lot of management people who love AI buzzwords, so a whole blog just ripping into it really speaks to me.

I’ve been to both touristy and more “normal” parts of Turkey, and I was pretty shocked how few people understood English (or French, since you mention it). I actually mostly got by with a broken mix of English and Arabic loanwords I know they have in Turkey (or Turkish loanwords we have in Lebanese Arabic).

Drive down any road in Lebanon and you’ll see most signs, especially newer signs, are in English. When I was a kid it was mostly French and Arabic, now it’s mostly English and Arabic with some French sprinkled in. I’ve also been seeing a lot of municipal road and highway signs use “Beirut” instead of “Beyrouth”.

I think we still lean more heavily on French loanwords in our day to day Arabic, at least when not discussing something tech-related.

Also cinemas have consistently used the original English audio now, while we had a good 20% of these movies dubbed in French when I was a kid. A lot of companies’ business operations now are almost exclusively done in English (I’m talking about the documents - the conversations are naturally in Arabic).

I guess none of this is strictly true, there are areas and sectors (especially law) where French is still much more dominant. But people who are French-educated all eventually learn some English, the reverse (the category I’m in) is very rare. I still understand French, even rapid-fire French French, but speaking it or writing it has become so rare for me that it’s really atrophied over the past few years. My English is fine, because I’ve actually had to use it daily.

This is all just additional info, my point is just that Lebanon should probably be higher than Turkey on the list. Turkey has a massive domestic media machine, business is done in Turkish there, I’m pretty sure their schools teach everything in Turkish instead of having some subjects only done in foreign languages like we do. So just based on what I know in these two countries, the placements seem off, and it makes me question what else is going on with the data.

I wonder what the methodology is. There’s no way Turkey is higher than Lebanon unless the metric is something specific that we have terrible data coverage for (which is very likely)

A lot of complaints around release were that the game wasn’t as complex as Oblivion or Morrowind, to the point that it was a disappointment for more hardcore players.

I once read a comment on the old site about how Skyrim’s combat is like mashing WWE action figures together.

I completely agree but I don’t think that’s a weakness at all. Maybe when it released, the game was seen as a grand RPG by more casual people and as a watered down Oblivion by older ES players.

But I think by looking at it not through the lens of a grand RPG, but as a familiar, comforting brain-off experience, it really shines. It really gave us the most it could for how low effort it is to play, and I mean that in a good way.

I remember getting recommended a YouTube video (by the algorithm) called something like “why do we still like Skyrim” and I thought the video was very disappointing. And I think the video’s thesis was about the same as mine in this comment. I wanted it to be something like this:

I associate the game with a long tradition of RPGs that I wasn’t around for, as one of the last great games we got before the priorities of the industry shifted again. The graphics didn’t need to be perfect, the comically small number of VAs didn’t need AI bullshit, the straightforward story lines don’t need to be groundbreaking. The music and atmosphere though are immaculate. It’s a game with a ton of flaws, even some jank that is endearing in hindsight. It just works!

Throw on the modding aspect and you have a very “pure” PC gaming experience. This is exactly what I want from a game, something that’s good enough to just be fun to run around aimlessly in, without feeling like I need a podcast to play in the background, that I can just lose hours in.

I’m playing a much higher effort game now. Workers and Resources Soviet Republic makes the Cities Skylines 2 look like drawing stick figure houses. WRSR is absurdly complex and is super engrossing when you’re in it, if you’re wired to enjoy these types of games. However, I need to be mentally ready to jump in.

With Skyrim I just launched it when I was bored, and I was less bored after.

I insist: Skyrim’s simplicity is what made it work.

You see, when football is mentioned online, the collective intelligence of any comment section is cut by at least 90%. This stacks with another 90% if it’s women’s football or any token LGBT acknowledgement in football. The joke is Muslim Bad.

Which is a shame. I used to make fun of le sportsball amirite until it clicked that there was immense entertainment value in these matches, which could be super tense and exciting even when an individual match doesn’t have super high stakes. There’s storylines with each of the players and managers, there’s a lot of diverging personalities among them and they all handle the same game in their own way. And unlike scripted shows, when something unexpected happens it is so much more interesting. Like the story is real in a way that scripted entertainment isn’t.

I thought it was another one of those meme languages at first.

My reading is that it’s not necessarily a problem with the platforms but society at large.

One example you mentioned: yes, html5 games (and just downloadable itch/steam games) exist and they fill the gap left by Flash games from a gameplay perspective maybe.

But the mainstream appeal of Flash games and animations was different to what we have now. The social phenomenon of people randomly hacking together terrible flash games isn’t the same as the current tiny indie game phenomenon. I feel like the old ones were a bigger piece of the average person’s internet usage than the new one (the average person’s internet usage being 5% LLM 5% web 5% email 25% gaming 30% video and 30% doomscrolling or something like that idk)

I’m struggling to put into words what I mean by this, my comment sounds really vague when I reread it. The specific creative outlet that Flash gave people is not equivalent to what we have now, and the specific entertainment experience of browsing and playing Flash games is different from the experience of scrolling through itch. Am I making more sense?

Like of course the different technologies are different, but it’s where it fits into our lives that it’s really different imo. Hell, we could say this about Flash itself for the last few years before it was discontinued. Just the two thoughts of Newgrounds in 2006 vs Newgrounds in 2016 and how they fit into the internet ecosystem and internet culture are enough to see the difference.

I wonder if there’s a more efficient way to have things sync in blocks or something. I honestly understand very little about server architecture, much less decentralized social network architecture. Maybe having a smaller number of “centralized” (community-run, redundant, independent) nodes distributing blocks of federated data to take load off the actual instance servers that would only need to upload bulk data to fewer places?

Maybe this isn’t very different from how it already operates. Fuck if I know.

Good lord this makes my blood boil. I’m still in awe of the support being shown by ordinary people around the world these last few months but I don’t think I’ll ever grasp how much hatred is required to keep the machine running.

To think that if history went differently I could just get on a cab and visit the Holy Land like my grandmother did as a kid. Instead I get to watch it get bombed to bits in real time with the excuse that there wasn’t anyone there and if there were any they’re terrorists.

I understand that the subject of the OP is community space specifically for shedding judgement and all that, but

That URL is very suspect, even knowing that not all anime is made for kids

Which is partially felt more because and is exacerbated by the fact that companies and their shareholders feel entitled to capture every drop of money you have, to the point that buying a pizza comes with the option to spread the cost over four months just in case there’s 10$ from a person that they could only capture by offering the option.

I live half a planet away from America and even I’ve seen it. Disgusting.

Remember when we looked at phone apps that cost more than .99 and thought the developers were greedy?

If you still think the hardware is pretty good, you haven’t been using their newer hardware.

I think I wrote a comment about this recently, but their newest mouse with a layout I like (G604) was made with terrible soft rubber that is practically designed to disintegrate with use. All their mouse switches are also short life crappy switches that stop working relatively quickly.

Soldering new switches into the G604 is an absolute PITA because it was designed by people who didn’t care for repair. Still doable, just annoying. I just wish the rubber was replaced with the grippy hard textured plastic they used a few years earlier.

At least you only need to use the software at first when you’re setting things up.

Suddenly thinking about how the race to sustainably create more soil will probably be a theme for scientific research in the near future.

Desertification is scary!

It’s kind of nice how everyone is in on the joke now? Like I think if you told the average person 15 years ago that a lot of history “documentaries” are racially motivated drivel you’d get a funny reaction.

I think I could show this to my (quite conservative) parents and get a good chuckle out of them now.

Granted I’m from the Middle East and the racist theories we have here have some of the roles swapped around. We don’t have 24 hour electricity but the average person genuinely believes we are the god-chosen enlightened people who are only held back by some combination of hubris, western empire, and “western empire” (this one should have a bunch of parentheses around it, several sets, I don’t want to get caught in some spam filter).