Over the years, I’ve become one to keep my media use as legit as possible. No judgement on anyone who doesn’t, but for a variety of reasons I have chosen to.

For retro games, that means my process is:

• Evercade - I’m a huge fan of the Evercade ecosystem and if a game is available there I will play it there first.
• NSO - For games not available on Evercade, my next stop will be Switch Online.
• Collections - If a game isn’t available on NSO, I’ll see if it’s available via a collection. Think Castlevania Collections, Arcade Archives, Namco Museums, etc. For these I’ll typically check reviews before picking it up and make sure the games play well as that’s not always a guarantee.
• Unlicensed emulation - Only at that point will I fire up a game on my raspberry pi.

Though honestly I can’t really be bothered to tinker with shit as much anymore these days, so often (but not always) by the time I arrive at unlicensed emulation as the solution I’ll just decide to play something else instead.

Continuing to work my way through the Duke Nukem 1+2 Remasters on Evercade. So much love went into these its ridiculous.

I think regardless of that deal, they were already on the debt-go-round for long enough it would’ve caught up to them eventually. I can’t imagine this was gonna be “one last job then we go clean.” The market would continue to demand more and faster growth until they hit the wall one way or the other.

Seriously. I realize people have Feelings about DRM and always-online stuff, but this is an article about a game that was never especially popular or active entering maintenance mode after a couple of years.

They aren’t shutting it down, they aren’t making it unplayable (though of course either of those things could happen at any time etc etc) - they just are no longer producing content for a game almost no one is playing anymore anyway.

I tend to agree here. But it has been interesting watching the proliferation of streaming services and trying to figure out what’s gonna happen next.

Like Netflix was a big first-mover, then everyone realized they could keep more money if they built their own streaming service, then everyone realized that building and running a streaming service is expensive and complicated, then everyone had to get onto the Original Content treadmill to try to keep folks subscribed which has led to somehow even more commodification of art, and now that running at a loss and pouring cash into original content to bump up numbers has gotten too expensive some services are pricing themselves out of the market.

I’m fascinated to see what the next big move is for these businesses. With more and more people starting to choose month to month which one or two services to subscribe to rather than keeping them all, I wonder if we’re gonna continue seeing the return of ad-supported plans or some services only offering yearly contracts or what the next move will be in pursuit of endless growth.

I guess my reaction is partially because I never see articles like this for my other hobbies and while I don’t see articles like this about video games often, I do see comments around the internet about this fairly regularly.

I don’t hear people saying “playing board games helps me with strategizing” or “playing guitar has really improved my hand-eye coordination and playing in a band has helped my ability to cooperate with others.”

Maybe that’s because gamers tend to feel more defensive about the hobby as it has historically been disparaged. People are more likely to picture “CoD yelling person” when they hear you play video games than they are to picture “wonderwall at parties person” when they hear you play guitar.

But, on the other hand, D&D players and Marvel nerds seem to have largely moved on from “but it’s actually really cool and fun and not weird at all.” Maybe video game players should consider doing so as well.

I dunno, ‘game company commissions study to ask gamers to self-report about how gaming isn’t a waste of their time’?

I’m in my mid 30s and have played video games my whole life. I also participate in some gaming communities online and my real-life friends are about 50/50 with regards to gaming. And if asked, yeah, I would probably self report that video games have had a positive impact on my life.

But have they? I’m not qualified to say. I don’t have any actual data in front of me. I do know playing video games often makes me feel good, but I can say that about lots of unhealthy habits.

Was pumping 150 hours into Tears of the Kingdom better for me than the couple weeks of workouts I skipped? Is it good that I drank more beer during that time than I normally would have?

Would my life have been more or less improved if, instead of talking about video games online I had been practicing guitar and finding an open mic night to play at?

Would it have been better for my mental health and hand-eye coordination instead of playing Elden Ring to have gone to Home Depot, bought some wood, and built the shelves I’ve been putting off building in the basement to ease some of our storage issues?

If video games really were an unqualified good, would “my loser boyfriend stays up all night yelling into his headset about Overwatch/CoD/Fifa/Fortnite” be such a common stereotype?

I’m not suggesting video games are bad (or even that the sometimes-unhealthy way I engage with them is bad), but I am suggesting that “gamers say gaming is good for them, actually” does not provide useful data for analysis or discussion.

The title of this post is at best misleading and at worst simply wrong. From the source that OP linked in a couple other comments here (emphasis mine throughout):

Since the start of July, the app’s downloads have fallen by almost 30% compared to the preceding two months, according to data from app performance tracker Apptopia. … Twitter has gained usually 15 million to 30 million users a month since 2011, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It gained just 10 million users between August and September of this year. … Visits to the web version of X, which still operates as twitter.com, fell since the start of the year, with global web traffic down 10% in August and US traffic down 15%, compared to a year ago, according to an analysis by Similarweb. … So far in September, daily users are down to 249 million, a roughly 2% decrease… Monthly users are down by about the same percentage, now at 393 million users from 398 million in July.

That is emphatically not “loses over 30% of users in two months.” That is, though, “signs of slowing growth” and “signs of the most recent round of dramatic announcements wearing off and folks moving on with their lives” which is why Musk is doing his best to get back into the news cycle.

Maybe OP should go ahead and update the post with a more accurate title to avoid spreading misinformation.

Right? I’d never heard of either of these games before, but after playing the Goodboy demo and watching some YouTube videos of Witch n Wiz, I’m pretty excited for this cart.

Yeah, it’s not for everyone a lot of folks prefer emulation on steam decks, anbernics, retroids, pis, etc.

The things that drew me to Evercade are:

• Licensed emulation. Lots of folks don’t care about this, but I’m happy to pay for my media when I can. In cases of indie/homebrew releases, devs get paid which is great. In cases of retro releases, rightsholders get paid which is sometimes just someone with a piece of paper saying they own a particular IP. Which is maybe less important than paying the people who directly made a thing, but in the way our society is structured, imo it’s also important to pay people willing to keep something commercially available as long as they aren’t trying to gouge you.
• Curated library. I mean, part of this is just because not everyone will license to Blaze so they need to pick and choose. But back in college when my roommates and I built a mame machine, or later when I was emulating on a raspberry pi. I would mostly play the same handful of games over and over again. I love that I hadn’t heard of like 70% of the Evercade library and hadn’t played like 80% of games in the library until they came out on carts. So much discovery. I also love the fact that not all the games are all-time greats - average and below average games deserve a chance to be preserved, played, and loved as well.
• The community. I probably should have listed this first because I’m not sure if I would have gotten as into Evercade if it weren’t for the community. The folks in the discord are great. Lots of really chill and knowledgeable folks to chat games with, a few colorful characters to keep things interesting, and Blaze themselves are pretty active and transparent in the chat which is really great to see. There’s a weekly games challenge (often but not always high score related) that one of the moderators runs that has lots of us playing the same games at the same time which is always fun.

Anyway, definitely no judgement for you wanting to enjoy games the way you want - that you are enjoying them at all is the important part. Just wanted to share a little bit about how Evercade works for me for folks who may be curious.

It’s always interesting when someone is like “I wish I could go back to using smaller sites/forums or try some more open/ethical platforms, but I can’t because all of my family are on Facebook.”

Remember just 20 years ago when most of your family wasn’t anywhere on the internet and that was just fine? I recognize that I’m saying this as a semi-isolated weirdo on some relatively obscure corner of the Internet, but it’s okay to not be in constant passive contact with everyone you’ve ever met. Yeah it’s more work to keep in touch with the folks you actually care about if you can’t do so passively via Facebook, but that’s how it always was. Email exists, texts and phone calls exist, meeting up exists.

If there are people you care about you can still keep in touch with them without using the same social media platform as them. Just like in the 90s you didn’t need to read rec.models.railroad to keep in touch with your model train loving uncle.

I get that these connections (whatever one might say of their quality or tangibility if the interaction is just “look at picture, press like button”) are important to people and one of the positives of platforms like Facebook, but if you’re going to bemoan not being able to seek alternatives solely because the entire world isn’t switching with you, it’s important to realize that is a choice and not a requirement.

DMVs are sometimes where states will dump troublesome or underperforming employees they can’t outright fire.

On the other end, the DMV is one of the places where employees have a job interacting with the public for sometimes-complex transactions. And, generally speaking, the public is dumb, unpleasant, and unprepared. Especially when dealing with low-level government beaurocrats who are telling them something they don’t want to hear.

I gave away my NES, 3DS, Dreamcast, N64, and all related games and peripherals a few years ago cause they were taking up too much room for stuff I barely ever used.

I’ve already played these games on (3)DS back in 2013 or so, so I agree it’s the best way to play em. But I just don’t have the time, money, or space to be a retro game collector (outside of Evercade) anymore so I’ll make do with playing these games on Switch.

I’m playing through the Switch re-releases now and they’re great. The mapping controls leave a lot to be desired versus the DS originals, but it was never gonna be as good as that magic.

Yeah, I like that. After being able to recognize and validate claims, being able to verify the validity (at least logically if not factually) of any conclusions drawn from those claims seems like a good next step.

I dunno. For someone just starting to want to think critically during discussions of when reading things, asking them to get serious in the academic pursuit of logic and argument theory might not be the way. For one, it’s probably just asking for them to get stalled in the sort of dunning kruger zone of identifying fallacies and stopping there.

Especially when such behavior is already endemic to the internet and many platforms have feedback loops designed to reward this behavior. Just dunk on 'em and move on - watch the upvotes and retweets roll in.

I definitely don’t want discourage OP from learning anything, but I do want to be careful in what direction we point a beginner.

I think maybe learning to find good sources of information and verify claims might be a better first step. That doesn’t give OP any shortcuts I’m discussions, which is good. Then they may begin to notice different patterns or forms of discussion and at that point they can start to classify them and learn about them if they see fit.

Agreed. OP should be working on critical thinking skills in general and not specifically focusing on logical fallacies.

Logical fallacies and argumentation theory in general certainly have their place. But unless you’re taking part in a debate club or otherwise getting really really deep into these topics, they may do you more harm than good in thinking critically and having productive discussions.

The reddit (and, previously, slashdot) obsession with logical fallacies has been almost entirely as a way to prevent critical thinking and end discussion rather than promoting either.

When you sign up [for Mastodon], you join a server (called an “instance”), which resembles a forum and is based around a shared interest.

What an incredibly ineffective and possibly outright misleading way to describe that.

I have no illusions that if Facebook and Google had started with proprietary and non-interoperable chat systems that XMPP would be flourishing today. I think that, by and large, we’d be in the same place with it.

People chatting from XMPP to Facebook to chat with folks probably by and large would’ve gotten Facebook accounts for the non-chat functionality that was never interoperable and not part of real time chat communication. Think groups and events.

If you only interacted with Facebook people over XMPP, you were locked out of a huge portion of functionality unless you signed up for Facebook even while XMPP worked.

A lot of people are focused on “extend” in the vein of Facebook and Google playing fast and loose with the XMPP spec and implementation until the whole ecosystem got fucked and then walking away. Which is a real danger. I mean, in a lot of ways Mastodon itself has already proven that. How much fedi drama over the years has been caused by Masoton unilaterally deciding something that other AP microblogging platforms just needed to deal with? Lots of people have beef with Eugen for a reason.

But even more insidious than that will be luring people onto Threads for ancillary benefits and then cutting off that large swath of the fediverse after the drain is complete. Then we would definitely not “end up exactly where we are now.”

Imagine in 3 years. “Ohh threads supports a live chat thread feature but those threads don’t federate. My friends are gonna do one while they all watch the season finale of Marvel Bullshit Infinity. Guess I could sign up for Threads to take part. Hmm I can still follow all my friends in the broader fediverse from here, I can just make this my primary account. Scratch that I’ll make this my only account. Oh, what Threads is turning off federation? Oops sorry everyone else I have no way to reach you anymore, maybe you can switch to threads?”

So my two theories are:

• This was a rushed launch to capitalize on the latest Twitter shit show and the home timeline wasn’t done yet.
• They didn’t want people to log into Threads and see nothing if none of their other follows have activated yet, so instead they force you to see everything so you don’t run out of content and disengage.

Either way I’d expect to see it soon.