I don’t have a full picture idea yet, but I would probably upload art/ projects/ WIPs. I also was considering adding writings, but I’m not sure if there would be enough there to have a section for writings.

I definitely don’t have as much to share as others, but I would like to see the Internet become a less centralized space.

An author I follow on Bluesky has been talking about neocities a lot and it seems pretty silly and fun. You probably need to be signed in to view this, but you can see her talk about the process here.

As I have gotten more and more exhausted with modern social media, I have contemplated building my own simple website (think neocities), but have been hesitant to put much of myself out as I do not want to feed the AI slop machines.

Nepenthes is encouraging since I could see it being able to protect text in a way “glazing” (ie Nightshade) cannot.

Hopefully AI companies cannot sidestep this as easily as ROBOTS.txt…

As disappointed as I am with the name Switch 2 being so plain and ordinary versus their previous sequel consoles (Super NES, Gameboy Advance, Wii U); with the console being so similar to the Switch (1), I think they’d have another Wii U situation on their hands if they did have a more clever name.

If someone told me this was a mid-cycle refresh, I’d probably believe them; but maybe the official launch reveals will change my mind…

That’s a pretty big question, with a couple of different interpretations. If you are asking how I handle thinking about the passage of time, the easiest answer is to make it tomorrow’s problem. This is probably not the healthiest answer; but it doesn’t pay to stress over inevitabilities, so I just do my best to put them out of my mind.

If you are asking the best way to utilize your time, my recommendation is to start focusing on yourself immediately. It’s very easy to prioritize work by staying late or overworking yourself to make your bosses happy, but no amount of overwork will ever satiate your company; it will only serve to drain the life from your body. It’s very important to set firm boundaries with your job. I, personally, will not even look at my work phone or computer the minute I leave the office (on Mon-WFH days) and have a hard stop every day at 5PM unless agreed upon well in advance. You lose so much time and energy to your job that just standing firm on your boundaries can be a huge QoL boost.

Please also do your best to cultivate a creative outlet as a hobby. A lot of people don’t think they are/can be creative, but anyone can be creative if they find the right outlet. It could be art, sewing, crochet, music, writing, or even creative programming. The important thing is to find a way to explore your feelings and do something productive with them. In my experience, I am often the most vivacious are when I am making art in one form or another; I highly recommend it.

While the fact that Twitter is run by a flagrant right-wing fascist who would do anything to help other major right-wing fascists is nothing new, I did think this was an interesting look at the state of social media.

The idea that you can never own your own account (and likely, by extension, anything you post on said account) really drives home the point that the Internet as it is now is basically wholly owned by a handful of corporations.

I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to reach the point of everyone making their own silly little sites again. It seems like social media is now required to drive views, so the artists who need views for sales will always need to be on social media.

Luckily, decentralized social media is on the rise. Lemmy, while still comparatively small, has a fairly active user base; and while Mastodon has not (and likely will not) ever be mainstream, even Bluesky is technically decentralized as well (I think).

Having said all that, I would very much like to see people making their own sites just for things they enjoy. It’s surprisingly not that hard to do as long as you don’t need it very polished.

It will certainly be interesting to see how this film turns out given the oft-cited point that Link does not traditionally speak during the games (though I think he did in the CD-i games).

It’s also worth noting that video game based movies rarely do well. I’m not sure what the general consensus was on the Illumination Mario movie, so maybe people are more optimistic for this movie if they liked that one. Personally, I didn’t love the Mario movie, so I’m still a little uncertain of the potential quality of this movie.

I certainly hope this movie does well, though. Then we can finally get the Chibi-Robo movie we’ve all been waiting for.

I’ve never been one to play competitive online games since I have the hand/ eye coordination of a house plant, so I can’t weigh in on the advantages of blocking controllers that are “unfair”; but as someone who hated button mashing “A” in Animal Crossing, I can say that custom controllers can definitely have a place with a console.

In my opinion, this feels like Microsoft simply wanted more licensing money and is doing it under the guise of fair online play. It reminds me of Apple locking faster charging and data transfer on USB-C to their own proprietary USB cables.

Hopefully this does not negatively affect too many people.

Anecdotally, I find I get better discussions on posts if I include quotes from the article I find particularly relevant or poignant. I also like to comment my own feelings on the article in the comments as well. I don’t think the issue was the title of the article necessarily.

In this case, what sections did you wish people were discussing? To me, the section about the exclusives did not feel particularly engaging since the number of exclusives mentioned was actually pretty high since most games on a console trend to be third party.

If there is an argument being made you would like to highlight, I would certainly be interested in seeing it.

I think we all knew this was coming when Nintendo discontinued being able to purchase 3DS and Wii U games on the eShop, but it is still very sad to hear.

Many 3DS and Wii U games have been ported to the Switch over the years, but there will be several games that will likely never get ported because they were incremental series games. Why would they port Super Smash Bros Wii U when they already released Super Smash Bros Ultimate?

A lot of people will probably not care much being on the newest console, with the newest games, but it is truly sad to know that you will never be able to revisit these games again in a few years when you’re feeling nostalgic, or if you just like the old version better.

I can only hope that homebrewers figure out how to spoof their own servers to keep online functionally for these old games.

The interesting thing about this to me is it sounds like HYENAS was already very far along (being in an open beta quite recently).

I wonder if SEGA is giving it the Batgirl treatment, where they cancel it just for a tax write-off; or if it had serious structural issues that would have actually been very costly to rectify.

I’m glad to see SAG is standing up to the video game industry, which is notorious for mistreating its workers.

Hopefully, after seeing the damage from the WGA/ SAG Hollywood strike, the video game studios will take this threat seriously and negotiate in good faith enough to not warrant another strike.

I also hope that SAG standing up for themselves may inspire other game development employees to unionize and stand up for themselves as well.

This is quite surprising to me as Kamiya co-founded Platinum Games, and I always considered it to be largely under his influence creatively.

I have no idea why he would leave the studio that was already largely under his control. Based on the quote at the end:

I have a sneaking suspicion he’ll pop up soon somewhere else, perhaps funded by a Chinese company.

I have to wonder if he wanted to sell Platinum Games to Tencent some time back when they were having financial troubles but he wasn’t allowed to, so he left on his own to have more financial stability for his games.

Platinum Games has a problem of putting out solid games but rarely owning the IP themselves, so by leaving Platinum, I guess Kamiya is really only leaving Wonderful 101 behind (IP wise), and I’m not sure how likely he was to revisit that anyways. (Though Platinum did jump through a few hoops to secure the rights to it, so who knows?)

This move is quite perplexing to me, honestly.

That reminds me of when the GTA remaster collection came out and Rockstar had to delist the original (and I think they might have started C&D’ing some of the mod developers too).

At the end of the day, a direct port (or a cheap AI upscale in GTA’s case) does not have a lot of value add. This is especially the case when classic consoles (and the Nintendo Switch) can be emulated at an even higher resolution than native.

I understand why developers don’t want to actually remaster the game (or remake it, if they want to get really intense). It’s a lot more resource intensive, and it’s not a good guarantee of return on investment. Plus, most people who would buy a remaster would probably buy a straight port, too; so there’s really no financial incentive.

But having said all that, I simply don’t have much interest in playing direct ports. As far as I can tell, they’re really only useful if you don’t feel like doing the requisite tinkering to get an emulator working; but as you said, you’d probably still have better results on the emulator if you’re willing to put in the work.

I was able to track down the article (Garbage Day URL, Archive.today URL).

The portion I was referring to was:

Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.

Personally I was not contributing much there; but I suspect the users they offended most were the power users, which is where most of the content comes from.

The Reddit blackout had more of an effect than it appears. I saw an article a couple of weeks ago that showed commenting and posting was down ~50% since the blackouts; and I can safely say I haven’t gone back to Reddit since, and I’m sure others have made similar choices as well.

People can have trouble “voting with their wallets,” but I genuinely believe it is possible and does have an effect. Hopefully people do not forget the choices Unity has made here; but even if they do, Godot has already gotten a significant boost from this catastrophe.

That’s actually a very good point, especially with the number of EULAs that we encounter on such a regular basis. How hard would it be for Adobe to slip a clause in about royalties without us noticing?

Is there even a stated reason for this change beyond just simple greed? To my knowledge they aren’t maintaining any servers or other cost centers for the games developed on Unity.

As you said, hopefully there’s still enough of a negative reaction to this that it doesn’t take hold elsewhere.

I may be misunderstanding their new fees, but this still feels like a major disincentive for using Unity. Even with revenue sharing instead of per-install fees, it is still being sprung on all the developers. Unity is now being upfront about not needing to use the newer Unity versions; but if there are engine bugs in the older versions, there is not much choice in if they have to update.

I would certainly think twice before choosing Unity at this point.

My understanding is that most games come with the full game data on the disk, though it’s a little more of a gamble if some will be left as a download on the Switch carts since they charge by cart size if I recall correctly.

Having said that, it would still be the unpatched game data; but that’s still more playable than a digital copy when the servers are no longer maintained.

It’s also worth noting people with bad internet speeds can prefer the disks since copying 50-150GB is a lot faster than downloading it from the internet for them.

I do find it a little interesting that Phil Spencer is ignoring the content of the leaks and instead just focusing on the fact the documents are out of date. I would imagine the contents of the leaks are likely still pretty close to accurate, even if plans have changed a little, as a result.

I also wonder if Xbox will use the reaction to the leaks to determine potential changes going forward (ie: reactions to the console being all digital, reactions to the next gen console processor, etc).

I fully agree that game preservation is not a priority for any gaming company. The playability of old games and not requiring paying again for a remaster/ release can only hurt their bottom line.

The good thing is that they don’t have to like preservation, or even support it, when there’s physical game disks. In 40 years if I have a copy of Breath of the Wild and a working Switch, I can still play it; but the same likely cannot be said of a digital copy.

The fact that companies care so little for (or actively dislike) game preservation is the very reason physical games are so important.