My biggest issue with libraries is the limited selection, how much time it takes and the how inconvenient it is to find new books.

The most prolific readers I know use the library almost exclusively. Real book a week people don’t buy the books they read! They’d be broke!

A book a week? What am I going to do with the rest of my time?

185 books so far this year, no library card. e-books are a lot cheaper than physical books.

For me the biggest problem with libraries is the limited selection of books. As a kid, before e-readers were a thing, I was a member of 3 different libraries just to get access to enough new reading material. E-books are a blessing for those who like to read a lot.

I remember that at least I do not fuck up on a colossal scale like this.

There is always Thomas Midgley, who invented leaded gasoline and Freon (CFC).

I especially love it when they use the weight of an airplane as a comparison. “It’s as heavy as a Boeing 747”. Even if someone had an intuition about the weight of something that large, they would probably be wrong because aircraft are relatively light for their size, it helps when you need to fly. Everything in a plane is made to be as light as possible, so nothing on board of it would weigh as much as the non-aircraft equivalent you’d be familiar with.

Steamboat Willie goes out of copyright in 2024.

Why would this cause a lawsuit?

I’m playing Lies of P and it’s amazing. It’s been a long time since a game was able to draw me in like this.

There was no rule, but it was basically the only convenient way. Receiving e-mail on a phone was not at all common, typing a long URL on phone was a PITA and paying for stuff online was not something a lot of people were familiar with.

WIndows CE phones and the like were so niche there was no point in even developing apps specifically for them.

Also note that the above would usually only work in one country, if you wanted to sell internationally you’d have to make arrangements for a shortcode and RB-SMS for each country you wanted to sell in. Never mind the advertising campaigns. Apple taking care of that, with basically global reach and different kinds of payment methods without you having to worry about any of it was quite revolutionary.

30% seems quite a lot, no matter the platform,

I’ve been developing mobile apps since before the iPhone was a thing. I remember when the App Store was announced, including the 30% cut for Apple. There was a lot of excitement around the fact that developers could keep 70%.

Before app stores, this is how you distributed and charged for a mobile app: customers would send a text message with a keyword to a so called shortcode, depending on country this was a 4 or 5 digit phone number. For example, you would send ‘NAMEOFGAME’ to 12345. The user would then get a text message back with a link to download the game. The message they got back was a so called reverse-billing SMS (also known as premium SMS). This message would be billed to the customer, at a certain rate that you as the sender of the SMS could configure. This basically meant customers paid for games through their phone bill.

How this worked from the developer’s side:

• You generally didn’t own the short code, it was shared with many users, you had to pay a monthly fee for the use of that keyword. Companies who owned a ‘nice’ shortcode (like e.g. 12345) would charge more for it than those who owned a more difficult to remember one. This would cost you at least €100 a month per keyword (the same as you pay for an app store account per year, for an unlimited number of apps)
• For this amount all the operator did was forward the message to you, you had to have your own server to process the messages. Your server then had to call an API at the telco to send an premium SMS back with the link. (a so called WAP push message). The telco would usually keep 50% of the total cost to the customer. Send a €3.00 SMS , you get €1.50, the telco gets €1.50. For sending 140 bytes to a phone.
• The link you sent pointed to your own server, where you had to host the files for the game for the user to download.

Note that there was no store, no way for users to discover your game, so you had to advertise it as well. The telco’s took 50% for billing the customer, while you had to everything else. Of course the development tools for mobile apps were absolute shit as well.

So when Apple announced that they would let you keep 70%, would take care of hosting, payments, would provide a nice user friendly app store where people could actually find your app and provide decent development tools for you to build apps in, that was a fucking huge win.

I don’t think games like Ori, Hades, Hi-Fi rush, Call of the sea, Persona 5, etc are trash

I’m not saying they are trash, they are either really old or just decent games. I would say it’s mostly games I would rate a 7 or 8 out of 10. But with limited time available for gaming, there are enough games that I would rate a 9 or 10 to fill the available time. So why would I not just exclusively play only very top tier games?

GamePass is nice if you’re 16, can’t afford to buy full price games and have lots of free time. You get a lot of play time out of a limited budget with decent enough games.

But when you’re 40+ with a full time job, you make a different trade-off. You have much less free time but a higher income. You then tend to go for quality over quantity. Make every hour you can spend gaming count.

I will simply never have the time to play again to 90% of my games. It’s just impossible (even if I stopped playing new games today, I am not sure I will be able to do so before I die). Since it’s way cheaper to play this way, I don’t see the point of buying new games anymore

My reason is kind of the opposite: I have very little time to play games, so I choose quality over quantity. What I see on GamePass is an endless supply of mediocrity. I’d rather buy a few really good games at full price than spend the little time I have playing whatever Microsoft padded their catalog with.

This doesn’t strike me as a bad move on their part.

It reeks of desperation.

I would either go with a easy to remember naming system, something like child_male_0000, or with a type 4 UUID, to avoid naming collisions.

My phone is nearly a 7in screen

Assuming an iPhone Pro Max, with a 6.7” 19,5:9 screen, the 8” 16:9 on the PSPortal has 60% more surface area.

And the dual-sense then attaches to your phone and increases the size of the screen for free?

Most people use WhatsApp anyway, which is supposed to be e2e encrypted.

You could use your existing phone, and receive exactly the same product.

Your phone has an 8” screen and an integrated Dual Sense?

Or if you’re committed to buying a handheld, you could absolutely get a Steam Deck, still receive the remote functionality

Your Steam Deck has adaptive triggers and HD haptics? Mine doesn’t.

I’m considering getting this even though I already have a Steam Deck.

Europe ar least

It is in Europe. The advertised ‘from’ price must be the lowest price of the last 30 days.

Yeah, that’s illegal.