conciselyverbose

The list of words in order also definitely is.

And a lot of them are trying to stay matched to the real one.

One company can’t be a cartel.

It’s decidedly not free if you have to buy physical products to get it.

The friction of a physical purchase is relevant.

But all the rest of the slot machine mechanics in terms of dopamine juicing sounds and animations are still there, and they’re the biggest issue.

That’s a loot box with extra steps. You get loot box physical trash and loot box digital trash. TCGs are the original microtransactions.

Now, the extra steps are a small barrier that makes it slightly less bad, because you have to physically go to a store or at least order and wait to get them. But it’s not that much less bad.

No they didn’t.

“You have to rebuy your games, that you can’t play anywhere else” isn’t just “not the best way”. It’s straight up horseshit with no possible way to be valid. It’s also the biggest reason it tanked.

The only thing about stadia that was in any way redeemable was the fact that they didn’t mess around and gave full refunds for any game purchase.

It’s already proven. Repeatedly.

Nintendo and every lawyer involved should see obscene fines for the blatant harassment.

Emulation is not piracy.

There is an abundance of precedent that emulation is not copyright infringement and is not in any way illegal. You can absolutely make money on an emulator and there is absolutely nothing they can do.

It’s a far cry better than Google or Amazon making you buy the game on their service specifically.

It’s still cloud gaming. So it still sucks. But at least they’re not trying to force you into a shitty locked in storefront. (Though not keeping your Steam login is definitely a pain point.)

Black flag, more ships/weapon paths, maybe some fleet commands for bigger battles, expand the shipping jobs thing to feel like you’re really commanding a fleet.

Or none of that and just call it a pirate game.

If it was actually like Black Flag I’d be all over it.

But it’s live service shit.

The other dumb part is that when their manufacturing capability does significantly improve, AMD will happily sell similar chips to other people. And Valve won’t care in the slightest. Because all they want is people on PC so they buy games, many of which are through steam.

Linux being relevant is a bigger benefit to them than any revenue from the deck, and they’ve already demonstrated that it’s capable of pretty much any game that doesn’t actively exclude it.

The writing was always stupid, but 3 turned extra-self-congratulatory-stupid.

I mostly don’t play multiplayer, but some games just aren’t the same single player.

Madden, for example, the AI just is too complex for them to handle it at a high enough level for the balanced but competitive strategy game football can be. All Madden is hard, but it’s hard by cheating. Playing against humans is how you get the chess match. I’m sure there are various other genres focused on strategy that are similar. AI can beat advanced humans in clean games like chess or go, but probably not on a PS5 and not with messier strategy games.

lol sounds like Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher.

I think what I’m eventually going to have to do is roll my own. I don’t need crazy complexity, but I do want some features nothing seems to have. I want the bulk editing that’s only on goodreads, and I really want series to be first class citizens. That means series nesting in other series and being able to have a blurb/rating for a series instead of each individual entry, mostly. I just haven’t got to it yet.

I don’t necessarily have to have the metadata all the public social network style tools use to combine everyone’s input to one book object, though I definitely understand how it’s frustrating for services to lose information when you import your lists. But organization tools are critical to me.

I had like 1200 books when I tried it, and the number missing wasn’t too bad.

But I’m not doing a list of 100 books searching one at a time. It’s bad enough to have to do big chunks to add to my reading history because I don’t keep that up. Re-doing organization without bulk editing just isn’t going to happen.

I don’t use their reviews to decide what to read, but I have checked after the fact on books I like and I think the quality of what they surface tends to be pretty bad.

A lot of mindless criticism, especially. It’s perfectly OK to be critical when a book has flaws, but so many of the top reviews were people who just weren’t the target audience criticizing it for being targeted at something different than they wanted. Whether that’s rigorous academic nonfiction with reviews complaining that it cites its sources, kid/YA books with people complaining that there isn’t enough depth, someone like Janet Evanovich or Jana Deleon writing deliberately nonsensical stuff for light humor getting complaints about not being realistic, romantic suspense getting criticism because characters are emotionally connected too fast when that’s part of what the genre is, etc.

It’s perfectly fine to be disinterested in a book because you’re not interested in that genre, but it seems like way too many of the higher visibility reviews are people who just aren’t interested in what the book is trying to do.

I have no idea.

I do know that I’m not super enthusiastic about Amazon being the one controlling my reading history, but I’ve tried migrating to several of the alternatives and it’s just too much.

Goodreads has a nice page where you can see 50 books at a time, skim down the list, and checkbox to make bulk changes. I’m willing to painstakingly reconstruct lists like that with an alternative, even though it will still be kind of a pain. But I’m not willing to manually search every title to add it to a list, or go through my reading history and need multiple clicks and backwards navigations for every book I want to add to a list, and that’s the state of anything I tried a couple months ago. Bookwyrm specifically sounds really nice, as a way to use federated tools to find people with similar interest and follow their reading and share. But the transfer is a lot.

It should be easy to provide examples of exclusivity deals they signed then.