Just to toss my feedback in the ring: I listen to a podcast themed around a local sports team on Spotify, and I often download them to my phone locally because I’m old and still have the habits of being on a limited data plan even though I’ve had unlimited for years.

I noticed the ads (pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll) and was surprised because a lot of them tend to be local ads for various cities across the US. HVAC services in Chicago, lawyers in Houston, etc. None for the city where the podcasters live, most of their audience lives, or the spots team is based.

I don’t always download the episodes to listen, only if I know I’m going to be out , or if I’m mowing the lawn and might occasionally stretch my wifi range. I haven’t tested fully, but it seems as though the ads only get baked into the audio upon download.

I also noticdd a few months ago that downloading a podcast I was partway through resets my progress, which has been incredibly annoying. If the ads are inserted at the time of download, that would make sense because the length of the audio would change.

Ah I just searched for Firefox news and the PPA thing was the only one that came up.

As for firing the executive, I can’t find anything about him being specifically relayed to being open-source anything. Steve Teixeira was their Chief Product Office briefly- he only was hired in 2022 and left the company a few months ago, and prior to that he worked for Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter. So I don’t think this can really be framed as some attack on open-source or privacy. If the allegations are true that they discriminated against him for having cancer that’s shitty of course, but Mozilla has of course claimed that they did not and it’s going to court. They didn’t fire him either- they asked him to take a demotion to Senior VP of Technology Strategy and he chose to leave instead.

Yes Mozilla bought an ad company. They’re called Anonym and their stated goal is to provide an advertising service that can exist profitably without violating privacy. I hate ads- I block as many as I can and I use a pi-hole. I avoid ad-supported services as much as possible. I’m also privileged enough that I can afford to pay for a subscription to a lot of stuff or just buy physical media to rip and store on my own server. But there was a time when I was a broke college student stuck using campus Internet and playing by their rules, so the safest option I could afford was just to watch ads. Ads can be an ethical business model that helps improve the lives of low-income households. For people with legal or ethical concerns about piracy, or additional restrictions on their Internet, or who just lack the technical skill.

It’s certainly fair to keep an eye on Anonym and Mozilla in this regard, but I haven’t seen anything objectionable there yet.

Similar for the Mozilla AI. It seems it’s still in it’s infancy and I’m not a fan of companies jumping on the air bandwagon in general, but at the very least Mozilla has identified the problems with other AI’s and is looking to create a better alternative. If they get caught stealing training data, releasing tools to allow high schoolers to make deep fake revenge porn, tell people to start putting glue in their pizza cheese, or some other crap like that then they should absolutely be criticized for it. But none of that has happened yet that I’m aware of.

I also can’t find exactly what you’re referring to with Russia. The closest thing is that it looks like there were some extensions that were made to work around Russian state censorship. The Russian government passed a law in March banning such workarounds. In response, Mozilla took down 5 extensions, reviewed them, and then decided to reinstate them in June. Not quite ideal, but still seems like reasonable action to me.

It’s fair and a good thing to criticize Mozilla and Firefox. But it seems like you’re trying to spin every single move they make as a sign the sky is falling.

And I also know that there are both states and corporations paying people to go on the Internet and push propaganda. Firrfox has a lot of enemies. You cant just blindly believe every article saying they are succumbing to enshittification.

I’ve seen predictions of Firefox’s downfall for decades. Still waiting for it to happen.

It’s really easy to see the headlines saying things like “Firefox is tracking it’s users and violating their privacy!!!” And panic. But digging into the latest “scandal” (the PPA), it seems like Firefox is behaving pretty reasonably.

One of the main criticisms is that it’s opt-out instead of opt-in. Which… I kind of agree with Mozilla on. 99% of users aren’t going to know or care about this, and the 1% that do are the kind of people who probably would have extensions to disable it or just use some obscure ultra-private browser instead.

I don’t fault NOYB for bringing it up either. It’s good to have organizations like that keeping an eye out for everyone.

But I also get worried that sometimes communies attack their closest allies for being imperfect harder than enemies actively working against their interests.

That’s assuming she gets them as kittens.

Old cats are often considered less desirable. Parents want to get their kid a cute little kitten, not a 13 year old cat that’s going to trigger a conversation about mortality with their 5 year old human child soon.

Kittens are also a pain in the ass. Bundles of energy with no manners.

So my first thought is that she either fosters older cats or just adopts them to give them a good golden year or two on the way out.

Or if she rescues strays there’s a greater risk of having health problems already.

Or maybe she is evil as the comments suggest. I have no clue lol.

1. I’m so fucking tired of pixel art games. And I’ve noticed recently that going back and playing actual 16 bit games with real pixels feels so much better. It’s hard to say for sure what it is, but I have a few theories.

First, in old games that actually use pixels, everything has to snap to the grid. For these pixel art games running at 1080p or maybe higher, what is supposed to look like a pixel is actually a square made up of multiple pixels. In 16-bit games, a sprite can only move distances the same size as a pixel, but in these modern ones the “pixels” can move by fractions of their own size. It loses all the neat, discreet, visual appeal and becomes messy looking in my opinion.

Second, the color pallet is too large. Old games had a limited selection of colors, and often in order to make the most of them the colors used would be significantly different from each other, while still all being part of a cohesive pallet. We are used to millions of colors, but consoles like the GameBoy Color and SNES only had ~32,000 to pick from total. The GameBoy Color also has a software limitation to only have 56 colors on-screen at once. Using a full, modern color pallet without those limitations allows for colors that are close to each other to be used. That’s great for 3D models where we are thing to mimic reality, but for pixel art it just makes everything look messy and sloppy. There needs to be a sharp, distinct contrast for pixels to be satisfying.

Third, there’s just too much stuff happening. This I could probably adapt to, but I just have this expectation that pixel games should just be a few moving sprites and maybe a couple of background layers.

2. The name “Arco” tells me absolutely nothing. It’s not memorable. It’s a complete blank slate that gets washed away. I’m not even certain if that’s just a proper noun from the game or if that’s just a different language word.

3. A hybrid turn-based/real time strategy game? My instinct is that sounds like the worst of both worlds. It has been successful before- Transistor and Paper Mario come to mind. But in general, if in playing a turn-based game it’s because I want the chill, low-pressure experience. I probably want to be less than sober. And introducing real-time elements means that those games get pushed into the real-time category when I choose what I want to play and when. And if in playing a tacts game, 99% of the time in going to choose a turn-based one and get lit.

4. As many others here have said, I’ve never heard of this game. I think this is a legitimate problem facing a lot industries, especially digital products. Doing some quick searching I found someone estimating that Spotify sees about 55 days worth of new audio uploaded every day. Everyone is creating and we don’t have enough to line to consume.

Personally, I suspect that if I went through the exercise of looking at my Steam library and trying to project when I would be able to play through all of the games I currently own, it would probably exceed my life expectancy. Definitely if you add in all of my console game collection.

There’s not a great solution. Corporations try to punch through the noise with marketing. One of the most important pieces of Steam as a platform is their ability to promote games. There are whole networks of influencers- streamers, video creators, podcasters, bloggers, magazine writers, etc all trying to help sort out the games worth playing.

But the problem persists - there are too many games being made. And I don’t want to just say to put up more barriers to entry, because indie development is important for getting fresh new talent and ideas into the industry. Some of the best experiences I’ve had have been indie games, and some of the worst offenders for cranking out banal, mediocre time sucks have been huge corporations with giant marketing budgets.

The only solution I can think of is more “platforms” rather than games. Minecraft, GTA V, Skyrim. Especially with mods, you can get a unique and interesting experience without having to invest into learning and understanding a whole new game.

Amazing. One of the best purchases I’ve ever made.

It’s rare for me to see games in my library that are not supported, although there are a few. But there is a difference between running and running well. Demanding games will get maybe an hour of battery life and the fans will be pretty loud the whole time. Some games (especially strategy games) really work better with a full keyboard and a higher resolution screen. Some games I just would not want to play on a handheld. But most of the time the games that I want to play work well.

One trick I use to get better battery life and performance is streaming. I use Chiaki to stream from my PS4, and Steam Link (as a non-steam app lol) to stream from my desktop. It’s often worth it for the fan noise reduction alone.

It’s even better at emulation. It’s a great machine for PS2 and GameCube games- I have the back buttons and track pads mapped to speed up, pause, slow, and rewind gameplay and to control save states. I have not dialed it in yet, but I think with some tweaking you could probably use the gyro and/or track pads to do some good Wii emulation. 3DS and DS are great too, mostly because of the track pads. Anything older emulates fine, but isn’t as impressive.

I have gotten PS3 and Switch emulation to work, but the fans go on and the battery life goes down, so I don’t really use it for that. Plus storage is a bit tight and PS3 games are huge.

It does feel like Valve was just a little too early. I wish the screen was 1080p.

The 2230 SSD’s that it uses were kind of uncommon when it released. The weird size made them more expensive and they had lower capacities. I managed to get a 512GB one, but I wish I could have gotten like 2TB. It seems like that’s changing now though. Similarly, I wish microSD cards came in larger capacities. Storage just seems to get used up so fast these days.

No, but they had a very close relationship. Morrowind was an Xbox exclusive. Oblivion was a timed Xbox exclusive that was supposed to be a 360 launch title that got delayed (the Horse Armor fiasco happened in 2006, while Oblivion didn’t release on PS3 until 2007).

“…The price point, at the time, was the issue. We felt, it’s probably worth this,” he said. “I won’t say who at Microsoft said, ‘Well, that’s less than we sell a theme for; a wallpaper is more than that. You should charge this; you can always lower it’”

Even the horse armor, allegedly, was heavily influenced by Microsoft.

Horse armor came out in 2006. Micro transactions started in 2002 with Maple Story. Plenty of other games had micro transactions by then. Horse armor was a peak when Microsoft drove too hard and consumers pushed back- it was far from the start.

Time zones are aligned to population centers as much as they are political boundaries.

For example, this methodology would probably cut major US cities in half. It’s hard to tell exactly, but some cities would be Phoenix, the whole metropolitan corridor of Oklahoma City to San Antonio, Salt Lake City, and Detroit. In Canada, Edmonton and Calgary stand out.

I also have a gaming PC (and I stream to every screen in the house) and a Steam Deck, so from that perspective it’s even fewer exclusive games.

I do really prefer physical games, but even that is going away. Some games just don’t release physically, or even if they have a physical version it’s basically just a different kind of DRM. I recently bought Gran Turismo 7 physically and was incredibly disappointed that it had to install 128GB to the PS5 to even open, then it took a while downloading ever more updates and data once I opened it.

I traditionally loved Naughty Dog and Insomniac franchises, but Naughty Dog has only re-released games on the PS5 so far. Insomniac… Rift Apart is decent. I don’t really like Marvel or superhero stuff though. I tried Spiderman and it’s… Fine., but it really makes me wish I was just playing Sunset Overdrive instead. I’m in the process of playing through the older God of War games for the first time- so far they aren’t bad but they seem overrated considering how hyped they were back in the day.

There’s no killer Hideo Kojima game yet. Gran Turismo is a micro transaction, always online, multiplayer-focused shell of what used to be a great series. There isn’t any equivalent to creative games like Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, Katamari Damacy, etc. Stray was really good- my PC kind of struggled with it so I might pick up the PS5 version if I ever see a physical copy on sale.

I don’t know that it’s just PlayStation either. Looking at my Steam library by release date, the last big AAA games I have are Yakuza 6 (2021, still haven’t played it yet), Control (2020- although I think that’s because I have the complete edition. The base game was from 2019), and Horizon Zero Dawn (similarly listed as 2020, but the base game would have been 2017). It seems like more and more studios are closing, more games being released are just “meh”.

I bought it in the fall of 2022, when the shortages were just starting to end, expecting it would get more games. I wanted to get one before they did a mid-gen refresh that removed stuff like backwards compatibility, the disc drive, etc.

It’s been really disappointing so far. I still think I’ve put more time into PS4 games than PS5 games. Astro’s Playroom was fantastic, but unfortunately it is still probably the best game for the console.

This looks like an ad for Pyre by SuperGiant Games if it came out in the early 2000’s.

Is that the Smilodon?

Victor Gruen is widely considered the inventory of the modern shopping mall. He was an Austrian Jew who immigrated to the US when the Nazi’s annexed Austria.

I can’t find much specific on his political views, but I’ve seen him described by historians as “far-left” and “socialist”.

Shopping was originally a small part of his vision. He wanted to make an indoor, air-conditioned version of European pedestrian areas. Residences, schools, libraries, hospitals, parks, etc. He hated how the mall he envisioned became the shopping mall. He was influenced by Disney Land - trying to make a planned neighborhood that optimized the human experience. In turn, Disney took a lot of influence from him to make EPCOT.

So I don’t know that he was a Marxist, but he denounced the capitalist hellscape that his malls eventually became.

They didn’t create Shadow of the Colossus. They were a support studio for Team Ico.

Same thing for almost all of their games. The Astro series is from Team Asobi. Gravity Rush was from Team Silent/Team Gravity/Project Siren (that studio kept changing its name). Parappa the Rapper was NanaOn-Sha. Death Stranding was Kojima Productions. Patappn was from Pyramid.

LocoRoco was an original, but that series hasn’t been touched since 2008. I doubt many of the original devs were even still there by 2021. Ape Escape and Legend of Dragon are similar.

Japan Studio has too many games to check them all, but all the ones that I recognize as good and memorable games are from other studios.

Out of curiosity, why are you annoyed at them closing their Japan studio? They have a ton of game credits, but were mostly a support studio. Like, technically they have credits on Bloodborne but I think everyone pretty much agrees that’s a FromSoft game.

The only recent original games from them I see is Knack and Knack 2. Personally I thought they were pretty decent and are better than just a meme game, but at the same time they weren’t exactly successful hits either. Is there some hit game or series I’m missing here?

And what was left of them was just merged into Team Asobi. Which I find kind of funny because Asobi was originally a team from Japan Studio that was split off.

Um… Yes. Just to be clear, I am advocating that Wyoming produce less coal.

And for the US (the whole world really) to consume less.

While that’s all true, it’s also true that Wyoming today has the highest CO2 per capita production in the US at 96.4 tons.

The re-writing of the tax code you mentioned created the “Cowboy Cocktail”, making Wyoming a tax haven for billionaires and enabling money laundering.

They are taking some small, slow steps towards mitigating the damage they have been doing for decades and are continuing for the foreseeable future.

The Murdoch empire transcends borders