
Our News Team @ 11 with host Snot Flickerman
Yes, I can hear you, Clem Fandango!


I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise. Musk never wanted to do anything about the bots, he just wanted to make sure they were parroting his chosen propaganda. He really should lose his shirt over the fact that he purposefully devalued Twitter before purchase by screaming about the bot problem he never intended to fix, but claimed he did.
For sure, but that always gives advanced users the option to ungate it through the registry. The benefit to them of having it be “modular” would to be able to completely restrict even power users from being able to free their OS to use how they actually want to.
Once again, the original article was debunked, so we’re talking hypotheticals here anyway, a modular version isn’t coming.
I mean, I would argue that having to pay for access to different parts of Windows, like say access to PowerShell or access to more advanced features and settings has been part of the way they make money for a long time. That’s why their used to be “Home,” “Pro,” and “Enterprise” versions all with various levels of capability. So while it looks like the original article has been debunked, I would think that offering stripped-down versions of Windows would just serve as a way to push upgrades to more full featured versions the same way they press you to upgrade to Office 365.
More importantly, it looks like PCWorld is retracting the article and has issued a post mortem on how it got published.
EDIT: As @[email protected] has pointed out, that Windows 12 article has been debunked, not just by outside sources, but by PCWorld itself at this point. The article itself has a large disclaimer on it now, and they have a breakdown on how the story got published in the first place:
Original Comment:
This actually tracks completely with the news about an incoming Windows 12 announcement and in particular the claim about Windows 12 being modular. The description has claimed that it will make certain aspects of Windows able to be added or removed at will. Meaning options like a “minimal” desktop installation that has very few options, no PowerShell, no Terminal, no access to a majority of common Windows features, and very little control of the OS other than changing the desktop background.
In other words, this new “Project Helix” or whatever will be a stripped-down version of Windows 12 with everything non-gaming-related removed, including access to half the system settings I’m sure.


So glad Stellar Blade Goonerstorm 2 will be more widely available to legitimize chuds claiming they need unrealistically proportioned half naked women to enjoy a game and that anything less is “woke nonsense.” /s
(I’m sure the gameplay itself is fine and all, just the shitlords who hyped this game gave me an overall ick for it)


Attitudes like this is why people reverse engineer systems and build emulators.
To an extent I understand why Miyazaki and Sony felt they shouldn’t let outsiders mess with it lest it was an underbaked and bad remake, but at the same time, it’s locking the game to a historical artifact, and one that many people (including myself) had hoped to one day play on PC without using an emulator.


Even if they cannot hoard that much themselves, anything they hoard will contribute to the death of the PC space and I don’t think Sony is just going to let their consumer electronics division, which has been a huge part of their brand for decades, go quietly into that good night. They might not have as much money to spend on it, but they’re not going to just stop making PS5s and other consumer electronics devices. That also means that if there’s PC hardware shortages for the foreseeable future, that they’re waiting for those shortages to strangle the PC gaming industry and revert a lot of those PC gaming converts back to console.


My guess is they’re watching the PC parts supply issues due to AI and have decided they will use their institutional weight to also hoard parts to push consoles back to the forefront since it’s harder to pirate on consoles and easier to resell the same game on new console generations.
Sony is and has been a big institutional player and I would not be at all surprised to see them moving on hoarding parts themselves: for AI, for consumer electronics, for game consoles. They’ve been practically waiting for a way to kill the PC industry and take the profits from it.


Also, and I’m just throwing this out there, maybe the circlejerk of nostalgia bait for Gen X/Millennials means fuck-all to younger people in general because it’s the nostalgia of their parents, not their own thing?
Like, aren’t we seeing this in so many different properties? As time marches on, interest wanes? Nobody cares about Marvel movies anymore. Nobody cares about Star Wars anymore. The most hardcore fanatics tend to be older and had the originals, which were literally original content, as things they grew up with. Part of the mystery and excitement of them was how much was left unexplained. Seriously, the Clone Wars was this mysterious fucking thing when it was just an offhand comment by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: A New Hope. Now we have entire TV series dedicated to the background of the Clone Wars. Mystery gone. The first season of The Mandalorian brought back a sense of mystery to the series and then promptly dropped it to mix it in with every other piece of Star Wars memorabilia.
Young people want their own stuff that they’re growing up with, they don’t want rehashes of the shit their parents obsessed over.
Look at the continued interest in Adventure Time spinoffs, for example. Adventure Time first came out when I was just shy of 29. It would be fodder for the children of people just slightly older than me. It was also enjoyable for older folks who enjoyed silly fantasy, which gave it wider appeal. It persists more because it was an actual original thing that some people grew up with.
We live in an era where copyright that lasts 100 years after authorial death has broken corporations brains and they are scared to death of anything original in case it might not be a clear moneymaker. Letting interest in a new property grow over time is almost unheard of in the Netflix era of two seasons and then fuck you, it’s over. So even when new properties are explored, most aren’t given enough time to mature into something that becomes truly nostagliac for a younger generation.
If corporations want people to be as invested in long-lived series, they have to allow the option for new, interesting series to take the stage. Is it really a shocker that people are over games that started in the NES era? That young people want stories and ideas that reflect the world they live in, not the one their parents grew up in? Young people absolutely lose their shit over Undertale and Deltarune, both games made by a single auteur developer. Pokemon, referenced in the article, were sleeper hits that took time before they became an absolute craze.
I’m in my forties, and I constantly talk about how the world our parents brought us up to live in was dead before we were born. It’s the same but at an accelerated pace for kids these days. The world we know and are trying to prepare them for no longer exists. Our stories and nostalgia become meaningless for our kids because it doesn’t speak to their experiences.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.


Worse, it also makes it seem like developer support that is provided through Discord needs to be always on/always available since you can be pinged on Discord 24 hours a day. Why would you do that yourself, I don’t know. At least with forums you can choose to respond on your own time frame and people have less recourse to act like you should be around and available. It’s just asking for higher demand from the userbase since you’re chatting with them in real-time, they begin to expect real-time fast responses.


I never even finished 3 because got seriously bored with it, and never had a whole lot of interest in 4, especially hearing how badly optimized it was. It just didn’t look like anything worth the money to me, that’s all. Then I literally forgot it has been out for a while because I was so disinterested.


I think it’s rather that they’re still forced to use Webkit everywhere but the EU and financially it probably doesn’t make sense to port Gecko to iOS when worldwide iOS has pretty small marketshare. iOS only holds over 50% marketshare in USA, Canada, Australia, Japan, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. In most EU countries it’s under 30% marketshare. Android literally dominates in all of Mexico, South America, Africa, and Asia, in other words, far too many countries to list, most of which iOS has less than 10% marketshare.
Why would you go through so much trouble for arguably such a small slice of the world’s iOS market when the majority of the iOS market will still be forced to use Webkit?
A few things here:
I personally think that interacting with anything related to Harry Potter continues to give it cultural dominance and longevity, so even if you aren’t personally spending money to support the giant piece of shit that is JK Rowling, you’re helping it stay relevant enough to keep making that bigot of a bitch money.
It can also be argued that since Epic made a deal for giving the game away, that the money has already been paid to Rowling, whether you grab the game for free or not. The fewer people who grab the free copy, the less wise of an investment it will be seen as by Epic’s beancounters. This also ties back into the first point of the more people taking the free copy is giving Harry Potter more cultural dominance and longevity.
I pirated this game when it came out specifically I could play it and write about how bad it was in terms of gameplay, story, and game design. I don’t feel like re-writing a full on review here, but I’ll just say it: It’s a bad fucking game and the only reason people have given it as much attention as it has gotten is the association with Harry Potter. If this had been an original property with no connection to the HP series with similar gameplay and story it would have been a clusterfuck of a failure on release.
Anyway I’ll shut up now but fuck Harry Potter, the only thing Harry Potter related I’ll accept anymore is Wizard People, Dear Reader, because it’s a parody.
How Valve sounds right now: “It’s totally cool to rip off kids with blind box stuff and get them addicted to gambling mechanics!”
I’m with you OP, we need to stop it in physical games as well. Just because Magic the Gathering does is and Labubu does it doesn’t make it okay. It actually just creates artificial scarcity and pushes children and the families providing them the money to gamble ever harder to get the rare drops, on the off chance that those are valuable.
Even Beanie Babies never stooped that low.