The best explanation I’ve heard is that Game Freak just flat out refuses to ever hire new people.

In college, circa 2005, I played about three hours of WoW during a free weekend. I installed the game (from a CD!), started it up, and played for an afternoon. When I got up to go to the bathroom, I realized that I was at a crossroads: I could either make this game my life for the next indeterminate number of years, or I could leave it behind forever. Those were literally the only two options for me. My brain would accept no third option.

I deleted the game and went out to get pizza. Since then I’ve never picked it up again, and now it’s so big and unwieldy I’m not even tempted anymore. But that was a touch and go situation for those few hours.

A few games have given me similar pulls over the years, but I’ve gotten better about it. Balatro is the most recent one to grab me, since I got it only when it came to mobile. And yeah, it grabbed me pretty hard, but I also know that once I unlock all the Jokers I’m unlikely to go much further in it.

Addictive, yes, but non-extractive. There’s a big huge difference.

• Digital Wellbeing. Enforce the decisions you made about app usage. Honestly it’s kinda saved my sanity, particularly this year.

• Scheduled text messages. This should be in every single messaging app. I schedule reminders for other people, I schedule messages that I think of at ridiculous hours to go out at reasonable times, I even schedule messages so that sometime else reminds me to do something.

Yeah, well, losing two console generations in a row will do that.

You can definitely swipe up on a notification to make it go away without dismissing it.

Honestly, just make this habit: whenever you see a non-actionable notification, before you swipe it away, long press it and hit “turn off notifications.” Then you can go through that app’s list and choose the ones you need—or turn the app’s notification off completely!

For ones you want to show up, but don’t want interrupting you, switch their delivery to Silent and Minimized.

Be ruthless with your notifications. You’ll feel a lot better.

WebKit is really only available on Apple devices in any meaningful way.

I mean, they can rein them in or not. I really don’t care either way, because I’m going to leave most of them off anyway. I turn off the obvious ads, of course, but almost everything else too. Basically, unless it’s something that I can take direct action on or someone I know who is intentionally trying to contact me, it doesn’t get a notification.

That’s…remarkable.

I’m not saying that would be a better experience for players, just that if they wanted it to succeed they should probably have done more marketing.

I’m not entirely oblivious to gaming news, but the literal first I had ever heard of this game was when they announced that it was being shut down. Methinks after eight years of development it could’ve had a few more dollars tossed into the marketing budget.

I think it might have better QOL features, but honestly the gameplay loop in BL2 is better. And I think the engine might be more robust, too.

A couple! “Peer Review” and “Perpetual Testing Initiative.” Both free.

Borderlands 2 is such a good game that one of its DLCs (Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep) is also one of the best games ever made, in its own right.

Man. 2010-2015 were some STRONG years in gaming. Portal 2 and its DLCs, Borderlands 2 and its DLCs, Skyrim, Shadow of Mordor, Hearthstone, The Last Of Us, Pokemon X & Y…

Edit: this comment appears to have lost its parent, so now it just seems like a non sequitur, but you folks are smart.

You’re not wrong. But “joy” isn’t exactly fungible, so it’s not really an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Actually, I want to go even further and say that I think his work actually is worth quite a bit. Not that he is worth that much, or others aren’t (again, I don’t know him), but he has given millions of people hours upon hours of enjoyment, and that’s nothing to shake a stick at.

And what he’s doing with it is also important. I haven’t heard of him dumping millions into Trump’s campaign or the Proud Boys or whatever.

And honestly, even if he did, my real respect is for the work that he did and the business model he used, not for him as a person. I don’t know him at all. I don’t even know his real name. I just meant that this way of doing software professionally should be more common.

The Apes always pay their debts.

But I have absolutely no problem with that whatsoever. Dude wrote a good, solid, complete game, sold it for a fair price, and made bank. That is the business model I want software to be sold under, and I’m thrilled to see it working for him.

Bankruptcy is intended to be (though is not often in actuality) a temporary restructuring period. A lot of companies just end up liquidating while under bankruptcy proceedings, but Atari emerged from Chapter 11 in 2014 after a year of restructuring and selling off IPs to pay their bills. Now they’re doing a bunch of stuff, including casinos and hotels.

Bing, not Edge.

But the point of Bethesda isn’t to sell their games. It’s to sell GamePass. Nobody has to play Fallout, they just have to want to play Fallout enough to buy GamePass.

They saw what MKBHD’s honest reviews did to Fisker and Humane and said “can we stop that from happening?”

If you do not want the Settings app to nag you with Microsoft Account prompts, go to Privacy > General and toggle off the “Show me suggested content in the Settings app” option.

My Settings panel should not have suggested content

That’s like offering book recommendations at the BMV

I am here to do a single task and nothing more. I will not be enjoying my time here.

What’s next? “Please rate the settings app on the Microsoft store”?

Yeah, it definitely has the Star Trek movie curse.

Each only in comparison to its predecessor, though. I still think Windows 7 was the last version to get out of its users’ way and just let them use their computer; everything since then has been worse than 7 in some subtle way.

I love it. There’s so much depth there.

They at least did the courtesy of deleting the Windows UI, though.

There was an episode of Star Trek about this.

“Expensive as a cast iron bridge” is a great saying. Is that something I’ve just never heard before, or did you coin the phrase?

Yeah, but even before that…people were only excited about 7 because of how much of a dumpster fire Vista was. And prior to XP (which Vista replaced), most people didn’t care about OS versions at all.

They do this every 4-5 years. Nobody is ever bothered enough to cause a problem for Microsoft’s bottom line.

You better believe they are. I get it about every other month, and my laptop doesn’t meet those requirements.

This is accurate. I’m a full stack dev, and a huge number of job postings I’ve seen over the past ten years or so have switched to React.

I made a stupid little page that downloads a Pathfinder 2e SRD API, and then randomly combines an ancestry, background, and class from that list and displays it on screen. It’s really nothing special, I hacked it together in an afternoon. But I showed it to a friend and they were blown away that I didn’t use a framework for it. I was like, “it does three things. Why would it need a framework? What would I even use a framework for?”

They still couldn’t believe I did it by hand.

Friday Monday Saturday Sunday Thursday Tuesday Wednesday

In its defense, that also flows better if you’re trying to sing it.

Yeah, and that’s cool, but it is significantly different from the original implementation (or at least the original idea) since it is a keypad-based device. You couldn’t really flash it onto an Android handset, for instance, as I understand it.

Yeah, I read a retrospective written by one of the developers, and it sounds like they had the trouble that they could only get development partners for low-end devices (which kind of meant that they had to target developing countries) but they couldn’t get companies like WhatsApp to make web apps that would run on Firefox OS (which meant that it was kind of a non-starter in those developing countries).

Couple that with some questionable priority decisions at the top of the project, and a major reshuffling of Mozilla’s organizational aims near the end of the project, and it all just sort of fell apart. I do kind of wonder if it would have done better today, or maybe as a tablet or a Roku competitor.

They did. It was a project initially called “Boot to Gecko,” about a decade ago; and the idea was to make a Linux kernel OS so lightweight that you were running web apps as close to bare metal as possible. There were intended to be no binary apps, only web apps running on open standards; though that didn’t necessarily carry through as originally intended.

I agree. I think it was before its time and would be a real boon today.

More and more every day, I wish the Firefox Phone had survived.

And nobody uses it for that in the gaming industry these days anyway. It’s just “AAA = Big studio.” Or honestly at this point “big marketing budget.”