Okay go

Here I was thinking they should have made it look crappier

Imagine referring to your dad by your surname

FWIW the international broadcasts did the same, I think it was a single feed to all syndicates

I was gonna say, of all the big chains in America, Costco at least seems to try and be half decent to its customers and staff

Sounds like the jury is out then

When I worked in GAME (formerly EB in the UK) in the mid-00s we never unsealed new stock for display, we just changed the lining slip on the dummy boxes that always stayed on the shop floor (head office would send us the updated slips they wanted every couple of weeks). Fairly sure we had a policy that once the plastic wrap had been removed it was only returnable as a pre-owned trade-in (which seemed kinda scammy in some cases, but it was the policy)

FWIW I imagine genuinely pre-owned stock would get a label on it to not mix it up with new stock, but yeah no idea how they’re handling non-preowned returns

If it had the shrink wrap on it when you bought it, this is almost certainly from QA at the factory as others have said. It is trivial to build a machine that would read carts on the line, but also plenty of places will still do manually sampled QA.

If no shrink wrap, then it was either opened at the shop to use as a display case (pretty sure they had already stopped using real game cases for this about 2 decades ago, when I last worked in a shop like that), which could either mean a mix up or a staff member testing it out (this wasn’t allowed with non-preowned products when I worked in a similar place)

Or perhaps someone bought it and returned it within the return window if the store allows such a thing, I don’t think typically it would go into pre-owned, but maybe clearance in that scenario. Though I think many places don’t really let you return games once they’re opened due to online registration features

How about we don’t build dystopian digital panopticons?

Anyone else see Vinnie Jones in lock stock?

Honestly you shouldn’t need to break the bank at all to be better than the built in speakers in most cases. I don’t want to say definitively because I’m sure there’s some basically scam products out there, but pretty much any sound bar will be an upgrade in 99% of cases.

A quick search shows a number of well known brands with offerings under £100, and one from a company I don’t recognise that apparently seems to have a number of positive reviews and available for £40

You’ll obviously get a further improvement if you go above the budget level, but that’s definitely not to say you can’t get a decent improvement over not having one at all.

TBF this always ends up with a lot of misplaced blame on the consumer

TV manufacturers decided/figured out long ago that Joe public cares more about a screen being thin, at time of purchase, than it having any semblance of audio quality. And they assume anyone who cares about audio will buy a set of speakers or (increasingly) a sound bar anyway, so they just need the bare minimum included.

This has gotten to the absurd point now where the speakers included in your average TV aren’t much better than a particularly loud phone speaker.

It’s basically impossible to get something that sounds even audible on those speakers, without doing what adverts do and compressing the shit out of the signal, which has the bonus of sounding loud and bad for everyone, there’s no bringing the detail back that was squashed out. Movie studios aren’t going to mix a movie that sounds bad on a system designed remotely properly (e.g. a cinema or reviewer’s TV), so we’re in the current situation.

The unfortunate situation today is you basically need some kind of separate speaker(s) with a TV because the manufacturers all have cheaped out across the board and don’t include anything good enough any more. The consumer shouldn’t be expected to know this and have to pay extra, the TV should come with speakers capable of producing audio properly.

Focal length motherfucker, do you choose it?

If you don’t, you’re letting your focal length choose your photos

It’s not every day you get to use a word like dilettante, so I figured I’d make a salad

Flukey dilettante regards stochastic parrot as unfathomable prodigy

Read all about it

Yeah, but as someone who grew up down south and has lived in the north for the majority of my life:

Breakfast, lunch, dinner

Very clear, no fucker doesn’t know what you’re talking about

Breakfast, dinner, tea

What the fuck are you playing at, skipping lunch and having a drink to compensate?

Get in the sea

Tea is important enough in this country to not use the word again, especially not for the second most important thing: dinner

He wasn’t impressed and I didn’t make it to the next round.

Poor Stockholm syndrome afflicted fool

Breaks my heart to know people are still suffering this particular hell

That was always the fake dream that was sold, about 15 years ago there were a lot of people writing cukes

I never saw a single business analyst or product owner ever open even one of those text files that ostensibly primarily only existed for their benefit.

The closest we got was copy and pasting the user story from the ticket and hammering it into the shape of the existing regexes

Then we all woke up from the fever dream about 10 years ago and I’ve basically not seen one since.

Tbh with this AI bubble it’s only a matter of time before someone tries it again

Oh I’m aware we don’t have one global standards org, but generally at ISO, IETF, IEEE, ITU & IEC are all some that come to mind with some level of shared interest, however I wouldn’t say they act competitively to each other and tend to work collaboratively rather than competitively.

I suppose interestingly, to use your HDMI example, this is kind of what happens when you don’t have a central standards body handling this stuff, HDMI came from the television industry and DisplayPort came from the computing industry. There is no technical reason for both to exist, and one could have been adapted to fill the needs of both and become the one standard if it wasn’t for industry groups ultimately trying to profit (HDMI carries licensing fees and requirements, so does DP to a lesser extent).

I guess you’re right though, I probably should have thought it through a bit more before my last comment

Yeah I was going to say the same, this was created by someone with an overly basic understanding of how these things work

Natural monopolies over things like infrastructure and standards aren’t necessarily bad as long as they’re not privately owned nor profit seeking.

For instance, I can’t exactly imagine how a market of competitive standards orgs would even remotely be able to reach the consensus necessary to accomplish the goal of creating standards. It’d just be an endless XKCD 927

Letterboxd is pretty good, though it got bought by private equity a few years ago and they’re now trying to flog it off to Netflix or Paramount, so probably numbered days