Is there a Near-Darwin Award?

At some point years ago I did some online test and it turned out my English language vocabulary was somewhere in the top 0.01% or something like that.

Which is kinda ridiculous because I’m not a native English speaker.

I think it’s the result of years of lots and lots of reading things in English: books, newspapers, magazines, even online.

Then on top of that I moved to Britain, which did wonders for learning the local slang of at least the part of it were I lived and even meant some words I learned I only really know them in English (for example, terms used in professional Finance) because I learned them in English, not in my native language.

Also, a lot of the most supposedly sophisticated words are basically the Latin or Greek words barelly changed (sometimes not at all) or technical terms that originated in the dominant language at the time that tech was invented, so they’re pretty much the same in all languages I know (so, say, the word “heliocentric” is pretty much the same in my native Portuguese, in Spanish, French, English and so on) so for things like scientific and technical terms having a good vocabulary is mostly language agnostic.

How much difference does it make for your life?

What’s the fraction of your time you spend in it?

How long do you have to work to earn the money to pay for it?

As I see it, those are the kind of question which dictate how much time one should spend in trying to figure out the best option for something.

Trying to figure out the best cost/quality option in, say, soap or discardable plates for a party, is seldom worth it versus spending time figuring out, say, what’s the best house or car to buy or even just a good sofa for you living room or mattress for your bed.

And yeah, plenty of people won’t spend anywhere as much time researching even a purchase they’re going to spend the next 30 years paying for (the house), which IMHO is pretty sad - if something will cost you tens of thousands of hours of your life to pay for (by working to earn the money to pay for it), spending many hours of your time in making totally sure you’re getting the right one is the wisest way of going about it.

So, it’s totally logical for casual gamers to invest in their game purchasing decisions the same time and care as they do for, say, their soap purchases, and it’s logical for people who spend many hours a week playing games to care a lot more about finding the best games for what’s probably their main form of entertainment.

Tried God Of War, lost patience after 30 minutes - too much of a “guided experience” for my taste.

Picked up Valheim again for my 6(?)th run of it and only lost patience with it maybe a month (in real time) later.

Been doing Saelig since (got it as a promo from GoG) but now have so much money in that game and such a steady way to make more that it’s not really fun anymore.

Just updated Songs Of Syx to v0.71 and preparing for a new run on that.

I’ve been gaming for almost 4 decades, originally in a ZX Spectrum and after than mostly on the PC (tried modern consoles with the WII, but found it a bit meh).

For me the modern AAA gaming experience is seldom as much fun as some Indie games out there and AAA games now tend to have much less replayability: AAA games in the last 1 or 2 decades mainly have fixed game areas with fixed and reasonably simple game rules so once I’ve seen it and done it I tend to still remember how it was for many years after playing it, so the exploration fun isn’t there anymore in a new run (in my experience it takes maybe a decade before I can come back to the best such games and have fun with it again) whilst many Indie games have procedurally generated playing fields and/or complex enough game rules that after I’ve played so much of it that I got fed up, it takes me a lot less time to have fun in a new run.

Even supposedly great games like Red Dead Redemption II turned out to, for me, be engaging and interesting for far less time than things like, say Terraria - sure, the former starts a lot more impressive, but the fun goes down a lot faster whilst the latter just keeps throwing challanges at you. Also having played it until you’re fed up, some months later Terraria is fun again for another run, whilst if you go back to it a year later, for RDR II you quickly remember what’s were in the game area and how to go around doing stuff, so the “discovery” part of fun isn’t there anymore (this especially so for the story: it’s really only interesting once)

Mind you, there are actually older AAA games for which this doesn’t apply. For example, I can still go back to the Sims 3, start a new game and it will be fun for quite a while.

I think that the problem with modern AAA games is that far too much was invested into glitzy visuals and a heavilly curated game area (not just visually but even things like scripted events) and not enough in engaging game play, plus I get the impression that game play tends to be low complexity so as to be accessible to more people, and for me after 4 decades as a gamer, simpler game rules are usually boring unless the interact in complex ways. Further, all that curating (read, “tight control”) of the game experience goes against a great source of fun in games - emergent gameplay (how the interaction between game rules and between them and the game environment can create varied and complex situations that need different solutions) - something which, IMHO, is part of the reason why in some games multiplayer is a lot of fun when singleplayer is not (humans are great at creating the novel and unexpected) and which works especially well with game with tons of things which interact with each other and with procedurally generated game spaces.

I did indeed miss that part.

Thanks for pointing it out.

You can get infinite Revenue by giving everybody $2 if they give you $1 dollar.

Such a company could proudly claim to have 1 billion sales and $1 billion dollars in revenue whilst not mentioning the “small detail” that they took $1 billion in losses to make those sales - which is pretty much what you’re doing there for SpaceX.

When judging an investment, which is what we’re doing here when talking about their IPO, what maters is profit, not revenue.

Literally almost the entire infrastructure of Starlink has to be “rebuilt” every 8 -10 years, because that’s how long their latest generation (v3) satellites last in average before they deorbit due to the air drag at low orbit or their electronics fail due to the higher radiation in Earth’s orbit

Their business model hasn’t even been proven to be profitable outside niche markets where they’re the only solution for Internet and there are enough people/companies who can afford and are willing to pay a big enough premium for that service that it offsets Starlink’s costs of having to manufacture and launching replacement for their satellites, all of which invariably die after about 10 years.

My personal version involves “Go to sleep” vs “Read just one more chapter of the book I’m currently reading”.

You raise a good point: with all online game stores, including GOG, if you don’t have the game installer in your system you risk losing it because of some licensing reasons.

So to fully protect yourself from that risk with GOG you have to download the game offline installers.

The difference in this between GOG and other stores is that:

• GOG actually has offline installers and makes it easy for you to get them (either from their web pages or, as explained by somebody else below, using software that connects to their systems and just fetches them automatically)
• GOG enforces that games sold via their store do not have DRM and cannot require networking access to install or run

For all their games GOG makes available the tools for you to protect yourself from losing games due to the store having to pull them door or going bankrupt, plus makes sure they won’t stop working (at least for single player mode) at some point due to some 3rd party switching their servers off, but you still have to do your part.

The other stores don’t even give you that option or protection. I mean, sometimes for some games you can make it happen (for example some game installers can be copied from the Steam cache and later used and the game run without Steam), just not reliably, not seamlessly and you’re not told upfront for which ones that works, so you don’t get to make an informed purchasing decision if you care about still being able to play a game a decade from now.

Unlike the others GOG give you the option and the guarantee that it works, the rest if up to you.

I did not at all like using launchers back when I gamed in Windows, but I really got around to liking Lutris now that I game in Linux - it integrates with my entire games collection (including older titles from physical media), is not trying at all to push me to buy, buy, buy and it doesn’t get in my way when all I want is to start a game and have fun (i.e. no waiting for store app or game updates).

Also I figured out how to configure it to run my games sandboxed with networking disabled, so that’s my default game launch config now. Can’t do that at all with Steam.

Finally, it’s way more flexible when it comes to force the more stubborn Windows games to run in Linux (including the funny and more extreme case of a certain game that wouldn’t run in Steam no matter what I did, but the pirated version wasn’t that hard to get to run fine in Lutris).

Have you ever even tried Heroic or Lutris as launchers rather than the store-specific launchers?!

They integrate with pretty much all big stores so you can see your entire games collection (not just the subset for a single store). Also they’re way (WAY) more customisable and flexible in how you run you game, so for example most of my games running in Lutris run behind a proper sandbox (firejail) with networking disabled (something that the No DRM of GOG games also helps make possible, as to be sold via GOG games can’t require a network connection to run).

Furter, the Open Source launchers don’t care how you sourced some of your games - if you have it you can add it there and launch it, even if it’s an old game with a CD installer or something you got from sailing the high seas.

I have both the Steam Store App and Lutris and whilst Steam has a slicker UI and deeper integration with many games from that Store (for stuff like Achievements), using Lutris is IMHO a better experience, especially when it comes to supporting my entire games collection, what I have access from the UI to tweak to get the more stubborn Windows games to run in Linux (you can easilly change actual launchers - including but no limited to Proton - as well as seriously customise how the game is run), overall privacy protection and digital safety (the whole sandboxing with networking disable thing) and, curiously, even because games in Lutris launch way faster since unlike Steam when I launch a game in Lutris I’m not constantly forced to wait for the store app to update before the actual game starts.

Things like Lutris and Heroic are done following an Open Source ethos (highly customizable, which also means you can get overwhelmed with options if you try and change anything from the defaults) and no trying to serve objectives which are store-specific (i.e. they’re not at all trying to do what’s good for that store, such as shoving adverts in front of you to buy more games or supporting high integration of specific games and a specific store).

Whilst in Windows I actually tended to avoid launchers (literally installed GOG Galaxy once, checked it out and then uninstalled it), after switching to Linux I have come around to really appreciate Lutris. I haven’t got around to appreciate Steam all that much - it constantly gets in my way when all I want is to enjoy the game (generally because I often start the game from a desktop shortcut and have to wait for Steam to update before the game starts) and it’s a bigger hassle to try and tweak stubborn Windows games to run in Linux via Steam than via Lutris and, of course, there’s the whole “can’t cut networking for it” thing.

Absolutelly, GOG’s lack of support for Linux beyond just having Linux versions of some games available (which sometimes don’t even work well) and the open REST API so that open launchers like Heroic and Lutris can talk to the store and fetch and install games directly, is a negative.

At the same time, the Steam app is also an inferior game launcher versus Lutris and Heroic, and I suspect so are all game store specific game launchers since they’re designed first and foremost to benefit the store, whilst Open Source game launchers are designed to benefit the user.

I’ve been a gamer for almost 4 decades, so I have quite a lot of experience wanting to run games that I remember were a lot of fun and it turns out they are so old they won’t run anymore.

Typically it’s one of 3 things:

• The hardware I have now won’t support it (say, I don’t have a floopy drive anymore, or they’re from an entirelly different architecture such as the pre-PC game consoles). There’s also quirky ones such as games made at a time when CPUs were so slow that the game just runs as fast as it can (which was fine for older CPUs, but not for CPUs which are thousands of times faster) rather than use the system clock to set its tempo.
• The OS I have won’t support it. Say, it’s a DOS or Windows 3.1 game
• The game has DRM which relies on shit which doesn’t apply anymore (for example, OS quirks that aren’t present in newer OS versions).

There are often ways around the first two - for the hardware sometimes you can get modern versions of older hardware (for example you can actually get an external USB Floppy Disk Drive) and if it’s old enough there will be emulators, whilst for the OS it’s either emulators or adaptor layers.

Only way around the third is either a game crack or the game having no DRM to begin with.

Now, outside the transition of hardware architectures (say, from Amiga to PC) this used to apply maybe after a game was out 10 - 20 years. In the Phone-home DRM generation this seems to apply much faster - the game maker just turns off their servers 5 - 10 years after the game is out and now you can’t legally play that game anymore.

All this to say that GOG and Pirates are the only ones fighting the good fight on making sure we won’t suffer this shit some years from now, which is even more important now that we’re in the Phone-home DRM age.

It’s exactly GOG’s thing that games sold there can’t have any DRM, so this scenario is out. (Also, no disk with GOG games ;))

Probably why you won’t find things like Red Dead Redeption II (PC) in GOG, since Rockstar wants to force you to register in their systems to get your sweet, sweet private info. (Curiously, the pirated version has no such anti-consumer crap)

In my experience as a gamer for almost 4 decades, the most likely scenario with a really old game is that it simply won’t install or run in the OS version or even hardware that you have now, though give it enough time and somebody out there will have created an emulator or adaptor layer for it (like DOSBox).

But yeah, any game from the Phone-home DRM generation which isn’t bought from a seller which has No DRM policy (which only GOG has, as far as I know - even itch.io doesn’t have a No DRM policy) will almost certainly have an artificially created end-of-life that has nothing to do with the OS or hardware you have being too new for the game.

I was working on server side stuff back then and IIS was never dominant - it was more a hodge-podge of various solutions including stuff like Sun’s proprietary stuff on top of SunOS, and indeed IIS was also in the mix though at least in my experience it never really overtook the Unix-based solutions.

But yeah, Apache with Linux came out and took pretty much the whole webservers and web-services market pretty fast, and Linux itself took over most of the broader server-side market (so, stuff beyond serving web-pages or REST interfaces).

Windows NT had a bit of a moment before that, but it didn’t grew all that big on the server side because of competing Unix solutions back then (SunOS, IBM AIX and so on) and then Linux came and pretty much crushed NT server-side for anything but serving Microsoft-ecosystem-specific stuff (such as services supporting single sign-on for Windows).

Oh yeah, I remember that.

Shame that he’s one of the ones who plowed, sowed and fertilized the field were anti-EU populism grew strong.

His was the usual “magical” thinking of technocratic neoliberals in Finance who grew up in stable Democracies - the idea that you can Financially and Economically tilt the field as much as you want to favor a handful of people whilst disfavoring the majority and there will be no consequences outside of Finance & Economics (which they control).

This was quite a widespread way of thinking back then amongst Finance and Political circles in Britain - the idea that in Democracy control over Economics was the same as total control.

The reality was of course quite different: the pain suffered by the many as a result of the decision that Asset Owners should be saved using Austerity for the rest to pay for it, generated a social and political pushback which the Far-Right and the section of the very rich who funded such parties (many of whom also owned tabloids pushing such ideas) skillfully redirected towards anti-immigration and anti-EU feelings, which in turn ended up causing Brexit.

Similar things happened all over Europe, but because Britain was already thoroughly subverted by far-right tabloids and had a stronger and deeper Austerity than the rest (thanks in part to Mr Carney) there it happened sooner and harder, plus the results from Brexit were a warning to the rest of Europe and as the public opinion in the rest of Europe quickly turned against the idea of referendums on leaving the EU after seeing the shit show in Britain, the Far-Right parties there quickly shut up with their previous anti-EU rhetoric, so things haven’t become quite the shit shot as in Britain, though we did see the Far Right growing following the political and Economic choices made after the Crash, which were along similar lines as those in Britain in the Eurozone too, just not quite as nasty in most of it (with the notable exception of Greece, which was made to suffer to save German and French banks).

Just because Democracies don’t tend to end in Revolution, doesn’t mean that pain inflicted through Economic means doesn’t end up generating some kind of social and political pushback.

Just avoid like the plague brands that sponsor World Cups.

I’ve been doing it since the last one in Qatar (because of the slave-like conditions for workers there) and am doing it for the current one also (because, well, mass-murdering Fascists supporting the XXI century version of the Nazis whilst they activelly mass-murder children because of the “crime” of not being White Jews).

As it so happens, a happy side effect is often that not consuming products of those brands (which are invariably large brands) means you produce less disposable stuff and/or consume more local products. You even end up saving money because you either stop consuming something that you don’t actually need or you replace it with a store brand, and those are cheaper.

Win-win-win.

I’m neither Canadian nor live in Canada.

I did, however, live in Britain when Mark was the head of the Bank Of England.

His policy during his tenure there, which started a bit after the 2008 Crash, was to sacrifice workers and income from work in order to protect and even grow at a faster pace the wealth of Asset Owners and Bankers.

During at least several years of his period there (can’t talk about the entirety of it, since I left the country before he left his job), real incomes of the lower 90% of the population were falling at around 1% a year, whilst for the top 10% they were rising at over 20% per year.

Mark Carney was the Bank Of England Governor of Austerity, a widespread pain which almost certainly was decisive in causing Leave to win the Leave Referendum and thus Brexit.

Unless, he has massivelly changed as a persom since the days when he was getting paid a massive salary to in a time when everybody was suffering, make sure the ultra-rich and sleazy bankers not just kept their riches but actually saw them grow faster than before (doing so by sacrificing the working class and the income from work), he doesn’t give a shit about people losing their jobs unless they’re his mates.

Could it be whatever blackmail material Israel seems to have on him?!

Being able to track people is a desired feature, not a happy coincidence of leaving it to the private sector.

Go see who voted for Chat Control in the EU Parliament and who you see voting for it is the mainstream parties which have been well entreched in power as a power duopoly and which have been Neoliberal for decades.

They want the mechanics of Autocracy in place because it makes it easier to spot dissent and interfere in attempts to change the system that keeps them in power and makes them personally very wealthy from doing favors with the power they hold to very rich, very thankful, friends.

I reckon a nice cold beer would’ve been a better charitable donation.