Viewers have literally zero attention span, so if the talking isn’t super high speed back to back without even a single second to pause for breath, people click off or scroll past.

Same with subtitles that flash up rapidly, a single word at at time.

That’s the sorry state of affairs we are now living with.

Cloudflare presumably don’t want to give away the identity of their customer.

Even if only 1% of people used adblock, then that’s 1% of millions of dollars of ad revenue. It’s easily enough to put several people on this as a full time job if they want to.

I’m sure Google saw it as only a minor issue at first, but the number of people using adblockers is presumably going up all the time.

The irony being of course that adblock usage is skyrocketing only because companies like Google have made the Internet so thoroughly ad-polluted it’s intolerable to go without one.

I mean, it could come in suppository form…

I suppose it happened because from a mainstream perspective handhelds like the DS and PSP were far behind dedicated systems in terms of graphics, and so the expectation was never there to have “triple A” visuals - neither from consumers nor industry.

Made for very fertile ground in terms of games that had budget, but still had a long leash to go and get wacky.

I’m fairly sure a lot of places have to wait, unless you have an electric shower.

In the US people usually have an immersion heater tank for the hot water. Here in the UK I’ve got a combi boiler that produces water for hot taps, showers, and also central heating radiators.

In both cases there’s some distance of pipe between where your hot water is coming from and where your shower is and that’s what you are waiting for - for the water to get where it needs to go.

How does your stuff work?

Yeah, I agree the bots are genuinely "more fleshy"and with skin and such - just saying where my imagination was at - which thanks to the wonder of books can be quite different for different people.

I wish we knew what the motivation was for choosing the actor. The cynic in me thinks they opted obviously male lead to reduce friction and claims of “wokeness” but without some inside insight we can’t know.

In my imagination, Murderbot looked kinda like the player character from the game ‘Citizen Sleeper’, pictured below.

Which is to say, very androgynous and very obviously cybernetic.

There’s quite a bit of character similarity between them too, because the titular Sleeper is a human consciousness in a cybernetic body that has a lot of biological parts, and they are kept loyal to the company who owns them by a drug that will cause their body to break down if they stop taking it. Same intent as the governor module, but a different approach.

I found Murderbot’s physical appearance an important aspect of the books, not just for surface plot reasons (everyone knows they are a bot etc) but because it’s a large part of what people need to overcome from the perspective of seeing past their prejudices.

Wow yeah. That must have been a really infuriating gameplay issue, no wonder players were upset with it.

A shame the game was so rushed or I’m sure the dev would have fixed that in code.

What was the bug and workaround? :)

Matrix org isn’t obligated to run a public instance at all - they could stick to developing the spec, and let other people run instances.

And honestly maybe they should, because then we wouldn’t have this huge consolidation problem on matrix.org in the first place.

Promoting that the nunber exists as a actual thing people should use is good, yeah. :)

The actual number isn’t so important, though. If ever needed to call the non-emergency number I’d search it up, which fortunately I can do given I’ve got loads of time because it’s not an emergency.

For sure.

If they’ve got a problem with non-emergency callers dialing 911, surely it would be best to try and reduce that problem through other means (such as fining persistent inappropriate use of 911)

I don’t want to talk to a robot when I’m on the floor dying.

I loved that app and I still miss it (and reddit) in some ways, but the API Apocalypse was when I decided I had to take a moral stand and quit. No way was I going to be railroaded into the first-party app full of ads and nonsense.

I haven’t looked back since.

I agree with you, it’s insidious.

Given you’ve got a Pixel phone, you can save at least yourself from this problem by running Graphene or Calyx on it.

When the textures are high-res but the model is low-res

I agree. After all, they are still selling it, and people are still happily buying it. A friend got one about 3 months ago and he’s been very pleased.

The Steam Deck is still under four years old, let’s remember. The Nintendo Switch is over eight! Of course that’s not an apples-to-oranges comparison as the Steam Deck aims to run any game, not just specifically optomised titles. But it’s an indicator.

On the subject of being old, we get way more life out of PC hardware right now than we did back in the early 2000s. Nowadays if you buy a high end GPU you might get a decade of gaming out of it. Back then you’d get 2-3 years and it would be obsolete, because graphics tech was just evolving so fast. (Of course, cards now cost ten times what they did back then, but that’s another story…)

Point is, there’s plenty of life left in the steam deck yet :)

The ship was one of the best parts for sure. Once you are competent it feels super liberating how nimbly you can zip around a planet.

The other good parts of that game were progression, and death.

I love that knowledge is the only thing retained between loops - the only currency of value. And I loved the feeling of making new discoveries.

And with death as an expected mechanic, the game doesn’t have to put up any guiderails to save you from it. There are no training wheels. You want to go outside without a spacesuit? Bad idea but we’ll let you. You want to literally lose your ship so you can never get it back? Sure, go for it. You want to fall into a space anomaly and see what happens? Be our guest.

Masterpiece game honestly.

You’re not wrong, but I only came here to try and explain the meme.

Three quarters of a century ago, a different society than ours suggested flying cars as a possibility for the world, and now we make funny pictures about it.

Whether that was at the time objectively right or wrong for them to believe is a whole new topic that I’m not equipped to get into.

Well yes it’s unrealistic.

It was an imagined future based on boundless optimism that things would keep getting better and better, both technically and socially.

Inventions and discoveries at that time were happening so rapidly it surely felt like some revolutionary new thing was always just around the corner. We’d probably invent some amazing new levitation technology that would let things hover without making any sound, and it would all be powered by individual nuclear generators in every car, because why not right, nuclear is the future!

It was a dream from a time of optimism that never came to pass. The current day meme isn’t about literal flying cars, it’s about the contrast between this imagined world - no matter how realistic or not - and the reality we actually got.