Coconuts are just really, really big seeds. They’re a nut, as the name implies.
However, I have a counterpoint because there is one fruit that I absolutely like with chocolate. Dried mango slices in dark chocolate are delicous.
Well, okay, two - bananas in chocolate are tasty. Back in the times when chocolate fountains were a regular occurrence at events, I could have eaten half my body weight in them.
Part of that is due to the sheer complexity of games now compared to then. It’s hard to test everything.
Of course, there’s also the problems of games getting released in noticeably buggy states, which seems a lot more common now than it used to be (there were definitely buggy games released for the PS1, but they were rare).
TF2 had a long and prosperous life. It’s 18 years old at this point. There are a few live service games (usually with subscriptions) that have survived longer, but TF2 had its run, and it was a good one. I bought it as part of the Orange Box and I absolutely got my money’s worth and then some from it.
As for physical media - I don’t know if you were around for it, but there was a period before Steam took over the industry when most major PC game releases had CD keys you had to input and validate before you could play the game. Do something the publisher doesn’t like? The key gets revoked and you can’t play the game any more unless you buy another license. There were entire underground communities devoted to cracking the CD key validations in games. Now you just use Luna or Steamless and call it a day.
All it would take for Valve to lose their effective monopoly on PC game distribution would be for someone else to make a better product.
Every other major PC game distribution platform (besides GOG, and they’re far more niche than Valve) has essentially started their attempt to unseat Valve with enshittification baked in, and it was obvious.
If you have something that you can’t afford to part with, you don’t let it leave your person. It goes in your pockets, or in your carry-on.
If you have something that needs to get somewhere safely, and you can’t afford to lose it, and you can’t carry it with you onto an airplane, you don’t put it in your checked luggage - you ship it. With insurance.
Everyone either knows someone, or has had the experience themselves, of losing luggage due to an airline’s neglect. It’s a known risk.
Amazon is a service. That service is becoming materially worse (I have a harder time finding what I’m looking for because of the flood of substandard products and Amazon’s preferential search treatment practices, and even when I do find what I’m looking for, there’s a sizable risk that it’s a fake). This is very much enshittification; they captured the market share, and now they’re squeezing it. Anything that makes them more money but is worse for the consumer, they do. Anything that is better for the consumer but costs them money, they don’t do.
There are two factors necessary for a truly free market that prevent any capitalist system from actually being a free market. They are:
Consumers need to have perfect information about the products and the companies that make and/or sell them - in other words, companies must not be able to hide their sins.
There needs to be zero friction for new entrants into the marketplace, whether that is from costs to start up a business, or anti-competitive behavior from other companies with money to throw around.
It is impossible to achieve either of these in the real world.
Ugh. Well, sounds like I made a good choice dropping it…
The Sword of Truth series.
I read the first book as a teenager. I was rather skeezed out by the roughly one-third of the book that was a poorly-disguised authorial kink fantasy.
Then the second book had a lovingly detailed description of a witch gaining demonic power by getting railed by a demon.
Whoever wrote those books, didn’t have much consideration for the reader.
Sizable chunks of the Old Testament were documentation, rather than formatted with the intent of being engaging. It’s like how a family bible often has genealogy hand-written inside it, except it’s the contents of the book itself.
For the longest time, Sanderson was utterly terrible at writing romance, and it was very obvious. A lot of it was probably due to a lack of personal experience. He’s gotten better, but a lot of the ‘lack’ you’re feeling in his writing probably stems from the same place. Despite writing about dark topics - apocalyptic events, oppressed populations, the failures of heroes, etc. - he is missing the edge that you get from other authors who write similar stories. Personally I don’t mind, and I really enjoy his books - but I can understand why others would find them bland.
Okay, that’s actually kinda great.
It has no meaning. It’s a meme purely for the sake of being a meme.
The word that always comes to mind is ‘literally’ which has come to mean ‘figuratively, but with emphasis’ and it drives me nuts - because it removes the word we have to say ‘this is a thing that you might assume is figurative, but it’s not, it actually happened’.
If you own it on GoG you don’t need a pirate copy - just save the offline installer.
Personally, I wouldn’t include Proton in the costs of the Steam Machine. The Deck already is benefiting from it immensely, and I would consider it to be a cost of expanding into Linux gaming in general - especially with the Lenovo handheld and other devices starting to jump on the bandwagon as Microsoft continues to take repeated dumps on their userbase. Its R&D costs are being won back by the market % Steam takes on any games bought and played in Linux, which means that it can benefit from that continued revenue stream rather than the one-off hardware sale.
The hardware has to break even. The software already has.
Don’t forget aggressive rent-seeking behavior.
Agreed. The distinction is between ‘millionaires’ and ‘multi-millionaires’ imo.
They’re buying the parts directly from the manufacturers though, so cutting out the retailer middle-man could offset the R&D costs.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some secret Google search engine that still has decent search results instead of the paid-for mess that us plebs get.
AI, on the other hand? The flaws are intrinsic.