FM Chiptune Musician | DX Complex Staff | SEGA, MSX and Retro Tech Dork | He/Him

Formerly [email protected]
Microblogging at [email protected]
https://netnomad.dxcomplex.com/

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • i honestly regret deleting my xitter account. not because i actually want to use it, no way in hell, but i got curious recently and saw that my username was retaken by someone else, so now any old links there go to them instead of me. would have been much better to delete all of my tweets and change my display name and bio to point people to mastodon. maybe even set up automated tweets telling people switch. even if i got banned for that, that at least prevents anyone else from squatting on my old id. oh well, you live and you learn!



  • i came here to say the same thing! if people actually genuinely like the new reddit ui, those people might just want and need different things out of a website than we do, and trying to onboard them might be a fool’s errand. not to be a gatekeeper, i’d love if everyone quit the corporate web, but a lot of the things people complain about here like the ui and the decentrilization are why i’m here (in my case mbin) and not there to begin with

    same thing with mastodon, people still rail against it’s ui but the ui was a big reason i even made a mastodon long before twitter was bought out, back when they first tried to phase out the chronological timeline


  • i wrote out a whole big thing and then my phone ate it so here’s the sparknotes: game design, both hardware and software, is a dialogue, with ideas bouncing back and forth between companies. none of your examples exist in a vacuum or were “never before seen,” nintendo just tend to be the ones who strike gold when they try something. with SEGA out of the game and sony and microsoft focusing solely on horsepower, the hardware dialogue has mostly stopped. it took a while to be noticable because consoles start developement way before they’re released, so it’s only catching up with us now. with new (sort of) entrants into gaming hardware like steam and retro handheld manufacturers entering the fray, things will likely get interesting again- but just like how we’re only feeling the drought now, it’ll take a while for existing hardware to catch up with the dialogue





  • i see a lot of comments saying how the current situation is better than if streaming platforms became fragmented like TV, but part of why streaming services for TV became so popular is because TV and movies are things you don’t often return to- aside from a few favorites, you might watch a show or a movie only once every five or ten years, whereas you listen to your favorite music over and over and over again. imo if Spotify were to collapse, it’s less likely that people would shell out a fortune for WB+ and Sony+ and more likely that they would just go back to buying an album every month or two, which is a win win because it’s cheaper for them and way more money going to the artist. hell, even if 98% of people just went back to limewire and 2% started buying music again, that’s still ultimately way more money for artists



  • oh boy. here we go.

    Faith of the Heart is great. the arrangement is a little weak but the tune itself rules and the words capture Archer so well i was shocked to learn it was a cover and not purpose-written for that

    The Wrath of Kahn is just ok. it’s less Star Trek and more an action movie celebrating the characters that we love, which makes it just the same as the later movies everyone hates. the only ones that are really feature-length Trek are Motion Picture and The Undiscovered Country. Into Darkness would be listed there too if the plot didn’t keep getting hijacked by Wrath of Khan nostalgia baiting, ironically

    the soap opera vibes in Discovery make sense in universe. they never really got a chance to be a peacetime exploration vessel and then it turned out their captain was secretly a space Nazi. compare and contrast how Pike treats them and the Enterprise crew- he seems to be aware of this and treats them with kid gloves. whether or not that was intentional and/or if it makes for good TV is left as an exercise to the reader

    Dear Doctor was a good episode. they didn’t condemn those people to die, they offered them a multigeneration treatment that just kicked the can down the road. it’s not about the decision so much as the decision to not make a decision (which granted, Rush tells us is still a choice). it’s messy but that’s the point. Cogenitor is the episode that deserves the hate. it may very well be the single worst episode in all of Trek



  • i don’t think it’s so much that they’re actually the baddies as it is that they became too dogmatic and process-oriented to be able to do the good that they were trying to do. on the micro scale they were too inflexible with their rules to always do the right thing, and on the macro scale they could bend the rules however they wanted in the name of The Greater Good. protecting the Jedi order so that they could hypothetically do good later was more important than admitting to mistakes and exposing themselves to criticism to do tangible good in the moment. in less words, they meant well and had their heads pretty far up their asses. the Dooku episodes of Tales of the Jedi demonstrate this very well

    whether or not this is just the Jedi Order or the larger light-side-user community is up for debate. a lot of people point to the prophecy of balance being brought to the force and say that that required an equal number of Jedi and Sith, and that idea seems to have seeped into Disney canon, but at least originally Lucas seemed to intend for the light side to represent balance and for the dark side to be a corruption of that, in which case the Jedi Order being assholes meant they also weren’t really Jedi to begin with

    another commente argues that of course they’re assholes because they’re a religion, but i’d argue that they’re assholes because they’re an organized religion. if being a Jedi is about harmony with all life and the force, as opposed to using it and abusing it, you can’t create Jedi by using and abusing life forms the way a beaurocratic institution invariably does. it’s not a coincidence that all of the great Jedi heroes throughout SW are either deviants within or otherwise estranged from the order. standing up for people and doing the right thing almost always involves sticking it to The Man, and the Jedi Order were The Man


  • honestly i’m not even sure how the author of this managed to boil down feed UI preferences into “questions” or “options” or whatever. all of the same content is there, it’s just a matter of if it’s expanded or collapsed by default- merely information density. what it really comes down to is older sites collapsed things by default, newer sites expand things by default, and most people like whatever they grew up with. i’m gen z and much prefer the older style just because i was on forums and old reddit right around when my peers opened their twitter and instagram accounts. there is definitely a discussion to be had there about which format is healthier and why companies prefer the latter format these days, but to skim right past that into the bit about third parties makes me think that was the real point the author wanted to make and contorted their UI argument to get there