8bitdo aren't really for any particular device, but the quality is fantastic.

White background & gray text.

When did we shift away from black text?

There's less contrast with gray, and on a lot of displays it's more difficult to read, and more straining on the eyes.

God dammit.

It's been years. Literally years.

Well played.

Sounds like you've already answered your own question.

It might die. If it does, it's not a super big deal. You have backups. You don't like creating unnecessary e-waste.

As gets have said, crystal disk info can help detect any existing problems, but it can't predict the future if something happens suddenly. So it can be a good indicator, but don't assume it's 100%.

As a kid, I found Gargoyles Quest infuriatingly addictive. I wasn't good enough to do well at it, it annoyed me, but I kept going back for more.

"... and I must say, your potatoes are particularly nice"

Same.

Used Liftoff before Boost became available but it was buggy. As soon as boost was released it was a no-brainer, moved straight over. The familiarity from using it with reddit is excellent, has a great feel and everything just works how it should.

Wish that was my worst case scenario

I hadn't used FB for quite some time, when I finally tried to log in again, they wanted me to confirm who I was first with real ID.

Not to make a new account, just to access my existing account, of which I know the password, security answers, and could confirm ownership via my registered email account.

And that was the final nail in the coffin.

Fuck. No.

It sounds like you're coming at science from a religious or philosophical standing, and blurring the lines.

Science can explain and account for everything in life, whether you understand it or not.

There are plenty of things that we as humans do not yet understand, but it's all still science.

The question of 'why did this have to happen to me/them' is completely null and void; it's a question stemming from a belief system, not a scientific system.

Person X got cancer because they were genetically predisposed to it, or they encountered a environmental occurance that caused it. Person Y had a heart attack at 50 and died because they had a preexisting heart condition, or they were unhealthy, or an environmental incident occurred that initied it.

The philosophy of it is not scientific, it's philosophical and has no valid place in a scientific explanation.

Discussing philosophy can be thought provoking, entertaining, enraging, and enlightening all at the same time, but it's totally different to discussing science.

As for coping strategies, accepting that some things are simply out of your control is a good place to start. Easier said than done at times, I know. We as humans gravitate towards belief, we've likely evolved to do that. But again, that's science. Know your limits, understand that you won't always have control, and accept things that are beyond your reach. Life won't always be fun, but you're the only person in charge of your own thoughts and feelings. Use that to your advantage whenever you can.

... And you end up accidently clicking a button that was previously above, and landing on a page you didn't even want to see!

The Water Temple was a nightmare of a level. Easily the hardest point in the game. If you stick with it, the everything that comes after it seems relatively straightforward!

That being said, having finished the game multiple times many years ago, I played through Breath of the Wild then went back to Ocarina of Time, and it felt very dated. Lots of nostalgia, but the control system is that of a very primitive game by today's standard for open worlds.

As for your question though, The Lost Levels in the Super Mario Allstars game. I've never gone back to it after all these years, might be worth trying again now with fresh eyes :)

I totally agree, I just cba. I have too much going on in my life to start from scratch like that again, and windows is just easy now. I hate the whole drm model, but like most people, I'll live with it unless Linux finally becomes an easy, viable alternative that's supported to the same degree as windows and feels just as easy to use.

At the moment, yep, completely agree.

In the future, maybe not so much. Think cloud gaming. Think VR. Think 4k per eye atm, scaled up as tech improvements scale up to much higher resolutions than we currently have. Maybe multiple people streaming VR games at the same time in the same household.

Now put all of that together.

Bandwidth isn't an issue right now, but this could potentially be a pretty sweet improvement as we move forward.

Video conferencing however... Not sure how that would benefit from this.

Yeah fair enough, I wasn't really considering ports to new systems when I asked the question. I was thinking more along the lines of, if they remastered something like SMW with more modern graphics or slightly different controls, it wouldn't hold up to the original masterpiece. But then again flatscreens don't display games designed for crt screens as well as they were initially intended. Maybe remakes would've been a better question!

I've always had mountain bikes. Most recently got a 29er. I don't ride much these days, but feel like a road bike might get me out more.

After seeing your comment I went and checked when I got my Logitech X-540 set, not quite as long, 14 years, but also still going strong. Probably far from ideal for an audiophile, but they've been fantastic for my needs and can still blast out great sound when they need to. Been hooked up to whatever media centre setup is on my TV since I got them, in fact they've been the only consistently connected piece of tech in that system in 14 years. Literally everything else has changed multiple times.

He's a greedy little shit who'd rather run the entire platform into the ground for a buck than do anything useful with his life.

He could've done great things. He could've gone down in history shoulder to shoulder with some of the big guys, instead, he's been a snivelling backstabbing little fungus from day 1.

There's also cryptocurrency. Not as invisible as many would have you believe, especially when KYC checks are involved, but there are definitely ways to stay hidden with it, by choosing certain exchanges, transfer methods, and currencies.

Not as straightforward of an answer as OP is probably hoping for though, and it also depends heavily on the recipient of the money.

We're looking to get our first TV in years, the current one is about 10-12 years old. We don't watch normal 'tv', everything is streamed through another device.

What kind of adverts can I expect in a modern current-gen TV?

Where I live, Costco tends to be priced fairly in line with supermarket prices, but slightly higher quality for a lot of things. Not everything, you get to know what's what, but as a general guideline it works. Meat for example, I'd always have said it was higher quality and cheaper prices, but the chicken has dropped in quality over the past few years. So you've still got to be careful at times. TP is much cheaper, but comparible to named brands.

Not sure tbh, I have a couple of SF30 Pros for about 3 years and they've been solid, never had any shedding.

I only have the one pair of darn tough socks, but they're fantastic, might ask for more from santa this year.

Most uncomfortable earplugs I've ever used lol.

Glad you're getting on well with them :)

Just shows how different everyone's ears are.

Yeah I ended up with moldable ones that you squish in and they shape themselves to your ear, then stay soft until you remove them. Tried a few different designs and these worked best for me. It's so nice being able to sleep in near silence!

I'd heard great things about loop, but they just aren't right for my ear shape unfortunately.

Yep, that's right, you drew false conclusions from the start, in that I was referring to the same shade of gray as in the study; which, incidentally, was far more focused on light background & dark text vs dark background & light text, than it was black text vs gray text, so it wasn't even really relevant to begin with.

Glad we finally agree!

I didn't even realise this was released for the snes! Fond memories of it on the spectrum. Might need to crank up the old emulator when I get the time.

I mean, I wasn't mistaken, you drew false conclusions from what I said from the offset, then dug your heals in when I made it crystal clear what was meant, time and time again. Anyway.

It feels like we're arguing semantics for the sake of it, you're entitled to your opinion, as am I. You misinterpreted what I meant from the start, maybe I could have been more explicit. Whatever the case, have a good evening.

Agreed, SMW was actually the first thing that popped into my head when writing the post subject, SMB1-3 definitely qualify too. I'd put them all on equal footing in this regard.

I don't disagree about the overuse of light grey/white, but it's really irrelevant to what I said.

My entire point from the very start, the point that you're replying to, was about the differences in shades of gray, be that from calibration or design choice lol.

If a screen is so badly calibrated that dark grey is coming out substantially lighter then it's probably going to doing something similar to black.

From my experience of using screens like this for years, no, it doesn't. Black is black. Gray varies by screen, and more importantly, by web dev.

No developer ponders what shade of black to use, it's 000000. Gray... Not quite as clear cut.

Ah, typo sorry, I was thinking nes when I wrote that, but my fingers must have had their own idea.

Nothing anecdotal about that, but sure. And my entire point from the start was that black causes less strain than light gray.

At the end of the day, you have your opinions, I have mine, and I'm sure you're right that dark gray is better than black for eye strain, but in the real world it doesn't work like that due to the reasons I laid out above; monitor calibrations and web devs who just throw whatever shade of gray they want on to it.

I loved it until I didn't.

Don't remember how far I got, maybe 2/3 of the biomes, then I burned out and got bored. That was a while back, and flattening the land was really glitchy. I'd have an area perfectly flattened and ready to commence building, save it all down, come back next day, and it'd all gone to shit again. I got sick of trying. It became more of a grind just to get back to my last save point than I wanted, and gave up on it.

Did it ever get a full release?

That was a beautiful game!

You don't always have control of calibration settings when you're on someone else's monitor, but at lest black always looks black and is still readable without selecting text to change it.

Also, as I said, not everyone uses the same shade of gray when building a web page/style/theme. In fact, far from it. Black however, is always black, one shade, 000000.

Weird, that worked first time for me too, but when I asked it directly to infer any information that it could about me, it refused citing privacy reasons, even though i was asking it to talk about me and me only!

The problem with that is that not all displays show the same colours and contrasts, so what looks like one shade on monitor A can look totally different on monitor B. Combine that with the massive number of sites that just have any old gray, as opposed to a specifically recognised dark gray, and you frequently end up with text appearing is light or mid gray.

When this happens, (which you notice a lot on certain monitors) the eye strain is faaaaar worse than a nice thin black text. I find myself pressing CTRL-A at times to highlight everything on the page for a little more contrast, because the standard text is so unreadable.

Yeah that's an interesting way of approaching it. Definitely makes sense thanks :)

There's some countries that accept it as payment fairly widely, and a couple that have even properly adopted it iirc.

In general though, no, but it's certainly usable globally and would get around OP's problem if the recipient accepts it. And if OP can be bothered with the hassle of learning about it.