Pixel 6 phone, and I pretty much just picked it up and pointed it :)

I guess that explains why they're going to such great lengths to convince us that talking about Game of Thrones around a water cooler is such a tremendous benefit to humankind...

Clowns who think like this need to fuck all the way off... and, honestly, it's up to older folk like me to make that clear. Younger folks are going to be fooled or scared into thinking like this and be unable or unwilling to speak up. We who have less pressing concerns need to have their backs.

Leaving Twitter for Mastodon barely had an impact. I was just about done with that whole place, with or without Musk in charge.

Reddit is different... I still loved using it. I had my subscriptions honed, all my interests represented. I suffered none of the toxicity that others saw. Not sure if that was just because I mostly used smaller, niche-interest subs or because I mostly lurked and seldom posted? It was all friendly, knowledgeable and entertaining, a stream of consciousness that I could dip in to whenever I wanted to.

So I'm not leaving Reddit because of the experience, but more on principal (both the API kerfuffle and a general aversion to ad-revenue models, which are clearly harmful to society). Principals sadly don't give me something to read over breakfast...

I hope Lemmy can become that stream of consciousness in time. I'm trying to do my bit by being an active contributor rather than a lurking grazer.

Working from home has its pros and cons. Fortunately, in my experience, the pros are all mine and the cons are all someone else's. That kind of colours my judgement.

It's interesting how far Linux desktop has progressed recently... I don't hate Windows, in fact I think it's a great OS for most purposes. But I happened to try Linux Mint a few years ago in a fit of pique about being excluded from the Win11 upgrade for spurious reasons... and it just kind of stuck.

Two years later and I am full on Linux now. Don't even have a Windows partition (though I do keep a VM). And I'm about to buy a new laptop that I intend to buy without an OS, it will never be touched by Windows, there's just no need.

For my purposes, Linux does everything now. OS, software, the games I want to play... I never even think about it. Also, everywhere I look, I see Linux - my Steamdeck, my MiSTer, my Pis, my Miyoo Mini. It's everywhere...

Switched to Linux Mint about three years ago after being unable to take my perfectly good laptop from W10 to W11. Dual boot firstly, quickly becoming entirely Mint. It just worked. It was the first Linux distro I'd tried in about 20 years that I didn't mess up in a week or so.

Recently bought a new laptop and decided to distro hop. Tried various flavours of Fedora, and a few others, but ultimately came back to Mint. None of the others worked quite as well as Mint does for me (though I really liked KDE Plasma, and Gnome surprised me once I finally discovered extensions!)

Why did its valuation tank after Elon Musk took over and started enacting his policies? Perhaps we'll never know...

Yeah, me too. From a consumer perspective, music streaming (not just Spotify) has managed to remain a worthwhile offering, the kind we all said we'd be happy to pay for if it just existed back in the piracy age...

Contrast with video streaming, where you now need to have five different subscriptions just to have a hope of watching half the things you want, where the content changes all the time and geo-limitations abound.

Take my extra quid, Spotify!

Pretty much all of them... I have so many memories of old 80s computer games where all I remember is level 1. It appears that I was terrible and perfectly happy with that.

I really wish they'd drop the YouTube Music aspect of this and just do an ad-free YouTube sub. Happy to pay content creators for their work; less happy to give Google money for a music platform after what they did to Google Music.

All workers are required to enjoy 30 minutes of mandatory social engagement at a designated "Fun Area". Enjoyment activities can include: hearty laughter, corporate value appreciation, appropriate camaraderie. If the enjoyment you wish to experience is outside of these allowed forms, please speak to your department's Enjoyment Adjustment Officer.

Except in the case of the Sega Master System, where the simplistic 8-bit graphics felt like a massive leap up from the terrible box art!

More broadly: an inability to discern good sources of information from bad sources of information.

Same solution though: education.

In the interests of good comparison science, it's worth mentioning that a couple of platforms also got homebrew ports...

Over on the Atari 8-bit platforms, we have "Gacek", a kind of unbranded version of Bomb Jack. It's really good, and really pushes the old Atari's to their limits. Varied sprites and colourful backdrops, and a range of music throughout the levels. It feels really good to play as well.

There are oddities though - like the way it plays the theme from Gradius/Nemesis on the high score table. And the way it doesn't mention Bomb Jack at all (understandable, given its homebrew nature). So it's not so much Bomb Jack as Bomb Jack-ish. But it's still very good!

The venerable Colecovision also got a homebrew version, this time staying truer to the original. It's also very good, and looks way better than a 1982 console has any right to. Control is fluid and fast, and the music is catchy and not annoying.

The bomb sprites are a bit large however, and the game tends to be a bit on the easy side, given there are fewer enemies on screen. But it's still a tremendous achievement.

There's a sweet spot, right? Popular enough to be viable; not so popular that the quality decreases.

It's 20 years old... if Windwaker isn't considered retro now, then Atari 2600 games weren't considered retro in 1997 :)

I'm starting to think that we need to see AI research in the same way we see biological weapon research - a visit from a SEAL team or a cruise missile for any identified laboratory. Smash the disks, burn all the print outs!

Okay, this is hyperbolic and unrealistic, but I agree with this lion-maned YouTuber - we are really not ready.

AI as a tech is game changing, but it practically demands at least UBI (and probably some form of socialism) as a prerequisite. We, meanwhile, are still electing conservative governments! The same arseholes that will label the legions of unemployed artists, actors, musicians, coders, admin assistants etc etc as lazy and cut their benefits.

Does anyone truly believe that a tech that can replace half of human jobs is going to create happy outcomes in today's society? Or will it just make tech-bros and scammers richer, and virtually everyone else poorer?

I did try running Plasma on Mint, but it was never quite as good as on Fedora or as smooth on Mint as Cinnamon.

Honestly, I think I just like the simple uniformity of Cinnamon. It's dull and predicable, but really, really solid.

The coder who converted the Spectrum version (Bob Pape) wrote an excellent memoir about how he went about it, his life at the time (he was basically a teenager) and his interactions with the weird, nascent world of gaming development companies. It's really fascinating and well worth a few hours. And it's free! It's Behind You: The Making of a Computer Game

I don't think many people, even the doomiest doomsayers, reckon it'll lead to human extinction. But "food and water shortages, mass migration and small conflicts" is not nothing, and could lead to a situation where we think extinction might have been a preferable option.

Wait, hold the front page! There's one more to consider... and, predictably, it's probably one of the best.

I don't know much about the Sharp X68000, but judging by this version of Final Fight, it certainly knows its onions. By which I mean "ports". Because this looks and feels pretty much identical to the arcade. Same everything. It almost doesn't feel like a port in the ZX Spectrum sense. It doesn't feel compromised in any way.

You know, it's somehow less fun playing ports like this. They're just effortlessly wonderful, so it's hard to find anything to write about them.

As such, I'm still giving the port of the week to the GBA ;)

I recently switched from Chrome to Firefox as part of an ongoing de-Google effort... and, honestly, I found it fairly easy. The two things I missed and found solutions for were:

1. Profiles - I just use the built in profiles with the Profile Switcher extension
2. Casting to Chromecast - I use the fx_cast extension and actually find it more reliable than Chrome's casting!

Other than those, I've found it to be a very comfortable, familiar experience.

This was especially a problem with for ZX Spectrum owners... they were, shall we say, a little bit reluctant to show Speccy buyers exactly what they were getting.

Yeah, it really was amazing to play blind. We especially enjoyed the DLC... when we first realised what it was all about, it nearly blew our minds!

GBA Advance Wars... I missed it first time round, so I'm playing it through on my Miyoo Mini Plus. Absolutely perfect handheld game, ideal to grab for a quick half hour mission.

I mean, the arcade is clearly the best version... (if you're talking the original game).

For the ports... the Spectrum is great for sheer chutzpah, but the PC Engine port is probably the most faithful of all the versions that weren't running an emulator. The Sega Mastersystem is also extremely good, on much less powerful hardware.

No idea if it's related, but I see similar behaviour (the not loading, rather than the error message) whenever Firefox requires a restart for an update. It doesn't make it clear this is what is happening, it just stops loading web pages in existing tabs. Only if I open a new tab does it show the "Restart to keep using" message.

I've spent far too much time diagnosing network issues without realising I just needed a restart :)

Not really older games, since I grew up parallel to them, but I'm kind of jealous of the ubiquitous NES culture in the US in the mid-late 80s.

Consoles were a rarity in the UK till the 90s, and the Sega Mastersystem was largely the only game in town where I was before that. I didn't even see a NES in person till the 00s. Seeing ads in comics for NES games, or hints of NES Mario and Zelda in magazines was a rare glimpse into another world.

Nope, Lemmy exclusive :)

Just want to contribute something to building the Retrogaming community, after years of being a consumer only on Reddit.

(mostly it's just an excuse to play loads of games... you know, for science)

As a diehard desktop user, I seldom use mobile clients other than for brief looks. However, just got back from a week long holiday where I used Sync exclusively for my morning scroll - and it was was brilliant!

My one remaining quibble is with the way that links in comments are inexplicably a couple of font sizes bigger than surrounding text. Anyone found a setting to change that?

I''m one of the people who sheepishly really liked "new" reddit's interface, so Alexandrite is like catnip to me!

Infinite scroll! No more losing place in feeds!

Yeah, it's weird. I'd been trying it on and off since 1997, and always bounced off because of some annoyance or other. Now... nothing. It's very low friction.

For some reason, Mint doesn't provide access to the power profiles out of the box... no idea why. I just install a Cinnamon applet called "Power Profiles" and it gives me the same systray switcher as Fedora.

Fresh install of Mint was giving me about 2 hours battery life. By switching to Power Saver profile, I can get up to about 6-8 hours. I mostly only need to go to Balanced or Performance when gaming.

"Under The Skin" with Scarlet Johansson. It has easily the most low-key terrifying scene I've ever seen in a movie (the beach scene). And the whole film is the very definition of wtf.

Well, my problem is partly that I play docked, so every issue is magnified up to 50 inches... so take what I say with a pinch of salt.

I managed to get it to run at a fairly stable 30fps, but the settings were so low that everything looked pretty muddy and basic. You can turn off the FSR to get it to look less blurry at 800p, but it still looked pretty bad. Generally, everything just looked a bit unstable, you know? Hair was pixelated, lines were jaggy everything felt jumpy and gritty. I'm sure it would look better on the SD screen itself.

I also read that Act 3 onwards takes a further hit to performance... so at that point I decided to cut my losses. Shame... it's the first game where I've genuinely felt the SD isn't up to it.

Yep. Even when clicking the single checkbox captchas, I try really hard to click it "just like a human would". Which is weird, because I am a human. I think.

I'm always vaguely jealous that I missed out on NES culture first time around.

In the UK, consoles weren't really a big thing until the Megadrive and the SNES, and the NES seemed to be nowhere at all, at least where I grew up. A few people had Master Systems, but mostly it was Spectrums and C64s.

I'd see the NES in magazines occasionally, or in game ads in American comic books I got my hands on, and it always looked so cool.

Me too. I always saw Twitter as the internet's "stream of consciousness" and I use Mastodon in much the same way. Now that I'm all set up, the only real difference is that the stream is somewhat more sedate and far less likely to encounter a section of rapids.

Don't drag the Sinclair into this American mess!