They make some good points about how we view “classic” games too.

A lot of 16-bit games are remembered fondly because of things like “look at how many colors are on the screen at once! Look at how big the sprites are- they’re almost as big as the arcade version! Hear how there are 4 separate audio tracks that kind of almost sound like real instruments sometimes!”.

Mario 64 is a great example for me. I hear other people was nostalgic about how incredible it was to be able to move in 3D space at the time, and how they spent hours just wandering around levels and marveling at the technology. For me, I did that with Crash Bandicoot (which came out a few months earlier in the US). And shortly after Spyro blew them both out of the water with its incredibly smooth controls and, imo, better graphics and sound. When I’ve tried to go back and play Mario 64 I find it a clunky mess of a game, more of a tech demo than anything else.

On the one hand I can respect the pioneers. The original thinkers who push the frontiers of what art can be. On the other hand, those games that rely so heavily on being “revolutionary for their time” often don’t hold up well decades later when tons of games have done what they did better. I think it’s possible to appreciate those games for what they did without enjoying going back and playing them.

When I look back at what I’ve played the past couple years, games like Control and Horizon: Zero Dawn stick out. I don’t think either one of them had anything particularly innovative or new. I see any games coming out today where I say “wow that’s a Control-like” game. But what they did do was execute on a high level, with a lot of polish and very few flaws. I think that’s the biggest strength of AAA games: execution, not innovation.

Exactly this.

My father was (is?) bipolar. He was fine when he was on his meds, but decided to stop taking them and became a monster. Lost his job, wife, eventually my sisters and I went no contact for our own safety.

This is an autism community, not an ADHD community. I’m autistic, not ADHD. But i am aware that I need to put energy into communicating with people I want or need relationships with. Everyone is different, and every relationship needs compromise to be successful. To simply say “I have ADHD so you have to deal with it or get out of my life” well… Bye then.

And it still outsold the 360 in the end

I don’t remember that. Maybe you’re thinking of something like “if the Wii keeps selling at its current pace it will pustell the PS2”?

They said that about the Switch as well and it didn’t happen.

Sure, I might own the hardware

Not for long. The goal seems to be to make RAM, flash memory, and GPU’s so expensive that most consumers will need to purchase low-powered client devices and subscribe to cloud computing business models. It’s a handful of companies who are cornering the markets, controlling the supply, and seeking rents.

Yeah I know there is a lot of overlap, but there’s also specific ADHD and AuDHD communities.

My partners have severe ADHD and I am quite confident i do not. I made a multi-community for the various autism spaces across Lemmy, and I wouldn’t mind the occasional ADHD meme mixed in, but it seems like all of them are just flooded with ADHD posts.

As silly as this is, licensing was the straw for me.

In high school, I built my first desktop and pirated Windows XP. In college, i built a PC for both my wife and myself and purchased two Windows 7 licenses really cheap with a student discount. In 2019, my PC died so I built a new one, re-used the license, and saved a lot of the old parts. In 2020 I got my wife a new PC (barely managed to buy the parts as the pandemic was starting).

So as the pandemic was in full force, I had enough functioning spare parts to make one gaming PC that would have been mid-tier 6 years prior. I put it in our unfinished basement and planned to mostly use it for playing videos or music while I worked out, maybe do some light stuff like personal email or web browsing or light gaming- since I started working remote full-time I didn’t want to spend much time in my office when I wasn’t working anymore.

So I had to choose an OS for it. Pirate Windows? Buy Windows? At that point I was constantly running into issues with Windows on our machines. Updates forcing themselves on us. My wife’s machine has upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8 on its own somehow and was pretty terrible until she moved to Windows 10. I had tons of driver issues with the audio interface I used for music production. Windows had been getting slower and less responsive and had been rough on the older hardware. So I installed Mint Cinnamon.

There’s still a lot of things that are frustrating and annoying. More advanced things that almost no one would ever want to do are way easier, while simple everyday tasks make you jump through hoops. Installing programs from the default repository is great, but good fucking luck if what you want isn’t there. But it performs way better, is way more customizable, doesn’t have the spyware. Works way better with my audio interface.

Eventually I got an OrangePi and set it up as a Pi-Hole with Debian. I got a steam deck and love it. My wife got a laptop with Windows 11 and hated it so much I set it up to dual-boot Mint Cinnamon too.

It’s classic rent seeking. We will own nothing, just lease a low-powered client device from our phone carrier or ISP and do everything in the cloud with AI.

That seems to be the plan from these megacorps anyways.

I played a decent number of games this year, and a lot of games that have huge fan bases. God of War 2018, Bloodborne (my first ever soulslike), Baldur’s Gate 3, Disco Elysium, and more. But the one that keeps gnawing at me is Subnautica

I remember when it was in early access I watched Markiplier play it, and it piqued my interest enough that it was the first time I ever bought anything in early access. Which is very unusual for me (I think the only other time I’ve done that was Hades, which was also great). I played through as much of the game as there was at the time, or at least as I could find. Which was still mostly in the safe shallows, no deep areas. Still out in a dozen hours or so and was satisfied given the price so I moved on.

In 2024 i recommended it to my wife, who loves marine biology and base building games. She, in turn loved the game and I watched her play through it. I got to see all of the deep areas. After watching her play it and the DLC I got the itch to go back to it, so I started a new file in late 2024.

By mid-January 2025 I was about halfway through that file. My wife visiting her friend in another city, so I had the house to myself, I think I took some PTO too. Single-digit temperatures Farenheit outside. My wife had taken our only car, so I was loaded up with plenty of weed, drinks, food, and snacks. So I had a few days to focus and finish that first file. I had such a great time I did something else I almost never do: I immediately started a new file to play it again. While I had so much fun, I also learned so much and had so many ideas of what I could have done better. Better places to build based, exploring in a different order, knowing all the great spots to farm resources and get blueprints and everything.

So I played through again. The soundtrack is phenomenal synthwave that perfectly suits the game, but by the time I had built my cyclops and was ready to plunge down into the depths I was also ready for a new soundtrack. I put on one of my favorite albums, which is also one of the most appropriate: Oceanic, by Isis.

I strongly recommend this to anyone who likes Isis or Subnautica. Just absolutely sublime. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate.

The info area of this community has a great resources section that helped me a lot. https://embrace-autism.com/ was particularly helpful for me. They have an e-book on autistic burnout in particular that I plan on buying if no one gets it for me for Christmas.

AI has slop is a problem, and Shovelware has been a problem for decades, basically as long as videogames have existed.

However, a LOT of these cheap and obscure games on steam have more innocuous explanations, with that explanation often being “the dev doesn’t really care about making money”. Perception, for example, is a student project that was released for free and I wouldn’t pay much for anyways, but it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

Or when I was in a band, one of the other members was a developer by trade who, as a hobby, connects with a couple of his other friends to develop game that he released on steam. I recorded and produced an EP for that band and we released it for free and we certainly spent more money buying drinks at the bars we played than we were ever paid for playing. I think his game was similar: they charged money for it to cover some of their costs, but he certainly never left his day job.

Or Mind Over Magnet, which was the project of the YouTuber GamerMakersToolkit. The whole thing was a multi-year project where the guy made videos covering the game development process and culminated in the release of the game. The actual business model was based on the video content, while the game itself was just a side piece that was probably profitable, but I doubt made enough profit for him to survive on for years.

Oh yeah I have as much respect for him as I can have for any other celebrity I’ve never met or interacted with at all. I just wanted to get ahead of anyone responding to me pointing out that he’s not particularly qualified on this subject.

The reason I referenced him at all was not because of his qualifications, but as a way of establishing how popular these conversations were on the internet at the time. In that sense, the fact that he’s not an AI or finance expert and doesn’t specialize in such content speaks to how widespread the topic was at the time.

The last one standing or the last one left holding the bag?

This can result in support for hardware and software being upwards of two to three YEARS out of date. Which for gamers for example is unacceptable and causes issues more often then not.

I think your perspective might be a bit biased towards your own bubble here. People are still buying Nintendo Switch’s. People are still buying Steam Decks.

I am getting close to 600 games in my Steam Library, but only 2 were released this year. Both were Indie games (Fragrance Point and Tower Wizard).

Ram is costing hundreds of dollars. GPU’s are costing thousands. Desktop gaming, heck desktop ownership in general, has been falling off. If people are still on x86, they are more likely to be on laptops.

For the average person, the idea that you need your OS to be updated every couple of weeks so that you can check your email and play Minecraft with your kids is insane.

Kind of gross how this article seems to be trying at every turn to say, “no ai is actually good! It helped us catch the bad businessmen that happen to be in the AI industry!” By focusing on a tiny trading period on November 20th.

Because I remember casually watching Hank Green talk about this same thing more than a month earlier.

Hank Green isn’t a finance bro or an AI guy or even really a tech guy. He’s just a guy reacting to things that are trending, and I remember I had seen the main graphic he was talking about floating around the internet for a while before I watched the video. People have been calling AI a “bubble” for much longer.

I am old enough to remember the report that 95% of generative AI companies failed to see returns from using it. That was back in August.

I don’t like giving credit to “trading algorithms” for things that humans figured out a long time ago.

Laundry detergent. The detergent instructions, coming from a biased manufacturer, will always tell you to use waaaaay too much in order to encourage consuming more. They stuff them with scents so that you can tell they are working and have a constant reminder with you about your purchasing decision. It’s bad for the washing machine- residues stick around and can clog things up and cause moving parts to wear out faster. In fact, washing machine manufacturers often recommend running loads of towels without adding any detergent a few times regularly just to clean out the excess.

I could always feel it on my skin and feel suffocated by it. When I lived in an apartment, most of the rest of the building was from some Caribbean country and used some expticly scented detergent in the shared laundry machines, so unless I wanted to spend time and money to run empty cycles I had to just deal with it. I’m so grateful now to have a house with my own machines that only see my own, unscented, detergent and in reasonable amounts. And it gets cleaning cycles regularly.

It’s a real shame that bigots have historically used “it” to de-humanize people.

Personally I use male pronouns because it’s easy and obvious and I don’t really care enough. I don’t love constantly identifying with a gender. But I also don’t want to be identified as plural. And yeah, I know that singular ‘they’ has been around for hundreds of years, but you can also find grammar authorities speaking out against it for hundreds of years. For exchanging information efficiently, I think single vs plural is a much more important distinction in our modern world than which gender someone identifies as.

I wish I could identify as “it” without freaking people out. I also wish people respected objects, without having to give them gendered pronouns or faces or human names to do so.

I respect all my they/them homies, including one of my partners, but it seems to me like a linguistic bandaid on a bad system.

A long time ago I used to think I was not autistic. I remember complaining to my wife about something, probably vehicle traffic, and saying “why can’t they see the system?” Eventually this turned into almost a catch phrase I would use to complain about people in general.

In retrospect I find it pretty funny that I ever doubted.

I don’t like graphic tees, for several reasons. I don’t like the feeling of printed fabric kn my skin. I also swear, no matter how many times someone claims “we looked everywhere and are proud to say we found t-shirts that actually feel good!” The shirts never have as good of a material or cut as the generic ass solid color t-shirts I get. Seeing the print slowly start to crack and fall off over time makes me sad. I don’t like the visual stimulation of a bunch of text or graphics or busy patterns.

Finally, having something, especially words, on my shirtt feels like I’m trying to start a conversation with the world. For a lot of people, t-shirts are a way to signal their interest and that they WANT random strangers to come up and talk to them about it. It allows people to form a community. And I absolutely do not want that. I don’t care if we listen to the same band: I don’t want to stop and chat with some random stranger as I’m walking around.

I can’t stand hoodies. The weight on the neck is weird. I have long hair that makes hoods a pain. I don’t even like pullovers- I prefer to have something that zips or buttons or is just open in the front.

I hate having my forearms covered. Always rock a rolled up sleeve when I have to wear buttoned shirts.

Personally the only time I turn it off is if I am putting it in the case. Even then if it’s just a 15 minute car ride to a friend’s house I might just leave it on.

It’s also rare for me to go more than 2 days without playing it, and I mostly play around my house where I have USB cables around to plug it in if need be, so battery isn’t a huge concern. In fact I usually have the battery saving feature set to limit it to 80% charge.

The only reason I really turn it off in the case is our if heat concerns, and I suspect that’a just me being over protective. I guess the other thing is that there could be security and privacy concerns from carrying around a device with WiFi and/or Bluetooth on.