Fair, and maybe I’m stepping in it a bit, but thought a post about a 4-switch Vader 2600 might attract a lively crowd.

I wouldn’t presume to have even 20% of the 2600 games that bring something different and good to the table, it’s just (to misquote Samuel Johnson), for so many of them the good parts are not different and the different parts are not good.

And again, that’s completely apart from a personal nostalgia (god knows I indulge in that) or to propose that they’re simply not fun in a binary sense. If I’m 12 and I get 2600 Venture I enjoy the hell out of it, but if I’m a middle aged man in 2024, at the bare minimum I’m going for this.

So, real talk? Most 2600 games are rough, and barring personal nostalgia, there’s little reason to play most of them in the age of emulation, especially arcade conversions, which sometimes nail the gameplay (but often don’t), and generally have to perform acts of violence on the visuals to make them work with the system and the business realities around their development (i.e. staffing, timeline, budget for ROM chips, etc.).

Some worthwhile ones that come to mind:

• Combat (multiplayer only)
• Warlords (multiplayer only)
• Pitfall
• River Raid
• Pitfall II
• Space Invaders
• The Empire Strikes Back

It’s not that so many more weren’t fun, or even still aren’t in isolation, but it’s like we’re all the rich fat kid from Pee-Wee’s big adventure and have access to every single game on every single system, at least up until the end of the 90s. There’s no reason to play the nice port of Berzerk that looks like it does, or play the flickery Pac-Man mess, or even (I’ll say it) fight with the groundbreaking but still primitive and abstracted gameplay of Adventure.

At this point, the only way you get anything made for theaters is to find a nostalgic brand to tie it to. This will probably suck, because Speck and Gordon peaked with Blades of Glory, but conceptually I have no problem with a pioneer-themed action comedy, and it barely matters that they dusted off Oregon Trail to do it.

Recent experience has shown that you should be careful if the property you’re working on has extensive lore and loud fans, but I’m somewhat sympathetic to creatives who just want to get a project funded and are willing to glom onto to an existing property to do it.

Even Nintendo starts with a cease and desist. Get that rom out there, and nobody will give a shit how shady the site or discord they download it from is. :-)

Neat little pair of packages. Seems a bit pricy to me, but I don’t think I’m the intended market. I wonder what the Pi Pico on the JAMMA module is for.

I kinda liked the concept vehicle, but the production version managed to make just pile terrible little changes on top of one another until it came out looking like a bigger Pontiac Aztek that someone forgot to paint. It’s lumpy and quite ugly in a way I was only half-expecting.

They’re probably claiming the entire truck as a business expense because of the wrap. Therefore, they’re able to basically buy it with untaxed money, saving whatever their effective business tax rate is on the $100k or whatever. Of course, stuff like that is usually a bit of light tax fraud, because many small business owners just want a big expensive truck, but putting advertising on the car you drive for personal use doesn’t make every mile a business mile. You can deduct the wrap itself, and if you are diligent you can deduct a reasonable and justifiable amount based on the advertising value and actual business use, but especially for shop owners, this is just tacky business owners hoping they don’t get audited.

Ford Maverick and Hyundai Santa Cruz are the closest things available in the US now.

Counterpoint: They already know you can’t “do” the job-specific tasks because you don’t work there yet. If you know the tools, that’s extremely helpful as they teach you what to do with them. If there’s pile A and pile B and they’re mostly the same except B already knows JIRA or Visual Studio or whatever, then that’s a legitimate differentiator.

When the existing team is forced to get new software, there’s a presumption that they already know what tasks the tools are supposed to help them do. There’s no “other pile,” so might as well suck it up and kill your productivity by ten percent for a year. It’s okay though; you can improve it by 1% from the original baseline for nine years after, because the McKinsey and Accenture people totally promised us that makes sense. Rinse and repeat.

One of the problems is that the TV series are starting to look and feel like TV, even when they’re telling galaxy-spanning stories of huge in-universe importance. There’s a certain je ne sais quoi missing from the production values that even the most garbage of the movie offerings (pick for yourself which those are) still did right. Star Wars fans, including me, are always overdramatic, but as a franchise it’s also getting small.

Meanwhile, the plans were for there to be at least one movie a year, yet nothing since Solo 6 years ago has even made it into production. Something is off. Whether it’s as simple as a bad media strategy of announcing their “inside baseball” pitches to goose corporate earnings, or an actual dysfunction in the studio, it’s worth talking about.

Wouldn’t that only apply if the Orions were pre-warp? Probably still a violation of 100 different Federation laws and Starfleet regulations, though.

Seems like they don’t work exactly the same as they used to, as they now use MTP instead of USB mass storage, but while annoying, it’s generally a pretty trivial fix and your OS may already use MTP devices with no trouble. It seems there may be some other knock-on effects with fonts not sideloading right and needing a Calibre plugin to make pagination work how it used to.

So yeah, it’s getting worse, but Amazon hasn’t figured out how to bring the hammer down yet.

Calibre has always been a small price to pay, but if sideloading goes away, I’ll certainly never “upgrade” again, and I’ll trash my 11th gen Paperwhite if they somehow make it stop working. Usable e-ink ereaders are even doable as DIY projects now, and Kobo will probably stay less closed-off than Amazon for a good while.

That said, reading the comments and the article it seems like as long as your OS (or some app) supports MTP, everything should still work more or less as it has, which is to say kind of annoying and with Amazon pulling little microaggressions like deleting your cover thumbnails, but overall sideloading should still function.

Yeah, I don’t think this goes to trial and rewrites the lawbooks or anything, but there’s enough here to litigate, and I reckon Tesla will settle to avoid going to discovery.

This is a bit different, in that it’s not a trademark claim, but rather a copyright claim. They’re saying that the still isn’t meaningfully trying to be anything other than a Blade Runner still, and Musk’s use is not protected by any sort of Fair Use. There would likely be a statue of limitations or something for the specific cause of action, but you can’t lose copyright the same way you can a trademark.

One could argue it’s an uncreative derivative work not subject to a fair use exemption, and actively used in commerce to make money for Musk, while simultaneously it damages the Blade Runner brand if, as claimed, other car companies assume Tesla and BR have a relationship, or the BR brand is inextricably linked to Tesla and Musk. The fact that Tesla and WBD hurriedly sought a copyright clearance, once Tesla realized WBD didn’t have all the necessary rights, doesn’t speak well for Tesla’s position, nor does the fact that Musk referenced Blade Runner at least twice in his presentation.

The Liberal Arts Side of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

Palpatine

I learnt the chosen one.

I would like one industrial replicator, please.