I’m John Harris (they/them). I maintain the gaming blog Set Side B. I used to write @Play for GameSetWatch long ago. I’m Metafilter member JHarris. I wrote the books Exploring Roguelike Games for CRC Press, and We Love Mystery Dungeon for Limited Run Press. I’m on itch.io and there I maintain Loadstar Compleat, the archives of classic Commodore 64 disk magazine Loadstar. BLM! Trans rights are human rights!

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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • rodneylives@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.world•Why Does Nobody Use Lemmy?
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    4 days ago

    Disagree. This is a case of the brand actually not meaning much. “Reddit” isn’t great either, but people think it does because it’s well known.

    I’m reminded of the person who said Mario was a character designed from the ground up to be marketable, when it was literally created to make a graphic of a person readable in a 16x16 sprite with three colors.



  • The way I see it is, for many things on the internet, the raw number of people using them has stayed steady or even gone up slightly, but there are so many more people who wouldn’t have used the old internet online now, and much of the money and energy goes to catering to them, which means Facebook, Instagram, Reddit etc. The people who know what they’re doing still use the old internet. We should be extending our arms to the people stuck on social media, who think that is the whole thing.





  • You know, I don’t know if that’s what “a Western audience” wants. I know that Youtube has made its service steadily worse over time, and also much more resource intensive. Checking Firefox’s Process Manager, it currently lists four Youtube tabs loaded in memory that total up to 1.4GB. And I know a lot of that isn’t the video: when I load a new Youtube tab, it shows the “placeholder” content, gray lines where text will go, for several seconds before anything really displays.

    I mean, Bilibili sucks too? I get popups before videos I watch with anime characters, whee. There’s also the whole currently-is-in-Chinese thing, kind of a drawback for an English-speaker, But it does seem to load a bit faster.



  • I just installed Windows 11 in a virtual machine for software development purposes.

    • This machine has a valid Windows 11 Pro license, but it didn’t recognize it because it’s running in a VM.
    • It installed a bunch of stuff I didn’t need and had to uninstall, because Microsoft assumed my use case.
    • I had to log into a Microsoft account that I use for nothing else, using my phone’s two-factor authentication.
    • I had to flip a bunch of switches NO to opt (as far as possible) out of Microsoft’s tracking.
    • I had to do the updates overnight.
    • When it was done, I then began the process of clearing all the crap off the computer and out of the taskbar. That’s ongoing.

    Simple!


  • rodneylives@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.world•Modern Gaming - Deathbulge
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    3 months ago

    There are all these people who think it’s only a video game if it involves big fightymen killing things. That’s hyperbole (they could be big sportsmen doing sports), but not by much.

    These are the people who view graphics as the be-and-end-all of a game’s quality. There are more kinds of games than anyone could count, but you wouldn’t know it by asking those people.





  • rodneylives@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.world•Tipping
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    4 months ago

    Yes, but in the US servers get paid much less than minimum wage with the presumption that tips will make up the difference.

    Businesses are supposed to make up any difference between what servers fail to earn as tips up to minimum wage, but:

    • It gives businesses an opportunity to fail to do this,
    • It means that minimum wage is what some servers effectively get, and
    • It effectively means the amount of tips servers get per hour is lessened by the difference between their hourly pay and the minimum wage rate; it’s a way for businesses to reach into server tips and get some of it for themselves.