There was an abstract conceptual theory of system agnostic game add-ons. It isn’t… completely inconceivable.

You could work with a relatively prolific engine, like Unreal, and set up a standard character model dummy with designated hard points for attaching accessories and certain default movements. Then any accessory could simply scale to the environment - Master Chef could swing a keyblade while the Elden Ring guy gets to wear Iron Man armor, because these are all “human” models with well-defined structures that could map to the associated equipment. The blockchain becomes a universal registry for these assets that a platform can read from to render the art.

The problem is that nobody ever actually implemented this universal protocol. They all just ran off making jpegs of weird animals and running fake auctions to create the illusion of a secondary market. You had zetabytes of data being processed so some Baked Alaskahole could claim his Kumming Koala was worth $40M.

I don’t even strictly begrudge “the blockchain” as an idea for licensing and data storage (just please don’t ask me to think about who is generating the licenses or storing the data). But it was all vaporware. None of it was anywhere close to being created, much less delivered. People were throwing billions with a b of dollars at entirely empty promises.

Why, Linux?! It is said that you would destroy the Blockchain, not join it!

Dated a few of Catholics, and they aren’t any grosser than the Protestants, Atheists, Muslims, or Buddhists I’ve been with.

I don’t think she’s planning to date a priest.

No way am I dating a Catholic

There are a lot of hot Catholics.

Going on Reddit for dating advice is a mistake.

Teach her to order something off a foreign-language menu, invite the family out to dinner, and see if she can place her order fluently.

Doing the “Five year old white girl shocks waitress by ordering Orange Chicken in perfect Mandarian” bit IRL would be pretty funny and adorable.

Can’t believe they got Weird Al to do “Dare to be Stupid” for that film. What a moment in history.

Carving my soul into seven unholy partitions in order to maintain my unnatural existence as a Windows Guy whose shit still works.

Was that game any good? The mobile version had a Gacha mechanic that scared me off, but it otherwise looked like a really smooth SNES style JRPG.

Most of the abstractions, frameworks, “bloats”, etc. are there to make development easier and therefore cheaper

That’s true to an extent. But I’ve been on the back side of this kind of development, and the frameworks can quickly become their own arcane esoteric beasts. One guy implements the “quick and easy” framework (with 16 gb of bloat) and then fucks off to do other things without letting anyone else know how to best use it. Then half-dozen coders that come in behind have no idea how to do anything and end up making these bizarre hacks and spaghetti code patches to do what the framework was already doing, but slower and worse.

The end result is a program that needs top of the line hardware to execute an oversized pile of javascripts.

I think it’s given us a big wave of “Return to pixelated tradition” style games. When you see 16-bit sprites in the teaser, you can feel reasonably confident your computer will run it.

emerge

I agree that this is bullshit and Linux is better. But as someone with a Windows work computer, this was a huge help.

I’d have to check the specs, but I believe its an M1 or M2.

I’ve never tried to install linux on an Apple before.

If its pre-installed, its typically called “Bloatware”.

And I remember having bloatware on my machine going back to the 90s. The first really high quality gaming computer I got was a Sony Vaio and it had tons of bullshit excess software I had to mop out of it before I was ready to really use it.

there are literally millions of people who don’t even know or care about knowing how to change desktop background

I’ll cede “know”, but I heavily dispute “care”.

Plenty of Boomers are painfully aware of how awful the internet has become over the last decade. Hell, they got to experience it before the rest of us precisely because folks who never knew how to migrate off AOL or Yahoo got enshitified first.

My own mom hates using the computer in no small part because she takes too much of what she sees at face value and ends up with tons of spyware, bloat, and scams rampaging across her laptop. I have to clean it out for her every few months, and I’m constantly fighting with her over what’s actually garbage and what she’s convinced she needs.

But the end result is that she just… won’t check her email because she hates it. She won’t answer her phone because she’s afraid of scam callers. She won’t trust ANY website, so she doesn’t use Amazon or Uber or Netflix.

It isn’t that people like my mom don’t care. They care immensely, because modern technology has become unusable for people like her.