vaguerant

Yoshi’s Woolly World probably still counts. It got a 3DS port, but it’s a game whose visual identity is a huge part of the appeal, most of which is lost when running at 240p. In terms of games that probably should be on Switch, I think the Zelda remakes and Yoshi are the last ones. Kirby and the Rainbow Curse and Nintendo Land would both be hurt by porting to a system with “normal” controls, to the extent that they probably won’t bother.

There’s not really any one reason the Dreamcast failed, but the library being larger doesn’t necessarily map to the library being better. The Dreamcast didn’t have any heavy hitters on the level of a Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye or Ocarina of Time. In terms of games that are still in the mainstream consciousness, it’s probably Sonic Adventure and Shenmue.

The library also had another thing that I think held it back from greater success: ports. Releasing so early, basically in the middle of the lifespan of the PS1 and N64, meant that a lot of the games were cross-platform with one or more previous-generation consoles. It’s hard to demonstrate the power of a next-gen console when so many of the exact same games also worked fine on the consoles people already owned.

The other big source of ports in the Dreamcast library were arcade games. Sega was offering the ultimate in home ports of arcade games at exactly the time in the games industry when arcades were collapsing. The Dreamcast was the best way to play basically any cross-platform game that came out in that period, whether it was ported from arcade or lesser consoles, but ultimately they were games you could already play or that you specifically didn’t want to.

I don’t want to give the impression that the Dreamcast didn’t have good or original games, it had both, just not “I must upgrade my console mid-gen”-quality games. It’s a library that’s aged very well but at the time, not enough people wanted what they were selling.

I get the argument, but email is also very different to the kind of open-web network that the fediverse resides in. There are problems the fediverse faces which email doesn’t like discoverability. The emails either come to you or they don’t. With federated social media, you have to find the content you’re looking for first. Maybe you use a search engine, or somebody gives you a business card with their handle and instance, whatever. Then you have to figure out how to view those posts from your home instance if you want to actually interact in any way. There’s browser extensions and stuff which try to make this easier, but that’s another thing that has to be explained and set up, plus not everyone is visiting from a web browser with extension support, or a web browser at all for that matter.

It’s not fundamentally impossible to understand the fediverse, but there’s more of a barrier than email, which can be explained in a single sentence like “Your email provider gives you a unique address that anybody else can send emails to and vice versa.” I don’t think convincing ourselves that the fediverse is actually very simple is going to convince people outside the bubble that that’s true.

Super neat concept. I really enjoy the melding of (micro)blogs and threads, which is what I like about Kbin/Mbin; I can follow interesting people from Mastodon without needing to visit a separate app or site. In a way, this scratches that same itch for Lemmy.

I do wonder whether the algorithm understands sarcasm. A while back, I watched a video about some movie bombing, something objectively bad like Morbius, and they joked that the movie wasn’t actually failing for all of the obvious reasons, but because it was “too woke”. They didn’t really believe that, they were just making fun of people who say that about movies. Still, for the next couple of weeks I had to keep marking channels as “Don’t recommend” because they were all unironic right-wing rage-bait about the woke agenda. I don’t know for certain that that’s why I suddenly got all those recommendations, but that was my best guess.

It’s real in the sense that the established policy is to retire ccTLDs within five years of a country code ceasing to exist. But there are multiple provisos there:

• we don’t know with any certainty that the IO country code will be disestablished; it doesn’t necessarily follow that Mauritius regaining control of the British Indian Ocean Territory will mean the end of the IO country code (and associated .io ccTLD), for a variety of historical and administrative reasons
• we don’t know with any certainty that IANA will unequivocally shut down the domain, vs. converting it to a generic top level domain like many other existing special-interest and novelty gTLDs (e.g. .cloud, .gay, .info, .tech)

Obviously it’s worth keeping an eye on what IANA does with this situation, but personally I suspect one or the other of the above will happen. It’s probably in the interests of Mauritius to retain the domain as a source of income, but if they don’t then somebody else will likely want to take ownership, and there’s plenty of moneyed interests in retaining .io since a number of large business customers (the largest likely being Alphabet/Google) are already using it.

Do you have any insight into why it’s so much more memory-hungry than the docs indicate? Is that a problem on its own, or just normal and accepted behavior for Mbin?

I guess that probably depends whether you’re counting by raw numbers or by proportion of each age group. I just looked this up and Pew Research Group has this chart from April 2024 (attached). Proportionately, it shows a fairly consistent shift toward more support for Republicans as the age brackets go up, with the one exception being from 60-69 and 70-79 where support drops 2%. Either way, Baby Boomers are proportionately more supportive of the Republican Party than Gen Xers are.

Moving on from proportion to raw numbers, that’s definitely tougher to tell. The Wikipedia articles for each generation cite the latest census data, but that was in 2019, so obviously figures will have changed since then. Still, the census said there were 65.2 million Gen Xers living in the United States, vs. 71.6 million Baby Boomers. Have six million Boomers died in the last five years? Probably not, but obviously the ratios will have gotten somewhat tighter since then.

Ultimately, on raw numbers, I’d say Baby Boomers (currently aged ~60-78) currently outnumber Gen Xers (currently aged ~44-59) and are proportionately more likely to support Republicans, per the Pew chart.

EDIT: I got ninja’d, but I brought a chart.