I don't want to enter the giveaway (my Steam backlog is big enough as it is) so I'll say my nice things here instead. :)
Thanks for providing a safe and welcoming place for us Reddit refuges. Been here for I think almost a year now and it's been so nice being a part of a smaller instance that still has so much activity. I'm not the most active user, but I try to engage more here than I did on Reddit to do my part in promoting community.
Thanks for everything you do!
I'd argue the two greatest barriers for the average, non-STEM individual adopting metric in America is the speed limits being in mph and the temperature being in °F. Both are convertible easily enough, but when you constantly have to do so to engage with critical infrastructure or safety (cooking temps, etc.) It provides a barrier against adoption for anyone without the drive to make a concerted effort to use metric.
I doubt you'll get any disagreement on your take for the controller. It was definitely an odd and experimental one, though I do remember thinking it was really cool looking when it came out. I was also 6 and not the best judge of functionality.
That having been said, the cartridge decision was in line with Nintendo's recent plays at the time that had paid out for them in a big way, and that they continue to follow today. They had made a gamble on the Game Boy a few years prior that absolutely blew up in their favor. When the Game Boy came out, the Game Gear was it's competitor and Game Gear had a color screen and a lot more screen real estate. Nintendo made the choice to focus on power efficiency (up to almost a half a day of playtime on four double-A batteries versus the Game Gear with about three and a half hours of play time on six double-A's) and production cost reduction. Some of those design philosophies carried forward to the N64.
Additionally, something a lot of people seem to be unaware of these days is how absolutely stark the difference in loading times was between something like the PS1 discs and the N64 cartridge. I grew up on the SNES and N64 and when I first played a PS1 game the load times made me not want to touch a Sony console for quite a while.
Anyways, that's my two cents. No disagreements here that cartridges held the N64 back in some ways but the tradeoffs made it an amazing system and miles above the competition for me, personally. Good gameplay and quality of life will always beat more power in my book.
Got it, that makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to write this up!
So, I keep meaning to look into this but I come from the wrong background to have an intuitive grasp of the pieces at play here. My work is primarily in back end systems development for data driven models and I have very little understanding of how networking elements interact or even what they are, for the most part. If someone with that background is reading these comments and willing to take the time, would you be able to provide an explanation for the differences between Manifest V2/V3 and how V3 prevents ad blockers from working?
I did, back in... 2005-6? Somewhere around there. I'm from the US, so the first part of your comment applies to me, but at the time iTunes let you put music from the CDs you owned into your collection, and made it very easy to load music onto an iPod. I was 16, with some of my first disposable income from my first job. Couldn't get music easily from anything but CDs or iTunes (Or Kazaa/Limewire, but that's a different story) at the time so it just made sense. Around the time I realized I was locked into the platform by my purchases I stopped buying there and started streaming or buying CDs again.
Much appreciated.
Those were a hard 11 years for Derplander. In another 11 years he's going to look just like Yoshi-P.
Fairbuds, according to iFixit.
For the curious, the article actually goes into detail on a new polymer experiment to make something that ACTS like non-Newtonian fluids -- the summary makes it seem like said fluids were the discovery rather than the inspiration.
I primarily play cEDH, so be aware I have some biases during deck building and take my advice with a grain of salt.
In my experience, the rule of thumb is the more consistency you want in a deck the more tutors you should be running. I know you mentioned wanting to preserve the power level of your deck and that means to me that your deck will always be inconsistent -- some games you'll draw a god hand, some games you won't.
As an alternative to more filtering or protection, have you considered adding in disruption to your opponent's setups? Again, power level considerations might be a problem here but things like Massacre Girl or wheel effects might help you into a more stable position early.
I also always favor free interaction in blue to defend your key pieces, but that has the power problem and the consistency problem -- running one or two pieces of free interaction (E.g. Force of Will, etc.) won't help too much on average if you don't have ways to find them.
At the end of the day, I think I'd lean into disruption in any spellslinger type deck like Kess in order to reach a position where you can leverage your yard to outmaneuver your opponents.
"Give" you pearls? That's socialism!
What a wild ride of a read that was. Reminds me a bit of when I first got to college. Glad things started going well for you.