Wasn’t the entire point of not using “Windows 9” branding and instead going straight to “Windows 10” from 8 that they didn’t want the last version of Windows to be 9, that they preferred a nice round number.

Isn’t there a Black Mirror episode of this

Can I play devil’s advocate a little bit here, because I was really unaware that this ever worked for anything except indie artists on Bandcamp. So Bandcamp works for them or for discovering new music obviously.

I didn’t know artists ever sold digital music on their websites, but that does make sense, so I checked - if I google Taylor Swift and go to her website, there it is, digital music purchase. Great.

I went to U2’s website, and the only music I can buy there is vinyl. I don’t want vinyl, I want digital. You can buy merch, but I’m after music, not merch. Looking further, there’s all sorts of galleries and information about each album and song, but you still can’t buy the music.

Other mainstream artists I googled didn’t even go that far. Googling them brought up a wikipedia link, social media links, tours. All stuff I don’t want. Now your list has “contact artist via social media” - setting aside the fact that it’s unlikely a popular mainstream artist will even reply to anyone at all about anything, this is a real point of friction. I don’t want to have to contact an artist to find out some alternative way to get their music. If I’m buying something online, there needs to be some way to buy it online and ready to go. If we have to wait a couple of days or weeks for a reply that may or may not come - the process failed.

If I had to guess, they would probably say something like “it’s on spotify”.

So yes it probably is a supplier problem, but it seems to me that this is happening for the majority of popular artists if a majority of music people like is mainstream. I assume if you like the majority of indie music then that’s probably not the case.

HotS isn’t really dead - you can play it now and it feels as good as ever. We all want to see continued balance patches and more cosmetics and heroes and maps but the fact is that it already feels balanced and has enough cosmetics and enough heroes and enough maps.

That’s not to say we won’t love more or that we may as well stop playing it, but the real question you’re asking here is if the game is dead - it is not dead, and therefore won’t “return”. You just load it up, pick a hero, click Ready - and it’s “returned”.

per month

The event is a celebration - why would they bring up layoffs?

High quantity, low quality?

Maybe video games should be priced at value per hour

I don’t know if I want to be punished for doing well

Contraband Police - it’s like Papers Please, but since it’s in first person, it’s more complex - you have to manage the whole border crossing area with the few staff you have, you have a car that you have to manually drive to a supply shop and to drop prisoners and contraband off at, and you can get ambushed along the way or at your base, where you’re manually be shooting at smugglers with guns you buy.

Shadows of Doubt - A game where you play as a detective in a city and you have to solve cases (sometimes murders) and often end up committing crimes yourself along the way. A lot of cases solved used by matching faces to names to fingerprints to voices to jobs to blood type, eye colour, hair colour, age, and so on. Extremely addictive and often hilarious, despite how buggy this early access game is.

Dicey Dungeons - A roguelike deckbuilder with 6 different classes where you roll dice against cards with different effects and your enemy does the same to you. I don’t love roguelikes and really don’t like deck games but this one is really appealing, and has a great soundtrack. The different classes play through a LOT of different “episodes” where the rules of the game change.

also playing a lot of Heroes of the Storm every goddamn night

Is paint 3d actually any good?

I had such a hard time using it for basic things that I’d look for wherever they’d hidden away traditional paint instead.

Wanting good usability isn’t petty

From taskbar settings, they removed “Never” combine taskbar buttons, and forced it to always combine taskbar buttons.

Like if you prefer having 3 open folders showing as 3 buttons, too bad, you can’t do that in W11 without a third party patcher.

Yeah I don’t get it. Did microsoft say they would stop forcing edge on users?

OK which distro should we use

Do yourself a favour and get Bitwarden or similar. Browser password managers are way too vulnerable.

Er, what’s a modern anti chat game

Is Tom Holland now better known for Uncharted rather than Spiderman?

Final Fantasy 7 Remake. My god, what a disaster over the original.

I can’t bring myself to continue it even though (I think?) I’m half way through the game, because while the Sector 5 reactor in the original is, by good game design standards, just a replica of the Sector 7 reactor with less going on - since you’ve already done the same thing earlier on, in Remake they decided to make it an enormous labyrinth that you can’t find your way out of, just because. I guess they needed to extend the playtime.

That’s just one of many, many things wrong with the game despite an amazing original, but it’s the spot that completely prevents me from loading it up again to continue on. I went and started a new game in the original instead, just to be sure it wasn’t the nostalgia glasses talking. It wasn’t.

But I guess it looks really pretty.

Just like real friendship.