That’s just the inherent cost of going with general purpose engines. They’ll always perform worse than specialized tech, but modern games are so complicated that custom engines aren’t really feasible anymore.

Unreal is the king of bloat. Rather than “general purpose” they strove for “all purpose” - Unreal Engine tries to do literally everything out of the box with as many bells and whistles attached as possible. The result is that Unreal Engine games require tons of optimization to run well, and even the editor itself consumes tens of gigabytes and runs like crap.

Unity is simply a mess of poor decisions and technical debt. Their devs seem to reinvent a crucial development pipeline every few years, give up halfway, then leave both options exposed and expect developers to just automatically know the pitfalls of each. Combined with horrific mismanagement and hostile revenue-seeking, Unity has lost a ton of goodwill over the past few years. It’s a major fall from grace for what was once the undisputed king of Indie dev engines.

Godot is tiny, decently performant, and great for simple games, but it’s very bare-bones and expects developers to implement their own systems for anything beyond basic rendering, physics, and netcode. Additionally, the core developers have a reputation for being incredibly resistant to making major changes even when a battle-tested pull request for a frequently requested feature is available. Still my personal pick though.

I’ll always have a soft spot for the original Xbox due to XBMC, the homebrewed Xbox Media Center.

Though most would probably know it better by its current name, Kodi.

The DS with a flashcart was nearly perfect. It was incredibly pocket-friendly due to the rectangular shape, the screen was protected from scratches while folded so you didn’t need a case, and it could emulate every console up to the N64 as well as every Nintendo handheld (obviously). I was upset when my cart finally died - no other handheld emulator I’ve found is as convenient.

It’s sad, but it makes sense they’d be hesitant to speak out. One of Trump’s known rape victims dropped her case because she was receiving extralegal threats, back when Michael Cohen was still his personal fixer and loyal attack dog. And Trump was just a shady failed businessman back then - he has way more power to hurt people right now, and has spent his entire life publicly trying to crush anyone who crosses him.

And that’s not even getting into all the other names that’d be on the list. Their cushy lifestyles are far less likely to survive their names coming out than “Teflon Don”, so it’s likely they’d be willing to do some extremely shady shit to silence their victims. I doubt pedophile rapists are the sort to shy away from operating outside the legal system, after all.

This is how I’ve always felt about it too. All of Whedon’s other shows had twists that made the audience hate entire seasons; there’s no reason to believe Firefly would have escaped that pattern.

So instead of being sad it died early, we can be glad we can still imagine where it could have gone in the best case scenario. The vision in our minds will likely be better than what we would have got if it’d continued.

No need to worry about Jayne’s inevitable face-heel turn, or whatever other terrible subplots could potentially have cropped up in later seasons like River developing explicit (rather than merely suggested) incestuous feelings for Simon, or Inara betraying the crew for a cure to her disease (before being welcomed back a season later), or Kaylee getting killed off out of nowhere because Whedon loves doing that to characters of her archetype, or YoSaffBridge becoming a core crew member after we learn her tragic backstory even though her awful personality hasn’t changed at all.

And that’s not even getting into what the network execs, who hated the show, would have done with their meddling. Things could have been so much worse. Fans should console themselves with the fact that the show at least died with its dignity intact, and we even got a movie that resolved a few of the major hanging threads.

No one talks about famous actor James Dean becoming an ultraconservative asshole, being closeted racist, or a serial abuser of women. He died before anything like that could happen. Firefly is the same way.

Something like this would have happened even if Joss Whedon wasn’t revealed to be a scumbag. Adam Baldwin, the actor who played Jayne, went on to become a major mouthpiece for the alt-right and a mainstay of conservative Twitter. IIRC he’s even the one who named GamerGate (not that the name required even a modicum of creativity).

I do!

I mean, I have a friend, and they have two other friends, so therefore I have three friends… right?

The nobility of the sea. True blue bloods, if you will.

They don’t shove them onto spikes so they’re not quite at shrike level, but leopards sometimes drag their kills up into the trees to hide them. Imagine walking by during a windy day and it starts raining monkeys and antelope.

ChatGPT

Cybersecurity

So you know how to fix all the security holes the AI left in your codebase, right? Right?

I remember reading sketchy guides on how to add custom ringtones without needing to pay for the privilege. Arbitrary restrictions on user folder access predate Android.

Once a week? Those things could go pretty much forever on a single charge so long as you weren’t making calls, even with batteries that had a tiny fraction of modern capacity due to their simple hardware.

Nowadays even a completely idle smartphone on extreme power saving mode is lucky to last a couple of days, especially if you don’t/can’t disable the vendor-mandated bloatware that periodically wakes it up to phone home. When used regularly, it’s not uncommon for a phone to drain within a single day.

Sometimes I miss the simple, rugged designs - right up until I remember how much better smartphones are at literally everything else. Still wish companies would get the memo and focus on bigger batteries rather than smaller phones, though.

Thanks for getting the intro theme stuck in my head for the rest of the day, you monster (username checks out?).

It also helps protect against biting insects.

They’re testing the costume for Dogma 2.

We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants, but there are so many layers of giants that it’s hard to see the ground.

As much as I believe PayPal would do this (they have closed accounts without warning and stolen all pending funds many times in the past, which is why it’s commonly recommended to avoid them if you’re making decent money), the only source for this article is a Reddit thread that doesn’t name the game or company.

There’s a decent chance this is just someone’s creative writing exercise using the current scandal to get attention.

I’m right there with you. They’re basically saying “things could be worse, so there’s no point in wanting them better.” It’s a nonsensical thought-terminating cliché.

They’re taking the opposite approach.

In the past families had a bunch of kids because they needed extra laborers to stay afloat, plus childhood mortality rates were so dire they needed spares to cover for the ones who wouldn’t make it.

We’re already seeing pushes towards removing child labor laws, and RFK Jr is well on his way to ensuring death from easily preventable diseases makes a comeback.

You just wait. Come Vatican III, my homeopathic infini-wine will be an accepted, nay, mandated part of Catholic mass. They’re always saying to be more like Jesus, and what’s more Jes-ish than duplicating food to feed the masses?

And are they considered bread or meat? Or both, allowing for the world’s most compact and efficient sandwich?