In his defence, Monkey Island is Ron’s creation and the ending is probably what he always intended. It felt like a fitting conclusion to me that neatly tied a bow on the whole saga.
I believe that, as far as "The Secret" goes, this is what he always intended. The idea had been floating around forums for quite a while and I have no objections to that.
Having said that, RtMI feels like Ron Gilbert telling me to go away and do something else with my life. The world is falling apart, the game characters don't care, the ending itself gives up on you and, in case you didn't get it, there's a letter afterwards from Ron Gilbert himself telling you that, if you try to recapture the past, "you'll sort of get what [you] want but it won't be what [you] expected".
As far as I'm concerned, I would have preferred it if he hadn't made the game at all.
I thought the ending was lovely as well. We get sincerity, but seems some people can't go to sleep without an epic boss fight and some dramatic reveal of the "secret". This was the better way to do it and for me the best point and click ever made.
So instead you get a sophomoric meta-ending that has absolutely no originality and shits on decades of storytelling? The ending is trash and an insult to the fans' intelligence because the author can't accept he's "just" writing adventure fiction, as if that's beneath him and instead needs to make some philosophical point about the nature of aging, thereby completely stepping out of his skill set. Go read Proust, Ron Gilbert, and leave that silly ambition to rest.
I appreciate this is intellectually lazy but is there a tl;dr? It’s a clickbait headline followed by a conversation that’s, at least initially, not good at conveying context.
They had a guest on who has a history of surprising results published from studies with flaws in methodology (although the author of the post is clearly a little biased). The complaint is about the podcast not being very critical of her, while framing the discussion with the question “How do you know whether you should believe surprising results?”.
This minor deterrant to adoption scales up with lots of other minor deterrents. Users want "it just works" and that's the experience they get with Microsoft and Apple (however bad it is in other ways).
Desktop Linux must match or exceed that base level of experience if it wants to drive meaningful adoption.
Let's be practical: give users a brief explanation of the downsides before they make choices like installing proprietary codecs. Treat them like adults. Let them have an easier life in favor of getting them on board.
> Users want "it just works" and that's the experience they get with Microsoft and Apple (however bad it is in other ways).
It isn't. With Apple they get "it works or it doesn't" which is crap when it doesn't, because you can't fix it and Apple won't. With Microsoft things are commonly broken, often by accident, and no easier to fix than installing codecs on Linux. But worse, with both of them, is when things are broken on purpose. Almost like Linux. Only not for your benefit, but for theirs, at your expense.
Which puts some lie to the notion that easier always wins. It isn't easier to use Windows, it's a mess of bad code and half of it is out to get you. People use Windows because they have to, or because it came on their computer when they bought it. If you want adoption you need to address that -- do something about the Windows-only apps. Get more Linux PCs into the stores.
Which are the things that are happening. Things that used to need Windows are now websites or mobile apps. Google's money got Chromebooks onto the store shelves. And if you include ChromeOS, Linux has gone from <1% market share in 2010 to now having as much desktop market share as Mac did back then. All of which at the expense of Microsoft, because now Mac has twice that much.
Being opinionated isn't the problem, it's a feature. The competition is opinionated too, but its opinion is that you're cattle to be milked.
I suppose it's a little like UIs. Old school, green screen UIs have a learning curve and can result in very efficient usage. Modern, friendly UIs sacrifice speed for presentation and accessibility.
Even if I were to ever use an iPhone (which I won’t), it bulks up phones even more. I already find modern phones far too large. I was thinking more of something like the Nokia E71 [0] or for a bigger screen, a slide out like the HTC Desire Z / T-Mobile G2 [1], both phones I had before, and loved at the time.
Yeah, I saw that. I’d like a combination of both :D But it will be at least another, maybe 2-3 years, so who knows what they’ll have out by then. I’d also have to check the support story.
That’s a good point. I visited Latvia a few years ago and was struck by how large a section of society there identifies as Russian, to the extent that in some places you were more likely to hear people speaking Russian than Latvian.
Poland would be a more difficult target to justify than the Baltics; only 0.1% of Poles speak Russian; 30% of Latvians are native Russian speakers. I could see Putin going there next.
>An attack on any NATO member requires a response by NATO.
I am not, even slightly, sure that this is the case anymore. Economic sanctions is as far as anyone is willing to go anymore it seems - and half-assed ones at that.
I absolutely cannot see the US, England, or any other NATO countries sending people to die in Latvia. There just is zero stomach for that in most of the world.
And people like Putin know that, is the problem, I think.
That is exactly why the situation is so dangerous. If there is even a hint that the US and the whole of NATO will not come in strong, then yes there is the possibility that he could go further.
There is another very dangerous scenario that has not been considered. A Russian inspired coup in one of the existing NATO countries with a not so small large Russian speaking population. That government then saying they want to leave NATO.
On another side, it's not even mentioned that in the middle of the war action in Ukraine, nobody seems to have noticed Putin just annexed another country, Byelorussia. The Russian troops were supposed to leave at the end of their 3 week long exercises, but they are now leaving...never.
> On another side, it's not even mentioned that in the middle of the war action in Ukraine, nobody seems to have noticed Putin just annexed another country, Byelorussia. The Russian troops were supposed to leave at the end of their 3 week long exercises, but they are now leaving...never.
Belorussia has been a Russian puppet since the collapse of the USSR, nobody's noticed it because nothing has changed.
True, but weeks ago their dictator was still trying to maintain the farse that the Russian troops were only present for exercises and would leave then. And its rumored the "referendum" planned for 3 days from now will settle it.
I struggle with the constant stream of fad terminology, the latest being Metaverse and Web 3.0.
In some ways, Metaverse appears to be simply a new way of describing what we already have —- aren’t social networks themselves already metaverses? In others, the likes of FB and Apple are pushing technologies to enhance “Metaverse immersion” (made that up), none of which is gaining significant traction.
VR and AR headsets continue to improve, and yet still fail to extend beyond the realm of tech demos for most people. (I understand AR has decent uses in industry: hardly a metaverse.) This criticism is coming from someone who was an enthusiastic early adopter with Oculus, and who currently owns a Quest 2, which is excellent at gathering dust, and at occasionally wowing VR noobs (who are amazed but never end up buying one).
Then you have iOS AR, another technology devoid of practical and compelling uses. I love the Measure app with the LiDAR sensor —- is that a metaverse, an electronic tape measure? I guess so.
Maybe you don't like your VR but I actually know more and more people who use their headsets and looking at the stores and forums and so on it seems like it's gaining real traction.
Less so for AR but Pokemon Go still has users an I see ARish features integrated by default into my default Samsung camera, and ARish stuff into meeting software, streamers etc. It's not super advanced yet but hardly dead and I wouldn't be convinced something big won't come out of it.
>My take: the Metaverse is the new chatbot.
I'm not a fan of most chatbots but they've been very successful, improving and you see more of them. An apt comparison even if made for the wrong reasons.
Had the "knotted rope" moment with the term "Web3" the other day, came across about 6 different uses of the word in a 2 hour period; and every one was someone who was (being charitable) fully bought into and enthused about "cryptoeconomy".
They seemed to be using the term to mean "the web, but fully monetized on an NFT-like basis" but in some way that seemed to denote an ideological significance on par with the concept of the Trinity.
If I heard either term being used like this at a conference, I'd be wary of the kool aid.
I thoroughly enjoy mocking Web 3.0 for its particularly lame naming device, seeing as it's being borrowed from a failed attempt to utilize Web 3.0 a decade ago in relation to the Semantic Web. It's quite fitting that the clown show chose that name, again.
"Metaverse" used by anyone but a corporation implies data portability and open standards that allow hopping between servers owned by different companies and taking your stuff with you.
Well i agree. Chatbots seemed like they would be huge and at one point I knew a dozen+ companies that were just working on chatbot technology. Now I see them mostly used as the first line of defenses and data collection before a chat bot "user" is passed off to a human. Very widespread use for a specific use case.
Will Metaverses take over our lives? Probably not. Will they become wide spread for a specific use case? Probably.
I’m using repair and protect, and I have no idea whether it’s doing anything. Experienced a much greater impact by cutting out most added sugar from my diet (including in coffee).
On Regenerate NR5, there seems to be skepticism on Reddit. This analysis looks solid:
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