• 9 Posts
  • 205 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2023

help-circle


  • Outer Worlds has no space-based content. Yes, you have a spaceship, but it’s essentially a fast-travel device. One of the locations is a space station, but it’s no different than a large building (e.g. it’s not shaped like a torus or anything interesting like that).

    Outer Worlds is a really fun take on the Firefly space western concept, though, as long as you understand all of your activities will take place on worlds/moons with basically the same gravity & atmosphere.






  • Research has shown that adolescents exhibit higher levels of open-earedness

    I feel like this reasoning is a bit fallacious. By definition, ALL music is new when you’re young.

    Sure, as a guy in my 50s, my typical shuffle playlist has like 30% of songs on it from when I was a teen, and another 30% or so from ages 20-45. But that’s because my musical tastes have grown somewhat steadily, but I haven’t stopped listening to stuff I used to like either. By simple statistics, the “variance” in my music selections has to go down over time, since I’m not discarding old music from my collection. Some kind of “regression to the musical mean” has to happen as you add more music without removing old music.







  • Plenty of decent country before the 1990s. Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Ray Charles, the Statler Brothers, Mel Tillis, Roy Clark, John Denver, Willie Nelson. Later country artists with pop sensibilities like Kenny Rogers, Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, Reba McIntire.

    I’d argue that Roy Clark ranks as one of the most talented American guitarists/banjoists of the 20th century, easily in the same class as Jimi Hendrix or Prince.

    Today, look for specific types of country music (e.g. Bluegrass) to find more authentic stuff, or just bite the bullet and listen to stuff with different genre labels like “Americana” and “Folk”. A lot of good modern country music ends up in those genre classifications because the marketers can’t figure out how to fit it into the stadium country ecosystem.





  • If I remember correctly, at the time Valve justified the 30% by pointing out that Apple was charging the same for music and video content. And Valve immediately started building value-added services like forums, updaters, multiplayer support, achievements, etc. to justify the price.

    If you compare what Valve was doing to the physical media distribution methods of the period, it was a MASSIVE improvement. Back then, you could sell 10000 units to Ingram Micro or PC Mall, or whatever, and you only got paid if they sold. And any unsold inventory would be destroyed and the reseller would never pay for it. And if you actually wanted anything other than a single-line entry in their catalogs, you paid a promotional fee. Those video games featured with a standup display or a poster in the window at the computer store? None of that was free; the developer was nickeled and dimed for every moment their game was featured in any premium store space.




  • Presently I don’t pay for journalism

    So the answer to, “Do you pay for journalism?” is, “no”.

    It’s great that you have free, ad-supported news that you enjoy. But complaints about “the outsized influence of ad-money” seem pretty hypocritical when you choose not to pay.

    (I realize you were not the original commenter complaining about the influence of ad money, but you picked up the ball so I’m responding to you.)