ryven

Rick Perry moment

Right, but... what does it have to do with Jeeps showing in-car advertisements?

I don't understand how this is related to the Streisand Effect. The Streisand Effect is when you try to suppress unflattering info about yourself, and in the process you call attention to it, so now everyone knows. But we didn't learn about this through Jeep trying to suppress the info, we just learned about it from people who saw the ads.

What can I say, I aim to please!

I mean, this is clearly a bit, but I don't think addicts smoke exactly one cigarette a day. Some people who smoke small amounts never become addicted. I used to smoke, like, half a pack over a few weeks, forget where I left it, and then go months without smoking. Haven't smoked at all in probably eight years now, not because I intentionally quit but just because I couldn't be assed to carry them around any more. (I really only started buying cigs so that I could stop telling people I didn't smoke when they asked to bum one.)

My friend tried to convince me to get into bitcoin early and I didn't bother, I thought it was just a fad, like my mom "investing" in Beanie Babies.

He spent all his on drugs before the price took off though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It is hard to see how the slot machine in LBALL can be gambling when you are guaranteed to profit on every spin (unless you've intentionally designed a machine where you can win nothing, but that seems like your fault). Gambling involves risking a stake, but in almost every configuration of the machine that you'll encounter during normal play there is no risk, you are guaranteed to make more than it costs to spin. The challenge is to make enough to stay ahead of the landlord.

The Sims 3. I had to figure out how to disable OneDrive backup for my Documents folder, because Sims 3 insists on keeping your saves there, and somehow everything breaks if OneDrive tries to sync them. Previously I had given in and let OneDrive sync everything because Win11 nags you if you try to avoid it.

I also have to fiddle with processor affinity to get the game to launch, for some reason.

It still crashes a lot.

World of Warcraft is probably still in the lead even though I stopped playing years ago. It would be in the thousands of hours, which dwarfs anything else I've played.

If you search for "poker" on PEGI's site, it seems that many games which are actually about simulated gambling are rated 12 or 16. They seem to think Balatro is more likely to expose children to realistic gambling than, say, Prominence Poker or Pure Hold'em World Poker Championship, which seems completely bizarre, given that those games are about playing poker and Balatro is a fancy kind of solitaire with no betting.

This is the part I can't figure out. It's not just indie games: ages ago, Pokémon dropped the casinos from their games specifically to avoid having their age rating bumped in NA and EU. So clearly they sometimes account for gambling in side content. But somehow other franchises have kept them in, and aren't suffering.

Does it just depend on whether or not the particular person assigned to review your game is a hardass about particular things?

The patent isn't about the balls, it's about the summoning controls, and it seems broad enough to cover any controls that use a control stick together with buttons to aim a device for summoning a character. It is ridiculously over-broad, and part of a grand tradition of software patents being granted that are more akin to patenting "the idea of doors" than "a specific design for a doorknob."

That's why the new control is "press button to summon next to you," it doesn't use the stick and thereby avoids the patent. It's also ass because it doesn't let you aim the summon, but it is hard to envision a control system for aiming summons that doesn't use a stick and buttons and also doesn't suck.