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Honestly, let’s bring geocities back (not exactly in that form). Anything that isn’t a throwaway post on social media goes there, and you can post links to it from all the social platforms for reaching a broader audience. Then there’s a place for getting the most up to date information about an event, that doesn’t require making an account, and the person putting the event on doesn’t have to make sure posts across multiple platforms are updated with the same new information.
Class action is probably their best bet. Up until now, for the most part, companies have opted to refund digital purchases like this, like when Google ended Stadia and refunded everything. And while it’s easy to laugh at people who trusted and believed that they had permanent ownership, I truly hope that there are enough people who stand up and take this to court, because people shouldn’t be punished for not being cynical like us. And if a company is going to sell something as a purchase, rather than a rental, they should at least have to continue to provide it to those who did buy it. I have several games on Steam that can no longer be sold due to licensing reasons, but Valve still lets me download and play them, because I purchased a license. Sony and Discovery should either have to refund people, or continue hosting the files for those who purchased these shows.
Yeah, also I think there is something about the human connection and communicating personal ideas and feelings that just isn’t there with AI generated art. I could see a case for an argument that a lot of music today is recorded by artists who didn’t write that music, and that they are expressing their own feelings through their performance of someone else’s creation. And is it really all that different if an AI wrote something that resonated with an artist who ultimately performed it? Which for a good chunk of pop-culture regurgitations may be completely valid. But in my opinion, the best art, communicates emotion, which an experience unique to biology, AI might be able to approximate it, and sure there’s a human prompting the AI who might genuinely have those feelings, but there’s a hollowness to it that I struggle to ignore. But maybe I’m just getting older and will be yelling at clouds before long.
FaceTime would be nice to have on Android as well, I know it technically works via a browser, if you get an invite from an iPhone user, but it’s such a bad experience for everyone. And I’m sure they do that because it’s easy peer pressure “advertising” from Apple users who want to video call with Android users, but can’t be bothered to put any work into using a compatible app, and instead blame Android users for the incompatibility.
Lots of good suggestions in these comments so I’ll throw a couple oddball suggestions out just for fun. Dredge isn’t exactly a full-on horror game, but has some Lovecraftian horror elements, and I really enjoyed it. Not sure that kind of horror really fits the holiday though, so I’ll also suggest Pumpkin Jack, which is even less of a horror game, but is a pretty enjoyable 3D platformer with a lot of inspiration from the season and holiday.
Sailing around the world costs money, but you can learn about other places through other people sharing their experiences on tiktok. There are livestreams teaching language, where you can get a much more personalized teaching and your questions answered without judgement for interrupting, there are carpenters sharing useful tricks, and showing how to build things for yourself. There are livestreams showing how to operate a crane at a shipping port, and what that career is like. TikTok has a lot more than the dancing, meowing, and giggling, although if that’s what you watch a lot of and interact with, it will happily give you only that, but that’s a user problem, not a platform problem.
The big ones for me are a cover/replacement for the fabric face gasket, prescription lens inserts, and for long play sessions a fan insert for the headset can be a nice to have, but I don’t run mine all the time since sometimes it’s just adding noise. The face gasket has probably been the hardest thing to get right, since a lot of third-party ones either don’t have enough padding, or are hard to swap in and out, so I kinda prefer having a full extra magnetic insert so I can easily change between the original which is most comfortable for me, and something else that I’m less worried about sweating all over for more active games.
I’ve spent over $1500 on VR (HTC Vive, and Valve Index, plus some accessories for both). I’ve never been able to talk myself into even a Quest 2 for $200 back when they went on sale shortly before they raised the price due to “supply chain issues.” I enjoy VR experiences and I’m personally okay with paying enthusiast prices for hardware that improves the experience, but I want nothing to do with Meta/Facebook’s ecosystem, at any price.
Based on the recent development work that appears to be happening in SteamVR for Linux, which hasn’t gotten that much love since a couple months after Alyx released, my money is on this being a “standalone” VR headset. That said, I’ll be happy with almost anything at this point, I really enjoy pretty much all the hardware Valve has made over the years, and trying out their ideas for new ways to interact with games is always fun.
I’ve wondered for a while now why so few devices seem to generate it on the fly. Even Google Home and Alexa devices seem to play a 1 hour long file that fades out and in. The older, standalone “sound spa” units played a loop a few seconds long, which bothered some listeners who could hear a pattern due to the loop (maybe due to compression artifacts). I imagine it’s probably just computationally more expensive to generate it on the fly, rather than playing a file, but I also suspect that it’s also just companies pushing out the minimum viable product, and looping an audio file is easiest - especially if the device is already designed to play music, or other audio files like “ocean waves” and “babbling brook.”
I think there should be a separate license to drive SUVs and Trucks over a certain size. And that maintaining that license should be a bit of a hassle - like a required in-person written and practical test every 2 years. If people want that commanding view of the road and “safe” feeling that comes from endangering everyone else on the road, then they should have to put in some extra effort - not enough extra effort that it’s unattainable for those who actually have a need for a vehicle of that size, but enough effort that it would discourage the widespread use we have currently.
Does anyone know of Gullikit is still doing the thing where their joysticks have the square active zone as opposed to round like the stock sticks? I bought a set for my LCD SteamDeck a bit over a year ago, and after learning about the square active zone causing issues for some, I haven’t bothered to install them.