• 0 Posts
  • 76 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
cake
Cake day: November 29th, 2023

help-circle


  • I miss forums as well, and I’m actually moving back to them. Back in the early 2000’s, I visited like a dozen forums each day. I was a member of like three watch forums, a camera forum, a Star Trek forum, some gaming forums and others. Just ‘doing the rounds’ kept you busy for a while. People also were insanely knowledgeable on those niche forums, and they all had their own specific culture and flavor to them.

    Places like a niche subreddit are… OK at best. They are convenient and easy to visit, but don’t tend to have the level of knowledge and discourse that I generally enjoy. You also run the risk of your sub getting ruined by people who are into the wrong aspects of your particular hobby. For example, on a watch FORUM, the discussions are about design, mechanical features, history, photography, how to repair, etc. etc. On the subreddit, a lot of posts tended to be drive-by posters who ‘found a watch and wanted to know what it’s worth’. or ‘is this fake’. The subreddit didn’t curb that, so eventually I and many others just stopped going there. It was basically too easy for people to post there just because, well, they could. Whereas on an actual watch forum, you can do a bit stricter moderation and the registration requirement weeds out low effort posting.

    Some consider that ‘gatekeeping’, but I see it as a valid way of protecting one’s chosen community.


  • I don’t think I’ve met any Brazilians back in those days; (online) gaming is really expensive there from what I heard, right?

    One fun thing in the old COD lobbies was always to teach others slurs and general cursing in your language. I learned how to curse folks out in like 50 languages. Each country also has its own unique style of cursing. We Dutch really like to incorporate diseases for example.


  • I’m certainly not going to say you’re wrong on that first part. I’ve been online since 1996. At that time, the internet was the domain of white, heterosexual, nerdy, generally well educated guys. And me being a white, heterosexual, nerdy, well educated guy… well… going online felt like coming home. Those were my people. I still really miss those days.

    But I also know that the experience of someone not like me would’ve been wildly different. I learned a bajillion slurs on COD lobbies after all. It’s a good thing that more people now feel welcome online, as it led to platform growth and functionality that we otherwise wouldn’t have had if it was just ‘my kind of people’.

    The current safe, sanitised, gentrified gaming sphere also has benefits: COD lobbies these days are very pleasant by comparison. You even have to sign a code of conduct to get on multiplayer. It feels more welcoming, less hostile. Of course, companies certainly have been financially incentivized to attract as wide an audience as possible. For example, the very first GTA game sold about 6 million copies. GTA V has sold 200 million. And with ever-increasing development budgets, you can’t afford to cater to a niche, you want to cast as wide a net as possible to recoup those costs.


  • FinishingDutch@lemmy.worldtoRetroGaming@lemmy.worldI miss console ads being this weird
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    75
    arrow-down
    10
    ·
    edit-2
    11 days ago

    I miss that era. Companies didn’t mind a bit of edginess and weren’t afraid to market to adults. The console culture itself also isn’t what it used to be.

    These days, gaming consoles all need to be safe enough for five year olds to play on them. And it’s caused everything to be just too bland and safe, both in marketing and the console itself. Can’t really have things like Xbox 360 Uno with the live camera feed and no moderation. Or the wholly uncensored COD lobbies.




  • Guess I should stock up while I can huh?

    I’ve been a RPI fan since the beginning and have used their boards for all sorts of projects and tinkering. But it’s hard not to feel like it’s losing sight of what made it attractive in the first place: low power and low priced computing. It had its charm in buying a Pi Zero and just chucking emulators on it and handing them out to folks who might want to have a go.

    But with the more expensive, more powerful hardware you just can’t really use them for things like that anymore. Just too expensive and too much oomph for the use case.

    We’ll see if the company finds its way. But this usually isn’t a good sign…







  • Pretty much this, yes.

    There’s also the complexity of approach procedures that they need to follow in order to mitigate noise complaints. Back in the old days, they’d just fly from radio beacon to radio beacon, with look-out-the-window navigation for the final approach.

    These days, lots of airports are within or close to cities, which means a much more complex routing and specific altitude and speed restrictions. GPS made that possible; they’re simply too much workload for pilots.

    So yeah, in emergency situations where GPS fails completely, there’s going to be some changes to procedures needed in order to make that work. They’d also need to increase separation between planes in order to prevent problems.

    The simple solution is: nobody should fuck around with GPS since we literally all benefit from it.



  • Personally, I rarely even have the option to buy the things I want in a local business. They simply don’t have it. My local book store isn’t going to have obscure, expensive, foreign language books on specialty subjects. I also have good, expensive taste in plenty of other areas that stores don’t cater to. I pretty much NEED to buy at an online specialty retailer.

    And yes, if they do have it, price certainly is a factor. I don’t mind spending say, 10-20 euros more to have an expensive item in hand that afternoon rather than wait a week. But I’m not going to pay more just to ‘support local business’.

    If a store is doing poorly, usually they are to blame. If you don’t sell the products people want at a price they deem reasonable, well, why even exist?