I had no idea you could look at your own library on that site. I may have to try this.

I had the same experience when I recently had to get a new phone. Stock launchers have improved a lot.

I’m going to give you the unpopular answer: it’s not going to get better. I almost beat this game, and really enjoyed a lot of it, but without spoiling there will come a point where you have to do a lot of things in a specific and high stakes order across multiple planets. I tried it a bunch of times and found it so frustrating to have to redo it over and over again that I eventually just threw in the towel and moved on.

It sounds like you’re enjoying it even less than I did, so I would guess this point in the game I’m alluding to will frustrate you even more as well.

So I haven’t played this game, but I think what you’re feeling makes sense.

I think for many players, myself included, they aren’t looking to have their teeth kicked in. They also aren’t looking for a walk in the park, though. Unfortunately, many games’ handicap systems (handicap meaning a mechanism that gives the player an added advantage) make it very all or nothing. It’s either super difficult, or braindead easy. I’m not saying that no one enjoys playing a game that is basically on rails and un-failable, some definitely do, but I think it’s reasonable to say many players want to be met at their edge.

The problem as a designer is everyone has a different edge, and the edge won’t even be the same for different activities when it’s the same player playing. You might get frustrated by a boss, but absolutely love meticulously exploring an environment, or thinking through a challenging logic puzzle. Others are the reverse.

I don’t really have a point to this comment, but I’m a game designer and find this stuff really interesting. It’s a very hard problem to solve but I think what you’re feeling is completely understandable. If I were you I would feel a little robbed, too!

After watching the new dune movie I got inspired to play through a campaign on Dune: Spice Wars. So probably that!

There’s been ads in Google for over a decade now.

I’m glad to hear it may be shifting. Long overdue for a people I found to be very friendly in my short visit there. They deserve much better.

To be honest I’m just praying your regulators make laws so draconian that it ripples over here and improves things indirectly. That seems to be all we can hope for anymore. 😔

Too techy for me unfortunately. That’s why I’m looking for something that doesn’t have ads natively.

Do Chromecasts not have ads? I’ve never used one.

Yeah after watching John Oliver’s episode on this I wouldn’t say it’s that shocking even

I hope some people with the means setup bot farms that just pump garbage or subversive stuff like you said into these things until they lose all usefulness to the corpos. It does seem like one of the best ways to counter them.

As much as the tech savvy folks on here can espouse trying to protect your own privacy by doing this or avoiding that, it’s just not a reasonable expectation and the burden to do better should be on the companies collecting data. The vast, vast majority of users won’t even be aware of what’s happening, and that means it’s everyone’s problem, or will be, whenever this blows up someday. You can try your best to avoid giving up your data, but none of it matters because everyone else in your life gave it up already. It’s all a villainous entreprise and I do believe it will blow up someday, maybe not even too far in the future.

Yeah that ship sailed months ago. AI is practically a meaningless term at this point.

Maybe this is already a thing, but it seems like allowing communities to be migrated from instance to instance would be a great thing for avoiding takeovers.

Bard is on copium with that last one.

This is unfortunately not that uncommon. Pedos often work in child focused jobs. Very disturbing, and that’s why background checks are important in those fields.

All I can say is I really agree with your vision, and while I don’t see a path to get there in the current system, especially as individuals, I hope we can.

I am aiming my criticism at the individuals, so we agree on that. I would also love to see the incentives change, but no offense, that’s a hand wave. There’s nothing actionable in what you said. Standing up and saying no more is action, and something we can accomplish as individuals. Change comes from people, not from systems. Systems can only change once the people change.

While I definitely agree with parts of this, that making it costly to do amoral things would be good, I have to say that the rest is exactly what I’m calling out. By saying that profit is the only goal of business, and that being purely profit-driven is an amoral position, we give the greedy and amoral a tremendous free pass. We blame the victims, consumers, because they continue to support these greedy people with their money, when we should be holding the greedy fully accountable. They are the problem and existing purely for greed is not an amoral state of being. It is quite the opposite, and that is what we must no longer accept.

No offense to you, I don’t think you mean any harm by your comment, but it served as a good example of the mindset I am trying to address.