Oblivion is cool, but I’m with everyone else that want to see Morrowind remade first. I’ve been personally holding out for the Skywind mod for several years now. I just checked up on it and, yeah, they’re still workin’ on it.

It’s a good op ed and one with which any supporter of enlightened democracy should agree. The Supreme Court are playing fast and loose with public trust at a time when partisanship has crippled the other branches of government and polarization is dividing the country.

How can anyone respect a court that explicitly has no ethical standard?

America was founded on the freedom to believe in crazy things, so to a great extent I agree with you. But all rights—including speech, privacy, and religion—have limits, and these limits need to delineate the space between the competing rights of others.

If gay people have the right to marry, then a county clerk cannot have the right to deny marriage certificates to gay couples.

If people of legally protected classes have a right to conduct business without fear of discrimination, then businesses cannot have the right to refuse service to those people, for religion or any other reason.

I hate that I agree with this. On the one hand, “lying about a pandemic during a pandemic” sure sounds a lot like “shouting fire in a crowded theater,” but things like the lab leak theory aren’t really a matter of public health. While there are times when the government can and should fight dangerous misinformation, this is the kind of executive power that needs to be kept in check by the courts for the executive’s own good.

The handheld/console hybrid has been Nintendo’s dream for a long time. They even merged their handheld and console development teams a few years back, so I can’t see them abandoning the formula.

The only way I can see iterating on the Switch design is by dropping the dock in favor of a tv dongle to connect and stream wirelessly. This could allow for asymmetrical gameplay much like the WiiU (and would open the door to WiiU ports).

Sounds like backwards compatibility is a lock—not that it’s a huge hurdle for today’s machines—since most of the account features involve software and save data. The retro game archives will probably make the jump too, since keeping them locked behind a paid membership is probably more lucrative than the Virtual Console ever was.

Anyone who has ever transferred their account to a new Switch knows how easy it is, for the most part. The biggest chore is redownloading software data, so maybe Nintendo will allow full game data to transfer over via SD card this time.

I’m conflicted. I have no sympathy for Meta, but I think it would be a mistake to defed from all corporate-run servers axiomatically. Involvement from deep-pocket industries has its issues, but it also builds legitimacy and awareness.

You wouldn’t want your email provider to block all communication with Gmail, just because it’s Google-hosted, would you?

Ultimately, the strength of the decentralized model is to allow those who don’t want to see normie Meta content to move to a platform like Scicomm. But I worry for the drama and fallout when large instances make decisions that affect a huge number of users.

I’m a huge proponent of physical media, but this is entirely unsurprising given Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda. Compared to Switch and especially Playstation, the Xbox has a much higher rate of digital game sales.

If Starfield were on PS5, it would get a disc release for sure, and Xbox would probably get one too for the sake of parity. But discs aren’t terribly important to the Xbox crowd, and that goes double for PC gamers.

Moreover, digital games are good for the publisher’s bottom line, so physical media is only going to exist as long as customers demand it. And PC and Xbox gamers simply don’t.