MudMan

I am screaming into a pillow at the image of Americans prepping for the apocalypse while doing zero things to avoid it.

Look, I've said this a bunch of times around here this week and it seems like I'm trolling, but I'm not. I've been spooked for years at finding out that my US friends were absolutely unwilling to engage in any political action but were also consistently sure that a violent revolution or uprising was both inevitable and imminent. The idea that this is a widespread societal thing and that not only has it not been altered by another wave of trumpism but has in fact been reinforced is absolutely wild.

I don't know who convinced Americans that they are simultaneously the sole main characters of life but also absolutely absent of any agency or responsibility over what happens, but holy crap, they did an amazing job.

That is extremely cute but also the exact reason people just buy the chocolate ones these days.

Given how many features use generative AI to build user-generated content I would say mark this moment. There is a future of slop-centric Roblox stuff everywhere and this may well be where it starts.

I'm not as mad about that as most will be, but... yeah, I've mentioned a couple of times around here how weird it is that nobody is really bringing it up so far.

You don't dye them, you buy them wrapped in colorful paper.

Not that anybody bothers with an egg hunt anymore over here, people just give these to kids directly now. Sometimes they're chocolate bunnies instead because everybody knows who the real star is and chocolate tastes better than boiled eggs.

Do people not use chocolate eggs for this? Is anybody still boiling actual chicken eggs?

More importantly, do I care? Is this news?

There are tons of options. Chromecasts, Apple TVs, Amazon Fire TV, Nvidia Shield are all commercial options and I recommend none of them.

The traditional broke student choice for this is to just get a laptop that has a HDMI out or the ability to spit out HDMI over USB C and plug that straight to the TV. That I can recommend. Especially if your goal is not to stream the media but to instead play a bunch of locally downloaded files.

Beyond that you're going out of your way to set up bigger self-hosting stuff and if we're talking "upgrading from a VCR to playing offline videos on my TV" it sure sounds like we aren't there yet.

I don't know that Nintendo was forcing the issue for profit. I also don't know the costs and margins (if any) for Nintendo or who they were working with to get the storage, to be fair. But I have to assume that if Nintendo had signficantly cheaper access to storage and was artificially throttling to everybody else you'd have seen more first party games on larger carts, and that wasn't necessarily the case.

Regardless, any solid state storage was always going to be more expensive than optical storage and scale up with size gradually in a way that optical storage doesn't (until you have to go to a second disk or an additional layer, at least). Cartridges are just inherently riskier and more expensive, even at the relatively modest spec of the Switch 1. Definitely with what seems like competitive speeds in Switch 2.

That doesn't mean one has to like the consequences of it. At the same time I'm not sure I can imagine a realistic alternative for a portable. We're not doing UMD again, so...

It was, though.

Objectively. This is not an opinion.

Switch 1 carts HAD to be purchased from Nintendo. It wasn't an off the shelf part. They weren´t SD cards priced commercially, they were a specific order that was part of manufacturing a physical copy and stacked up on top of printing labels and paperwork, making cases, shipping them to stores and so on. Margins for physical media are garbage as it is, but Switch carts were significantly more expensive than, say, a PS5 BluRay and they crucially ramped up quickly with size.

Technically the carts were available to higher sizes, but there's a reason you very rarely saw any Switch 1 games with cart sizes bigger than 16 gigs. Basically the more stuff you put in your game the more expensive it was to physically make the boxed copies. Crucially, that is a cost you had to pay whether you sold the carts or not. It was a manufacturing cost.

Look, at this point it's hardly worth it trying to wrap one's head around industrial retailed boxed copy software manufacturing, but trust me, physical Switch games were relatively and absolutely expensive to make in an environment where digital distribution was king and the next most expensive version was dirt cheap optical media.

Neat. I dig some of the industrial design on the thin laptops.

Gotta say, though, the "Here's how to try to fix sleep issues on Linux" blog post being right there on the front page is... telling.

Hey, if extremely good, hassle-free emulation didn't do it I wouldn't hold my breath, but I guess more options can only help.

I am slightly facetious and mildly hyperbolic.

But yes, I absolutely hate strangers forcing conversation on me. I find few things more grating and hostile than landing in a foreign country horrendously jet lagged and having a "friendly" cabbie try to extract my life story from me while telling me about their mortgage payments or whatever.

I once had someone in the US just sit at our bar table unprompted and strike up a conversation and I saw my life flash before my eyes. That's what psycopaths do. It's like getting punched right in your social anxiety with spiky brass knuckles.

I'm not sure that's how that works. The Switch already had both physical boxes with digital codes in them and cartridges that required mandatory downloads to run. This seems like a physical unlock key for a digital download, which depending on how it's implemented is actually easier to both resell and use offline than the Switch 1 solution to the same problem.

I don't recommend purchasing either, and I avoided both of those options on Switch 1, but I'm pretty sure this at least does not make things any worse.

I have major gripes with a number of pricing choices in this thing, but to the best of my current understanding this one is based on a misunderstanding.