The Octonaut

I love my Steam Deck. It’s literally beside my hotel bed right now, while the Switch is at home with two kids under 10. But:

• the docking and detaching experience is frustrating as hell
• it is significantly heavier and yet feels more fragile.
• it has profiles but not comparably to the Switch in terms of use and UX
• and the controller experience is very hit and miss.
• • It spent 2 months just literally randomly shutting off bluetooth - you had to go into desktop mode and re-enable with a Linux command until they patched it - but that’s not even it - whenever it did that, it also disabled the sticks!.
• • I have multiple entries in the controllers screen - none of which can be renamed or show indicators as to which controller they are - where every now and again the Deck decides sorry, I don’t recognise that controller anymore. Please come walk across the living room and awkwardly stand in front of the telly pressing buttons on the Steam Deck’s face to re-pair things.
• • Oh and controller layout schemes are a cool and powerful feature but way too complicated for me to explain to an 8 year old.

If “I just want to pick up a controller after work and forget what Philip in Marketing said he thought the project was going to look like”, or “I want to buy games once and share them with my kids” or even “I’ll throw this in my bag to kill 20 minutes at the waiting room” are factors, the Steam Deck is very much not superior in every way.

Again. Love my Deck. Almost exclusively buy “Verified” games now. Halfway through a Nintendo game that somehow is easier for me, a software dev to find ajd emulate on Deck than on a Nintendo console. But the Switch has been a remarkable console to have in my living room. The first console I bought (actually now that I think of it, that my wife bought for me) since Wii and before that since PlayStation 2. I’m not really a console player. I have 1000+ games on Steam. Still Switch excels at many things and the sales figures should make that obvious.

That would have been a great article to post here a year ago

Much better. Please do stick to the pictogram communication, saves everyone time.

Well given that I’m neither American nor particularly aligned to Washington Post (I had to Google “wapo”) or the New York Times, it wasn’t a particularly interesting question. Having lived by the South China Sea however… yeah it’s probably more pertinent to my interests what Yogibear posts about that.

Did you forget your image macro?

I guess we’ll find out when Yogsy posts them some day.

Do we post opinion pieces on news communities now?

I do not wish to enjoinder with your Game Launcher and anonymous telephony

tax dollars

What

One of the good things about living in Ireland is that I’m 99% our government is neither competent enough to perpetrate elaborate crimes against its people without being exposed almost instantly, nor powerful enough that even fascists getting into government would have a meaningful impact bar providing a colourful humorous segment of the inevitable documentary on Europe’s second fall to the Axis.

I work for a telecom. In my country there is well regulated legislation that specifies how and when the police can ask the telecoms for cell location data, usually used for missing people.

They also provide large scale, anonymised data for crowd movement analysis. For example it was used to demonstrate how 60,000 people moved into and out of a stadium located for historical reasons in an old-fashioned, dense residential area, in preparation for the arrival of English football fans.

Well yes, the only way to erase a nation or culture’s hatred of your violence is with enough violence to literally genocide them.

But there really aren’t that many. You just put it down for a generation until it comes back, usually with a different name.

Stop making violence the only thing you’ll react to in any way? Or indeed, stop responding to peaceful resistance with violence (eg the civil rights marches in Northern Ireland).

It might seem like Palestine has been a hopeless mire forever, but there was a point in the 90s where the last reasonable leaders of both sides were coming together for a peaceful solution. Hamas and the Israeli right wing - the “both sides” of today - were on the fringe.

Then Yitzhak Rabin was killed by an Israeli right-winger, Israel inexplicably responded by killing a Hamas leader, Arab civilians were massacred at the Cave of Patriarchs by an American Israeli, and Hamas responded with more bombings, Yassar Arafat died under siege by the IDF, Hamas took control of Gaza, and well, here we are.

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin is probably as impactful to history of that of Archduke Ferdinand, but seems to be being forgotten.

As an Irish person, you can’t end terrorism with violence. You just create martyrs to a cause, a cause which looks more and more legitimate the more civilians suffer and die because of said violence. “Kill the rebels” every 20 years did nothing for peace on Ireland for 800 years.

Agile is explicitly a way for a team to be self-organising. What benefit do you get from it as a solo developer?

They were observed finding one ROM on the Internet, ever. They do have their own emulator(s).

Nintendo is a bunch of humans. If my boss asks me to see if I can find the installer for an old version of our software, you can bet I’ll check anywhere before volunteering to go scrape old hard drives.

They are not “banning” emulators. They take action against two sorts of problems: leaking, and distribution of copyrighted material. Yuzu was taken down because they stupidly started charging for help with playing Tears of the Kingdom before its release. Other emulators have been threatened because they included binary console OS software (rather than actually fully emulating the console itself) or actually distributed game ROMs.

Dolphin has been around for about 20 years now. Why? Because they don’t distribute copyrighted material, recommend against doing so, and don’t require to include any binaries from the console.

Here’s all they had to both say and adhere to, to “survive” the supposedly blood-hungry Nintendo for longer than some of the people reading this have been alive:

Where can I download game ISOs/ROMs?¶

Short answer: You don’t. Buy games and dump them with a Wii.

Long answer: Downloading commercial games is illegal and thus strongly frowned upon by the Dolphin developers. To prevent legal issues, this includes gray areas like downloading games which you purchased earlier. You don’t necessarily need to own a gaming console by yourself because you can buy a game disc and dump them with a friend’s console. On the other hand, copying a friend’s game dump is considered illegal again.

https://dolphin-emu.org/

Also, lol @ the idea that it’s hypocrisy for them to use their own game files. You understand that’s what a ROM is, right? It isn’t magic. It’s just a binary file.

…

“Ripping” ROMs, or dumping them, takes almost no effort. If you have the cartridge reader its about as much work as taking photos off an SD card. Certainly nothing at all like cracking a game, which is pretty much software development.

Please consider informing yourself before forming strong opinions.

Just so we’re clear, are you under the impression that “ROMs acquired from the Internet” represent something other than Nintendo’s work?

I regret to inform you that animations are images

1. What, lol. China doesn’t kidnap foreign businessmen.
2. “Their” equipment was 51% (at least) owned by a Chinese company. Of course they can’t literally steal it.
3. “They considered crime”
4. They were going to buy the equipment again… from China anyway? lol

Tell your boss get off the Trump juice.