Forgive me father, for I have sinned.

There’s a hidden advantage here apart from moving away from Microsoft, or having 1st party controller support.

Game devs will have a precise target to optimize for.

If enough steam machines and steam decks are out there, it simplifies porting software since you have a handful of fixed targets to hit. A studio could easily buy a few of these appliances for testing and development, and know for certain the product will run as intended. It’s a luxury currently enjoyed by consoles, and it really does help their dominance in their respective niches.

This also helps smaller studios since the bare minimum means targeting a known steam platform, rather than pulling machine specs out of thin air and taking their best shot. It’s a much easier problem to solve and takes a lot less time and money.

I think there will always be room for high-end gaming, but as long as you’re “steam machine 2025 compatible” or whatever, you know what you’re going to get.

<< The Monkey’s Paw Curls >>

2026 marks the first year in American history where a completely home-grown pandemic forces borders to close, and air-traffic to be redirected as to avoid receiving American passengers. The EU, Arab League, and countless other countries congratulate themselves on rapidly orchestrating the containment of the disease to the USA; truly a landmark moment for international relations. Meanwhile, a Georgetown-based super-PAC “La di libertine” gains untold amounts of influence in government, following an uncannily well-timed short-sale of AI-based stocks. When asked about speculations as to their ties to Italian crime syndicates and fascist hardliners, they declined to comment.

Narrator: And that’s when the Fire Nation attacked.

In a small, anecdotal way, I can say with confidence that the level of fiber trenching that happened (in a major metro area) from late 1999 through 2002 was on a whole other level.

I predict a whole “Weekend at Bernie’s” DeathGate scandal where a whole bunch of executive actions and auto-pen shenanigans happen posthumously under his name, even though Vance is right there. Why? Because it’s exactly the same kind of greedy and stupid this administration has demonstrated so far.

I already learned my lesson here.

Last time I said something like that was November of 2019.

There has to be a better name for that.

And just like that, the e-machine continues to fulfill its intended purpose: browse the internet like it’s 1998. It’s never obsolete, but you do need a time machine to take full advantage of it.

Exactly. It befell the same fate as the first Fullmetal Alchemist series, complete with an insane ending that was improvised and duct-taped to the end of an otherwise perfect series. At least they had enough wisdom to soft-reboot it, so they could finish the series the same way the manga did.

Dragonball Z also gets an honorable mention here, where the animation team was constantly at risk of getting ahead of the manga, so they had to build in LOTS of filler episodes to buy time.

I was gonna say. There’s none added because that’s what they are.

“Oops, all preservatives.”

I’ll take it one step further and say that if you absolutely must use Office, O365 works in a browser on any operating system. You literally don’t need Windows anymore for that.

My prediction is that they’ll go full SaaS and make the non-pro version “free”, with a whole raft of features “cloud only” behind a Azure/O365 subscription.

https://youtu.be/1WDW8XKEGgU?t=45

Honest.

Solid list!

but i always felt those two game designs were kissing cousin

I see them as the same genre. You have this “pushing the map’s frontier” mechanic, along with some power or item progression to enable that. The rest is find-and-seek to connect all those dots. IMO, the only major difference is a side vs top-down perspective.

Dear Microsoft CEO and C-suite people.

Push back on your investors now before it’s too late. AI features are ruining your product and its image.

A lot of companies are tied in up this AI bubble and Microsoft is not too big to fail in this regard. Your customer-base has gotten by just fine without AI and invasive screen-capture technology used to support it, for decades at this point. Most people see your product as an operating system: a product designed to support other products. They do not want more capabilities from it, and have come to rely on good support for hardware compatibility, stability updates, performance updates, and most importantly, security updates. It is the darling of OEM PC installs, and government and commercial enterprise continue to renew their site licenses because of it. These are the core features that will continue to bring value and keep people on your platform, not AI.

If you firmly believe that agentic AI is the future, make it an optional installable product or a completely distinct operating system altogether. This is strategic since it has radically different marketing needs than Windows or Windows Professional, and supports a distinct subset of your overall install base. Foisting this feature set on your existing users is doing nothing more than artificially inflate adoption numbers, and you’re risking the entire enterprise to think your investors don’t already know this. It’s not smart, it’s not even brinksmanship or a bold technology decision. It’s reckless.

Exactly. Another lemming made a fantastic quip to this effect, claiming that consoles and windows are performing “SCP level containment” for the rest of us. Let them have CoD.

Malicious compliance writ large.

Also, the number of hurdles you have to clear for this tells volumes about where the site owner priorities lie.

I love that the fox example is probably the very bottom of the “not even remotely related to news, yet true” barrel.