If you worked with raspberry pi emulators, or retro gaming handhelds you'll notice a common theme pop up a lot in comments and on reddit boards. Setting up these devices can be a hobby unto themselves. Curating roms, downloading logos and screenshots, scraping data, picking themes, tweaking and customizing until... you realize your done. Maybe you should actually play a something.

... And then you'll see threads of people talking about the same thing.

Hey, have any of you guys actually p...

There has always been something weird to me that in a lot of the radicalized lefty spaces I hang in, that there is this weird resistance to a lot of bigger open source project solutions. But it's not necessarily that a program is OPEN SOURCE, but that it is made by FOSS minded people. Style a website or a brand like it's a tech startup and no one bats an eye. Instead. As long as it's... corporate enough. Which seems like... really effed up values?

And like okay I get it to some level. FOSS peo...

There is a bitter sweet feeling when I watch a Japanese wrestler or a Luchador get signed with WWE or AEW. With exception (there are more than a few. Classically Rey Mysterio and more modernly, Asuka), you often realize their best work is behind them. But you also know someone is getting a big payday. You can't work super hard forever so slowing down in the places that pay more seems much preferrable.

But it often feels like tourism, or getting food at all you can eat buffet. Sure it's stea...

It's no secret that I hate The Game Awards. It's the same twitter rant from me every year. Some years are lucky and I mostly manage to ignore it, but a lot of twitter discourse got me thinking...

Now, I'm generally pretty anti-Award Shows in general. Not because I think Awards are bad (I especially love small community awards!), or industries celebrating their own is dumb but because most of them either fall to capitalism or have been cynical cash grabs from the start. Even events that seem...

This seems to be the type of cranky ass old person take that cohost loves so lets go.

There are a lot of shitty things about gaming. Exploitative and predatory micro transactions, terrible DRM schemes, addictive but shallow gameplay loops to feed point 1... But most problems we have in gaming are inevitable. Not that they can't be fixed, or overcome, but no one person or company could stop these things from initially happening. Ideas born from market forces.

... But Achievements, for something so unfortunately ubiquitous now... are kinda a weird idea? That we needed a... platform specific list of arbitrary accomplishments with their own, universal sound and popup message? It's easy to imagine a world where that didn't happen and arguably, it happened the only time it could happen.

When the 360 came out, we didn't have any idea what online services should look like. What did it mean to have a profile and friends on your console? Microsoft had an idea for "Gamer Score" (which, while it is a still existing niche is... something only weirdos talk about now) and needed a way to give that relevant, but neither of these things were inevitable. Nintendo still doesn't have them (Notably actually saying 'Achievements don't actually solve any kind of problem games have') and Sony seemed to only do it since it was a point used against them in the console wars. If Microsoft never added them, as they blindly stumbled around trying to figure out early online systems, it's easy to assume that they never end up happening. Despite this. Achievements are very much in the popular consciousness. And they suck.