Hey if I could sell a million copies of a game for just a dollar each as my cut of a bundle, well I’d be a millionaire!

The question is: did Disney commission the Percy Jackson series or did Rick Riordan shop around for publishers like a traditional book author and happen to get picked up by Disney?

It’s the Texas sharpshooter fallacy writ large. You can always pick the winners after the games are written. The hard part is picking a winner of a game beforehand.

Those are books published by Disney written by established individual authors. They’re not gang-writing books the way they make movies.

You have to include the risk of not succeeding. Without high graphical fidelity to differentiate yourself, you’re forced to compete on gameplay alone. Large companies like Nintendo do not know how to make hits reliably. That’s why Nintendo keeps recycling old franchises.

Look at all of the indie games that no one plays. There are thousands and thousands of developers out there making games. The vast majority of them never succeed. It’s just like trying to become a New York Times best selling author. Notice how Disney hasn’t cracked the novel as a medium. That’s why they spend all their money on big budget Star Wars and Marvel movies and TV shows.

Here’s the reason AAA devs are obsessed with graphics:

It’s the only thing that differentiates them from indie devs.

Once you realize that indie devs can do anything and everything that a AAA game can do, except for creating tons of high detail 3D models, levels, and textures, you begin to see the AAA studio’s dilemma. If they don’t hire all those artists, level designers, and animators then they’re forced to compete with indie devs on gameplay, story, and features — none of which they can do!

Why is that? Because there are millions of indie game devs out there who are willing to spend many years of their lives trying out ideas that have close to zero chance of being successful and all the gamers out there are happy to pick that one in a million game which actually succeeds! For a AAA studio to step into that arena would be absolutely foolish.

It’s the same reason big corporations dominate book publishing but they don’t even bother trying to write books themselves.

The thing I wasn’t prepared for was not the lack of time, it was the lack of desire to play games.

Yes, it is a choice. However one of the biggest problems is that so many of the good choices are gone. I’m talking about the positive social institutions and community organizations people used to belong to. The third spaces.

Communities have fragmented. Neighbours hate each other. Both of my neighbours hate our family. One is a childless, alcoholic husband and wife who also hate each other (they used to be nice years ago) who also hate us and give us creepy looks all the time. The other is green lawn-obsessed neighbour who hates us for the pine trees we have growing on our property and refuse to cut down (at our own expense) to suit their tastes.

We’re a society of severely mentally ill, isolated, confused, and angry people. Our villages and communities are all gone. We’re all a bunch of islands unto ourselves.

The manosphere is one symptom of a much larger problem. Look at it in isolation and you’ll miss the big picture. Authoritarianism is on the rise globally. Loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions. Society’s traditional institutions are a distant memory. All we have remaining are loose groups of people shouting at each other as the spectre of war lurks in the background.

Nothing like Prince of Persia. Has that overwrought modern platformer control scheme (with a zillion different things you can do in the air) that every single other modern platformer has. No thanks!

Anyone know of any modern platformer games without all that nonsense? The idea is to feel more like a human who actually needs to think before jumping. I want to feel the weight of my character, feel a strong sense of momentum, and be fully committed to jumps. Air jumps and mid-air momentum control are not my style.

That’s a strange list. OpenAI doesn’t only offer SaaS for end users, it also offers API access which puts it into the infrastructure game with the likes of Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure (which actually offers OpenAI services and pushes them out to Windows users en masse).

6 million units at $700 a pop is $4.2 billion in revenue. Much closer to 1/2 of $10 billion than 1/10.

Apple has never made more money from the App Store than from iPhone hardware sales. When the iPhone launched the App Store didn’t exist yet. Over time, Apple’s revenue from services (including the App Store) has grown dramatically to around $26 billion per quarter today, though that is still less than what they earn in iPhone sales (a bit over $50 billion per quarter in 2024).

This is the same mistake everyone makes. They think Donald Trump is just a person. That he actually matters and we just have to get rid of him and everything will be okay.

It doesn’t work that way.

As fascism didn’t die with Hitler, it’s not going to die with Trump. All of the problems — all of the rifts in our society — will still be there when he’s gone.

So you want Donald Trump in charge of the telecom industry and any other industries that have received some sort of public subsidy?

“To my friends, everything. To my enemies, the law.”

This is the only logic to it.

My point here is that none of these cases feature Microsoft inventing a brand new product and trying to market it for the first time. Their whole strategy from the very beginning was to look for existing products with existing markets and try to conquer them. They even had a name for a variant of this strategy (targeted at open standards) which the US DoJ famously discovered during the antitrust trial:

Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.

This is how Microsoft has operated since day 1:

• they let Dartmouth take the lead with Dartmouth BASIC and followed up with Altair BASIC (Microsoft’s very first product)
• they let Gary Kildall take the lead with CP/M and followed up with DOS
• they let WordPerfect take the lead and followed up with Word
• they let VisiCalc and Lotus 123 take the lead and followed up with Excel
• they let Apple take the lead on GUI with the Mac and followed up with Windows
• they let Netscape take the lead and followed up with IE
• they let Sony take the lead with PlayStation and followed up with Xbox
• they let Apple take the lead with iPad and followed up with Surface
• now they’re letting Valve take the lead with SteamDeck and following up with their own handheld

That’s why they’re doing this. The sleeping dragon is waking up. They’re gonna pour all of their marketing effort into killing the Steam Deck because of the threat it represents for consumer Windows.

We actually don’t have much in the way of pain relief besides NSAIDs (of which Midol is one), local anesthesia (which I believe is not indicated for IUD insertion), and opioids (I’m sure you’ve heard of those in the news).

It’s not only clinical trials where you test on people, chemically. There are a ton of tests for skin care products to compare their effectiveness. These have already gone through trials for safety but long-term research on their effects is important.

One example is the anti-acne medication Accutane which is known to cause birth defects. This drug cannot be given to women who may be pregnant under any circumstances. I believe doctors even require proof that the patient is on birth control before prescribing it.

As for menstrual cycles: they are known to affect skin, hair, joint mobility, pain sensitivity, mood, food preferences, weight, and more. Tons and tons of studies are affected by this. Everything from dieting to mental health care, skin care, hair care, and even sports medicine, exercise, and recovery from injury.

Oh I can’t justify it at all. These things come about because of complex interactions throughout society. Scientists didn’t decide for themselves to have these strict rules on experiments involving women who might become pregnant. Those rules were imposed on them by politicians and regulators whose goals were not to promote the best possible research.

The same goes for the situation in the US with employers providing health insurance through group policies. That situation came about during a war-time cap on employee compensation. Employers used the insurance benefit as a way to circumvent the cap. Now Americans seem to be stuck with a system they increasingly do not want.

One of the worst heartbreaks I experienced growing up was when I realized that no one is really in charge of anything and that we’re all trapped in a system we can’t escape. 1984 was a big influence for me on this one.