The argument also ignores that these platforms don’t charge more than the original brick and mortar distribution systems they replaced, under which the industry developed in the first place.

The thing that has changed is that AAA budgets have ballooned to the point that their sales targets have to be unrealistic. The author suggests that needing 4 to 8 million sales to break even is too many, but a game that currently needs 8M sales would still need well over 5M even if the platform’s cut was 0%. And I don’t have any confidence that the publishers would actually reduce their expectations for units sold even in that case.

Depends on where you look. The five strings at the nut somehow become 7 by the bridge. The sixth string appears to start under her left hand, and the seventh may actually be emerging from the sound hole.

Oh wow, they really nailed the visual presentation. If you presented those screenshots as being from a lost Impressions city builder I’d have believed it.

I haven’t actually gotten around to trying it yet, but Alton Brown made a video recently where he rolled his own pancake mix. It looked good.

I have no idea who either of us is talking about.

But I use I/me pronouns for myself. That’ll get confusing real quick.

That or The Lonely Island.

Not only has that always been the case, but that’s the only possibility: DRM, on a fundamental level, is just encryption where Bob and Eve are the same person.

(For the uninitiated, the basic problem statement for cryptography is that Alice wants to send a message to Bob without Eve knowing what it says.)

You aren’t your dogs mistress

I’ll grant that it sounds a bit archaic, but “mistress” is technically correct there.

But yes, agreed that “master” can be used in a gender-neutral way.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

Of the three, Iron Fist seems like the one that would be best suited for this treatment, as being a magical kung fu monk doesn’t require wealth (and arguably should be inhibited by it). But he’s also the one I’m least familiar with.

Batman, stripped of his wealth, would still be a world-class investigator and martial artist, and could probably still do quite well as a street-level hero. I’m less sure that he’d still feel like Batman without the gadgets, though.

Iron Man I don’t think would work without significant hand-waving. Take away his financial resources and you’d basically have Ironheart, but she only built the suit in the first place with a Stark grant, and even then had to turn to alternate, less ethical revenue streams to finish it.

Gotta use the --headshot flag then.

Based on the trajectories in ominous/vivid, those coconuts aren’t just falling, they’ve been hurled.

Like a tropical version of the apple trees from Wizard of Oz.

Which is ironic, because while the modern French word was borrowed from English, the English word is from Old French.

2nd place is a fantastic drawing of a frog.

1st place is an absolutely spot-on FROGGO.

When entering a contest, it’s important to understand the judging criteria.

“I like cathedrals that don’t burn down.”

That’s not true. I care very deeply about avoiding them.

One of the oldest known jokes is from ancient Sumeria, and nobody understands it:

A dog walked into a tavern and said “I can’t see a thing. I’ll open this one.”

Usually, yes, but where coffee is concerned (labeling on coffee makers, for example) a “cup” is traditionally 3/4 of that.

So it’s ambiguous if they don’t specify further. (Do they? The link isn’t loading for me.)

This feels like an exercise in Goodhart’s Law: Any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a useful measure.