Unironically some of the most fun I've had gaming this year:

1) Game where you crank thru different retro screensavers (Stars of the Screen)
2) Literally just an average day on Geocities [COLORIZED] (Hypnospace Outlaw)

My current prediction is that phones like these on the left (what I currently have) seem to be increasingly niche in favour of the ones that fold out to be like tablet-size instead; I'm also still bitter about the death of sidekick-style full keyboards tbqh

Clocked in like ~50hrs on it and I honest to god started wondering if it was a bit. Like there's an early dialogue where someone went "hmm, that name sounds familiar". I was like "kind of smart to program in a character with the same name as what the player enters, wonder what they're gonna do w/it"

(I know, it's just an egg on paratha, but my local place introduced me to it & they somehow time the egg part juuuuust right so that it basically fuses into the top layer of paratha, but doesn't fully mix. So the egg gets all crispy. I'm incapable of nailing it)

I once looked up a recipe for this online & when I finally unearthed something that looked like what I wanted was soundly informed by the blog post that it is a dish he mostly makes for his toddlers. Made me think, maybe I do just want kid food tbqh

And truly, what could be better than removing all of that pesky overhead. Only paying for the cloud hosting/processing/etc, with 0 further expectation or reliance on another actual human being

So why would they ever deign to think about the minutiae, the unimportant stuff like how and when laundry gets done, where they're going to eat that evening? They don't have time for all of that; if they can pay someone else to think about that for them, they can focus on the Real Important stuff

Of course, BC that's exactly the kind of mentality of their creators. They've ultra-optimised their time, it's all grind, all genius, all them working on important stuff that's going to save the world, drive that profit through the roof

Of course. Of course that's exactly the kind of substrate that brings all this 'AI assistant' stuff out. Those ads seem so maddening and shallow, so barefaced about messaging "you don't need to think!!!"

Like I imagine if you're more keyed in than me this isn't a shock but I feel like I just cracked the fucking davinci code

And then further down someone says: "If you can make more in an hour than you need to pay someone else to do something in that hour, outsource. You still profit, and don't have to stress about doing it with your auxiliary time."

And then I stumbled upon some thread about hiring a VA, where someone explicitly says "I outsource anything that isn't necessarily work related but still takes time", and they list off things like making restaurant reservations, ordering stuff, 'interviewing babysitters'(!)

So I'm on some bullshit about programming my own virtual assistant / tamagotchi (don't ask, going through it) and I was casting around for novel ideas, ended up searching 'what can a virtual assistant help with' which is how I stumbled upon the knowledge that Virtual Assistant is also a job title

Hate that I'm going to have to actually read about economics one day

Idk man, it's just the atomising of all of these things into all these tiny costs. Theoretically an individual has unprecedented access to a whole variety of sources, but everyone has to earn a living right? Everything is work and time and money, and it's all caught in the net of data privacy

Like of course you could still just buy the paper, but the shift to cater more to digital access can change how available the physical product is. And ads in the physical paper don't have the option to individually track you; even when paying, the digital ones can and often do?

But the trend now is also this 'freemium' tier - you can read this, but your options are pay in the currency of money for a subscription, OR in the currency of access to your personal data. Specifically I'm talking about the trend of 'pay to reject advertising cookies'