It's a lot better than it used to be, from a Linux perspective. I switched to Mint a few months ago and it can be a bit fiddly, but I haven't had any real issues with any of the games I've tried. Admittedly, that's all through Steam, but still.

This tracks with everything else they've been doing. They don't care about life, they care about control, which this highlights perfectly.

The laptop's definitely more versatile, but there's something to be said for the handheld form factor. If you're on transit or something, you're not going to want to whip out a laptop. If you're just using it at home, though, laptop all the way.

Yeah, IBM supplied a ton of computers to the Nazis during the war, as well as expertise on implementation/usage, from my understanding.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/black-ibm.html

The problem with that argument is that there's value in something being not Facebook/Meta (or Twitter, or another corporate owned and run mega service), but that value isn't as easy to demonstrate as "here's a bunch of shiny features", and once people are locked in, the focus shifts from improving the service to monetizing the service, making it rapidly worse for everyone.

People largely don't think about how the services they use are structured, until any inherent structural issues come back to bite them. Twitter's an obvious example, with people who were dependent on it for their livelihood from a networking/advertisement perspective ending up in trouble when the service went south. Reddit's another example, although how that ends up is still TBD.

I think it's reasonable in that the same kids who get into the difficult, complex parts of Minecraft are likely the same sort who would enjoy something like Myst. You're right that it's far from a perfect comparison (two very different genres, after all), but there's something in it as well.

I'd suggest you look into some of what's possible in Minecraft before dismissing it. The basics are simplistic, but the moment you start dipping into redstone builds you're opening up an entirely different, entirely more complicated can of worms. Some of the mods available also expand that complexity greatly - Create, for example. It's a different genre of difficulty than what's offered by puzzle-based games, but I don't think it's possible to argue that there isn't depth to it. Factorio's another one which I'd name as offering significant complexity in the same vein.

I'd also note that Myst is almost generation defining in terms of its complexity. I'd be hard pressed to point towards many other games that were on par with it from its time (and I'm intentionally excluding some of the classic text adventures here, which were difficult in ways unfair to the player).

Other way around - base launches at $20, dlc comes out at $5, game and dlc get bundled down the line in a $25 pack, discontinuing the separate purchases.

Would you feel differently if no updates were released for the original game, and all development post release was bundled into a paid expansion? What if, after that, the game was only made available with expansion?

IMO, that’s all this is, with the nice bonus that people who bought in early get the expansion for free.

I think there's a difference between choosing whose lives have value and choosing who to empathize with. I'm not celebrating their deaths, but aside from the teen who was on there, I can't say I feel much about it one way or another. They knowingly chose to take the risk, signing waivers saying that they knew the trip could result in death, and it ended badly.

Looking at it from a different angle, I can also see why people would be frustrated that an incredible amount of attention and resources are being spent on people who intentionally put themselves at risk for a pleasure jaunt, while if a fraction of that (on a per capita level) was spent on everyone who was at risk of dying from issues brought on or exacerbated by poverty, we'd be saving a lot of lives.

If this marks the return of people actually picking up a newspaper (or the digital equivalent), that'd be fantastic. Not holding my breath, but one can hope.

I think before an AU like you’re suggesting could work, the US would need to get its house in order. Just from a Canadian perspective, the States already have a strong influence on us culturally/socially and economically. Tying ourselves even more closely to the US while one of the major parties is actively flirting with fascism is (I hope) pretty well out of the question.