People voted for this with their wallets.

As an iPhone guy, I know we already have it like that, and our keyboard has always sucked (and none of the third party keyboards help, they all suck compared to Gboard on Android), but while we dread the day that Apple becomes a data broker like Google… that day is not here yet.

Borderlands. The first one. The game is amazing by yourself and slightly better with friends. It’s not meant to be worse either way. It’s just a lot of fun.

The later BL games were made the same way, but I haven’t found any of the sequels (/“Pre-Sequel”) to be as engaging as the original. They are bigger and more ambitious, though, with BL2 being a fan favorite. I just really like the Soldier (Roland) from the first game. The other games don’t have a character I like playing as much as him, so I’d rather join the original rather than settle for a lesser character.

Actually, the best co-op game is Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. It’s played with your left hand and your right hand. I’m being a bit of a smartass, but technically it does qualify as co-op because two characters on the screen are being independently controlled and they must work together. But it is specifically designed to be played by one person. Your dominant hand should control the older brother, with the analog stick moving him and either trigger doing the action, whatever that may be (it’s basically a one-button game, plus the stick). Your other hand controls the younger brother, same thing. So naturally the older brother runs straight and does what you expect but the little brother tends to stumble and waver. All intentional. Also, don’t bother with the remake. It breaks a few things and honestly doesn’t look much better. Different art style, not better. Just play the original. You can get it on GOG on sale all the time for like $2-3. Also, it’ll take ~4 hours to complete and you’ll probably never want to play it again (but recommend it to everyone). I actually bought the remake (mistake) and had my wife play it. For the hell of it, I speed ran both of them (this was on Xbox) for the achievements. Then I did the same on the original. Interestingly, you do not have to complete the game to get all the achievements! You don’t even have to complete the final fight, or do the climactic scene before the final fight. Before you’re even aware the climactic scene is coming, you sit on a bench and blip, there’s the last achievement, if you’re doing an Achievement% run, that’s when you call time. (I’m not a competitive speed runner. I just did the runs to pop the achievements before uninstalling them.)

Oh — I meant strictly for health reasons. Guess I got a bit off-topic there.

But yeah, starch breaks down to sugar and we don’t need more of that. I do love my corn (maize) tortillas for wrapping up meat and vegetables though!

You know what I find deplorable? Spyware as a feature. Like Android.

Also, Google bypasses ad blockers. Say you have an iPhone, or an unrooted Android phone. You’re blocking ads? You’re using DNS to do it. The Google app, and Google apps in general, ignore the system DNS settings and use Google’s own DNS. There are some good reasons they do it, but the chief upshot for Google is, they get to inject ads into a device whose owner explicitly tries to block them. Since ads can also carry malware/ransomware, Google is intentionally opening a security hole in a device you may not be able to 100% secure, but could be fairly secure. Relatively secure. For a smartphone.

I actually got ransomware on a popular Android blog through an ad they served. I’d just wiped my phone — this was the last Android phone I’d owned. So I mean, I’d wiped the internal ROM. Repartitioned it, installed a recovery (TWRP, naturally), and then flashed a custom OS. Back then, you couldn’t get stock Android on a national carrier in the US. So, I was flashing a European CFW customised with the CDMA radios that the US was using at the time (we’re all GSM now like the rest of the world, I think the last CDMA towers, which were 3G, have been shut down but I’m not sure — Sprint and US Cellular were CDMA and they’re both part of T-Mobile, and Verizon was the big one and they’re all on the GSM tech now). Anyway, I hadn’t installed AdAway yet, I was just reading tech blogs, when my screen went red, said illegal content was detected on my device, pay “the FBI” so many thousand dollars in Bitcoin to unlock my device. I laughed, wiped the internal ROM again and started over… installing AdAway before going out to the open web. Lesson learned. But that’s the kind of thing Google intentionally opens its users up to by tunneling around the ad blocker. (I don’t name the tech blog because I contacted them and they were very helpful in identifying the source of the ransomware attacks and getting that advertiser de-listed. So there is no reason to “name and shame.” But it can happen to anyone, and without even going to “shady” sites.)

Yes. If you’re a free developer (you have to register as a developer to even do this), you have to re-authorise the app every 7 days or it gets “revoked” which means the app will not launch.

You also have to install a certificate that certifies the app(s) to you. This is generally safe, but you should be careful with trust certificates. You’re basically taking full responsibility for the code that’s being executed on your device. If you haven’t audited the source code (or if someone you trust hasn’t), it might be a risk.

If you used a signing service, someone has bought a bunch of paid developer licenses and they’ve given you the certificate for one of them. Once Apple discovers this, they’ll revoke that developer license which revokes your apps. The signing service will then issue you a new certificate. Revokes aren’t super common, or so they say (I’ve never used a signing service).

I don’t do it. The 7 day thing really isn’t worth it and they aren’t any iOS apps to sideload I care about.

Delta is the coolest emulator due to cloud sync and it’s in the App Store.

No. But we can sideload. Two apps for free, have to be authorized every 7 days. (It’s actually three, but the app that does this for you takes a slot, so that and two others.)

You can also get a developer license for $99/year that lets you do unlimited with a much longer authorization window.

Depends on your age to a certain extent. Older men tend to value monogamy more, but we’re also older and looking for a sure thing (if we don’t have it already). Chasing tail, bedding a different young lady every night, sounds fun, but when you need someone to take care of you, it doesn’t really make sense as opposed to a long-term relationship.

If you’re younger though, you got your whole life ahead of you… just be safe. And try to avoid the crazy ones. They deserve love too, but they also take a lot of patience.

Adopt. Don’t make new people. Take in people who have been abandoned. My father had the same idea in the 1970s — I suppose I should be fortunate my mother overruled him on that one. But he had the idea almost 50 years ago, for similar reasons.

And apply a similar philosophy to the rest of your life. We all know the word recycle. And I have been a proponent of recycling for over 30 years. I’ve heard it doesn’t help. I’ve heard some municipalities take it all to the same place. I don’t care. I still do it. But I also remember when there were three words. The original slogan went “Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.” Many people forgot the first two. You can reuse and repurpose a lot of things. But you should also reduce consumption as well. Eat less processed food. Stick to protein — plant and animal (unless you’re a vegetarian/vegan obviously). Stick to the outside of the grocery store (produce, dairy, deli, meat). Bakery is nice for an occasional treat, but find out what they make in-house and not ship in frozen.

I don’t think I’m doing enough on my own. I also don’t have illusions I’ll convince many others. I’m not really trying to. I’m not trying to save the world, just survive it.

Passed it a while ago. That doesn’t mean we can’t slow down.

Humanity will evolve to deal with the changes, maybe. Maybe not.

Been wondering this, or something like this.

I used to be good at Mario 1, but I cannot play it on emulators. It feels like there’s a delay. It feels a little like Mario is on ice, much like the ice levels of Mario 2. Mario is running, and I want to jump or stop, but there’s a noticeable delay and it makes me feel like my old ass has lost my touch. But playing any modern game, my reflexes are good enough. In a Nintendo to Nintendo comparison, I play Animal Crossing on the Switch, and sure enough, if I’m running and pull back on the stick, my villager skids at exactly the time I want them to. But on that same Switch with the same controller, I can’t control Mario in Mario 1 worth a damn. I do just fine in Super Mario Wonder, though.

(Side note, more to do with Animal Crossing than older games, but I’ve noticed a wired controller, plugged into the Switch dock via USB, with the Switch on the dock, gets more latency than the Switch in handheld mode, which I’m pretty sure uses Bluetooth to connect to its controllers, even if they’re physically connected — not 100% sure on that. But for one example, fishing — even the five-star rarity fish — is quite easy in handheld. But, with the wired connection, I mash A as soon as the fish bites, and it still slips my hook. Maybe the latency isn’t from the controller to the dock to the Switch, maybe it’s from the Switch to the dock to the TV (and speakers since I close my eyes and listen for the sound, which most animal crossers agree is the best way to fish).)

Is that the first game? Yes, it was great. But the publisher was scummy AF and broke the game up into four parts. Now, granted, each part came with an anime DVD which gave you some of the back story/real world issues around the back story, so they did try to make it worth it. But still, it should have been one game.

AdAway isn’t in the Play Store? That was my ad blocker back in the day… on, like, Jellybean and KitKat.

Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google has since banned ad blockers. They threaten their business model after all.

Not actually true, there are still some scam apps on the App Store. As long as they have recurring subscriptions, Apple doesn’t care too much. It’s the free apps that are just as good, they will bury, even if they have users.

As far as music, I agree. I use Apple Music because it’s the best streaming service for my needs and they pay artists better than the other big one. But on iOS you also have Marvis Pro and MusicHarbor. I couldn’t get that experience on Android. The actual Apple Music app is great on Android, and it has gotten better, but on iOS I still prefer Marvis, which is a frontend to Music.app.

Yes, my Android phone (Galaxy S10) has a headphone jack and a microSD card reader and a fingerprint reader. And it’s a flaghship. But it’s a 2019 flagship. (Still does things better than my iPhone 16 Pro Max, which is Apple’s flagship from last year, and still their current flagship model. Most notably, the Android keyboard is better.)

Do any new flagship Android phones have headphone jacks? Not that I need one. I’m 100% on board with AirPods. Love them. I own headphones but it’s a lesser experience. I have some decent (not great) over the ear Sennheisers (they were around $50, so not audiophile range, probably the brand’s entry model) and they’re good enough, but the AirPods are a better experience in many ways. But anyway, mid-range Android phones have headphone jacks, but they’re underpowered compared to flagships, and Android flagships are underpowered next to iPhones of the same year. So while granted, a mid-range 2025 Android likely outperforms my S10 across the board, I have no reason to upgrade what is essentially my backup phone.

That’s true. Where I was, I didn’t have access to a physical one, but could have Googled it. Google often sources Dictionary.com which includes a thesaurus, but also gives AI answers.

That said, the AI gives several choices, so it’s not choosing anything. Still, point taken.

I read about this earlier on Ars Technica. I was expecting a paywalled link. Was not expecting to find a mention of “No Longer Human.” Ars didn’t mention that. Or the chat logs. It was a long article but didn’t go into the same depth.

So, I’ve read “No Longer Human.” A more recent translation is called “A Shameful Life” and that’s a bit more apt, I think, but doesn’t have the same ring. It’s about a guy who feels less and less like a person, like what he does and feels doesn’t matter. It’s a wild book, about a double suicide, and the author later killed himself much the same way. There have been several adaptations — none of them very good. None of them quite captured the book. I wonder if it’s just unfilmable. Anyway, it’s a shame that it’s being referenced here, because it’s good literature worth considering, and I hate to see it maligned in much the same way as the Doom game was following the Columbine massacre. Relevant or not (guns in that case, suicide in this case), it’s a shame art gets associated with tragedy simply by association.

Perhaps the same could be said of AI technology, and it has been. But certainly AI needs better safeguards. According to Ars, when the guy started asking about suicide, ChatGPT said it could not help him — unless he specified he was talking about fictional characters. So he did that (Ars constantly refers to it as a “jailbreak”) for a while, and then I guess (and they guess as well) that ChatGPT just assumed that context and stopped requiring him to specify that.

Yeah, so Musk’s argument is that even though OpenAI’s product ChatGPT has more downloads, Apple should consider letting X’s Grok take the top spot because… reasons, I guess? Grok is still listed despite its antisemitic and other disgusting actions. It might be #2 (yeah it’s definitely shit, right?), it might be #5, but it’s still on the list, and it’s still available. Musk is just mad that Apple is not featuring it.

Meanwhile, Fortnite is the top downloaded free iOS game. It sits on top of the charts. Thusly, Apple has buried the chart and they refuse to feature Fortnite, instead choosing to feature Roblox and PUBG instead. It’s petty and silly, but the rankings do show which one has more downloads. That’s it. It’s not even about quality or anything.

I tend to agree with Epic (Fortnite) over Apple, but in regards to X, I’m with Apple. I may be slightly biased in that I don’t like Musk/X, but I’m with Apple strictly on the merits here. I don’t need biases to influence my reasoning here.

As an iPhone guy, I always thought, what apps am I missing? It was mostly emulators. Then Apple allowed them, and I ask the question again.

Oh yeah, we have Delta, why doesn’t Android have anything like that? So, in a nutshell, I can uninstall Delta right now. App gone, games gone, saves gone, it’s all gone. No longer have any trace of it on my iPhone. Go to the App Store and download it. Empty library. Got to start over, right? Wrong. Go into Settings, connect Google Drive. It’s now downloading my games, my saves, my settings. Everything back where I was. Would be so cool if it were on all the platforms, so a game started on one could be picked up and played on another. Not necessarily Android <==> iOS, but more like phone <==> computer/tablet.

Yeah, so anyway, what can’t I get in the Play Store or the App Store that I actually want?

I get it’s a slippery slope and future implications. I get that. I’m just not seeing the issue now.

Also, it seems like Google has taken away all the things that would convince you not to get an iPhone. They took your headphone jack (though an Android was the first to do so). They took your microSD card slot. The tech always sucked, no one tried to make it better; past 16 or maybe 32GB the write speeds were too low to be usable. Now they’re coming for your sideloading? Honestly what is the argument for staying?

Yeah, I think it was meant to. Maybe the origins are same/similar.

Fun trivia: Isekai is a Japanese genre that means “trapped in another world.” Sword Art Online made it popular but it wasn’t the first, even in Japan. The idea of being trapped in a video game goes at least back to Tron in the 1980s. SAO was itself a revamp/remake of an older anime called .hack//SIGN — not officially, but it shared way too many details with that decade-older show. (The books were written around the time it was airing, but the show would have been green-lit almost a decade later, knowing there was a very similar show already out. And the same people worked on it, made the music, made the games, so yeah, similar DNA in both.) But the first isekai may have actually been Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Isekai has western origins, Japan just gave it a simple name. And now it seems like there are dozens of isekai (word is the same singularly and plurally) coming out every year, and most of them suck. But isekai is everywhere. Stephen King has written isekai — The Dark Tower, The Talisman, 11/22/63, Fairy Tale, and probably more.