Keep a few extra cables of sorts I actually use fairly often (a few spare HDMI cables, some ethernet cables, and a few types of USB cables are no-brainers, for instance). Toss all the rest (am I ever, ever going to use a DVI cable again in my life? Decent odds, no, and on the off chance I do I can just buy another)

Any cable that's more than ~2 spares for a port on some device that is plugged in or otherwise in-use in your house, or isn't a kind of port you've used in a couple years (even if you could) should at least get some serious scrutiny and more often than not be donated or go in the trash.

Like, I held on to a couple coax cables more than ten years after the last time I plugged anything into a coax jack. So stupid, in hindsight.

Consider that getting the government out of healthcare would mean all the rural hospitals close.

Consider who that would most-hurt, while saving you money, before you jump to the humanitarian position. Consider it in light of the 2024 election.

Basically, yet more management by fad.

In that specific case I think it was a result of the whole show bending almost every gender-presentation toward something less binary, on purpose, but the general tendency to make a woman character stronger simply by increasing her masculine presentation is pretty common and isn't well received by a lot of folks.

But I'm a dude, I dunno if it read that way to women who played it.

Both types of software plausibly "are video games" but can take extremely different forms, and their appeal may diverge wildly—someone who likes one to an extreme, may have zero interest in the other. Others may like both sorts of play, but not regard them as interchangeable (i.e. if what you're wanting at the moment is an e-sport, a visual novel may not be any amount of a satisfactory substitute, even if you like visual novels).

We tend to draw a "toy/game" distinction (with games perhaps being a subset of "toys", but still its own sub-category, anyway) with physical objects to divide those with built-in goals from those without, and that seems to serve us well, but we've not translated that to the digital realm very well (and maybe we shouldn't, I dunno)

... and actually, wasn't it the case that before the discovery of the "whale" brain-hack to crack open a few (mostly) men's bank accounts, most of the gaming market was women, for broad definitions of "a game", both by player count and revenue?

Even comic books, I'm pretty sure it's only the American superhero-type comics that're mainly "for guys"—if we expand it to include stuff like manga and Euro comics, then the overall audience leans female, right?

Books are overwhelmingly dominated by women.

> And yeah most romance novels are trashy, but it's not like milslop Clancyfics are better. Most people just want some shallow entertainment and that's fine.

Romance is a poor term because it's used to launder literal werewolf "dubcon" porn under the same label as something like Jane Austen novels. That's probably useful to marketers and for sales, but it makes it impossible to make productive use of the label without further qualifiers for anyone who's trying to actually communicate using the term.

(Meanwhile, yeah, much of what actually sells in that genre [and, again, the term is terrible and overloaded] leans pretty hard into being trash. So does pornhub, or Mr Beast videos, or whatever. So what? It's fine to enjoy them, but it's also fine for folks looking for excellent works of art to mostly avoid them in that search. Meanwhile tons of the modern "literary fiction" and poetry market is by and tuned for an audience of women, in fact I'd be surprised if most of those two categories weren't that, but of course few people actually read lit-fic and especially poetry these days)

----------------------------

BUT, the post is actually less about all that than about how older "girl games" are missing from game history and ignored in things like game-making tutorials and instruction. I'd venture that "boy games" that are similarly low-narrative and/or lean toward being more of an activity than a game (bear with me on the terminology, I'm not interested in turning this post into gatekeeping "what is a game" but I think you understand what I mean, yes? The distinction is here useful) also get left out (I can think of a few[0]), plus the factor where a lot of these were licensed games, which doesn't usually help. I'm not so sure this is as much sexism as that narrative games and clear, tight, goal-oriented game loops are both major factors in games having artistic "staying power" or influence, and in lending themselves to "baby's first video game" tutorials (the latter, especially, for that), and are both really, really hard to accomplish in a video game without resorting to a lot of the usual stuff (violence, largely). This is fundamental to how games are built which is that...

...games necessarily objectify the shit out of literally everything in them. This makes satisfactorily modeling things like realistic relationships extremely hard, and even the games that do it remarkably well are prone to feeling kinda weird as a result (see also: Action Button's rightly-famous Tokimeki Memorial review on Youtube). This is why a lot of relationship-focused games end up as visual novels, where they can be contained to basically a choose-your-own-adventure book format. It's incredibly difficult to build a game-loop around relationship mechanics, and have it be any good at all. This is how you end up with so many "girl games" on the "wrong" side of the "what actually is a video game?" discourse (ugh): it's really hard to build "proper" game mechanics around a lot of the aspects of those "girl games" that appeal to girls in the first place.

Take a dress-up "game": in the most-minimal form (and a form which does exist in the wild!) you're not looking at something that's much more game-like, apparently, than MSPaint. Try to add a dress-up mechanic to a "traditional" game and you end up with something that's a pretty superficial veneer over bog-standard mechanics (stat-boosting item equipping, or something like the FFX-2 "dress sphere" system) or is purely aesthetic and has no "actual" "game" effects. It might be fine to include those anyway! But they're never going to feel especially integral to the game. How do you make dress-up itself a video game? You kinda... don't. You attach it to a sandbox, maybe, and let the player develop their own game (goals, narrative) with it, just like toys in a toybox. Like The Sims... which was a smash-hit among women. Go figure.

Is a toy box a game? Kinda no. Do the contents become vital components of a game when a child plays with them? Often, yes! What is a game? Do we call what kids do with toys, often, "games"? Yep. Is soccer a game? Is chess? Yes and yes. What do soccer and chess have in common with a girl developing stories around her real, actual dolls and such, and dressing them up different ways? Not a fucking lot, but we may use "game" for all of them.

... and so we've come full circle from "romance is a shitty term for a genre of books, and often not very useful for communication": "video game" is a shitty term and often not very useful for communication. The game can be what the player brings to a "toy box" that lets them dress up characters and move them around. Maybe it's fair to call a program "a game" if its main intent is to facilitate that, even if it lacks things like a traditional "game loop" or strong extrinsic goals or motivations (which would let us get away with saying that MSPaint could, situationally, be a toy in service of a game, but doesn't belong in even a very-generously-defined category of "video games" itself, should such distinctions matter for whatever purpose we have in employing the term in the first place).

But a video game can also be an "e-sport", on (kinda) the complete opposite end of a certain spectrum. These things have almost nothing to do with one another aside from that they happen on a computer and are supposed to be some variety of entertaining or fun. "Video games" are both those things, and everything in between, it seems. Not sure how useful it is to lump all that stuff under the one term, but so far efforts to carve out distinctions have been poorly-received, so we're stuck with "all these things are video games even though they're so wildly different that very often their fandoms have no overlap whatsoever, on substantial grounds, not just surface appearance or marketing".

[0] Long ago I had this DOS CAD program for kids called, as I recall, "KidCAD". It was entirely useless for any "serious" work, all it was, was effectively a rudimentary line-rendered digital lego set. Leaning into the kinds of distinctions the linked article uses, I think it's fair to call it a "boy game" in those terms, like a dress-up game is a "girl game". It also had zero built-in narrative and no "game loop" whatsoever. Guess how much attention it gets in game history, and how easy it is to find anything about it now? LOL.

Sure, but a bunch of stuff isn't supposed to change just because the president changes. It's supposed to take laws to change it, or even amendments. If those haven't been passed and the President tries to do that stuff anyway, we should want our civil servants to resist that.

The contrary notion is the Unitary Executive, which is that the president should be absolute dictator of what the executive branch does, with legality to be sorted out elsewhere even in egregious cases. This notion is very bad and we should not let it become normal, especially in a world where we've already seen absolutely insane rulings that place the president personally above the law.

If the executive is empowered by the legislative, we should not want civil servants to do gladly do every thing a president might ask of them. If the president is instead possessed by default of unlimited power to direct the executive branch and it's the legislative branch's job to reign in that boundless power (until the president ignores the law, then it's the judicial's job to finally make the executive knock it off one or more years later) then we would want totally obedient (to the president) civil servants. However, this latter idea is stupid and bad, so, we should want civil servants that don't treat the president's word as law, but the law as law.

The real money goes to:

1) Healthcare (in the US).

2) Childcare or foregone wages.

3) School/housing location (same thing; either tuition, or spending 20+% more for the same amount & quality of house in a nicer school district [and the ongoing cost of servicing the extra mortgage on that]; you can skip this, but if you can at all afford it, you'll not feel like it's optional)

4) Space. Larger housing and larger cars. You can skip this kind of (larger car is less-optional if you have more than three kids) but at significant cost to QOL.

So the guidelines say one thing, but I'd be surprised if a majority of parents are still putting their kids in them even by age 10, let alone 12.

Two keys rather than one, but makes up for it by not being way off in some oddball part of the keyboard. You can one-hand it pretty easily, since there's an "option" right next to the arrow keys.

Purchases that wouldn't go through if they didn't reduce competition shouldn't happen anyway. Banning those kinds of restrictions would help with that.

(option-underscore, or option-shift-dash if you prefer to think of it that way)

On iOS, you can type it by simply holding down on the "dash" button then selecting the em-dash from the list of options it presents. It may also correct double-dash to em-dash a lot of the time, not sure.

I have used the correct em-dash everywhere I can for over a decade, which amounts to nearly everywhere.

I have also learned that rarely does anyone care if it’s any good, or means anything. This is generally true, but it’s especially true if you are going with the prevailing winds of whatever management fads are going on.

Like, right now, you can definitely get away with inflating the efficacy of “AI” any way you can, in almost any company. Nobody with any authority will call you on it.

Look at what management’s talking about and any pro-that numbers you come up with can be total gibberish, nobody minds. “Oh man, collecting good numbers for this and getting a baseline etc etc is practically impossible” ok so don’t and just use bad numbers that align with what management wants to do anyway. You’ll do great.

If you set it up so it's convenient and usable by everyone in your house, including visitors, just like Netflix, it's not much cheaper. Electricity and occasional hard drive purchases add up. I bet mine averages out to ~$300/yr. I'm not sure whether just buying discs for stuff we actually watch, and the occasional 1-month binge-subscription for a series or something, would work out better, or not, but it's not a slam-dunk sure-win for piracy on the cost front.

> Except for a few outliers like you describe, streaming is an order of magnitude less painful.

Sort of. A good piracy server takes some time and effort to set up, certainly more than subscribing to even ten different streaming services would, and of course is beyond what most people can accomplish with computers, period.

However: 1) "I just plug in my laptop an play the movie" probably is less painful than having a bunch of streaming services, though not quite as friendly for all members of the household, and 2) Once it's set up, in actual use by people who aren't maintaining the system, the well-configured piracy server is less painful than streaming services, for those users.

Microsoft's best work is also pretty damn far in the past, at this point. All my fond memories of them are pre-2010. I loved a lot of what they were doing with various little software projects in the '90s (encarta! All kinds of weird experiments and little programs and games!) but that seems mostly gone now. I expect any list like this for them would be a handful of old pieces of software and HID items from the '90s and '00s (remember when they made really good mice and pretty good keyboards?), but dominated by a complete inventory of everything the xbox division has built to the point that it'd look more like some kind of gaming-focused list.

I'm not sure Amazon has built enough non-terrible user-facing stuff to make a top-50 list. Or a top-25. Or a top-5 that's not just a five different Kindle models. Their entire Fire line sucks, which just leaves Alexa. Not enough meat to make a meal like this out of, I think.

Google's list would be hilarious because it'd mostly look like a copy of that Google Graveyard site.