He has published his audio book about the airship R101 under a creative commons license, if you haven’t seen that yet I’d check it out.

You could say the same thing of the NES. The crash of '83 had as much to do with the mountains of shovelware on the market for the early consoles and microcomputers that might not even load and run. You got a lot of knockoffs, branded merchandise, and other low effort crap the programmer didn’t actually give a shit about flooding the market, which inflated the bubble, then it burst.

A large part of Nintendo’s strategy for entering a crashed market was to address this with their Seal Of Quality. Using anything from the design patent of the cartridge shell to security chips, they enforced a monopoly on manufacturing cartridges for their systems; Nintendo was the only manufacturer of Nintendo cartridges. And their Seal Of Quality meant they had inspected the game and made sure it is functional software, that it loads and runs without crashing. They don’t guarantee the game is fun, which is why Superman 64 was allowed to be published. It’s a garbage game but it doesn’t crash an N64.

Other platforms aren’t as strict with their libraries, which means there’s more and cheaper games out there for it. The extreme example is Steam on PC, where their algorithm is “publish whatever is submitted and pull it down if someone raises a legitimate complaint.” There’s a lot of great games on Steam, there’s a lot of Unity tutorial projects on Steam. Their excellent refund policies make this acceptable.

I am okay with some billboards that advertise services that are relevant to motorists, such as fuel, food or lodging near the road.

Product placements in television shows where the ad becomes part of the fiction.

I officially stopped watching Eureka when there was an episode about Degree For Men. I similarly gave up on Bones when the characters started delivering Toyota ads to each other.

I’m okay with there being a stick of Degree For Men label out in Sheriff Carter’s bathroom, or if the cast of Bones drive Toyotas. But when they stop to talk about long lasting anti-wetness or zero percent APR financing I’m fucking done.

A diminutive monochromatic quadruped.

I have one of those too, she’s asleep right now.

That’s exactly what I was referencing. They pissed off Sony by working with Phillips on the CD-i. Hilarious.

Compounding this was the Sega CD and 32X addons for the Genesis. Both were projects the scale of a new console, but they were built as addons to the Genesis so they limited their audience to people who already had a Genesis. Neither really brought much to the table in terms of software libraries; lots of Sega CD games were Genesis titles with red book CD audio instead of FM synth chip tunes, or the occasional FMV title.

Then they brought out the Saturn, which some people even bought. It was a Sega console that had no Sonic game.

So going into the Dreamcast, Sega had three poorly performing consoles in their back catalog. I don’t think the Dreamcast could have been a big enough success to save Sega’s console division, and especially not with Sony about to dominate the 6th AND 7th generations with the PS2.

Man I haven’t heard the name RocketBoom in so long. Wonder what ever happened to MeMe Molly?

The Engineer Guy just stopped uploading.

Same with Afrotechmods. TOP NOTCH electronics tutorial videos, he just stopped posting.

Pushing Up Roses, as she explained it herself, has pretty much said what she wanted to say about retro video games and largely does TV now with the occasional modern adventure game review thrown in. I wish her well but I’m no longer her audience.

DistroTube. Did Linux related content who might have an 88 tattooed on his neck by now.

Scott Manley. Similar to PUR, the content he makes kind of drifted out from under my interests; I became a fan of his Kerbal Space Program playthroughs and demonstrations of space flight concepts, but as far as I know now he basically does space news stuff now, which is perfectly cool but my attention wandered elsewhere.

Bright Sun Films. Once again there wasn’t a “nope not watching this anymore” moment, I think I just had my fill of Abandoned.

(dis)Honorable Mention: The Escapist. I no longer watch that channel but I am still a fan, viewer and patron of the talent themselves. Their new channel Second Wind is the most hilarious instance of owning the means of production I’ve ever seen.

The Modern Rogue certainly had a heyday. Past tense.

You know what’s funny? Nintendo put expansion slots on the bottom of all of their consoles prior to the Wii. In Japan, they were used for the Famicom Disk System, the Satellaview, the N64DD and the Gameboy Player. The latter was the only one that made it to the West. They never released an expansion for a console outside of Asia. They even had to retool several games that were released on Famicom diskettes for cartridges in the West, including inventing on-cartridge save files via battery-backed RAM for The Legend of Zelda in order to release them in the West.

Given Sega’s track record with console expansions, Nintendo might have been just as well off. Well, except for how the SNES optical drive add-on played out.

A Dell Inspiron laptop.

It just kept dying. Typing a Word document one moment, black screen the next. I bought this thing in August because I was going back to school and I needed a new laptop. By December I finally convinced them to replace the machine outright. I got a different model that lacked a lot of the features I had ordered.

I’m no longer a Dell customer.

I am completely done with the “male character says something chauvanistic, female character slaps, that’s the joke.”

Futurama did it quite a lot, Leela hit Fry a lot, Amy hit him a few times. I done with shows that do that. I see that joke happen again I’ll stop the playback right then and there and cancel whatever service I’m watching it on.

A mix of grains consisting of not less than 51% corn, water, yeast and oak. That’s what you need to make bourbon.

And after the war he went on to become an early pioneer in surfing!

I generally mourn actual Hardee’s. There were several things i miss from their menu pre-Carl’s Jr.

It was this webcomic that put this idea in my head and I just can’t stop seeing it everywhere “I don’t like this because I’m a woman” comes up. The original commenter also slut shamed the model in the ad which is why I figure it’s either homophobia or sex negativity in general.

But yeah yeah I know homophobia is bad and you can’t accuse women of being bad.

Your homophobia/sex negativity is noted.

Given this is a print ad, I think the primary payload is just “SEX DRUGS AND ROCK & ROLL” shouted as loud as it can to get the reader to stop flipping through the magazine and actually look at it, and then once it’s got the reader by the foveas it then says “Sony Playstation 2. Circle Cross Triangle Square.”

PS2 launched in late 2000 so this ad would be targeting tween, teen and young adult millennial boys and men, so the secondary payload here is to associate the PS2 brand with thoughts and imagery that demographic is interested in or curious about, such as clubs/raves/parties, girls, sex, party drugs, and sex with girls on party drugs at a club or rave and thus transfer some of that interest/curiosity to itself.

The tertiary payload would be to use association with more grown up imagery (also during this time were ads featuring four condoms in see-through packets bent into the Circle-Cross-Triangle-Square shapes among others) to set themselves apart from Nintendo, who generally maintains an all-ages friendly image, and especially during the GameCube era when they revealed The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker to much fan backlash at the “childish, cartoony” graphics. The PS2 looked more like a piece of AV equipment than Nintendo’s Barney The Dinosaur purple box, and could play audio CDs and DVD movies, VERY important socializing tools for teens in the 2000s.

Bottom line is it FUCKING worked. The PS2 sold like toilet paper. Sony sold 155 million PS2s worldwide, Outselling the GameCube (21.7 million and the Wii (101.7 million) combined And they did it with ads that said “Hey, if you’re grown up and with it enough to recognize what this chick is doing, ours is the game console for you.”

Not much can top the 3DFX VooDoo graphics card boxes.

Let me know how it turns out.