I never understood what the heck they were thinking.
I've been an Xbox diehard since the early 2000s but bringing your exclusives to PlayStation just makes me genuinely consider switching to PlayStation.
You are telling me I can now get all the games I want to play on PlayStation, or some of the games I want to play on Xbox? You're really making the case for me to switch.
And the whole "This is an Xbox" marketing strategy, claiming a Firestick streaming Xbox is as good as an Xbox? Firstly it's dumb and no one is buying it. Secondly, if people did believe it, at best you're just canabalizing your market share. You're not going to build any sort of brand loyalty to a dime a dozen streaming platform.
I switched to Playstation. The Pro hardware has an edge up on Microsoft, and I can get all the games I want to play. Remedy, Kojima, Bungie - all on Sony too, and slicker. Sure, Sony's had huge live service stability problems, but they do better now. Their UI is fine. There are regular sales. There's just no differentiator.
There has been unrelenting reflection on where I am and how I got here. A lot of lament for a small handful of decisions and a life marked by avoiding uncomfortable decisions. I don't know where the last 20 years have gone. Last I remember, I was playing Wii in my friend's basement. I remember the seemingly endless opportunities nights laid out before us. DVDs and pizza and furious laughter. I remember waking up in strange places. I don't know when that all ended. It ended.
I had a friend describe middle age as suddenly being able to see the outline of the cage. It's apt.
I'd have liked to have gone to a real college, had the college experience. I'd have liked to have mended friendships.
40 has such a strange loneliness to it, I take solace in my children. My friends had children years before me and it made friendships tiring. The age gap in our children now that I have my own has not helped.
I spent much of the last decade collecting retro video games. I have a room full of them. It came to me recently, I don't think I actually enjoy games. I enjoyed playing them with friends, but by myself they're hollow. I don't play games with friends anymore. When my kids get a little older we'll have fun.
I've had Damien Rice's "Older Chests" playing in my head on repeat despite my best efforts to drown it out.
I am in therapy, but I think I have just too strong of a mask for anyone else to truly pierce.
I'll get out of this funk eventually, I should take this as a wake up call.
It's never too late to call someone and tell them you appreciate them. It may not make you best friends again, but as long as you're both still breathing, it's never too late to reach out.
I have a much more relaxed feeling than I had 2~3 years ago. I am content, even happy, with the life choices I made. My family and I moved from Europe to South Africa, and while that has made the work side harder, the life side is so much better. Kids love it. They go to a much better school. We live outdoors most of the year. We hike. We sport. I took on surfing.
Like others have mentioned: reach out to those friends. Just a "Hi, how are you? I was just thinking about you and wanted to hear how you've been" can be the simple ice-breaker.
You're about at the half-way point for your life: what gives you joy? (playtime with the kids? learning a new hobby? ...?) do more of that! What gives you anxiety? (work? new boss?) figure out if you really need to spend time on that.
There are a thousand books about these things, but it's not really rocket science. Accept who you are. Accept who other people are. Make changes if you want.
From 18-28 life was sharing apartments with various friends just wiling our time away working easy jobs, rock climbing, video games, girls, etc. Then the looming pressure of "you are wasting your life!" drove us all into serious careers and relationships one by one.
Is it societal pressure that pushes us out of that life? It would be considered an "empty" existence, but being a part time bartender who just meanders around and spends time with friends/family until their time is up would be a weirdly buddhist lifestyle.
Thank you for sharing. Not yet 30 here, but I can feel myself getting older under the stresses of life. It's an uncanny feeling.
We all have different experiences and lessons. One of my most freeing realisations came after a bad breakup. It was that what I had wanted and persued was born out of the attachment to, and loss of what I had had as a child.
It opened my eyes to the idea that what was familiar to my childhood might not be what would be most enjoyable or rewarding or suitable for me. It allowed me to let go of that narrow ideal and embrace the possibility of a radically different life.
Not long after that I met my now Fiancée, who was from an entirely different culture, who I never would have considered in my subconciously narrow mindset of a "type" before.
I can relate to what you said about games. My friend ran a small server for our friend group in the early days of Minecraft. Logging on after school to hang out and build stuff together was a special experience. Special because it's not likely to be repeated. Cherished memories. I don't play now because I think I'm too busy and think I can't afford the time. It's hard to switch off that voice. You need other people for that.
I also feel that there isn't enough time to do all the things. Then one day I got a piece of paper and drew a little picture for each experience that I have tasted. I realised that many of these had been dreams at one point. Or ideas with aspirations to become proficient in. But looking back at it all on one page gives a nice feeling of contentment and accomplishment.
I often observe that a goal or dream has come true in its own time. Most often after that goal or dream has left my mind or active plans.
In the middle of my page of drawings I wrote the words "You have time." I look at it often.
I'm 43 and I'm about the happiest I've been in my life. I say that not to boast, but to say that putting some sort of restriction on your life because of your age is a bad way to frame things. It's never to late to try and build something that brings you joy. I've found my people where I live. I make an effort to see people and go out. The vast majority of weekends my wife and I are at home but we make an effort to host fun parties a few times a year. I find having a fun experience like that once every couple months does wonders for my mental health. Yes, I am very tired some times. And at this age, sometimes it will take 2 or 3 days to recover from a "late" night (that term has changed dramatically as we've aged). This isn't drinking related, I just can't sleep past 6:30 am.
It makes me so sad to see people basically give up. Therapy is a great start. You only have one life. Get out there and live it!
May be the shock of a realization, but not the actual realization. Yeah life moves in strange ways, time is gone but you also learned some, when the pain settles you may have a clearer and more colorful mind. The brain has often the ability to readjust. What are the odds of having the best life all the time ?
Learn SQL, learn the normal forms at least up to 3NF, profit.
I took an Oracle SQL class in High School in the very early 2000s and frankly it set me up for my career, despite never having touched actual Oracle SQL I've become the go to guy at every job I've had for optimizing queries and reviewing designs.
I read a book on how MySQL actually worked under the hood in the late aughts and it really went a long way towards the effort.
It's really not as hard as the complexity of modern ORM tooling likes to make it seem. That scares people away. It's an elegant language for a more elegant age.
I went to a talk like 10 years ago about how SQL will be displaced by Hadoop/MapReduce in the next 5 years. I posted on Twitter about it at the time like we'll see if that happens. Spoilers, it didn't. I can't even think of the last time I've heard someone invoke the name of Hadoop
An online game isn't the dos game you played as a kid. It's temporal. It's the roller coaster you rode as a kid. A law forcing the any roller coaster built to stay open so your children can ride it is just silly and going to deter interesting rollercoasters people might not like from being built.
Moreover, if a game is art, it is a form of speech, no? And compelled speech seems like a moral violation.
> Moreover, if a game is art, it is a form of speech, no? And compelled speech seems like a moral violation
Online games are a service that have art in them. That is why they come with licenses and privacy policies. They are an actual service that already has consumer protections.
Hand waving any criticisms or attempts at regulating them because they are "art" is deeply dishonest.
I love Last.fm, I've been scrobbling for over 20 years now.
It's amazing to me that they have managed to stick around like they have. They're very much an "old internet" site, and I hope they can stick around for many many more years.
I've been working as a dev for over twenty years now and have had my fair share of interviews. The very worst I ever had was about six months ago.
I'd had a fantastic initial interview, it seemed like a perfect fit and interesting tech. Overlapped a lot with some work I'd been doing recently. They made it sound like my experience was a great match and they were exited for me to move forward. I was the most excited I've ever been after a job interview.
The second interview a couple days later was a one-on-one with the CTO. After about five minutes of pretty friendly get-to-know-you chitchat he asks if I have any questions about the position. I ask about what my day to day would look like and he replies "I don't know, and that's the problem. I don't like to lead people on, I'll be honest I don't see a position for you here."
It was such a sudden slap in the face that my brain just completely shut off. I kind of just stammered out an "Oh... Um... Thank you for your time"
I didn't get to talk about my experience ... at all. Not a single mention of my twenty years of across multiple tech stacks my resume doesn't even begin to scratch. I've never been judged so quickly or so blindly.
Later that day, out of sheer frustration I email him back trying to explain that I'd felt like I didn't get a chance to talk about myself and all the ways I'd felt like I was a great fit based on the previous interview and how my experience applied.
Yeah. It's kinda like when someone gets infatuated with someone but they don't reciprocate. Do you want to be with someone who doesn't like you? Of course not. Find someone else.
+1. My worst experience was tech interview for TL… with current two most senior persons in team, with no-one else supervising the process. That couldn't go well.
Days after I graduated high school in 2004, my parents moved me and my family out to a 15 acre property in the middle of nowhere. Mowing the lawn on a riding mower was an all-day affair. The time I spent on that mower with just my own thoughts were some of the most meditative and creative of my life.
I grew up driving tractors and diggers, it's a very similar thing. Up and down, up and down, Perkins AD3 at 1700rpm for 540rpm PTO shaft speed, it all sounds like a mantra. Write a prayer on a strip of paper, wrap it round the shaft, offer up a prayer nine times a second.
I'm not a Buddhist either but the Tao helps me find the Way to accept diesel being nearly two quid a litre right when the good weather starts and all the fields need worked.
> some of the most meditative and creative of my life
This sounds like a worthy pursuit. We control the most powerful machines to ever have existed, yet it's all too easy to use them for anesthetic distraction. Offline relationship and meditation help develop our capacity to use these machines for something better.
Oh, nice! I have been wondering what was going on with Cringely for years. I was worried it was a health issue and am relieved to hear that that seems to not have been the case.
My own personal ponytail says this could just be this in a code block of a README
https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail/blob/main/.github...
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