There are a few reasons why I’ll watch a stream or let’s play of a video game:

1. the sports angle. If you like to play a game, be it basketball or A Link to the Past, watching someone else play it extremely well can be gratifying.

2. Additional performance. Streamers themselves are characters, watching someone react to the game can be compelling in a way that’s difficult to describe.

3. Rediscovery. Watching someone play a video game I know well can help me see it through fresh eyes. I can never play A Link to the Past for the first time again, but watching someone play it for the first time can help revisit that experience.

The specialized rendering processors of the NES and SNES and Sega Genesis could push pixels without all the distractions a CPU has, in away they were the first GPUs (although modern GPUs do a much more generalized job).

…What?

The NES had a 6502, the SNES had what amounts to a 16-bit version of the 6502, the Genesis had two CPUs, a Zilog Z80 and a Motorola 68000. I will grant you, their video chips were a bit more specialized for playing games, with sprite generators and such, lacking text or bitmap modes. Consoles mostly dominated arcade action, PC games were often slower paced but in many ways technically superior. True 3D graphics happened on PC earlier, hardware 3D acceleration happened on PC earlier, it wasn’t until the Xbox One/PS4 era that game consoles pretty much became entry level worsened gaming PCs.

Consoles were cheaper, specialized computers made specifically for games, PCs were far more expensive but significantly more powerful. No console in 1995 would run Descent or Mechwarrior 2.

That stopped being the case some time around the Xbox 360 era; By then, it was fairly common to see console ports of PC games or vice versa; console versions might lack multiplayer or have reduced graphics or something, the PC has pretty much always been the home of nerdier shit like flight simulators, but by the PS3 and PS4 era consoles basically became entry level gaming PCs. Console prices increased to the point that, for the cost of a PS5 Pro, you could put together a reasonable gaming PC…then ChatGPT ate all the world’s semiconductors and the child rapist in chief bombed Iran apparently on a whim and that brings us to the present moment.

Oh man I miss old flash-based escape the room games. Remember the Crimson Room?

Go get The Good Place on DVD.

low rise pants or see through electronics?

Caffeine. It’s perhaps a boring answer but I have a physical dependence on caffeine.

Or because he’s a cat that is near lemons. Citrus is very bad for cats and they HATE the smell.

Point of order: That was Microsoft rather than Google.

If we’re doing 2000s nostalgia, I guess hip hugger bell bottoms and translucent plastic is gonna be trendy?

Are Metallica gonna release a godawful album with shit production quality?

I was promoted from Commander Aggravated.

New tit ion battery generates fifteen times the power and shits butter pecan ice cream. And, like every other battery chemistry there’s ever been a news article for, isn’t real and will never enter production.

Cat ears are more sensitive and more directional than ours; their little dorito ears have more gain, and they can swivel them around. If you ever see a cat staring at apparently nothing, she’s probably not looking, she’s probably listening, and depending on how her ears are configured maybe not in the direction her face is pointed.

A cat is staring at a wall outlet? The wires might be loose and arcing, causing a ticking sound that pushes the “rodent detected” button in kitty’s head.

I thought that was an established fact.

But no one does.

Nothing I’m conscious of, though a lot of the names of races or peoples end in an oh or ah sound. Zora, Rito, Gerudo, Shiekah,

So, there’s a fun fact about that related to the Zelda series. You know how the Hylian language kind of sneaks out in enemy names? Like, Stal- is a prefix meaning skeletal, -fos is a suffix meaning warrior, so a stalfos is a skeletal warrior? And a lizalfos is a lizard warrior? A stalchild is a skeletal child. -orm or -arm means worm creature, like Moldorm.

Well, in the games prior to the N64, geld- meant desert or sand. The geldarm is a sand worm creature, the geldman is a sand man like enemy from Link to the Past. Then in Ocarina of Time there’s a race of women from the desert called Gerudo. Hmm.

I do occasionally receive a temporary field promotion to Major Aggravated.

I think this was and still is in part true for me.

The distinction is one large company that has a monopoly on this specific kind of thing, versus a bunch of individual companies that all use the same industry standards to interoperate with each other.

The USPS (and probably other countries’ mail services, too) is one gigantic corporation with a legal monopoly on letter carrying. The USPS uses the common highway, railway and airway systems that are also used for other passengers and freight to carry letters to their various offices to do businesses with customers across the nation. We have one The Mail Company. We used to have one The Phone Company too, but they broke up Bell Telephone.

There has never been a The Email Company. Email from the very beginning was meant to be an industry standard so that different organizations could host the service and interchange traffic between them. There are hundreds of them, a few big ones, a bunch of little ones, all sending standardized messages across the common internet.

Reddit or Twitter or Tiktok or Instagram or however many others are individual businesses. You sign up with an account with, say, Twitter, and that gets you access to Twitter, their backend software, their front-end user apps, their community, their content…one monolithic stack.

Mastodon is software you can use to make your own little Twitter. The folks that make that software operate a server running that software. So do other people; there’s a whole bunch of them. You can use it to make your own little Twitter all by yourself, which is how Truth Social works. But those of us who aren’t in a white supremacy retardation cult prefer to voltron all our little Twitters together into one big if nebulous network.

Lemmy does the same thing but with a Reddit-like form factor. So does Mbin and Piefed. Different software that speak the same protocol. I’m a member of sh.itjust.works, posting a comment to a community hosted on lemmy.world, replying to a member of feddit.org, each of these are Lemmy instances. Users on instances of Mbin and Piefed can also read and reply to this thread. So can Mastodon users, in fact. And Peertube, Loops and Pixelfed, which are Youtube, Tiktok and Instagram-alikes. They all use the ActivityPub protocol and can interoperate…within their own UI limits at least. Imagine being able to Tweet from Youtube. Not embed a Youtube video in a Tweet…Tweet from Youtube. Well you can Toot from Peertube. You just…Can; abstract as it is it’s a thing this collection of software can do.

I’m not sure you can define “the biggest bubble” in objective terms; defederation is a thing, it exists to be able to cut off spammers, scammers, anyone acting in bad faith. More often it’s used to separate servers that disagree politically, which in some ways isn’t ideal but I’m pretty sure that’s an unsolvable problem. A mainstream instance will get you the sumtotal; it’s a bit like living in the milky way galaxy; there’s some of it we can’t see because the middle is in the way, and there’s nowhere in it where that isn’t true.

As for a feed algorithm on Mastodon…I don’t know, I don’t actually use Mastodon. It is my understanding that the lack of a feed algorithm is considered a feature, not a bug; how exactly to discover content I’ll leave to someone else to answer.

In men it’s the third layer down under hair and grease.