Count Regal Inkwell

Nerd|Furry|Linux User|Ace|BiRomantic|Taken <3

Leftist with an incorrigible love for fancy aesthetics (mostly Renaissance Italy/Victorian England) that might be incorrectly read as a monarchist because of that.

en.pronouns.page/@vinesnfluff

Unicorn, but also occasionally gryphon.

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  • 120 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • See, I thought it might have been my tablets being cheap things.

    But messing around with that borrowed iPad (possibly a Pro, the person who lent me it was filthy rich and likes premium stuff) made me go “… This is like, a high quality laptop but worse in every way?”

    The screen was drop-dead gorgeous, and it was clearly a powerful (if locked down, cuz Apple) device – but it felt like everything I tried to do on the device was in some major way a compromise to accomodate for a less-than-ideal form factor.




  • Tablets. I’ve owned 2 so far, plus fucked around with a third, fancier one that was borrowed from someone else (in case you care: a very old Samsung one, a Xiaomi model from the late 2010s, and a new-ish Apple iPad for the borrowed one).

    They suck as smartphone replacements because they are too big.

    They lack button inputs, so they suck as gaming devices or as computer replacements.

    You can browse the web… But if you decide to type anything, the large size plus the touchscreen keyboard make for an awkward experience (in ways that it’s not on a smaller phone)

    They have lit screens, so they suck as eReaders.

    They’re sorta okay as like, personal screens for watching movies or whatever, but like, at that point just use a television??

    They can make sorta good drawing tablets, the ones that are pen-compatible I mean… Because I mean, yeah. But the lack of a keyboard is a bummer with how I learned to draw with my other hand on Ctrl+Z, though that’s more a muscle memory issue than anything.

    In general, every tablet I used felt like a less-good verion of a dozen other devices, yanno?




  • I feel like people who talk about graphics fundamentally misunderstand what they themselves crave.

    People want things that are nice to look at. Some artstyles require more computation than others, but ultimately all of gaming is art, and all of art is a conjuring trick, much like Cinema, how something is accomplished or how “believable” it looks is secondary to how invested you are in what you are consuming, yanno?

    I do however have personal opinions, and my personal opinion is that gaming peaked during the PS2/GameCube/Xbox years. Hardware was just about good enough that pretty much anything developers wanted to make, they could achieve. Nothing looked like real life, sure, but it looked good enough. And the more detail you are throwing at the screen, the more expensive it is to make. So back then we had a lot of mid-budget games. That had resources not available to modern Indie studios to do ambitious things, but were also not these insane investments that had to please every executive under the sun and monetise everything in order to break even.

    The perfect balance between niceness and feasibility.





  • Seems we had a similar idea –

    Sega Genesis/Mega Drive (850 MiB):

    magnet:?xt=urn:btih:2dc7abc164fa953f4ebe5be196305ebeffea0b42&dn=%5BBitsearch.to%5D%20%5BSEGA%20MDG%5D%20-%20Sega%20Mega%20Drive%20Genesis%20GoodGen%20V3.22&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.bitsearch.to%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.torrent.eu.org%3A451%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F9.rarbg.com%3A2920%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker2.dler.com%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.moeking.me%3A6969%2Fannounce

    Super NES (2,03 GiB):

    magnet:?xt=urn:btih:035bb648afa13f5624477fcf06ecc9d991375779&dn=%5BBitsearch.to%5D%20%5BSNES%5D%20-%20GoodSNES%20v3.27&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.bitsearch.to%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fwww.torrent.eu.org%3A451%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.torrent.eu.org%3A451%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.moeking.me%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.dler.com%3A6969%2Fannounce

    GameBoy+GBC (570 MiB):

    magnet:?xt=urn:btih:ff91115fb9c487121785af6b06dc5c7184ced0f1&dn=%5BBitsearch.to%5D%20%5BGB-GBC%5D%20GoodGBx%20v3.15b&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.bitsearch.to%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fwww.torrent.eu.org%3A451%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.breizh.pm%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.torrent.eu.org%3A451%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F9.rarbg.com%3A2920%2Fannounce

    Sega Master System (91,7 MiB):

    magnet:?xt=urn:btih:55cf2fe9d744e94f2adfc513d9c84e2ad8299557&dn=%5BBitsearch.to%5D%20%5BSMS%5D%20GoodSMS%20v3.24&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.bitsearch.to%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fwww.torrent.eu.org%3A451%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.breizh.pm%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.torrent.eu.org%3A451%2Fannounce

    Currently seeding all these.



  • Yes

    You can expect them to drop at maybe one more good product, as going public is what companies do when they want to raise a lot of funds for some project

    But after THAT, when it turns out that the new product is just… Making money instead of making ALL the money, the investors will take over and from then on it’s fucked.

    But yeah RPi has alternatives now. No need to tie yourself to them when they DO sink.






  • Deleted my previous comment, felt like I should give this a bit more attention.

    To be honest I feel like all designs are good in their own way. I like the general vibe of Memphis, but being that I was born in the mid 90s, it’s probably just that general energy you get from things that happened before you did, where they are “cool” due to how just-old-enough-to-be-old-but-not-old-enough-to-be-an-antique they are, yanno?

    Y2K design – Well. I like the transluscent plastic on Gameboys and Macs. Really underrated aesthetic, wouldn’t mind having it back. The DreamCast had some very sleek angles too.

    Frutiger Aero will never not “look like the future” to me. It was the age of computer interfaces having all sorts of fun colours and transparencies and animations, and it just LOOKED futuristic and neat. Don’t care for the product designs of the era though. That shiny finish would draw in filth and fingerprints from accross the room and after a very short time it’d lose its prettiness.

    Flat design I have issues with, like the hamburger menus and the abandonment of descriptive text in favour of abstract icons – It is also a bit too serious, but I understand and accept that, even if I miss the playfulness of Frutiger. – But it DID finally bring us dark mode. And my eyes are forever grateful.

    … Just wish solarized themes were the norm instead, no idea why they must have such high contrast. I’d even give light mode its time of day if it was a solarized light instead.