It’s marketing. Nintendo deliberately under stocks new hardware to make the value of the device explode on the secondary market. Scalpers know this and usually buy out most of the first run. When you can’t get the new Nintendo device because it’s unavailable and scalpers are selling it for 2-3x retail price, you are far more likely to buy is asap when it comes back in stock. They make less money initially but in a way that makes the value of the product extremely high, giving people extremely high motivation to buy while they can. Also, a sale to a scalper is worth as much to Nintendo as sale to a consumer. Nintendo is notorious for doing this every time.

I hope this wasn’t deliberate, but if it was Valve is going down the dark Nintendo path.

“What race are you?” It’s an extremely insidious, loaded question usually asked by someone who believes race is a biological reality. Things change however I answer this question, but nowadays my attitude toward the asker is what changes the fastest.

I remember before Snowden’s whistle-blowing people online assumed it was crazy to think the government would want to spy on citizens personal internet communications, too. Online privacy was tinfoil hat stuff for people who didn’t know better.

It is impossible. Everyone has free access to the List of All Famous People and took celebrity class in school. Every single person on the planet is aware of and interested in every famous person.

Dolphins will get there one day too.

This is actually fascinating because it demonstrates a social construct created by animals. Not all animals have the same intelligence, and in nature intelligence is typically found among animals living in groups. It requires intelligence to live and cooperate with others. To me it seems that these animals actually used their intelligence to preserve socially constructed zones for the general good of multiple groups of wolves, likely by staying where the right smell is and not going where the wrong smell is. Hopefully none of the wolves discover the prisoner’s dilemma and become a wolf emperor by suddenly invading and enslaving their unprepared neighbors.

I have desired constant stimulation for my entire life and I get bored by a lot of media quickly. Media that has no silence or pauses is boring in its own way. Well timed, artful pauses and silence capture my attention and gets my mind racing as to what it could mean in the context of a well-told story. Creating engaging media is more than jingling keys.

I think the problem is less being unfaithful to the source material and more that many of these books are adapted in an industrial style complete with alienated workers who are completely detached to the finished product. If hundreds of professionals are doing what their boss says to do on a project they don’t really care about, the end product tends to show the lack of effort and care. Any changes individual workers make to the film project that adapts it to the new medium is the only art to be found in a project otherwise fueled by cynicism and spite.

Everything is politics. Avoiding thinking about or discussing consequential things is a political position which is well served almost everywhere else on the internet.