Actually not true! Developers have and can allow you to port characters and equipment to a new game without using the blockchain. In fact, NFTs do nothing whatsoever to enable this — no more than any other form of account-based encryption you’ve been using everywhere on the internet forever.

I agree. The thing actually works amazingly well. It’s kind of depressing because this feels like a 100% marketing failure. The engineers did their part. The people setting the prices, making the deals etc. failed. Not saying that stuff’s easy, but it’s definitely the easier of the two jobs and they just dropped the…

I bought that exact deal, though figuring at least I’d have a nifty 4k Chromecast for one they threaten to yank YouTube (or pick network) off Roku, which is forever embedded in my TV, alas. Controller is definitely not bad.

NFTs are just a speculative financial tool pushed by the same hucksters who drove us into the 2008 crisis by bundling and reselling mortgages. Quite literally — many of these assholes were banned from trading securities, so have turned to the Wild West of crypto. The losers you find in forums pedaling this stuff have…

One solution I’ve not personally seen would be to include setting-appropriate human authenticators, like you encounter on the web (to, ironically, aid machine learning). So, instead of just button pressing to mine or whatever, you have to recreate certain ruins, or solve some puzzle that requires identification of an…

This is very anecdotal and second hand, but as a Hearthstone player, it’s noteworthy they’re skipping the card reveal this season for, in their words, staffing issues. Team 5 (who makes the game) has been bleeding staff. I view them as something of a canary in the coal mine, as it’s clearly one of the more…

While I agree NFTs provide the real possibility of digital ownership (like art certification), I don’t agree that this is cool. Property rights and a society more or less built around private ownership is not universal in human history and has not been universally good (nor, do I believe, is property a necessary…

It Takes Two is by no means a perfect game overall, but it’s revolutionary as a co-op experience. My wife isn’t much of a gamer and really struggles with navigating a 3D space, but the game kept both of us engaged without frustrating either of us. They accommodate any skill level by allowing the stronger player to…

Exactly. Renata Price (the author of this post) has made it impossible to argue that the special wasn’t offensive by just assuming her reader already agrees it was. This is alienating and hurtful to anyone, including her trans readers, that don’t agree with this stance. She’s just silencing dissent on what is clearly…

Actually it does basically feel like that in this instance. I’m a trans activist in the LGBTQ community and found the special to be a sincere—if misguided—attempt to connect racism to the trans experience. You could argue Chapelle could be better informed or that the special fell flat. But it’s not at all clear to me…

Gross? Did you actually watch the special? You might not like some of Chappelle’s sincerely held views about being trans, but he’s making a real attempt to engage with the topic with some nuance and to draw parallels to the Black experience. He’s certainly not being dismissive or just making one-off jokes. Even if you…

I agree, though in practice consumer stocks do often operate like a pyramid scheme. Not because the concept is flawed (owning a stake in a company), but because the big movers make their plays and then individual consumers act after the stock is already trending back down or whatever (they just don’t know it yet).

Roughly 65% of crypto mining occurs in China, a nation that relies mostly on coal for its power. So right off the bat, we can surmise that those touting the eco-friendliness of mining (which in any case requires an enormous amount of energy, be it from a more renewable source or not) are probably overstating their…

So, in a (very loose) sense, NFTs aren’t so different from a lot of art collecting. That is, a great deal of art can be perfectly replicated, so what you’re buying in a sense is a certificate of authenticity. This gains its credibility because an auction house/art collectors/museums etc. agree that the object you’ve…

Hah thought the same thing. This could actually be accomplished if Google/Apple mandate the use of a standard UI for things like pop-ups. Which actually seems like a bit of a no-brainer. 

I believe Apple can still require developers to include App Store as a payment option. It’s just now they can have their own as well. My guess is 99% of consumers still pay through Apple because it’s simpler.

Have to deal with a lot of cognitive dissonance to sustain the argument of social media platforms that they are at once “public squares” and insanely profitable media conglomerates. Never mind that you can’t just create an unqualified analogy to a world before we could send and receive information with billions. On…

While you cite some extreme examples, I actually don’t blanket agree that art shouldn’t, for the purposes of entertainment, be tasteless. I would point to the films of John Waters as good example of why your basic argument would deprive us of us culturally relevant artistic output.

To tack on to this sharp comment, a secondary issue is the conflation of unhealthy representations in corporate media and the personal self-expression and fantasy fulfillment of fan art. That is, if Disney regularly depicted adult relationships with children, there’s an argument to be made they’re normalizing…

I’m not sure what there is to “call him out on.” Journalists can’t just post news stories supported entirely by — and this is key here — off-the-record testimony. The problem is that victims won’t go on record and give their names, at which point any liability shifts from the media outlet, which is just quoting…