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Cake day: April 14th, 2025

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  • Fairphone has been a really disappointing experiment in so-called sustainable tech over the years. They keep making new phones instead of continuing to support the old ones, which might be greenwashing. (Whereas if you got a legacy Framework 13, it’s still user-repairable and upgradable.) If they wanted to make a non-upgradable device, maybe it would have been wise to make it high-end to futureproof to work until 4G gets phased out. Fairphone still is not making their products available in the U.S., and Murena is a borderline scam company and I am genuinely shocked Fairphone works with them.

    And I’ve heard their logic with the headphone jack, but I do think AUX is the lesser of two evils as removing it will just lead to more e-waste with broken bluetooth headphones that rarely last as long as good wired ones. Fairphone’s own bluetooth accessories have gotten negative reviews for their lower build quality, so Fairbuds are likely not the solution to the headphone jack problem.

    For the simple fact that non-Europeans can buy them directly off the website, I would sooner recommend feature phones from Sunbeam as it also has user-replaceable batteries and you can send it in for repairs. Or just any phone used.




  • Which, in one sense, is definitely cool. I get the impression that Super Metroid is a game with tons of replay value that encourages playing it in a different way each time.

    In another way, to make this happen, I didn’t think it was very fun for first-time players. Bomb jumping is kind of an awkward mechanic and harder to pull off than in Zero Mission, and finding upgrades seemed to rely more on pulling off complex techniques with perfect timing. I don’t remember ever being required to wall jump in Zero Mission or 2. There’s so many beginner’s traps too, with the one-way doors and the noob bridge. In Zero Mission, I felt like upgrades were more clearly telegraphed to the player, so you could get more of them without using a guide. In Super, it’s a lot of bombing random walls and stuff, and the X-Ray Scope feels really limited.

    If I got stuck, it would be difficult to consult guides, because many writers seemed to put sequence breaks into the walkthrough as opposed to a “natural” playthrough.

    While it might be true that Dread has a lot of “hand-holding” (I don’t know because I haven’t played it yet), part of me wonders if that criticism comes from experienced players who want a harder challenge than Super that lean even farther into advanced-level techniques. I guess I’ll find out when I play it.


  • I came of age during the PS3 era and the Indie Game Revolution, where people were debating on whether video games could be art, so I personally can’t help but prefer when games have storytelling and ludonarrative and lore.

    But for many people, Super Metroid’s lack of a plot will be a draw and not a drawback, and that’s cool. I’d actually really love a new nonlinear Metroid game in the vein of Super someday, and perhaps this time it wouldn’t take place on the planet Zebes.

    I have AM2R archived on my computer. I’m very excited to try it!





  • I’m trans and I see where you’re coming from. I was boycotting the game ahead of launch because I didn’t want to support J.K. Rowling, who has based her career off of making our lives harder.

    But…it’s been two years. We lost the battle. The boycott led to the Streisand effect and the game sold insanely well. Trans people got a ton of negative press converage. We were all made out to be intolerant and cruel because one trans person said something that made the GirlfriendReviews lady cry. It seemed like after that, GamerGate 2 went into effect and so many games with diversity are getting preemptively reviewbombed, like Dragon Age: The Veilguard, leading to layoffs and shuttered development teams, while games like Black Myth Wukong with a known sexist director are insanely popular.

    Hogwarts Legacy seems like such a small issue now. Now it’s 2025 and we’re quickly losing all our rights in an ongoing Constitutional crisis. These days, while I’d prefer if cis people buy the game used and add disclaimers to the posts they make about it, I’m too exhausted to care about the Wizard game and who chooses to play it.