PlzGivHugs

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Ahh. The classic, "this room is too big to leave open and too small to add furniture," tiny center table.

Also looks very Deep Rock.

The system started to be phased out in the early 70s, with the last federally funded residential school was closed in 1996 (although there are also the issues caused by day schools to consider). There is absolutely still people around who had a significant part in the system, both in organization and administration, as well as staff directly in the system. To my knowledge, none, or nearly none have been prosecuted for their involvement in the schools.

Honestly, I think now is probably the best time in history for discoverablity by far. Things like YouTube have done a lot, but I think Steam has played a massive part. Compare it to most of the other options:

Physical retailers tend to just be a wall of products, with the exception of games with a large marketing budget (esspecially those working out deals directly with the retailer) that often get special placement in their own shelf. Marketing budget is king, and everything else is hard to browse.

Reviewers offer a bit of an advantage as they provide an easy way to assess if games are good or bad, but they are usually limitted in the number of reviews they can publish, and those reviews tend to go towards the games that get sent from powerful publishers or those with most hype, meaning it usually still comes down to marketing budget.

A step up from that is most online retailers. Here, you have easier access to information about the games on display, and often have ways to sort by genre, price, or reviews. That said, a lot of emphasis is always placed on either the top grossing, games directly connected to the storefront owner, or games that directly buy space on the front page. This offers far more discoverability than anything that came before, but still tends to massively over-push higher-budget and/or higher-return games.

Steam on the other hand, has put far more emphasis on featuring good games on their front page. You can't buy the space, Valve doesn't bias the store towards their own products as much, and revenue plays a generally smaller part in the algorithm. Instead, they have a much better personalized recommendation algorithm and more tools for customizing your storefront (such as blocking tags). On top of this, they have recognized that this isn't enough, and introduced a myriad of (often half-baked) additional discovery tools, such the the Discovery Queue, Curators, and the various festivals like NextFest. Sure, its not perfect, but I can consistent find new games I'm interested in, whereas on other platforms its barely worth trying. I think this is a big part of Steam's success that often gets overlooked.

Considering all the limitations, and the hyper-fragmented nature of the Fediverse, maybe it'd be worth adding a feature to "redirect" or "symbolically link" communities. For example, [email protected] would just open [email protected] (possibly with a notification banner or similar to clairify). Throw in some extra tools to improve moderation across instances and you'd have 90% of the benifit of "super-communities" without the complexity.

I know you can do this by just making a locked community with a post describing this, but its a very clunky solution, and given how fragmented the Fediverse is, and how unlikely that is to change (given the structure) it might be worth having a dedicated method.

Can you confirm that this setup still works? At least with Kodi, all the apps had been discontinued, and that link is three years old.

That article doesn't cover it, but the reason its called duck tape, is because its predecessor was made from duck cloth (a think fabric) with "duck" being a loanword from Dutch "doek". Modern duck tape was just an improved, standardized version of this fabric tape. Later on, "duck tape" was warped to "duct tape" for its common use on ducts.

How do you get streaming services to work? As best as I can tell, none of them support much in the way of non-mouse inputs, and I wasn't able to find any scripts/addons being maintained.

I mean, If I wanted to be controlling everything with a mouse, I'd just sit at my desk. Unfortunately every other input method has near-zero support on PC at this point, even for a lot of the more open seas options. Kodi with a paid, illegal service was basically the only option I found, and I'd really rather not go down that route, esspecially when handing off this device to less tech-savvy family.

The main problem is just that a lot of this stuff is being tied to huge, (generally) well-remembered franchises so there is more eyes on it, and its directly comparing itself to better works. For example, The Acolyte might be okay by the standards of being just another sci-fi show, or as a fanfiction where the expectations are lower, but not when it puts itself alongside other main-line entries like the original trilogy, or even something modern like The Mandalorian.

As best as I can tell, the addon recommended there has been discontinued as a result of having to fight Netflix's DRM. Most recent posts report frequent issues with it. I was looking at other services, and unfortunately it seems the same or worse. I might try launchbox as another user suggested, and just use it to launch Windows apps, but I haven't tested it yet.