And to complete the trifecta, there’s also Aseprite for pixel art (it’s free if you compile it yourself).

Yeah, it’s twelve bucks to unlock scheduled backups and cloud syncing in Swift Backup, but then again this post is about paid apps. :)

Titanium Backup hasn’t been updated in five years, and I think that update was just to meet requirements to stay on the store. Their last changelog entry is adding the menu icon after Android ditched the physical menu button. There are a bunch of settings that are broken or do nothing due to changes to Android over the decades (TB has been around for so long that it supports Android 1.5).

I’ve been using Swift Backup as a replacement these past few years. It’s closed source but was recommended to me, and I haven’t run into any problems yet. Is Neo better in some way, aside from being FOSS?

8 changed a lot of UI for no reason other than to chase the mobile market. 8.1 reverted a lot of that and people liked it, but the damage to 8’s reputation had already been done.

If they kept the edition alive for a few years 8.1 might be remembered as a redemption story like Windows 98 Second Edition, but they rushed 10 out the door - as a free upgrade, no less - to get back the goodwill they’d lost.

Windows ME was a crapshoot. One of our computers blue screened a few times during the couple months we had it installed; the other couldn’t even run an hour without hard crashing.

Nowadays I can’t even remember the last time Windows crashed. Newer versions are definitely a lot more stable, though suck in different ways.

The funny thing is the whole commercialization process started with one of the future partners messaging the project lead out of the blue on LinkedIn. I don’t know about you, but taking ideas from a random LinkedIn user doesn’t strike me as good business sense.

Then again, getting something out of your years of unpaid volunteer work must be incredibly tempting, given how many open source projects have sold out over the years. At least it was to form an actual legitimate company this time, unlike when SuperSU (the Android root solution before Magisk came along) sold themselves to a scummy foreign ad company. That one still ranks as the all time top WTF sale.

It’s a forked up world.

CyanogenMod, which was the base of most custom Android ROMs at one point. After taking venture funding, incompetent business majors crashed and burned the project trying to commercialize it. It was then forked and LineageOS was born.

I’ve never asked, but I believe medical issues cropped up and their reduced retirement funds wouldn’t have been enough, forcing them to keep working, and the situation spiraled from there.

Yeah, I remember my parents talking about how badly they were hit in the late 00s. They were considering retirement just as the recession struck, and they lost a huge chunk of what they’d hoped to retire on.

They still haven’t retired fifteen years later despite declining health.

To paraphrase an old tweet: “parentheses - for when every thought comes with bonus sub-thoughts”.

Three things in CS meet the qualifications for arcane runes: complex regular expressions, pointer arithmetic, and bit shifting.

Ponder Stibbons inserts another punch card into Hex. Ants flow through tubes and gears begin turning.

Megumin’s other problem is she only specced into things that would improve her explosion’s damage output, neglecting basic mage things like mana capacity and efficiency. So she can only cast one (stupidly overpowered) explosion spell before all but passing out from using more mana than she actually has. It’s why no other party would take her, because even in situations where the spell would be useful she becomes a massive liability after casting it.

“Exploration is one of the central pillars of our gameplay. That’s why we’re offering this handy little DLC to instantly fill out your map!”

I’ve seen that kind of DLC a few times for open world games and it’s always jarring.

On Windows you can use NVCleanstall, which will notify you when there’s a driver update, download the installer for you, and even strip out Nvidia’s telemetry and bloatware from the installer before running it.

The bloatware and telemetry removal is the best part. There’s like twenty components in a default Nvidia driver installation and you only really need maybe three to run games.

There are two things I can’t stand in this world: people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures… and the Dutch.

The game made over a billion dollars but disappeared from the cultural zeitgeist almost immediately. Of course the publisher only cares about that first part, so unnecessary sequel it is!

What I meant by it being too late is that once you’re a billionaire, you can fund your interests (like making the world a worse place) off the passive income you make from interest and investments. Licensing fees are probably a drop in the bucket at this point. Even if she makes tens of millions less due to a massive boycott (which is wildly optimistic), it wouldn’t affect her life or political activities a smidgeon.

And since Hogwarts Legacy was the game that finally dethroned Call of Duty and random sports games as the top seller of 2023, I doubt a boycott would be at all effective. Harry Potter was many people’s childhood, and they’ll buy it regardless of external factors just to finally live in that world.

Edit: I fully support anyone who chooses to boycott Rowling and anything associated with her. It makes sense to not want to support her in any way. I just wanted to point out the unfortunate truth that a boycott won’t actually hurt Rowling or her disgusting political activism in any meaningful way, outside of maybe bruising her ego. She’s not beholden to public image like a corporation is, so she won’t even make a token effort to appear less awful.

There are good live service games, but the blatant monetization bothers some people.

Take Warframe, one of the most popular live service games. Everything can be earned in game, including the premium currency as long as you’re willing to put in time and effort. However, every single UI element offers a way to spend that premium currency with higher presentation priority than the actual in-universe methods of doing whatever that menu is for.

Want a specific gun? Only 500 platinum for a fully kitted out model* (or 25,000 credits for the blueprint you actually want, and it wasn’t until fairly recently that they added tooltips showing where to earn things in-game). Building something? Only 20 platinum to rush construction, or you could wait a day. Want to customize your frame? Here’s a few dozen color palettes, 99% of which cost platinum.

* Which is such an awful newbie trap. Don’t buy weapons or frames off the Market in Warframe, kids. Their Prime variants, which are statistically superior, can be bought off other players for a fraction of what DE charges for the inferior regular versions. The Market is hilariously, blatantly overpriced and has been since the very beginning.

Space Engineers is another offender. It’s a block-building game and all of its DLC is cosmetic skins, but even if you don’t own the DLCs those skins show up as unique blocks in the block picker with a padlock icon that tells you to buy their associated DLC. It clutters up the UI to the point of worthlessness, but there’s no way to turn it off because it acts as an advertisement.

Let’s not even get into gacha games, which feed off of addictive impulses to have a small percentage of players pay thousands of dollars to subsidize everyone else who plays for free.

Live Service and Dark Patterns go together. Games as a Service requires a constant revenue stream to fund development, which incentivises predatory design patterns.