Original N-Gage

Thi particular walk down memory lane is courtesy of Nokia's N-Gage duo. The original N-Gage was a neat idea at the time (2003). The only way you could play portable games at the time were on a PSP or a Nindendo DS (or older portable gaming consoles), but who wants multiple devices in their pockets?! The device ran the Series60 Symbian operating system, which meant that they could also run other PDA-style applications that were available on Nokia S60 phones.  The device was really half-baked though. The microphone and speaker were on the side of the device, which made it awkward to use, and in order to play games on cartridge (how they sold them back then, before appstores and quick downloads over wifi/wireless carrier), was to remove the battery and reset the device. 🤦‍♂️ Having to reboot your phone to change a game is a major failure.  The QD (second generation N-Gage), did fix things, but I think that mobile gaming of this sort wasn't ready for prime time.  Furthermore, other S60 devices could play the N-Gage games, seeing as their ran the same OS, so all you had to do was get a copy of the SIS file and play it on your N95 or other S60 phone.  Cool attempt, but poor execution IMO.

N-Gage QD

"Hi, the point of the "no Twitter crossposters" rule is so that people participate at Scholar, rather than going to another site and sending us stuff as a kind of amplifier and not being a part of the community here

I'll amend the rule to make this clearer, let me know when you've disabled your timed post crossposter or set it to post as Unlisted and I'll un-limit your account"

You know... just because someone uses cross-posting and schedulers for spring doesn't mean that they aren't part of a community. These kinds of activities (posting and engaging) can happen synchronously or asynchronously. They can happen in tandem or parallel to one another. I don't have social media open all day long.  When I read my RSS feeds and decide what to share, I'd like to have things drip out, otherwise, I am spamming my timeline.  I guess this is a bit too hard to comprehend 🙄.  I don't want to be overly harsh on this server admin.  They own it, they pay for it, whatever.  However, it's a bit disingenuous of the fediverse to decry other social platforms of ideological bias when many parts of the fediverse exist as reactionaries to those biases with opposing bias-forces of their own (yet they don't acknowledge it).  How a user wants to engage with the community should be up to them. 

And another thing (picture Peter Griffin here 😂) If users forget to add alt-tags on images (which happened from time to time because fedica doesn't have this functionality), users shouldn't be badgered about it.  I migrated to another server without many issues, but all of my old posts (about 1800 of them) remain on the old server.  For a tool/technology that touts the ability to move from one server to another, this seems like a huge oversight.  OK - rant mode off 😂

It's weird that I started writing this last summer and I am only now getting to it... let's see how much I remember 😂.

OK, so last summer I watched this series.  The premise was quite simple: who's the next Hawkeye not that Hawkeye has "retired" from being a superhero? 

This series takes place after the events of Avengers: Endgame. It's Christmas Time in New York, and all Clint Barton (Hawkeye) wants to do is to spend the holidays with his family. However, after meeting young archer, Kate Bishop, they both get tangled up in a murder mystery, an underground mob, and a much bigger threat. 

Before becoming an Avenger, Clint was much more of a Green Arrow vigilante kind of superhero, and his past life and deeds are now returning to haunt him, and by extension Kate who has found some of his old kit and has decided to become the next "guy with bow" (wow...so much disparagement of a super hero who's not a scientist, rich guy, or god 😂).

I think that this was a one-season-one-off, but it would be fun to get to see more of Hawkeye: The Next Generation ;-)

Wow! Almost a month since I started to comment on this and only now do I have some free time to actually finish my comments 😂.

OK, I am an Apple fan. I've gotten a bit more critical over the years, but I still like their products (more or less).  I think VisionPro (AVP) is a bit rushed to market.  No one is saying the β word, and people are treating this as the product, but I honestly think this is a little half-baked, sort of like the original iPhone.  It does have really innovative things. The ability to have multiple windows open in a virtual space is pretty nifty.  If I lived alone, maybe the theatrical surround sound would be great, but my television and movie-watching experiences do involve other people.  This device is also $3500, which means that it's out of the reach of most folks; and as we know Apple doesn't just target Enterprise consumers  - so it's still TBD if this is going to flop as a first-gen product.

The lack of hand controllers is an innovation IMO.  I think that controllers could be developed as add-on peripherals, in the same way as we have peripherals for our desktop computing devices, but being able to use a device without peripherals is revolutionary in my view.

So...what's your use case for one of these? While I think that it's geared toward productivity and movies in the Apple pitches, I think gaming is still the killer app for these things.

 OK, this is one the last blog from my backlog with a games-related theme ;-)

Not gonna lie, at the end of Assassin's Creed Valhalla I was in a "WTF?!?!" mood. I wasn't really sure I wanted to know more about Basim and his ways, but...now that there's a trailer out and we get to see Basim's origin story (and hopefully some kind of redemption arc in the modern day...) I can't wait for this game to come out :-)

Another one from my blog backlog.  This one is the trailer for the next Prince of Persia game, subtitled "The Lost Crown". It's been a while since I've played a Prince of Persia game, and this looks interesting. I don't often play platformers, but this looks interesting. Knowing that Assassin's Creed started off as a Prince of Persia game, I really hope to see crossovers from AC to PoP in this game ;-)