I suppose it happened because from a mainstream perspective handhelds like the DS and PSP were far behind dedicated systems in terms of graphics, and so the expectation was never there to have "triple A" visuals - neither from consumers nor industry.
Made for very fertile ground in terms of games that had budget, but still had a long leash to go and get wacky.
Same thing happened with casette tapes and cassette mechanisms.
Most people think cassette tapes were terrible, because they remember the bargain basement iron tapes and no noise reduction. A top quality chrome casette when recorded well and played back on the right hardware is very difficult to tell apart from the digital original.
Similar story with VHS to be honest.
There's a "minimum acceptable quality" which people were willing to tolerate, and manufacturers inevietably converge towards it in an effort to shave off a few cents here and there.
Audiophile now is very different, because it's not a mass market consumer format any longer - it's a niche hobby, and people are willing to pay top money for their hobbies.
I'm fairly sure a lot of places have to wait, unless you have an electric shower.
In the US people usually have an immersion heater tank for the hot water. Here in the UK I've got a combi boiler that produces water for hot taps, showers, and also central heating radiators.
In both cases there's some distance of pipe between where your hot water is coming from and where your shower is and that's what you are waiting for - for the water to get where it needs to go.
How does your stuff work?
The coffee story is quite a long way in, but it was an interesting read, thanks.
I guess the message is, things aren't always good because they are objectively good. Sometimes things are good because of when we had them, and who we enjoyed them with. And that's definitely true.
I'm two ways about this.
In recent years I've become quite a coffee lover. I've experimented with a lot of brewing methods, and got into small batch beans from independent roasters, with interesting qualities like being aged in whisky barrels (that one tastes and smells sooo good)
At the same time though I grew up in a family where the only coffee my parents ever drank was instant - a teaspoon of granules with some hot water and milk and maybe sugar. When I go over there to visit that's what I'll get, and I'm not going to turn my nose up at it. In some ways it's got that taste of nostalgia lol.
"All publicity is good publicity" , maybe....
Yeah, I agree the bots are genuinely "more fleshy"and with skin and such - just saying where my imagination was at - which thanks to the wonder of books can be quite different for different people.
I wish we knew what the motivation was for choosing the actor. The cynic in me thinks they opted obviously male lead to reduce friction and claims of "wokeness" but without some inside insight we can't know.
Haha! Congratulations on making a new friend for your mom. Sounds like just the excuse she needed to actually get to know your neighbour.
In this case not really a lack of filter on what is said (which kids do also lack) but a lack of social understanding on when and with whom we even start a conversation at all.
As adults we have all these unspoken rules before we decide to talk to someone. Do I know them? Do I have business with them? Does it look as if they want conversation or not? Am I going to be inconveniencing them?
Kids on the other hand will jump right in without a second thought, and that's kinda great. We should probably all be a bit more kidlike sometimes!
In my imagination, Murderbot looked kinda like the player character from the game 'Citizen Sleeper', pictured below.
Which is to say, very androgynous and very obviously cybernetic.
There's quite a bit of character similarity between them too, because the titular Sleeper is a human consciousness in a cybernetic body that has a lot of biological parts, and they are kept loyal to the company who owns them by a drug that will cause their body to break down if they stop taking it. Same intent as the governor module, but a different approach.
I found Murderbot's physical appearance an important aspect of the books, not just for surface plot reasons (everyone knows they are a bot etc) but because it's a large part of what people need to overcome from the perspective of seeing past their prejudices.
Is it really worth it?
I hope they drown the entire thing in ads, absolutely stuff it to the gills, because then I might be able to convince my extended family to finally move to something better.
I mean, it could come in suppository form....