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Cake day: November 9th, 2024

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  • It’s unfortunate. Games don’t get nominated by being apt for the category, they get nominated by being popular. Heck, last year RDR2 won in this category, and it’s never had any community support beyond a bug fix patch or two.

    This whole thing is a popularity contest, for the most part. No way anyone nominating or voting in these awards has played more than a few of the eligible games.







  • Also I really don’t understand why staggered joysticks are the standard.

    In case you were actually curious, here is the reverse timeline:

    • Staggered joysticks are the standard because Microsoft Xinput is the standard.
    • Xinput is the standard because for about a decade, it was the one controller interface that actually worked without issue for a lot of people.
    • Microsoft controllers worked for a lot of people on PC because Microsoft controlled the most popular console and the most popular OS. Sony and Nintendo had no interest in supporting their controllers for PC.
    • Microsoft maintained a similar controller layout to their original Xbox console.
    • The original Xbox controller was designed before the advent of popular dual-stick games (the first of which was the original Halo). At the time, the right control stick was seen as a secondary control for the camera in third person platformers (see also the c-stick on the Gamecube).
    • The original Xbox controller design was cribbed from the Dreamcast, which was to-date the nicest and most ergonomic controller. The Xbox design added the second control stick below the buttons.

    Also of note:

    • The only other dual-stick design at the time was that of the Playstation, on which both control sticks were secondary, an afterthought not even present on the original PS1 controller. Making the left control stick “primary” was progress.
    • Nintendo briefly ended up in the same boat as Sony, when they added secondary control sticks to the original SNES design to create the Wii Classic Controller.
    • The only controller that tried to make both control sticks primary was the Nintendo Wii U, which unfortunately failed for unrelated reasons. I had one, and the symmetry was glorious, for those few brief years.
    • Nintendo relented and went with the staggered design for the release of the Nintendo Switch, on which the asymmetry was necessary in order for both joycons to also be able to function as separate controllers.








  • It’s a shame that this data is being presented this poorly, because this is a really important issue that deserves attention. None of the figures presented in the linked article have the proper context to understand them. Even the UN report itself does not present their findings well.

    So, for instance, 140 women per day is of course more than the ideal number of zero, but there are billions of people on this planet. To actually quantify the gender imbalance of this number, we need to compare it to the number of men who are victims in the same way. From the report:

    Globally, approximately 51,100 women and girls were killed by their intimate partners or other family members […out of…] 85,000 women and girls killed intentionally during the year […] In other words, an average of 140 women and girls worldwide lost their lives every day at the hands of their partner or a close relative.

    The report does not offer corresponding numbers for male (or non-binary) victims. It does, however, say that 11.8% of male victims and 60.2% of female victims are killed by partners or other family members. It also acknowledges that 80% of all homicide victims are men and 20% women, which is beside the point as this is about domestic violence, but it will allow us to do some math to arrive at numbers to compare against.

    • 85,000 * 80/20 = 340,000 men killed total
    • 340,000 * 11.8% = 40,120 men killed by partners or family
    • so we are comparing 40,120 men with 51,100 women
    • women are 27.4% more likely than men to be killed by partners or family.

    …which should have been the headline. 27% more is massive! Domestic violence is a huge issue, and women are more likely to suffer from it!

    There is no need to obfuscate the numbers to be less honest. The honest numbers themselves are shocking enough, and scientifically literate readers won’t dismiss your credibility along with your cause. I look forward to future UN reports communicating these horrifying statistics a bit more clearly.