You need a CD flap, and that's the biggest visible feature of the console, so best to make it the centrepiece, and design around it. And CDs are circular so yeah, let's follow that in the design.
You need two buttons, one for power and one for open. Symmetry is always appealing, so make them symmetrical and balanced on both sides.
I feel like it very much was better at the beginning, though?
Discord kinda came around as an alternative for IRC and Teamspeak all rolled into one, where people could get the rooms and servers style of IRC with voice and chat all rolled into one, with the convenience of persistent messages and self-administration. Not much else was doing that at the time.
So we've ended up with Slack being IRC for business, Matrix being IRC for nerds, and Discord being IRC for gamers and everyone else.
Everyone is using it because everyone is using it.
When a platform gains Discord's level of ubiquity, it doesn't need to actually be good any longer. People will just keep on using it because that's where everyone else is.
Gotta say, the opening of Nier Automata is something I tell people how much I hated! It's a great story, but it's bad game design.
It's a mix of cutscenes and gameplay that takes about 40 mins to get through, there's no saving possible at any time, and if you die then you go right back to the beginning.
And I did die, twice. So yeah, that was a slog, and by the third time round I'm not enjoying the storytelling anymore.
If you are actually good and didn't die, I can see why you had a different and more enjoyable experience :)
As a developer who has worked on similar systems, I can see why it likely ended up that way. Not justifying it, only understanding it.
In the case of banks, it's likely that;
They needed to make 2FA mandatory for all customers, rather than opt-in. This means they needed an MFA method which a person of any technical competency can use. SMS is the "lowest common denominator" here, so they chose it.
The cost of sending SMS messages is high, but banks are (unsurprisingly) rich and can afford it
It would be great if banks offered better MFA methods, but development time in old-school banks is often ridiculously long as it is a very risk-averse industry that is also slowed down a lot by bureaucracy. It's likely they would choose something else on the roadmap, and stick with SMS as simply "good enough"
That Cloudflare were justifiably unhappy with the situation and wanted to take action is fine.
What's not fine is how they approached that problem.
In my opinion, the right thing for Cloudflare to do would have been to have an open and honest conversation and set clear expectations and dates.
Example:
"We have recently conducted a review of your account and found your usage pattern far exceeds the expected levels for your plan. This usage is not sustainable for us, and to continue to provide you with service we must move you to plan x at a cost of y.
If no agreement is reached by [date x] your service will be suspended on [date y]."
Clear deadlines and clear expectations. Doesn't that sound a lot better than giving someone the run-around, and then childishly pulling the plug when a competitor's name is mentioned?
When someone carelessly throws their trash on the ground, that says a huge amount about their respect for other people, their feelings about the environment, and even their views on social equality.
It's a tiny thing, but an immediate dealbreaker.
People who throw their trash on the ground are the same people who yell and get mad at minimum-wage staff, while those staff hold back tears. They are the people who take more food at a buffet restaurant than they could ever even eat. They are the people who think the world and everyone in it owes them whatever they want, but without ever giving anything back.
I bet we all know a person whose car looks like a scary biohazard of old drive-through cups they haven't cleaned yet, but I'd much rather date that person than someone who throws it all out the window.
As with other titles classed as "walking simulators", Edith Finch isn't really a game. It's an interactive story, and on that basis it's a good experience.
I found the message and the aesthetic quite impactful, and it left me with some strong feelings when it was done, like when you finish a good book.
Is it for someone who wants replayability in their games? - No.
Is it for someone who wants to spend a few hours immersed in a heartfelt narrative? - Absolutely.
The new ARM-based macs are actually very powerful, but as another commenter mentioned, the ARM architecture would normally be a bad fit for gaming as not much runs on it.
That said, there are ways around it.
I'm personally gaming on an M2 Macbook Pro, and am able to play almost my full Steam library of Windows games using a tool called Whisky
Whisky uses Wine (a longstanding Windows emulator commonly used on Linux) along with other toolkits to translate DirectX graphics instructions into Mac-native 'Metal' graphics instructions. There is a performance hit in doing this, but the end result is actually pretty good.
The result you get will depend on your hardware. I'm personally running a high-end M2 Max configuration and get 50 FPS on high settings in Deep Rock Galactic (a first-person shoooter game) but lower configurations would be okay for casual gaming.
There is another product that does the same thing as Whisky called Crossover. It is paid (unlike Whisky which is free) but is otherwise similar. You can watch this YouTube video on Crossover to get some idea on how it works, how to set it up, and the performance you might expect.
As for Minecraft, I personally play that too, and it actually runs natively on the new Apple Silicon macs anyway and doesn't need anything special :)
I've previously lived in Japan and there is always so much wrapping!
A large amount of packaging creates a perception of quality, as if a lot of care has been taken in the product, and culturally that sells well.
Kinda ironic as another thing you see everywhere in Japan is 'eco' this and 'green' that, they are very big on the perception of "saving the environment" and yet everything is covered in so much unnecessary plastic.
Yes, but ascertaining liability and securing a payout is a process that may take many years of being dragged through the courts, if it is even successful at all.
The government making money available immediately does help get things going with less uncertainty about who can foot the bill.
You need a CD flap, and that's the biggest visible feature of the console, so best to make it the centrepiece, and design around it. And CDs are circular so yeah, let's follow that in the design.
You need two buttons, one for power and one for open. Symmetry is always appealing, so make them symmetrical and balanced on both sides.
Very much an example of "form follows function"