About the trash police - is there anything stopping a neighbour planting plastic in the garbage and then calling the authorities? Or just saying that the plastic isn't theirs, and perhaps the neighbour planted it? It just seems hard to prove either way.
Not really. Korea is still a high-trust society with hints of distrust and snitchy-ness.
It's really ironic. Most windows of low-rise Korean homes/"villas" have iron bars over them. Most homes have spiked fences. Trash police have many terrified of neighbors. There are cameras (Police cameras + always-on dash cameras) literally everywhere. None of these are hallmarks of high trust. And yet, I could leave a wallet in a mcdonalds and it'd still be there after 8 hours.
Yes, video surveillance on your garbage. I'm not joking. CCTVs, dash cams are everywhere in Korea. Even public toilet mounted hidden cameras (by pervs or blackmailers) are a thing.
I enjoyed The Incredible Machine as a kid, the modern equivalent (though still 10 years old) is 'Contraption Maker' - https://store.steampowered.com/app/241240/Contraption_Maker/ - which was designed by the same person. Glad to see he's still going all these years later!
This is not 'Incredible Machine' related, but while I'm here, I'm working on an engineering-adjacent game where you build and automate a zoo full of spooky monsters. Might be of interest to some! https://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zooke...
I very much enjoyed RPS in the days of the original four writers, and also when Quinns was contributing, though I haven't kept up so much in the last eight years or so.
Eurogamer seems to cover the games news and reviews in the way I like best right now, and Digital Foundary's writing and videos that lean on the more technical side of games are just excellent. (I believe DF also have an arrangement to do some content for RPS, so it's probably being shared around as it should.)
Exactly, and it's not just about reading but also (perhaps even more so) about writing. If Nintendo control the manufacture of their proprietary disk, well, it's unlikely that a pirate outfit will be able to build a disk manufacturing factory that produces something compatible with retail Wii U's they can then sell their own non-Nintendo licensed games on. Or burn Nintendo's own games onto. The cartridge era of games were much easier to reproduce the physical medium onto, and this was super-widespread.
This did break down for Sony later on in a way it hasn't for the Nintendo Switch, a widely shared opinion on why the PS Vita flopped was because it was incompatible with standard SD cards _and_ that their own flash game cart and memory card offerings were so incredibly expensive. (And there were cheap SD-to-PSVita adapters that were released anyway. [0])
I'm having problems with Discord, Spotify and Gitlab right now. I wonder which cloud service that's running a third of the internet is struggling right now!
