All LEDs are backlit, and a full 1080p on a 7 inch LED screen is a dogshit reading experience that will make your eyes bleed in about 2 minutes. If you manage to find a terrible OLED at a low price, it’s still emissive and still absolutely terrible for reading.

Free is obscenely overpriced for using a budget LED tablet as a reading device. It’s terrible and has nothing going for it. Don’t pay a penny for a device you intend to read on with any display that isn’t epaper. You won’t read on it because it will be a torture device.

By default it will turn itself off after two days, but it still sleeps pretty completely without a bunch of idle power draw without doing that.

It has a pretty long battery life with no backlight and airplane mode. If you do a bunch of downloads or run heavy apps and have the backlight high, it will drain faster, but it depends how you use it. Boox pretty aggressively limits background behavior by default, though you can change some of it to allow what you want. I don’t have benchmarks or anything to give you a direct comparison, but I rarely think about battery. You’re right to raise it as a question, though.

The one thing with color specifically is that it needs more light than black and white to really shine. In bright sunlight it looks great, but indoors I generally have to raise the backlight higher than I would for other content, and that’s a good chunk of the power draw so makes a dent.

Anything bad about Android is worse on kindle or kobo’s OS. They’re more invasive, give you less privacy options, and make it much more difficult than a decent android app to organize content. I don’t actually particularly like Android, and would be miserable if I had to use it in place of my iPhone. But the device specific software is pretty much all really bad.

Don’t get a device without e-ink as a reader. It will end up in the trash where it belongs. A low resolution backlit display will just discourage actually using it to read.

I use Boox. I don’t really trust them, but Android is just way better than not Android, and their modifications to support e-ink are the best IMO.

I primarily use the go color 7, and the page turn buttons also add a lot.

SteamOS is arch, so some of the derivatives are too.

Steam shouldn’t really care though.

They definitely should be treated as super sketchy, because they are, but abandoning a project that doesn’t get anywhere near goals is part of the idea of kickstarter. It’s “this idea takes some minimum investment to make happen, and you (the funder) are willing to spend $X to make that happen if the critical mass is reached”. Abandoning failed campaigns is the core concept.

You don’t “have to” use them.

Most people consider a gift card as a substantially better gift than equivalent cash for a reason. It’s a shared experience whether they’re there or not.

Going to the restaurant they recommended is the point of the gift. That’s not a bug.

Gift cards are intentionally earmarked for a specific purpose. If you give me a gift card for a restaurant, I’ll go to that restaurant, and not feel guilty about “this is too expensive”. You’ve given me an experience I won’t choose for myself, but may enjoy. It’s memorable, and the experience is inherently connected to you even if you don’t go with me. I won’t buy myself a massage. But if you encourage me to do so with a gift card to a massage place you enjoy, I will enjoy the experience.

That’s the intent of gift giving. It’s a way to strengthen a relationship by sharing items or experiences you think someone will enjoy. Cash can theoretically do that, but rarely does.

One random one that jumps to mind is a game I routinely see bundled on fanatical dirt cheap.

Ugly starts a little slow, and I think the writing is just weird, but the some of the puzzles are really cool, and there’s a good blend between pure puzzles and puzzles that require platformer execution.

I don’t know that I would have paid $20, and I paid less than the $7 it’s available for there now (it says for 10 hours), but I enjoyed what I played of it.

The game is learning.

There’s some reaction element, but the core loop is learning how to be optimally positioned to use your weapon, how to optimally pace your attacks, when your attacks leave you vulnerable. Then once you get that, you do the same with enemies. You learn where they hit hardest, what you can avoid, what their tells are, and when they’re vulnerable.

If you’re willing to learn and approach the game with learning as a goal, and understanding that you’ll die as part of that learning process, they’re great, because they do a really good job of creating difficulty in a way that almost all damage is predictable and avoidable if you know what you’re looking at and approach it the right way.

If you just want to button mash you’re going to have a bad time.

Anything is “possible”. Forecasts of the future can’t be 100%. But not everything is plausible. If you round to 100 significant figures, the probability of the sun rising tomorrow is 100%. You’ll never get to true 100%, past, present, or future. Even after watching something with your own eyes and watching the video documentation 100 times over. It’s “possible” someone faked the video, and eyewitness testimony is known to be incredibly bad evidence for a reason.

Knowledge is strongly backed by evidence. Belief ranges from “the evidence is inconclusive/not strong enough/doesn’t exist” to “the evidence can’t exist”.

lol the inflammatory bullshit title already decided it.

My habit of collapsing long sections so it’s less annoying to scroll probably doesn’t help either, but whatever.

I don’t disagree with that. But he’s almost definitely responding to all the vitriol directed at employees losing their jobs as a result of bad decisions passed way down the chain to them, and this article is trying to make it some gotcha hit piece.

I do think being in charge of monetization at a company that does so in the way almost any AAA studio does is an inherently unethical job and will have a hard time feeling sorry for him personally, since he’s willing to do that job, but people are also being miserable assholes to everyone else who just is trying to work on a game for a stable employer. And all he’s actually saying is “maybe don’t be an asshole to people”.

He’s very clearly talking about celebrating people losing their jobs, and does so without saying anything super crazy.

Good luck with that.

They didn’t do anything more than a handful of idiots no one wants to deal with is going to be bothered by.

Ebooks.

It’s still probably not close to enough for my ebooks, but at least it makes a dent. Even terrible quality video adds up fast.

Just going to throw this out there for fellow introverts.

They have a lot of perfectly fine games. If they were priced appropriately.

Mario, Donkey Kong, Metroid are all pretty good 2D platformers (with Metroid obviously being one of the original sources of metroidvania as a genre). But tech has advanced to the point that one person, or a small team, can make 2D games every bit as good as theirs, many small teams have (with better art in some cases), and there are many better options that start at lower prices than their “huge discount mega-sale” price of $40-45, and discount even further beyond that.

Their games sell well enough, so clearly it works on some level, but it’s just generally doesn’t make a lot of sense to get a game like Metroid Dread over a game like Ori or Hollow Knight. Games aren’t fungible, and I get that, but I genuinely think a lot of indie games are better, better looking, and much more substantial than a lot of their 2D offerings.