Infrapink

@Infrapink@thebrainbin.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there any social media without memes and US politics?⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The whole point of the Internet has always been to spread memes.

  Because the Internet is a communication medium, and communication is made of memes. I'm not joking. Words, language, music, and art are all memes. (The concept of memes is also a meme). Before the Internet, there was ARPAnet, email, IRC, and BBS boards; all about communication, and thus memes.

  Before that, there was the phone network. Before that, the post office. Before that, books, pamphlets, and people telling stories down the pub or around the campfire. All memes.

  In fact, this very post is made of memes. The previous sentence contains at least nine memes – the words In, fact, this, very, post, is, made, of, and memes. But there are more memes in there. The phrase in fact combines the words in and fact to make a new meme – in this case, when those two words combine, it asserts more forcefully that the overall statement is true. There's also the spaces between the words, which makes reading the sentence much easier. Yes, believe it or not, spaces between words is a meme. Before the 8th century AD, WORDSWEREWRITTENINALLCAPSWITHNOSPACESBETWEENTHEM. Alcuin of York, a scribe and poet at the court of Emperor Charlemagne, came up with the ideas of lowercase letters and spaces between words to make reading easier, and his ideas were so popular that they spread across most of Christendom. Those memes were so successful that people think of them as natural and obvious parts of (alphabetic) writing, but they aren't. They aren't even a millennium old.

  Writing is another meme, going way back to the Stone Age, and it has evolved and developed into numerous other memes, such as the Roman alphabet (which I am using right now), Arabic script, Chinese characters, the Cyrillic alphabet, Brahmic script, Ge'ez alphabet, the Greek alphabet, Cherokee script, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and many others.

  Asking for social media without memes is like asking for food without proteins, fats, or carbohydrates. It's like asking for sunlight without electromagnetic radiation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would happen to the US if it denaturalised and deported all non-whites?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  “Whites” today now comprise literally every fair skinned ethnic background that isn’t east Asian. I shit you not, I think Hispanics who are fair skinned will be the next group subsumed into the white category

  Funny story. Before the 1980s, Hispanic people were considered white. (Modern people praise I Love Lucy for including an "interracial" marriage, but people in the 1950s just saw a white couple). But since Hispanic people in America tend to be a bit culturally distinct from the ruling class, other white people wanted to be racist against them, and so the meme arose and spread that people of Spanish and Portuguese descent are a race distinct from all other people of European descent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do females got to be so hard to talk or flirt with?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  There's also ladies, which has been popular for a while. Chicas has some currency in places with large Hispanic populations.

  We also had dames and broads in the 1930s, but those have fallen out of favour.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  There's more to it than that.

  Nintendo have spent decades meticulously building up a powerful brand image. As such, there are people who are fans of Nintendo the company/brand to an extent you don't see with Sony or Microsoft; other company's individual games have fans, but you don't get Microsoft Fans or XBox Fans so much as Halo Fans. This means Nintendo's games and hardware reïnforce each other; someone who bought a Switch for Mario and Zelda is the sort of person who thinks "Ooh, Fire Emblem!" and buys that, too.

  Plus, if you've gone to the trouble of buying a Nintendo console for one or two games, there is a psychological urge to justify your choice, to make it worth your while. So if you just got it for Mario and Zelda, well then you've spent hundreds of euros on a machine to play two games. But if you also get Fire Emblem, that's three games. Kirby brings it up to four. Thus, every exclusive makes the console purchase feel more reasonable.

  Then there are sales breakdowns. Nintendo gets 100% of the non-tax price of every one of their own games. To give a concrete example, Donkey Kong Bananza costs €69.99. Nintendo get €56.90 of that (€69.99 less 23% VAT). If they sell it elsewhere, they lose another 30% of the non-tax price in store fees. Thus, if they were to bring Donkey Kong Bananza to Steam, they would only get €39.83 per copy (€56.90 × 0.7). They would thus need to sell 1.43 times as many copies on Steam to make the same money as selling them on the eShop.

  That's the big thing right there. Some people for sure decide to go without Nintendo games if they aren't on other platforms. A subset of those people would be willing to buy Nintendo games on other platforms. But is that cohort at least 43% the size of the cohort who just buy a Nintendo console?

  But, of course, Nintendo don't just sell their games on the eShop. There are also tons of third-party games, each of which pay 30% of their non-tax price per purchase. If somebody has a Nintendo console, even if those third-party games are on Steam and PlayStation, they might buy those games on the Switch instead. (Source: I have done this. If you own a Switch, so have you). That's another chunk of money Nintendo would lose out on if they weren't selling consoles.

  In conclusion, for third-party developers, being multi-platform is good. But for Nintendo, a first-party developer, keeping their games exclusive is the logical choice.