Let me guess: it did fine for a few years until everyone had tried it once?

Now I’m torn between wanting to get it once before it closes to see what it is like and just not because apparently it is crap.

I agree with your first statement, but disagree with the rest. I am not their target market. I enjoy playing their games, but primarily because I am spending time with the kids as I do. Not many of their games are targeted to my demographic.

I disagree that they focus only on digital. Every single Nintendo game comes out on a physical chip. And sales on digital copies are rare and minor (30% off maybe). It is often cheaper to get a physical copy on sale cheaper than digital. And you can then sell it / buy it second-hand. I’ve read that with Switch 2, even the digital codes can be transferred to a new owner. Nintendo for all their faults have never forced you to lock in a digital library you can never resell.

I bought it second hand. Nintendo got $0 from the sale. In fact, two thirds of our physical games have been purchased second hand.

You might be surprised. I came to the Switch party super late when I bought my kid a switch Christmas 2023. He’s all over Zelda now, has BotW, TotK and even Skyward Sword on his Switch. For him, these games are all from the last year. He turned 2 the year BotW was released.

It’ll be the same story with Switch 2. Some kid who might not even be born yet will get a Switch 2 in 8-9 years and come across these games with all his school friends.

I doubt I’ll go the Switch 2 path with the kids. I haven’t seen a reason to upgrade, yet. I’m thinking of the Steam Deck - while the Nintendo had a fairly cheap entry point to get on the platform, I’ve spent enough on games to negate the difference between a Switch and a Steam Deck - where I already have a 500+ game library to play on it.

You don’t have to vote. You only need to get your name crossed off. You are then able to just leave if you really want.

And while those ‘how to vote cards’ (and their pushers) are annoying if you don’t need or want them, they do help people get something close to their wishes down on the ballot.

Some nerd like me will be affected by this one day and then script up something that emails them from 10,000 different email addresses that all bounce. Pollute their database.

Ha! A day later, I see the thing! It’s real all right:

Adobe Haven’t these dickheads been charging Australians more for their products than anyone else for decades?

I think it’s more aligned these days. But it used to be cheaper to fly to the USA, buy a copy of Adobe creative suite, go to Disneyland for the day and then fly home than it was to buy Creative Suite in Australia. It’s all subscription-based, now.

Ha! It’d make a great pursuit car, but I expect maintenance costs and risk of repair after rough treatment excludes it from that role.

We may have actually exported it to the rest of the world! In 1970, we had the Hutt River Province secede from the nation of Australia. To be fair to old Prince Leonard - he had valid grievances and was not just a nutter. The Australian Government was imposing wheat quotas on him when he was just about to harvest, and frankly didn’t exactly offer him much in the way of services.

According to my 2-minutes of Wikipedia research (which makes me an expert on this topic, don’t you know?), the Soverign Citizen Movement appeared in the USA in the “early 1970’s”. Which sounds to me like it may have drawn inspiration from the waves that Prince Leonard was making in Western Australia.

some are instrumentally straight-forward but lyrically complex and thematically challenging while others are compositionally exciting and lyrically just simple pop-y fun. It’s hard to rank both apples and oranges, especially when so many were great overall.

This has been my experience entirely. Nine out of ten songs in the list were completely new to me, so I’ve had a playlist of them and I’ve been trying to devote time to listening to it. But it’s been hard - lots going on in my world at the moment.

I liked the theme and composition of the Gurridyula song for example, but musically found it boring. I put Tom Cardy at #1 because it’s fun and the most Eurovision-ish song on the list, but it doesn’t look like many people liked it much. It’ll be interesting to see how the vote comes out.

Good news about San Cisco for @Nath@aussie.zone

Haha! I’m not exactly a massive fan or anything. I had just heard of them thanks to a previous thread (I think in here?) about JJJ Like a version and loved their Daft Punk cover. That got me looking more into their music and through that I knew about this song. It probably got higher on my vote card than it should have since I’ve nominated it. It’s a decent enough song, but not their best by any means. I love that it was filmed at Atlantis - an old Perth amusement park from my childhood. But that won’t mean much to people born after 1990 or outside of Perth. If Awkward had been released in the past year, it’d be the perfect song to send.

Amyl and the Sniffers is one of my favourite bands, have seen them live several times, and think they’d do a great job representing Australia.

After reading this, I thought that maybe I’d been too harsh with them so I went back and listened again. Nope - they’re really not my jam. Sorry. 😞

[ 7]  Tanzer - International
[ 9]  TISM - ʹ70s Football
[ 3]  Budjera - Is It Ever Gonna Make Sense
[ 2]  San Cisco - Under The Light
[10]  Amyl and the Sniffers - U Should Not Be Doing That
[ 6]  Gurridyula - From the river to the sea
[ 1]  Tom Cardy - Transcendental Cha Cha Cha
[ 5]  The Wiggles - Friends of Dorothy
[ 8]  MUDRAT - I HATE RICH CUNTS
[ 4]  Heleina Zara - Boundaries

So I had a brief look at the Labor policies, and to be frank, it all looks reasonable. I didn’t see anything there where I thought “that’s an awful position”.

So I re-visited the Liberal version. Maybe they all sound fine at first. Oh wow the Liberal one is awful. It’s all ‘Labor bad’ and ‘Under Labor…’ and ‘fix the mess of Labor’. Why are they the only party of the three to trash talk their opponents?

Anecdotal, I realise - but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of any school in Australia school dropping swimming lessons. To hear that it is one-in-four is not just surprising, it’s downright difficult to believe. From looking on the Royal Lifesaving website, I haven’t found this report. I have found something that appears to refute the news article however.

I think I’m going to need a source on this one.

I was discussing this just a couple of days ago. Greens have terrible marketing and are in desperate need of a rebrand. I’m curious though: Which of their policies are you opposed to? Because honestly: if breaking up bank cartels, restoring Internet privacy laws, promoting local manufacturing, science and research as well as improving the calibre of education are bad, then I guess I’m bad.

For me, my criticism of Greens comes mainly from putting stuff in policies that would be better suited to “dreams and aspirations”. They have a tendency to put stuff in there that are unspecific or at least out of the realms of what government does. But for all of that, I struggle to point to anything on their policy stuff and say “that’s an awful position”. At least, even if I’m not totally on-board, I see where they’re coming from. And that’s another point. Their policies page overwhelms you with too much to actually go through in one sitting. But, look at the Liberal/Labor equivalent pages? Greens are super open about what they stand for and what they would like to achieve. Labor have a few bullet points and Libs have a marketing brochure.

Oh yeah!! Who called it in November 2024, baby?!

It’s not clear from the video, but that billboard is a digital screen. It rotates between ads, so it never stays on any one ad for more than 10 seconds or so. It isn’t staring at Woodside employees all day. I drove past that spot yesterday (that freeway in the video is the main artery to get around Perth), and saw three ads on that billboard in the time I was in front of it. I did not see his ad. I don’t know if it is still in the rotation, of if he just had it on for the day he was filming. Also: It’s either really neatly edited so that it’s in the background most of the time he’s in front of the billboard, or he’s digitally altering it in the video to keep it in shot.

That said: West Australians are well aware that the state government works for the mining industry. As he said in the video, it’s glaringly obvious everywhere you look in Perth. I think he may be missing something from his claims that mining doesn’t contribute to state coffers though: it obviously does in some way. WA is rolling in money, posting big surpluses even through the pandemic years where every other government was broke. I don’t know anywhere near enough on the how of that to refute anything he’s saying though. Just that Teachers are not the reason WA posts a $5 Billion surplus.

Step one: Submit a bunch of bullshit answers to the classifications request form.
Step two: Trigger some algorithm that initially refuses classification.
Step three: Press release saying your game was banned in Australia.
Step four: Free Press!!
Step five: Get your classification when a human gets around to your title and have far higher interest in your game because of the press.

This whole episode fails the sniff test. I think Konami did this on purpose to intentionally rustle your jimmies.