This was said and true even even at the time. N-Gage did SO MUCH ahead of it’s time that it had a true chance to be a sale record giant to compete with the GBA (nintendos current handheld at the time).

It has so many quirks, and things that innovate that it feels like a nintendo product honestly. That is up until they miss the mark SO HARD with stuff.

First off, it has this really bizzare screen aspect ratio. It’d be great for arcade emulators…if it could run them. I assume any game post 1992 or so in arcades would be too hard to emulate on this. As a result, I never saw any arcade emulators on here.

Then there’s the issue you describe. Card reader UNDER the battery. No idea why they did this. Zero sense.

Then there’s the taco talkin. I have no idea who thought this up.

There’s no L or R triggers. They have a 12 button dialpad that they double as buttons, which works surprisingly well…but no triggers. So 1 and 3 are your default triggers, and it feels SO weird.

The fact that this was made by Nokia shows. It had amazing build quality. Phone OS for the time was top of the line. But it just has so much head scratching baffling moments that makes it very clear that this is designed by a phone company. Not a video game company.

When it first debuted, I remember the gamestop near me was selling it by itself for $399. I think that was 2003 or 2004. Something like that. I remember within about 9 months or so it was $100 and came with 3 games. A few months after that I remember them being like “Ok, $30, comes with 10 games. PLEASE just take these out of our store!!!”

I bought one.

Then I got home and found out you can get an MMC card (think SD card, before SD cards existed…and also much thinner), and you could download ALL the N-Gage games for free. You could even store like 20 games on 1 MMC card at a time. So yes, I had 10 boxed games, but I never even opened them. I just downloaded them so I wouldn’t have to remove the battery between game swaps.

Now they did also release an N-Gage XD, which is kind of like how Nintendo releases NEW DS after the original DS was slowing down sales. The N-Gage XD solved the issues of taco talkin, and needing to remove the battery. By this point it was already too late.

Maybe it was the early 2000s, and limp bizkit just released their new album, and grandma knew he liked wearing black nail polish and spiked collars with chains.

And then it got thrown into a drawer. And now he’s a financial adviser in his mid 40s, and his last parent recently died. So he had to clean out the house before he sold it. And found the hot topic gift card he forgotten about. It has $6 still loaded on it.

Well…I meant more from the angle of “hey, add me on signal”.

“Signal? What’s that?” researches with quick google search

“Oh, he’s a trump guy…” BLOCK

God dammit.

I’m JUST starting to talk to a woman online. I was going to tell her she can use Signal usernames if she’s not comfortable with giving phone numbers.

Kik gained a reputation as being a sex app.

Signal now has the reputation of being a trump thing.

CAN’T I JUST HAVE ONE GOD DAMNED APP THAT ALLOWS WOMEN TO EXCHANGE A HANDLE RATHER THAN A PHONE NUMBER SO THEY FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE???

Not sure why you used airquotes on dad, but yeah. I totally forgot about that character. I see your point now.

We must see things wildly differently. I remember Ross having a lesbian wife, and she had a lesbian partner, and they were always written as strong characters. The closest thing to homophobic is they’d make little jokes among the men about how they appear to others. And then they’d say something like “Oh, don’t do it THAT way!” And then the 3 guys would go “HEY! WHOA! OK!” as if to say that the way they were doing it looked gay, and they didn’t want to appear gay.

Which I don’t find homophobic so much as it is insecure, which was the whole joke. Their insecurities in themself is the joke. Not a hatred of gay people.

I don’t remember any mentions at all about trans on the show. I’m not even sure the word “trans” existed at the time.

The only sexism I remember is the football thanksgiving episode, and the poker episode. But the sexism itself was the joke. And I think they played both sides fairly.

HEY IT’S FREEEEED!!!

Guys. Remember that? Remember Fred? That’s how we’re going to look back on todays social media content. It will be cringeworthy embarrassments. Meanwhile go watch Fraiser. Go watch Friends. Go watch The Office. Hindsight is 20/20, but those shows hold up decades later. Do you think “Dance hype craze” video 574 is going to be something we remember fondly in 2040?

Holy shit. 2040. I’m going to be so old. My knees are going to hurt.

I mean…I need 2 hands. It’s a handful. It’s 2 handfuls! It’s a lot to go around!

…ladies.

Right???

And the world let out a collective shrug.

I’m not a coder. I don’t know how to code. But this right here made me laugh, and is proof that AI isn’t ALWAYS a garbled mess!

Really? That’s what we’re doing now? We don’t have enough public shootings daily in this country, now we’re going to add drone bombing to the mix? C’mon. What’s your excuse now? Is there another amendment to the constitution? The 2nd amendment guarantees you the right to bear arms. So what’s it going to be now? The 28th amendment guarantees you the right to bear wings?

…I never knew I had a strong opinion on tiktok, but I want this to happen.

Todays word of the day is…Enshitification!

So uhhhhhh…I’m not a software developer, but are you guys hiring? I don’t know. I’ll dress up in a clown suit and do unfunny things. Maybe I can mime a satire of what it’s like working at other jobs. Like drinking coffee, looking exhausted, typing on a keyboard, looking exhausted, talking on the phone, looking exhausted, sorting through filing cabinets, hanging yourself with a noose…uh…I mean…looking exhausted.

My point is, your job sounds amazing, and I want to work there even if I don’t have any skills or qualifications. Let’s make this happen.

Me 8 years ago:

I’m absolutely not getting a job at amazon, or ups, or usps. I’m not taking a job where you don’t have permission to pee. I’m a human being. I don’t care if I’m the president of the united states giving a state of the union address live on tv. If I have to pee, I’d tell the camera “Hey America, go grab a snack or something. I’ll be right back in like 2 minutes.” Fuck it, if I gotta pee, that’s just what I’m going to do. Fuck your profits for 3 minutes. I’M expelling waste.

And then my sister is like “it’s not that bad.”

Then me reading news 6 years ago that an amazon worker died of a heart attack and his coworkers didn’t even stop to call 911.

My sister thinks I made that up.

Ha ha ha, good quality headline from The Onion!

sees source

…well fuck.

If you live in the DC area, absolutely do NOT sign up for this service.

100% chance that the government, as well as musks companies would be monitoring you directly 24/7.

If you’re not tech savy, how do you row row row your bot???