It has been a while since I've played interactive fiction, so I can't make a specific suggestion, but modern games seem to be better at keeping the directions consistent (or at least providing clues when they are not). As others have noted, older games broke directionality to serve as puzzles -- failing to acknowledge that some people have a sense of direction while following twisty paths!
Newer games also tend to follow some quality of life rules in their design, things like avoiding arbitrary deaths and avoiding situations where the player cannot progress because they missed something earlier in the game.
> While it’s annoying in the moment to pedal around a parked car, I’m fine with it.
Personally, I'm fine with it too. Problem is, a lot of motorists are not fine with that. Whether I get stuck on the road because the bike lane is curb separated or because there is an excessive number of cars parked in the bike lane, motorists start screaming at me. A few months back, I had one aggressively pass me. I checked to ensure the road was clear before entering it, the only way they could have passed me in that manner is if they accelerated (i.e. they created an issue out of something that shouldn't have impacted them).
The sense of entitlement of some motorists is dangerous. They are willing to behave in a manner that puts people's lives at risk.
I regularly see more motorists run red lights in a given day than I have seen cyclists run red lights in a decade. Cycling is sufficiently common in my area to state outright that, proportionally speaking, more motorists run red lights than cyclists.
The same thing can be said for cyclists weaving in and out of traffic, and for good reason: if traffic is moving, it's a good way to kill yourself; if traffic is not moving, there is no need for it. (There is usually enough space on the right to pass. If there isn't enough space on the right to pass, it is unsafe.)
I have seen more motorists barrel the wrong way down a one way street, in reverse, than I have seen cyclists riding down one way streets the wrong way. Proportionally speaking, more cyclists may be breaking the law. In terms of safety, what motorists are doing is far more dangerous.
As for stop signs: other cyclists tend to get the hint when I stop at them on my bike. :) The ones who don't stop tend to do the same as motorists, by doing a "rolling stop". Doing anything less would be a good way to get killed.
So no, I don't agree that cyclists do not follow traffic laws as a general rule. In many cases, motorists are worse. I am not going to pretend that cyclists are better for altruistic reasons. The reality is that cyclists are much more vulnerable than motorists. Cars are made to handle collisions, bikes are not. Motorists pay more attention to cars than bikes, in the most part because other cars are more dangerous to them.
First of all, the walk would rarely be more than half a block. Bike lanes go down a small number of streets, so one can usually unload on an intersecting street. Not ideal, but ...
... bike lanes are not the only thing that creates this issue. Any road that lacks parking, with or without bike lanes, will have the same problem. Even when there is parking, all of the parking spots may be occupied. In both cases, people may have to walk a few blocks. While they may be grouchy about the lack of (sufficient) parking, you don't see many people blaming motorists for placing a burden on the elderly.
Finally, it is always possible to make accommodations. Having a carve-out for loading and unloading taxis will do far more for safety of everybody than letting people stop anywhere in bike lanes. It is also possible to have exceptions for people with disabilities, as long as non-disabled people don't abuse it.
If I had to make a guess: the incorrect domain was transferred by mistake. Remember, the person who the domain was transferred to was trying to recover a domain. The employees went out of their way to avoid giving the domain back to the rightful owners because the individuals involved did not realize it was a mistake since the vast majority claims they receive about improperly transferred domains are people trying to hijack domains. Either their policies don't acknowledge exceptions, or employees were just trying to cover their ass in case the author was someone trying to hijack a domain.
I certainly don't blame the author being upset and venting. I don't blame them for pointing out that there are problems with the dispute resolution process process. That said, I think they should also realize the registrar also has its own set of challenges to face. In this case, one of those challenges is to protect their customers from having their domain hijacked by a bad actor. The author's behavior most likely had those bad actor vibes, even if it was unintentional.
What about the authors' behavior justifies the lies about proper documentation for the transfer? There was no documentation. How does lying about documentation help protect anybody?
Different people have different tastes, or balance the good and the bad of the different eras differently.
Personally, I prefer the Internet of the 1990's. Part of that was the novelty and excitement. That led to a lot more experimentation. Part of that was the accessibility of the information that did exist. There was less wading through crap to simply find something, and the useless stuff that did exist tended to be easy to detect. (A lot of it was simply: I have an ambitious idea for a website but, Under Construction!) Most of all, the diversity was easier to access.
Today's Internet is much more polished and much more is available. Yet a lot of it is also siloed behind accounts, paywalls, or is a profit project rather than a passion project. That's not to say there is anything wrong with profiting off of good work, but there is a lot of people putting up low quality junk either because they don't realize how much effort is involved or because they are trying to make a quick buck.
No it's the modern web itself. Signal:noise ratio has become poor (as the article notes). Much more crap to wade through before finding a gem somewhere.
That's ignoring software bloat, super-heavy web frameworks, social media's addictive algorithms, user tracking & what have you.
> If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.
No argument there. That said, I think the big difference between the 1990's and today is that everyone knew the nefarious places and people existed but, for the most part, you actually had to seek it out. I am not suggesting that it was hard to find. Perhaps the worse of the worse was easier to find. On the other hand, it wasn't quite the same thing as algorithmic feeds. For example: I absolutely refuse to view anything remotely political on some sites (including reputable news sources or material that is clearly satire) since that is the surest way to be fed extremist crap. How far those feeds will 5ake me, I simply do not want to know.
I've never been a big buyer of new books since they were always kinda expensive. That was especially true as a child. It is still somewhat true as an adult. The place where I notice the greatest change in price is in the used end of the market, and that is mostly because the types of places where I would source cheap books seem to be less common. (When I do stumble across those places today, they are just as cheap. Maybe cheaper. Yet they are also harder to find.)
That said, the bigger issue is likely perception. The value of a book is lowered by the free reading material you can find online. An ereader is roughly the price of an archaic feeling dead-tree textbook. The glut of books chasing market trends means that you are more likely to end up with chaff than wheat. While the great books may be worth their sticker price, the pedestrian ones definitely have to compete with those perceptions.
That's peanuts. I dedicate far more time to locating goods on the shelf then toting them to the cashier than I do ringing in the purchase. You don't see very many people complaining about the lack of full-service in grocery stores. Besides, I usually grab a few items on my bike ride home after work. Self-checkouts tend to be a lot faster. Even in the days of express lanes, odds were that you ended up behind someone counting out change or outright ignoring the item limit.
They said that it affected less than 3% of Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fire tablets. I wonder how that number would change if they only considered Kindle e-readers? I suspect that the disposability of tablets distorts that number significantly.
Newer games also tend to follow some quality of life rules in their design, things like avoiding arbitrary deaths and avoiding situations where the player cannot progress because they missed something earlier in the game.
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