It's funny, I actually was thinking it's the other way around. Older gamers have a million different things begging for attention, so longer games just aren't as appealing anymore. Younger gamers can easily find the time to sit down for hours at a time uninterrupted.

In reality, it's probably somewhere in between. Younger people also gave increasingly smaller attention spans due to social media, so there probably are a growing number of them that just wouldn't sit with one game for that long.

"these so-called spontaneous community movements, by apparently complete coincidence, appeared in a range of Liberal seats and made no appearance in Labor seats".

Well, yeah, they were originally Liberal members, of course they'd be campaigning in Liberal seats.

"The intention was to get people to think, 'That nice teal candidate could almost be a Liberal, I'll vote for her.'"

Almost like the Teals are Liberals that differ on one or two key policies.

The fact that he's blaming preferential voting is worrying, I expect the Libs will start adopting that stance across the board soon. Our system isn't perfect, but it's much better than the absolute shitshow that is first past the post.

I use Heroic Games Launcher to run GOG and Epic games on Linux. It'd be great to get some official support, but it's the next best thing.

We've had an R18+ rating for video games since 2013, so not sure why Hotline Miami 2 wouldn't have been able to receive classification.

Funnily enough, I own the game on Steam, so at some point Valve also made the same mistake. But at least they won't pull the game from my library.

I think the major difference between the two is that in video games, the cost of the loot boxes is deliberately obfuscated through the use of whatever single-use currency the publisher has dreamed up, and made worse by the fact that the currency is only purchasable in select denominations, meaning you're always spending more than you're going to use.

You're not wrong that there are plenty of examples of physical "loot boxes" marketed at children, but at least with those you know exactly how much it costs straight up.

I wish our government would look into the actual predatory practices that these publishers are using in these games, but this is a good first step. At least the EU is looking into it.

That "worst case scenario" really doesn't seem that bad to me. Exactly what would happen to any busy that overextends themselves and runs out of money. What, exactly, makes Star so special that they feel they deserve relief from the government?

I think those quotes at the bottom are a really great summary of the problem with the Coalition's nuclear plan:

“As I said, from an engineering point of view nuclear power is an excellent form of energy,” Dr Finkel said. 

“What we can’t do is say, ‘Oh, nuclear is easy, therefore let’s stop all the wind and jump on to nuclear.’ 

“It just can’t possibly happen in the time-frame that we need. But that doesn’t mean we should rule it out because there’s that long term benefit.” 

I could see the merits of beginning to invest in nuclear now, given the time required to get it up and running, but only so long as the shift to renewables isn't interrupted. Unfortunately, I think the LNP see this as a way to seem like they give a shit about climate change, but really it's just a way to buy them another decade or two to line their pockets with coal.

At least here in Australia, we believe in the right for a select group of billionaires to make money off the land in the form of coal mining, and renewable energy threatens that right.

Now that the world is turning away from coal as much as possible, we're now pivoting to allow a select group of billionaires to make money off the land in the form of uranium mining, and renewable energy also threatens that.

At least with Metallica, we could laugh at the irony of a band regularly releasing songs about anarchy crying about piracy.

I've been able to strip the Kobo DRM out of a couple of book bundles using Calibre. Haven't bought this one yet, but I'd assume there wouldn't be a problem.

But Microsoft is doing exactly the same thing, only instead of paying for exclusivity of one title, they're buying developers so not just their next title, but all future releases will be exclusive, up until MS decides they're not worth it and dumps them.

Sony absolutely participates in anti-consumer practices, but let's not pretend that MS is any better.

Microsoft are no longer interested in selling consoles necessarily, otherwise they'd be holding stuff back from PC as well. They're interested in getting people into their ecosystem through Game Pass.

And while I agree with you that Sony and Nintendo have used plenty of anti-consumer practices, Microsoft has also done so in the past and I think the only reason they've been more pro-consumer of late is because they've been the underdog for a long time now. I would be anticipating a change in their behaviour the more people they get to subscribe to Game Pass, and this Activision-Blizzard deal is a huge step towards that.