We have part-time jobs as well, but those usually come with a minimum number of hours. Zero hours contracts were brought in to bypass those rules. Since zero hours contracts came in, part-time contracts practically disappeared.

Yep, exactly that. There are laws that say if you work more than a certain number of hours per week, you’re entitled to benefits like pension, paid holiday, etc. Zero hours contracts let companies get away with not providing those, as they’ll keep each individual staff member below the required hours, because there’s no guarantee of a minimum number of hours in their contract.

It’s absolutely atrocious, but the government spins it to make it sound like a benefit by saying you have extra time, you can lead a flexible life. What it means in reality for most people is that they need multiple jobs and still get no benefits that a full time job would provide.

Software updates can take quite a bit of bandwidth though. Call of Duty updates are significant events on the network, at the scale of streaming major sporting events.

They’re still going to charge app developers releasing on 3rd party app stores, so Apple will still make money through this route. https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/26/24051823/apple-third-party-app-stores-50-cent-fee

What’s the source of this?

Having worked in a university web team back in the day, these user personal spaces got dropped for various reasons. Teaching staff would push back on increasing password security, so accounts got hacked continuously. People would upload malicious applications through cgi-bins and the like. Maintenance costs skyrocketed. The cost of keeping these going because of these reasons were just not justifiable anymore, and it was much easier to provide them an account on a WYSIWYG system that could be secured, patched and maintained by an external company.

With the rise of online learning portals that included these features as standard, it became less justifiable. Why pay for two products, when one would do.

Peglin merges dungeon crawler rogue-lite with Peggle style gameplay.

Slay The Spire merges dungeon crawler rogue-lite with a deck builder card game.

Dicey Dungeon merges dungeon crawler rogue-lite with dice rolling.

I got stuck on a theme 😅

Played through the entire game, started on NG+. I really enjoyed it, the story was definitely a Final Fantasy story, much better than XV.

My one gripe is the lack of mini-games, which apparently was intentional on the part of the devs. All side content is still combat focused.

You can get through most of the game not truly mastering combat, but NG+ is a different story. Overall, a solid 8/10 game.

7th Continent is a “choose your own adventure” style game, where you explore a continent through a map of cards that expand as you play. It has a way of saving your progress, as it’s quite a long game. It’s pretty hefty as well, with hundreds of cards. I got it through Kickstarter, and it’s decent. They’re finalising the sequel this year, which I also backed.

It was all about getting on a good web-ring. I had a few sites across Geocities, Tripod and the like, but getting on a good web-ring brought the best traffic. Don’t forget to put a visitor counter on the page, and a cursor trail will impress everyone. This advice brought to you 25 years too late.