I was around back then and if you think post 9/11 US wasn’t a conservative hellscape of intolerance and jingoism I don’t know what to tell you?

The reason you don’t see advertisements like this is because the kind of investment entities that control game companies big enough to buy ads in playboy don’t consider it a profitable venture vs marketing on violence which is considered more family friendly than even the mere presence of a naked body in western globalized societies.

This has been true for a long time and as with anything there are exceptions… and conker is one of them… but it was an exception then as it is now.

If you want to talk about the diversity of topics and tones around sexuality that have been explored in modern indie gaming vs what was acceptable in the past well yeah… nowadays indie artists are able to do waaaaay more without being silenced by christian rightwing fundamentalism and its claw like grip on our society. I don’t think that was your point though.

If the suggested solution doesn’t work one thing you could consider is getting an armor x pro or the cheaper armor x (doesn’t have gyroscope sensor) that essentially turns your controller into an elite controller that can also be made to appear as a playstation or nintendo switch controller.

I have two and have used them extensively and my only criticism is the controllers need essentially line of sight with the dongles to connect. The connection doesn’t use bluetooth rather the controller is connected to the computer/console through the strike pack communicating with its own dongle.

https://shop.bigbigwon.com/products/bigbigwon-armorx-pro-wireless-back-button-for-xbox-series-x-s-controller

I know this seems random but an xbox x/s controller with an armor x pro is hands down the best xbox controller period even before you factor in the gyro sensor that can send input into games/consoles without gyro aim support through translating it into joystick input.

honestly I would prefer to drive a DIY custom built machine using a popular off the shelf gamepad, that way I could buy a handful of controllers and keep them in the cockpit as backups.

I also get the feeling the VR market started out a lot like the mobile gaming market in that mba business majors who have zero ability or to desire to make genuinely artistic and compelling experiences choked out any other kind of person being in leadership positions in the industry.

Similar to mobile gaming the rush of business majors who “think” they know how to transform vr gaming when they don’t know the first thing about game development and have never bothered to pursue a creative venture in their life that wasn’t just a thinly veiled scheme to scam other people out of their money has severly stunted the growth of the vr industry indefinitely as it did the mobile gaming market.

The very structure of the largest companies in VR (besides perhaps valve) precludes the possibility of any actual artists and developers with a vision getting into positions of power in these companies and even if they do, they are never actually listened to or you wouldn’t get embarassingly empty visions of VR like “the metaverse”.

VR, like mobile gaming cannot be understood as an out growth of the traditional gaming world, rather VR in particular must be understood as a market constructed by non-experts who didn’t give a shit about learning gaming development or how to create compelling fantasy worlds because the objective was always to be a digital landlord speculating and monetizing on an ownership of large swathes of digital communities that artists showed up and made into actual spaces people desired to be (artists are an unpaid detail though, that kind of fluff is easy, an AI could do it and besides it is fun for them!).

Unfortunately for VR fans I don’t think the industry will take any significant strides until those kinds of people are kicked out of the boadrooms of these companies and I don’t see that happening anytime soon given how long mobile gaming has been a squandered wasteland of casinos that nothing with any vitality or soul can grow in.

LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseq A different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it

My true love is Org Mode and Emacs, but honestly LogSeq feels similar in a weird way with its extreme simplicity but also confusingly powerful and open ended design.

I am EXTREMELY impressed with LogSeq, I showed it to someone recently and they straight up told me “this is the best software I have ever tried in my life!”… admittedly they didn’t know about PKMs, external brains, obscure powerful note taking, thinking and tasktracking software but also that is kind of the point… they could immediately see the power of these type of tools even though they didn’t know anything about them because Logseq is so straightforward and powerful.

Logseq + Syncthing (my favorite software period) is an INCREDIBLY powerful combination and honestly shits on 99.99% of office/task tracking/productivity/filesharing software from boutique productivity companies and multi-billion dollar tech companies alike. Like yeah… Syncthing isn’t a file backup utility, and Logseq has no built in simultaneous editing capacity in its current version but when you are talking about syncing edits of tiny markdown plain text files you can just basically forget all of that crap and just pretend you and the person you are sharing Logseq notes with are magically the same user making edits on a single device… and so long as you are reasonable with your editing pace and approach you can forget the nightmare of the cloud/corporate silos/subscription/surveillance-capitalism… COMPLETELY in the realm of notes and note sharing.

Crank the simple file versioning up to like 40 on your Syncthing share folder for Logseq, deal with the extremely rare file sync whenever it pops up through Syncthing’s GUI, preferably have one of the devices in the share network be a phone or raspberry pi that is online most of the time and never look back!