No yeah for real. I’ve never seen him doing anything I would really consider to be annoying, or at least, more annoying than any other science communicator, and he constantly gets shit on for being like, too cocky, but then when you push back I never get any examples of things he’s actually fucked up on, just that he has bad vibes.

I mean, I dunno. I was sort of okay with the link’s awakening remake using this aesthetic, because it was a one off game, but it does sort of strike me as a very like, default, low rent kind of appearance, and the item and enemy copying ability also strikes me as something that’s not that interesting, and not as interesting as the normal zelda dungeon by dungeon kind of scheme. A good portion of the things you’re gonna copy are probably going to have exceedingly similar behaviors, they’re going to be functionally identical.

It’s obviously a copy, ironically, or maybe an extension, of the design philosophy behind the recent two big zelda games, and this one’s adapted it to a lower budget 2D game. I dunno, I’m still not in love with the idea as a whole, and that’s kind of after two big games. I dunno if it’s really ever gonna be on the level of, say, portal, or something, right? Which is a weird comparison to make, but I do feel the need to make it. I’ve never really found physics puzzles to be that interesting, which is gonna be what a lot of games that try like, universal mechanics, are going to have to cowtow to, because physics systems are theoretically infinite even though they actually do have a relatively small set of constraints, right. I’ve also never really enjoyed stacking boxes on top of one another as a solution to a puzzle, despite that being omnipresent in every good immersive sim, which is weirdly what I would kind of peg the modern zelda design philosophy as belonging to.

I dunno. I feel like the change in style has been kind of hard for me to pin down. It’s very obvious in a difference of feel, right, but in terms of formally locking down the actual difference, I can’t say I’ve really found much that’s all that weird about it. Sure, you can theoretically use whatever ability, anywhere, at any time, to make any vehicle, or scale any platform, stuff like that. But 90% of the time, it’s going to be totally useless as an ability. You’re going to fall into a couple of discrete, routine behaviors, even given an “infinite” ability that you’re just sort of, free to use and abuse like that.

Compare this to a conventional zelda tool, which is not generally usable anywhere, right. You can use the hookshot to stun or damage enemies, right, you can use it to grapple onto a discrete set of platforms, but outside of that it’s not gonna be too useful. I don’t see that as being all that different from like. Ahh, well, with this ability, you can paste together two pallets! It’s effectively the same, they’re gonna come with a pretty similar set of constraints and behaviors.

I feel like, to me, a lot of the fun of emergent mechanics comes from eeking out solutions to puzzles that designers probably haven’t thought about at all. Sometimes you can basically sidestep a challenge that otherwise you would’ve had to do, and in that way, it feels very much like a casual version of a speedrunning trick, or, it’s something that rewards your cleverness, or your understanding and mastery of the mechanics beyond even what the designers might anticipate. I like that much less when it feels like the designer doesn’t have a set, like, idea of a solution to a puzzle. When they’ve just given me all the tools, and then they tell me to go nuts, I don’t feel as though I’m circumventing anything, I just feel as though I’m doing the puzzle as god intended. There’s probably also some amount of, if everyone’s super, then no one is, going on there. If every puzzle is some puzzle I’m able to circumvent with clever rules lawyering or mechanics abuse, then it gets older, faster.

So I dunno. I really like the third banjo kazooie game, it was probably ahead of it’s time, if this is the kind of direction we’re going in now, and obviously I have some level of nostalgia for it, because the 360 was my formative console, because I’m a zoomer. Feel old yet? At the same time, the first two games were probably just straight up better games, if I had to actually be honest with myself. They have wider appeal, and even if you just have an ability that you can only use on a specific pad, with a specific symbol, and 95% of the challenges can only be conquered how the game designer intends, it’s probably still gonna be better and have more broad appeal than having to either come up with a discrete set of vehicles, use the defaults, or else spend like 50% of your game time in the vehicle creation menu constructing increasingly niche vehicles to better perform the specific task.

I dunno. You see what I’m getting at, though?

Part of that is soccer mom-ing, part of that is “urban jungle” brainworm fearmongering, I bet. It’s the transition from station wagons to minivans to SUVs to crew cab trucks. You need a big cool truck that can protect you from the elements, and from the potholes when you go somewhere worthwhile, and also from the crime, even! woah, so cool! kinda shit. Just like, basic fuck you get mine style stuff, there, no questions asked, contextually devoid vacuum “I need to protect my family” mind. People being taken advantage of, by marketing.

Even from the renders I can tell you that it’s probably not going to work out, all other things being equal. Sharing the “format” of like, a cabover, similar to a kei truck, means that it would more readily be suited for smaller scenarios in which maybe turn radius and immediate over the hood visibility is more important, right, but then, its size kind of defeats that, and I suspect that the slant of the window, in order to make it aerodynamic at highway speeds, and efficient, is going to end up putting the driver back so far that it’s going to eliminate your ability to actually see over the hood as much as you might want to. Probably the format also has adverse effects on crash safety, as you really want a hood on your car in order to catch a pedestrian, scooping them up by the legs, and also as a crumple zone to dispel some of the force of crash from the front, which is ideally where most of your crashes are coming from.

I think probably also that the conventional american automotive taste might defeat it, as americans kind of, historically, prefer a larger shittier hood on their vehicle. They prefer the sort of idiot dominance that a big hood gives them. Carolina squat style. I could be wrong on all that, though.

I think my biggest concern would probably be that, even though light trucks are the segment of the market which are very obviously viable for EVs right now, the people who buy trucks won’t want to buy them, and the people who want EVs won’t want to buy them. Implicit in both of those is those who can afford them, which I think automatically maybe selects for people who have the worst taste of all time. Light trucks make sense for EVs, right, you have a rear suspension which is supposed to be beefier for large loads already, conventionally in consumer trucks you’re not going to want a longer travel distance because they’re not supposed to be these highly efficient vehicles, and going electric gives you a pretty good and easy tow rating and high levels of torque low in the power curve like you might get with a diesel engine.

But I dunno. Basically I think americans might be too stupid for it. Might see more success in japan, but I have no idea what their EV infrastructure is looking like or if they already have kei trucks or larger cabovers which are electric. Fleet vehicles would probably need something like a swappable battery on the cheap, or a fast charging system that doesn’t destroy the battery immediately, but the first one probably requires more infrastructure and the second one seems maybe like it would be a limitation of the technology.

buh-buh-buh but what about when I refer to mechanical engineering! what about when I need to adjust my cam timing! oh no!

I dunno, I would broadly agree and I think that it’s probably not a good thing to be calling people, but I do have two complaints I would like to file with the official board that governs this sort of thing. Neither of them relate to the word’s banned usage, however. Of course, it’s still gonna be a little weird.

One is that I like -tard as a suffix, I think it has a kind of satisfying mouthfeel in pronunciation, I think potentially we need some more words that use it, and I don’t think that as a kind of, like, workaround, or way to say the slur more. I kind of wish the suffix was dissociated from the slur, so this was more possible. The only other word I can think of that does this is mustard, which apparently arrived at a similar pronunciation through a different etymological route. I dunno, I find it to be a kind of like, inherently hilarious word, or satisfying word to say. Unusual, maybe, maybe like an unusual morpheme pairing. Maybe I have some level of just like unprocessed shitheadery though, that’s very possible. I also kind of wish there was a way that actually worked to de-escalate the weight of a slur, to rob it of it’s weight. Obviously, taking it back doesn’t do much, because it’s just going to be subject to the same in-ground out-ground dynamic, a la the n-word, right. It’s okay if gay people call each other or themselves the f-slur, it’s not okay if some straight guy walks in and does it. More positive associations might work but then, you know, doubtful that would work in the first place, and also you’d probably not see a lot of people wanting to take the L and push it on that one because everyone would hate them for it, both the people insulted and those who would use it as a insult.

Also, I don’t like this kind of mentality more broadly of “oh you gotta be more creative when you insult people.”. Some people are so boring and uninterestingly fucked, that they aren’t worth the creativity you expend upon insulting them. I think it just kind of shadows the problem here. No, you don’t want to say the word because it denigrates an entire group of people when you use it in an insulting manner. There’s not really anything there about creativity, or lack thereof, that makes it a moral problem. Sometimes you do need a low-rent insult, it should just be one that isn’t a slur. Call someone a shitheel, or something, it’s easier than this, there are plenty to choose from.

Okay, thirdly, I think there’s also a broader, and interesting question here, of, how an insult being based on like, unchangeable characteristics makes it more mean or more of a slur, right. But then that sort of, leaves out things we might consider as being changeable, like, say, body weight, which I would also say is a dick move, to insult someone on the basis of their weight, or to constantly bring it up, or anything like that. On the other hand, insulting someone on the basis of their eye color is maybe like, very antiquated, still potentially mean, and potentially very mean in like, maybe india? But I dunno so much if it would be considered a slur, really, as much as just kind of a very weird thing to bring up. Insulting someone on the curliness of their hair, maybe, but then that could be seen as a proxy for other things, just like most traits. It’s hard to do this with something too obvious because most of them have been historically associated with like, eugenics and shit like that. Maybe if you were to insult someone based on how big their feet are or something, that might be a more socially acceptable or lighthearted insult, even if it’s still mean.

We also have, like, technically all characteristics are unchangeable, if we live in a deterministic universe, right? Insulting someone’s intelligence, even if they don’t have autism or down syndrome or what have you, is still insulting a deterministic aspect of their character, which was sort of unavoidable for them to stumble into. If you insult someone for even, their choice of boots, right, you are just insulting a characteristic about them which was ultimately inevitable, the result of many dominoes falling into place. I think perhaps when we attempt to understand the purpose of insulting someone, we give it this guise of free will and agency which I think ultimately makes it more mean than it would otherwise be. It robs it of its whimsy.

We view insults as some sort of like, vehicle for tough love, vehicle for change, perhaps, or we view it as maybe righteous, because you’re insulting someone on something they can change and by implication I think, should change. I think we have to be honest, though. Insults are not for the people who are being insulted. They are for the people saying them, they have always been. If that’s the case, it doesn’t even need to be really related to the person you’re insulting at all, or even necessarily directed at them. It doesn’t need to be such a mean thing, if it’s just for you. And if it is just for you, then I think it’s more valuable to do that assessment and figure out why you’re actually doing it, instead of just like, giving into mindless frustration and calling someone a mean name, like a child.

Dunno, you might wanna just watch UFC 1. If you’re really high level you might wanna watch nog vs sapp, though. Best one I’ve seen that’s actually at that level, even though the weight disparity might not be so extreme as you desire outside of like, basically carnie shitfights like eddie hall fighting twins.

I still like watching fat men in nappies with waxed hairstyles throwing salt around a clay circle then trying to push each other out of it though.

Yeah see that’s why I can’t ever take anyone’s opinion on it seriously, because they just say shit like this. It’s like, only a step away from “oh Americans should be good at sumo because Americans are all fat right and you just need to be fat and they wear diapers right?”. Which itself is about two steps away from just like, “Haha look at the funny fat men and how fat they are, what freaks for being fat.”, which is an incredibly depressing sentiment. It’s like calling baseball boring. I mean yeah, it is, but obviously, baseball fans will hate it if you say that, because it being boring as fuck is kind of the point of the sport. If you watch the matches you can tell pretty easily that most of them aren’t faked.

Nah, man, it’s a grappling art with a pretty large amount of universal applicability and no real weight classes, more similar to the conventional folk wrestling styles that many different cultures have. Mongolian jacket wrestling, mud wrestling, lots of European countries even have folk wrestling styles that they don’t care about too much anymore. It’s more similar to Judo, or something, and most people don’t question the efficacy or reality of Judo. American folk wrestling became rough-and-tumble fighting, and also became carnie circus shit right after the civil war, and then spread around everywhere until the Japanese decided to just kind of make it real with shooto and basically start MMA as we know it today, arguably with some interference from Brazilian Vale Tudo guys. The UFC’s involvement mostly being tenuous carnie shit. Go watch like the first three or four UFC’s, it’s basically garbage.

The more complicated download on the match fixing that came about in sumo is that 14 wrestlers were convicted, some stable masters. The sport as a whole, as with many sports in Japan, has a bunch of Yakuza involvement and toxic hazing and other bullshit. There’s already a Wikipedia link on it. Hakusho just got massively demoted like last year because some jackass in his stable was found to be hazing newcomers and haranguing people for money. I dunno, somehow I’m not gonna call all boxing rigged just because every now and again they find out that some high profile match was rigged due to the nature of the sport’s overarching regulatory structure.

Sports with direct confrontation, hell, even any sport, don’t need fairness to be good. I’d say that fairness actually destroys enjoyment of a sport, a lot of the time. Now, sometimes that can not be the case, as a totally even set match can be impressive to watch just based on how the kind of, pachinko machine pays out, right. Depending on your definition of fairness, once we attain fairness, all that’s keeping the match from becoming a draw every time is pure random chance. You have to define random chance as not being sort of, antithetical to fairness.

Watching the high-level pachinko machine can still be fascinating, can still be entertaining. But overall, the fairness is actually an inhibition to sport, a lot of the time. People want a david vs goliath moment, if you ask them. I would just as well give that to them, easily, right, like, no question in my mind. Obviously there’s a balance to be had, but, that’s the job of commissioners, to come up with that shit after the fact, or in relation to viewership numbers.

Nah fuck that shit. MMA integrated weight classes and that’s sucked. Sumo is the only true martial art, straight up, not even pulling your leg right now

Edit: Yeah, I mean, men are “stronger” pound for pound or whatever, but, we kind of, are idiots when it comes to thinking of sports, if we just suddenly think all sports are about explosive type 1 muscles, or muscular structure, or whatever. That’s dumb, that’s a brainlet comparison and a brainlet appeal, I would say. If you gain leverage in one direction, you lose it in another. If you gain a bunch of type one muscle fibers, you become a chimpanzee, but also, you gas really, really quickly, and humans are endurance predators that maximize that endurance with fine motor control even in what might be considered gross motor action. Everyone has this conception of sports as being these kinds of, oh, instant action gratification machines, where you just watch some guy get hit in the face really hard, or get tackled, and your monkey brain goes coco mode, and so obviously explosive strength is gonna be good for these displays, so, men are better at sports.

This is not the case. Or at least, not entirely. Sports is more like a long-form storytelling vehicle with many different characters and mindless teams to it. Women can fulfill that role just as easily as men can, in many of the same contexts. If we have sports that are bad for co-ed play, then I would say, we have sports that perhaps need refining.

Which everyone thinks is somehow like, a horrible thing to do, oh no, the sports, they’re too sacred, we gotta find the best of the best, but sports have always been and remain subject to change and a ton of different shitty rulesets that everyone always hates. Basketball now, apparently, rewards a bunch of aggressive highlight-reel kinds of play, and apparently the older game used to be more defensive, I say apparently because I dunno. I know nascar has had the opposite trending for quite some time with limiter plates meant to protect drivers and the audience more at the cost of more spectacular crashes and pileups for which the sport might gain more casual viewership. And also not be boring as fuck driving in a circle for like three hours. That’s not a sport getting better or worse, that’s just some arbitrary cultural shift, a decision made, realistically, because of internal cost-benefit analysis at the behest of a corporation which runs the major league.

We might have the same capacity to integrate sports into a co-ed kind of a deal, if we had the will to do so, but I think the truth of the matter is just that nobody really gives a shit about equality, except for when you bring it up.

Me, I’m a fan of sumo, because fuck weight classes. I wanna see david beat goliath. To me, that’s a more compelling casual narrative that can easily be built into a sport. Fairness is highly overrrated, and also doesn’t exist, or else every match might as well just be random chance, or end in a draw. Michael phelps is some genetic freak or whatever. Go cry me a river, and then he can swim across it and back. Give me an abstract goal like “get ball through hope” or “throw guy out of ring” and then I don’t need any more to it, I’m right there with you.

christ, I feel like every time I hear anything new about brake particles, I wonder why we haven’t moved to some other material for them yet. ceramics, regenerative brakes that just charge a small battery or capacitor or something, that just exists on the wheel, fuckin something.

They probably were in terms of viewing angles at the time of release, and probably were better if you had a technician which was able to come and adjust it or could adjust it at the store before it was sold, but I think the flatscreen CRTs have a much higher tendency for image warping over time.

Hayes is not a checkout aisle self-help book lol he pioneered multiple major branches of CBT

I mean, both can be true, right. It’s not uncommon for pretty popular scientists to get into kind of the grift economy after a little while. Jordan peterson has how many citations to his scientific papers or whatever? But then he still rolls around and spews a bunch of bullshit that’s sort of framed under the guise of his psychological background, and you can still tell is pretty easily influenced by his jungian type bullshit. I dunno, been a while since I actually looked into him, but it shook my ability to trust psychology more as a field, after that one.

I admire the skepticism but you haven’t read it and clearly haven’t taken time to fully understand it. he isn’t making prescriptive claims. he’s speaking on behavioral science. “A happens, then B tends to happen. C happens, then D tends to happen. do what you will with this info.”

No yeah for sure I haven’t read it, don’t claim to have read it, I’m just extremely skeptical of that kind of book, which presents science to the public at large, because most of the experiences I’ve had with that sort of thing have been damaging psuedoscientific bullshit that I slowly have to talk my friends out of. Which becomes much harder when they think they know things on a topic because they’ve read like one book about it. I don’t even try to talk them into a different stance, I just try to talk them out of the kind of, oversimplified takes which they tend to get from these types of books. Steven pinker type books, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” type books, “The Bell Curve” type books, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, “Poor Dad, Rich Dad”, shit like that. Admittedly not all of those are science guys, and some of that shit’s kind of old, but, you see what I’m getting at, it all blends together for the public. Pop psychology, that’s probably the term for that specific type of book, and uhh, yeah, that book gave me that kind of vibe.

If I’m really being skeptical, than, not evaluating anything else, because I just got up and still haven’t finished my coffee, the first study at the end of your post has two experiments. The first has a sample size of 34, the second has a sample size of 44. I dunno if I would say that you can really extrapolate anything from such an incredibly small sample size, to be honest. Especially one that’s like, taken from standard college campus volunteers. I know there are lots of scientific studies that rely on sample sizes which are pretty small, and I would throw that criticism at those studies, too. Shit happens in nutrition and exercise science too, I know for sure, which is why you see shitty fad diets circulate so much. I dunno, maybe I’ll read the rest of the paper, but that’s just like my general, me throwing shit at psychology as a field, right? But, maybe more, like, maybe more to, I think, some sort of point, if I have it, right:

and we humans clearly need treatment.

Like what do you mean by this? Because you’re looking at this through “treatments”, right, and I dunno if that’s the correct lens with which to view most people’s problems that they have in life. I mean it’s not a fuckin, incredibly new take, right, but like, you have a society where you’re expected to work 9-5, probably more, hours, five days a week, probably go in on a rental with your significant other, or increasingly, with your significant others, for like, 60 something years of your life? It’s not a shocker when we’re experiencing increasing amounts of depression at large, then, to me. That people have problems with that. I mean like, does changing society at large, qualify as a kind of patient treatment? I suppose my problem, if I’m really trying to have one, is just kind of that like, there’s not really any amount of psychological help which makes it better that your fingers are getting crushed in industrial machinery. Psychological help, in that case, just looks like copium. I don’t think psychology can help a lot of those problems, I think the best it can do is put a band-aid over a crippling tumor, which is nothing.

If you were to ask me what we were to do with the mentality I have, I’d probably want to incredibly balloon sample sizes and drastically increase the amount of evidence that we’re collecting, compared to just like, some guy’s written observations on like 50 people in some random experiment. Probably though, this is impossible, because school funding does not look to be going up anytime soon and google isn’t gonna share their massive amounts of data they’re collecting on people, and even if we had a glut of data to go through then we’d probably still be having to come up with and apply some sort of framework to it. At which point we just end up with a bunch of hacky bullshit, where you just take the noise and draw something in it and then say that this was somehow a natural occurrence, so you’d also need more rigorous standards for what conclusions we’re actually able to draw from the noise.

Then, even if you were able to do that, you’d still have no real way of distinguishing, say, one set of noise from another set of noise, to compare the two and draw a conclusion, because we’re just playing with like, one set of data, in a vacuum, compared to another set of data drawn from a vacuum, and there’s too many variables which might effect one outcome compared to another. So you’d probably need to be gathering pretty rigorous data over the course of many years before you’d be able to draw a real conclusion. Even then, the data might not be good enough, I dunno if you’d have enough information.

I’d maybe lean more into neuroscience to try and cut out some of the external noise, some of the factors that might fuck your shit up, but then that’s also not quite a good method because it doesn’t really cut out the external noise so much as ignore it, and you can still end up finding FMRI signals in a dead fish.

So, I dunno, probably I’d just use science for maths and astronomy and physics, stuff like that, and then otherwise I’d dismiss it, in looking for philosophies and methods with which to live my life or shape my being around. Or, you know, try to take it as it comes, and not really accept claims at face value. I’ve tried mindfulness, and I’ve found it wanting, because it just caused me to dissociate whenever I encountered an outcome I didn’t really like, and then instead of responding to things naturally, and flying by instinct, it causes me to kind of be like, the guy who smokes weed and then becomes hyper-aware of everything they’re doing but then their actual behavior devolves into nonsense.

Then, when I got farther than that, and I started to observe that behavior in the abstract, then it just sort of struck me as like, none of this realistically gives you a particular value judgement, right. It’s fine enough to just say, like, ah, well, think about it more, evaluate your life more, think about the long term consequences a little more. But, that train of thought doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to be making the correct judgements, and even over a lifetime, it might very well be that I could try everything and still come to the wrong conclusions, wrong judgements, or the right conclusions and right judgements, or whatever. I could be a hyper-conscious CEO evaluating my own life totally inaccurately and still be getting by fine and dandy, and I could be a homeless guy with accurate takes but still have a shit life. It’s basically nonsense, to just be like, oh, well, think about it a little bit harder, just be a little bit more conscious, because that isn’t nailed down to anything in particular.

Nah, we’re never gonna get to idiocracy. The movie’s premise rides on the idea that intelligence is a heritable trait, or a measurable quantity. It is more the case, I have observed, that people are idiots by necessity. You know, it’s uhh, difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. It’s pretty easy to just call everyone stupid, and then move on, but it’s much harder to understand specifically why they’re stupid.

I mean that’s definitely just a checkout aisle self-help book, though. Psychology, along with nutritional science and some other softer, more survey-based fields, has been suffering a pretty massive replication crisis, where something like 50% of papers are totally incapable of being replicated, depending on the journal and subject.

So I dunno, I’d generally be pretty skeptical of anything a book like that says about how you have to live your life or what you should be doing or how you should be doing it. Even if it’s something like “mindfulness”, right, generally thought to be a therapeutic practice, which we’re extracting from zen buddhism or whatever, just like carl jung travels around and extracts a bunch of “archetypes” from other cultures and then supposes that they’re universal when really it’s all just kinda some schizo bullshit canon he’s coming up with on the fly.

I uhh, I don’t like the scientific paint that is painted onto psychology and psychotherapy, is I guess what I’m saying. The attempt at formalization. What is just as good for one person, to be mindful, is probably something that someone else should rather not think about at all. Maybe even as a functional adaptation, a functional delusion that they can go on believing, and still end up having a fulfilling and uplifting life for everyone around them.

Sony also made their bottom button the default “confirm/execute” button and the side right button the “cancel/backout” button. It just feels more intuitive to me.

Here to note that this wasn’t the way it was meant to be, on their controller, hence the common confusion you tend to get with a lot of games. I think it comes about as a result of them maybe trying to tread more of a line between the two, as, though we forget, there were more in the race than just nintendo, sega, and later, sony, back in the day, and nobody had really “settled” the layout. Sega, obviously, went for a layout that is basically opposite to nintendo. I don’t know if it’s purely a region locked thing, or if it’s a game-by-game sort of thing (which seems like a stupid move but whatever), but the button layout in america, for playstation, has tended to conform more to nintendo’s layout, than to sega’s. I dunno why, maybe it has to do something with the popularity of certain consoles to certain regions, or something along those lines.

In any case, O is originally meant to be confirm, the X is meant to be cancel, which I think makes slightly more intuitive sense, pictorially. The O is the positive, the X is the negative. Obviously, over time, this sort of became swapped based on region, and actually, the PS5 is the one in which it’s actually become universal that the O is the cancel button and X is the confirm button, for the japanese. Which is probably fucking infuriating, for them, I’d imagine.

I think I find myself wanting a little bit of a tactile dot or something on the button, so as to more easily intuit which one to press. You could even retain the switch’s ability to flip around the controllers, if you just put all the tactile dots on the outer radius of all the buttons. Like, put a little bump on the top of the top button, put a little bump on the bottom of the bottom button, etc. The only thing I can’t really figure out is how you might refer to that in a game, or refer to that visually in a way that makes sense, other than maybe just building that association over time. But yeah, having them be distinguishable tactily is, I think, a good idea.

Sega had the dreamcast with an “A on the bottom”, basic xbox style layout about 3 years before the xbox came out, as an extension of their genesis six button layout. With how friendly sega has been with microsoft historically, and especially the similarities between the classic “duke” controller and the dreamcast controller, the increasing focus on online play, I think maybe there’s a through-line from the classic sega button layout and the modern xbox button layout.

I mean it kind of, instinctually makes some level of sense to me. With nintendo’s stuff, the A button is on the right, and the B button is on the left, so you’re reading it right to left, instead of left to right. Hence, the accompanying swap in X and Y.

Playstation still basically conforms to a on the right, since O is generally used as a “confirm” button, and X is generally used as a back out button. So, they fill the same role as the conventional layout, they just abstract it in a kind of more fun way.