Well, fair enough that you were exposed to them. I didn’t have a lot of friends, especially not those even remotely into any kind of tech, as a kid; I think I first heard of trackballs from a programming teacher in about 1996 and bought one to try out of curiosity. Ever since then I’ve used one whenever it was an option.

I’ve even mostly used the same model. If you look in my comment history, you can see I recently mentioned that most of what I use is Kensington Orbits. I’ve tried other models, but they don’t work for me.

The one PC gaming exception for me is Minecraft. In that game you have to right-click a lot (as I’m sure you know) and I guess I haven’t developed the muscles for that because it makes my wrist very tired very quickly. Still, I play a lot of FPS games and have no problem holding the right click for zoom and such; only quick, repetitive right-clicking causes problems for me.

edit: To address your original comment, I have one friend who uses a trackball at work but a regular mouse for anything else. Other than that, I rarely meet anyone who has even heard of them, let alone used them, let alone consistently done so.

On PC, I game exclusively with trackballs and have since the nineties. I’ve never not been given the side eye when someone found out that’s how I play.

When was this magical time during which they were popular?

It’s been a year or two, but I had no issues with Star Citizen in Linux. IIRC, I ran it through Lutris.

The person perhaps (eventually) most qualified to answer this might be Graeldon, who is on a quest to play every Steam game in alphabetical order.

My pleasure! Glad it helped. Also, I like your username.

I’m still not sure how much to fear AI, as I’m not knowledgeable on the subject (never even intentionally interacted with one yet) and have seen conflicting reports on how worryingly capable it is. Today I did see this video, which isn’t explicitly about AI but did offer an interesting perspective that could be compared to the paradigm: https://youtu.be/fVN_5xsMDdg

(Warning, the video was interesting, but I got invested about halfway through when I started comparing it to AI, then was disappointed in the ending)

I saw an interesting video about this. It’s outdated (from ten months ago, apparently) but added some context that I, at least, was missing - and that also largely aligns with what you said. Also, though it’s not super evident in this video, I think the presenter is fairly funny.

https://youtu.be/L6mmzBDfRS4

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I don’t know if it is, but you can always just use yt-dlp or something similar.

Fair enough.

NerdCubed is, or was, my favorite YouTuber. I don’t like his live streams as much, but he did play Tomba in one.

https://www.youtube.com/live/0KMxIdL56TA

Didn’t NerdCubed recently play this?

It was probably the Technology Connections one. Even if not, I strongly recommend his channel.

https://youtu.be/udNXMAflbU8

I strongly dislike Windows - the only Windows device on my network is my wife’s work computer. However, my favorite desktop interface is the one Windows had in XP and 10. I even use Cinnamon because it’s the most similar experience (and shares a lot of the same key shortcuts I learned as a kid).

When I see a comment I like or a comment that makes me smile or a comment that I perceive as advancing the conversation - even if it doesn’t match the other two requirements - I upvote.

It’s pretty rare that I see a comment that gets a physical or vocal reaction out of me. This is only the second one I can remember on lemmy. Your comment made me literally guffaw. My opinion isn’t anything special, but it’s all I have to offer and I want to make sure you know you had an impact on me. Thank you.

Oh, I had conflated the two! That makes sense.

Thanks for metaphorically having my back!

Nobody but you poops and that’s concentrated evil coming out the back of you.

(Trying to make an early Family Guy reference here, but all I can find on YouTube is Rick and Morty, so maybe I’m misremembering)

This is exciting news, but the abbreviation makes me want to go to the Amigara Fault.

This is a video of a seal getting startled.

The human recording seems tedious, but I love the video nonetheless.

Not only is this true and annoying, but other things about the ads are getting worse, too.

I recently had to factory reset my TV and, after the first time I opened the YouTube app, immediately had to find the “don’t play video preview” option. It worked, except for the huge banner ad at the top of the list of videos, which still saw fit to play with deafening sound when I didn’t immediately change the video selection. I can’t find a setting to disable this.

Also, I’ve noticed the “fewer ads for this long video” message popping up during videos longer than thirty minutes (and now it seems like longer than twenty minutes). Not only is that message condescending like they’re doing me a favor, but I’m pretty sure it’s not true, at least not by much; and the ads are definitely longer and mostly unskippable.

Like someone else says in this thread, it feels like extortion.

It looks like WoW.

Fair enough, I can respect that.