Therein lies the joke.

I promised that there would be a joke when I mentioned the tablets in my previous post.

First, I'm not going to target any targets publicly, because I would prefer to take shots through appropriate channels for unshielded damage access, firing public shots only as a last resort.

So. Our tablets are a flavor of Not-BeepBoopBot. The parent company, Numbers, has rules that say if you build your tablet hardware a specific way, or if you remove any or all of the BeepBoopBot Services from the OS, or if you do certain other things, you cannot, by the rules of the contract, say your device is running BeepBoopBot.

However, you can run BeepBoopBot apps on Not-BeepBoopBot.

The funny is, there's a lot of super low grade shovelware on our Media Market, like, uh... Slice It!, Toy Fun, or City Car Parking! (Those're the actual names, mind you.)

There are also some Grade A titles that, ah... came ashore on a dinghy that was dropped from a galleon. Stuff like Monsters in My Pocket with Green Leaves, or Last Dream, 6th Edition, or Association Basketball Jelly (because we're too broke for Jam).

I have my doubts on the legal acquisition of those games for our consumption behind the concertina wire, but I'm even more concerned at the pricing we're charged for the vast bulk of the games offered to us.

On average, for the low, low price of $7.98 US, we can buy a game. And the inmates said, Amen. Many of these games have limited replay value, though the Green Leaved Monsters in My Pocket and Last Dream 6 titles might have 40-90 hours of play time to them. I can (vaguely) justify the price in my head on that note, but for the bulk of what I saw?

The bulk of the titles I've seen are typically no more than a buck or two in the BeepBoopBot Don't Pause Store.

Given that I might be stuck here for the entirety of my sentence, I just cannot in the slightest fathom these prices.

To make things more annoying, there's also a total lack of useful apps in our Media Market.
Want a dictionary? Sorry, can't have one.
Want a table or an app that can help you convert between Imperial and Metric measurements? Nope, no such beast. Want a periodic table of the elements, information about those elements, and stuff that can sate scientific curiosity? Nope, you're not allowed to self-educate.
There are no non-game apps in our Media Market that I can even find.

Now, there's a banner suggesting a subscription service is coming. I'm wondering just how bad this will be.

Music, also, is an expensive, painful joke.
In the age of Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, and other streaming services, we're being sold $18 albums.
EIGHTEEN DOLLARS. For a digital album. I hear that we are supposed to get copies of everything we purchase on a removable storage device once we go free, but I'm on this side of the line, and wary of any policy that can change at any time.
Now, I know there're some large albums in the store, and that price suddenly doesn't feel so bad, but for an album like, say... Apoptygma Berzerk's Harmonizer, or Sonata Arctica's Ecliptica, while they're great albums, I'm broke and don't make money -- I rely on the kindness of those on the outside to acquire my extra food items and entertainments.

Movie rentals are also a thing for us. They're an average of $7.98 a movie. I'm sure there're some less expensive titles available to us, but at this point, I haven't explored much of what's on the tablet's Media Market for movies. The likelyhood that I'll be interested in movies in the store is low, unless I can just binge-watch the four theatrical builds of Evangelion (1.11, 2.22, 3.33, 3.0+1.0) with Japanese audio and subtitles.
(I can tell you those're not there. There's only a handful of anime titles there, of which my brain says Naruto was one, and Bleach was another. And interestingly, Sailor Moon was present, as well.)

I lamented this to my friend, who is giving my voice purchase so that you are seeing this:
I would absolutely love to have something like CuriosityStream and Nebula here behind the wires. Give us intellectual media to access, something that feeds the brain.

You'd be surprised to hear that there are people in here who like to actually think about projects, ideas, concepts that might better themselves and maybe the world around them.

One guy here, upon finding out that I have this adoration for information surrounding batteries of the lithium persuasion struck up a conversation with me, wanting to know about the way lithium based batteries work, and if I thought he'd be able to build a vehicle using them as their power source.

I was happy to tell him what I knew about the batteries, and glad to tell him about the many, many love projects out in the free world that are doing things like repurposing one car's pack to make a totally different vehicle. Given enough batteries and work, one can make pretty much damn near anything they want if they're patient enough.

Now he's enthused about that entire line of thought.

Imagine if you gave more people more knowledge and something constructive to do with their minds, instead of watching TV and religious studies all day.

That's the joke.

Have a good one. :)