Such a tragedy. But honestly knowing what he did makes it worth it IRL

Well, the Monster Hunter Wilds Beta test ended. I’m devastated honestly, because I didn’t get to play it enough! It started the day I had work and ended 2 hours after I got off today. I misread the timezone and I thought it ended on the 4th and 11:59am in my timezone. It ended at like 8pm or so.

So that’s too bad! Other than that ~8 hour treat that I thoroughly enjoyed, I’ve finally gotten around to Dragon’s Dogma 2 and I’m enjoying it as well (though slighted now after my favorite series was ripped away from me). It feels a little floaty for some of the characters, but it so far has been a good experience. I’ve been in a bit of a gaming slump so it’s been nice to relax some and play some nostalgic games right as winter is hitting.

The gaming slump I was in had me pretty much only playing Phantom Brave and sifting through little games like Sonic Mania, so I’m looking forward to the games I have on my radar cause it’s really the first time in a while!

Oh also, Amanda the Adventurer 2 came out and my partner and I played through it a little bit. It’s pretty good, although it isn’t the most straightforward. We had to use a guide for quite a bit of it and, while we were close to the right track for each puzzle, we just were not on the ball with what the developers wanted from us. I think the first game was a lot like that though if I remember, and so really what matters more with that in mind is how they continue the story and the atmosphere, which they really nailed. The perfect amount of corporate conspiracy supernatural demon cult technological red herring horror.

All in all, I guess being an adult means winter is gaming time cause I’ve been pretty much too busy the rest of the year to really want or have time to game. For me, a big part of gaming is how I’m feeling, sometimes I want point and pop, sometimes I want laid back, sometimes I want something new, and sometimes I want to make numbers go big. And sometimes, I want to do other things that aren’t gaming, which makes actually gaming feel a little guilty.

That’s funny, I feel the opposite about Deadlock! There’s not really a MOBA first person shooter that is out there, particularly one with such an in depth movement system that is fairly ubiquitous for each character. It does have a skill ceiling, but I would say for casual play, especially starting out, it’s mostly about being patient brick wall and playing the denial game to force mistakes that you can punish.

It’s effectively a first person MOBA with characters that you might see in Paladins. It feels really good, but it is intense for sure – my biggest issue is map navigation and learning it as a whole. But I also really like technical gameplay, one of my favorite games is Smash Bros. Melee so this is just an extension of that love.

I would say if you wanted to give it a shot (if you haven’t already) give each character a shot in the training ground. Get a small feel for their abilities and it’ll help you get a sense of not only what feels fun for you, but also what to expect from the opponents! Edit: I had read your comment over again after I posted of course and I had forgotten that you did go into the testing ground. Sorry! lol. End edit. And for items, that’s a bit harder, I personally don’t care much and just go by passives that sound helpful. Just click once though, double clicking will buy and then sell the item.

Which, in a way is a testament to my first paragraph. Patience is key ;)

I played it for 10 hours, it runs fine. Granted, I have a 5800x3d and a 3080, but from what I’ve been reading the people complaining have similar specs.

I think it’s a bit of a CP2077 situation where some peoples experience vastly differ from others, from bugs to performance.

Yes and no. Some games you just cannot be patient about, as part of the whole selling point is the community in the moment. For example, the way in which hype went for Helldivers 2 pretty much necessitated that if you weren’t part of the community in the first 3 months then you missed out on a lot of “storytelling”.

This would go for most multiplayer games. Single player games though have a lot more freedom to be late to the game, so to speak ;)

Otherwise, for me personally it usually just comes down to the IP. Monster Hunter is my go-to, so it’s sort of a no-brainer for me to go for the new game as they come out barring any major issues or personal life events, I get them. I did buy Cyberpunk on release, however that was more because I wanted to see what my new 3080 could do and I was looking for a solid single player game, and I didn’t encounter nearly as many problems as other players did. But, I haven’t gotten the DLC for it because I haven’t been looking for that kind of game again yet.

Being ready for the game is another aspect I take into consideration, Dragon’s Dogma 2 was something I was pretty highly anticipating, but after hearing about the release issues and remembering what DD:DA was like to replay, I realized that I wasn’t ready for it again at release. However now it’s on sale and I’ve been out of gaming for a few months outside of small old games on my Steam Deck once in a while. I picked it up and I’ve been enjoying it.

So I think patient gaming really comes down to having the understanding of the social aspect the game is trying to sell - sometimes it’s marketing (2077) and sometimes it’s the nature of a game that’s fun to play with other people. Getting games like Phasmaphobia, Dale & Dawsons, they aren’t really going to be that fun if you’re multiple years late to the game. Similarly, if your friend just finds out about the game late, it’s just a smaller niche, being your friend group instead of random people in public lobbies, at which point you can expect to play that game a handful of times before your group drops it forever, lol.

Is the average fortnite player of voting age?

I like that it’s named after the person who created it and what it was inspired by. It was created by Beth. It was inspired by the Steam Deck.

It is the Beth Deck.

It’s brilliant, really.

Most arts are exempt due to the nature of them. Music, visual art, etc, the resources they take can be fairly ecofriendly, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be.

I was actually just thinking about this from an article that got posted, “Can music be sustainable?” and I was thinking about the production and supply side of it, like with records and CD’s, or in the case of books, print and cloud. As an author, there’s options for how you publish your book, but I would imagine not many think about how they publish being more or less eco-friendly than other alternatives.

It’s an interesting question – do paper books take more resources than cloud-streamed books (via Kindle)? I would imagine not, but they do need to process the paper and then ship the copies. But, Kindles need to be produced, and AWS needs to exist to serve them via the cloud.

Similarly for music - does the process of making records and shipping them have a bigger impact than we realize? The article itself was talking about touring emissions, but it got me thinking about the product side of things too with CD’s, records, and streaming music.

Also, back to the topic at hand, I think any service business could have the potential to earned a million dollars ethically, a lot of the factors just come down to luck and opportunity. My father is a photographer, he could earn a million dollars with his business if he had the right number of clients. All it could take is a viral TikTok and suddenly he’s the most requested photographer in the state. In a way, businesses have a social media lottery now, where virality can make you a millionaire as long as you can keep up with the demand. We see it happen with individuals too who get meme status and a bunch of interviews.

You’re spot on with that, I would think.

Third world Bitcoin miners, the energy it costs to run block chain math and transactions, and the harvesters of the materials of the hardware.

But in terms of capitalism, only 3 exploits is pretty low so I wouldn’t feel too bad about it, you’re no different than myself or anyone else existing with a computer, you just got a bit luckier.

(This is really only to point out that there are few businesses where exploitation cannot exist, namely those of small businesses, and even then, they exist in capitalism which bred the exploitation. That is to say, you just can’t get away from it. This is not a critique of you, and also, congratulations! That’s quite incredible :) )

The Boys is a good one, and an interesting one specifically because it plays to the StarWars-Imperialist / DC-Marvel-Authoritarian types. Garth Ennis, who wrote for The Punisher comics and of course, The Boys, is vehemently anti-everything that these types of authoritarians stand for.

Yet despite his hatred of them, he writes them exceptionally well in a way that is lost on the less observant viewers (man I just love that phrase lol). The people who love the Punisher for the wrong reasons are the very same people who love The Boys for the wrong reasons, it’s actually crazy how much crossover there is between the two pieces.

I think The Boys (show) also played up this aspect as a way to vilify power seeking behavior to the Conservative crowd by mocking Homelander outright, and subtly by showing the effects on The Boys (the group themselves and their struggles with power and how they use it). Very similarly to Sunny, there is a shift in the way The Boys is perceived by the conservative crowd around Season 3, as the writers were amping up their highlighting of the issues specifically because idiots were perpetuating Storm-lander’s sexualization of weaponized dehumanization (i.e. getting off on Nazi romance) - in the show so much so that even Homelander was like dude that’s fucked up.

The issue of course is that Homelander is justified to these idiots, so making him look silly and dumb comes to be one of the only ways that a specific demographic will understand that his actions are bad – which of course, they get offended by and do not like, because they’ve wanted to emulate Homelander the whole time. Characters like the right-wing Stepdad and the Podcaster Listener at the convenience store show how an individual can fall into the cycle of hatred perpetuated by the media and the entire point is completely lost on them because Homelander lasering those liberals was exactly what he should have done.

Part of it is scary, because I don’t believe it’s Marvel and cartoons that are breeding this mindset. These people are conservative christians who listen to talk radio and watch the news, and they are not being inspired by characters like Homelander, they were already like this. Characters like Homelander or the Punisher are just placeholders, scapegoats, a way for these hateful individuals to self-insert themselves into media. This does not mean that the answer is culling these characters existence, but rather continuing to highlight their faults and flaws in order to re-engage people to show them what it is like to actually be a good person.

I formed a barometer for measuring comedy and it’s perceived ripple effect on society. Look at the comedy piece, the joke, the theme as a whole, whichever element, and then ask - does it highlight the issue, or does it perpetuate it? It may be the case that the intention of the piece to be a commentary denigrating fascism, but if it does a poor job conveying that message it might just look like an over-the-top approval of it.

An example of this that hit me close to was for It’s Always Sunny during 2016, the insane “I can do whatever I want” antics that some Americans were replicating was seemingly getting higher and the crossover between people quoting the show in the wrong ways just made me realize that maybe the show hadn’t done a good enough job presenting itself to less observant viewers. Well they also felt the same way because they really ramped up the highlighting of the issues after season 12, in a way that is presented in a different fashion.

This of course, was disliked by that specific crowd - there’s a few people who aren’t hateful who just don’t like the new presentation and that’s fine (they’re wrong of course! lol). It wasn’t uncommon for a few years to see people rage about how the show went woke, and still happens but less often now because they all got angry and dropped the show (Newsflash asshole, they were talking about you the whole goddamn time!).

Anyway, as mentioned with Starship Troopers, this happens with a lot of popular media in the conservative sphere, as can be seen with Idiocracy. There’s a ton of other examples too, but we’re all aware of how often this occurs.

As opposed to everyone else calling them bootlickers, I think there is likely a subset of people like this who are not considering piracy against the big corporations as unethical, but the “trickle down effect” of piracy towards smaller business/individuals.

For example, if you were to pirate Starfield, no one would really care. If you were to pirate something like BlackOps, most people wouldn’t care (and those that do are corporate bootlickers). However, what about pirating indie games, or music VST’s, or circumventing a patreon from someone with under 100 supporters?

There’s two camps when I see anti-piracy comments; the bootlickers, and those that have the idea that pirates pirate everything relentlessly. The fact of the matter is that piracy does not hurt big corporations, but we cannot say that is also true for small developers publishing their game on their own, and vocal anti-piracy, or rather artist-in-mind individuals, will let the world know that we should support independent artsits and not pirate.

Now, whether or not indie games are getting pirated is a whole different story. And really, what this comes down to is just having the opportunity to purchase in a way that supports the pirates ease of access.

Also, it completely ignores the ethical aspect of piracy which is why support a company that doesn’t have your interests at the forefront of its business practices. Which is a very similar reason to decide to not pirate – I enjoy It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I would like to see more if it, I will pay Hulu and watch the show to tell them to make more IASIP.

If you like something, don’t pirate it if you want more of it. It’s actually very simple. If you do like it but can’t support it for personal reasons, don’t expect to get more of it.

Which of course, for the anti-piracy crowd is another sentence for, “you didn’t pay to watch it so they cancelled my favorite show!”

Tl;DR - A poor crossover between an individuals enjoyment of corporate content and an supporting independent artists living wage.

What a weird show that was lol

This is how I feel about it:

Best chance to own a game is a DRM-free digital store (GOG, a few games on Humble, itch.io, some others). But own always means “a license for personal use”. Has been like that forever. Even if you buy a disk - you own the (physical) disk and a license to use the software contained on it. You can’t of course own “the game” because that would mean you’d be free to distribute it. It’s all just semantics… You own a game for personal use! Just like you own a baseball bat… but still aren’t allowed to purposefully use it to bash somebody’s head in. Ownership has never been a 100% or nothing thing.

It’s just that DRM turns that ownership effectually into a usage license.

There is no ownership for digital files, because ownership would mean freedom to distribute. Semantics. So, we all have licenses to everything we “own” digitally.

As such, I don’t really feel slighted by Steam because this has been my understanding the entire time. Digital ownership =//= ownership. It’s the same for if you ever bought music from iTunes in the 2000’s.

I would feel different if Steam actively used DRM on everything (developer has no choice), and things like Steamless to remove Valves trivially easy DRM weren’t as accessible/were actively prevented.

I buy games on Steam and if they act up then I use my license in fair use for myself and format shift or whatever else I see fit to make my game functional, and I doubt that I would ever be taken to court or that the account could be compromised from doing this. Quite frankly, once the games files are on your computer Steam can’t do too much unless you let it.

And for me personally, I don’t mind the tradeoff for cloud saves, per game notes, community control schemes and per game personal bindings, access to community forums - I understand that not everyone feels this way, nor should they, but given that everything digital is a license anyway, it seems clear to me that Valve is interested in providing a service beyond a storefront for games, while competitors aren’t doing much of anything outside of litigation or twiddling thumbdrives.

The alternative to this is not using Steam, getting what you can from Itch.io and GOG, and not having access to pretty much everything I just mentioned unless you set it up yourself somehow (cloud saves are feasible but that’s a hassle, and everything else would be much harder, save community forums). Which is absolutely fine, but I like the services that Steam offers and I was never under the impression that I “own” the game any moreso than I “owned” my PS2 games. What’s more, there’s no license limit to these titles, so I can have my account for 20 years and play the games on as many computers as I want. I have encountered storefronts that limit your licenses to 3 to 5 uses, or sometimes slightly better ones sometimes have authorization revoking.

All this said, the gaming landscape is certainly struggling, it seems quite telling to me that all these companies are more interested in engaging in litigation to tear down competitors than they are in bolstering their own platforms to make them more appealing to gamers.

I can’t answer your question but I will say it seems like the website name is trying to go for aesthetic naming, such as “level 80” being what the URL is supposed to indicate. If the website is mostly gaming articles, and the sites name is 80.lv, I can understand what they’re trying to go for.

Let’s just hope for their sake Latvia’s servers don’t go down. Or maybe they are Latvian (I doubt this though)

I was more talking about their mobile devices, the iPods, iPhones, iPads, I should have made that more clear.

Even so, that doesn’t change the fact that Apple does actively prohibits users from accessing files/folders within the system, computers included. For something as basic as the Library folder to be hidden is just a little ridiculous.

It’s not hating on Apple to call out ridiculous things, and none of this is facetious. Unless you are a developer of some kind, having this hidden away in some ways is good for users who might break things. It just happens to make it difficult for anyone else who wants to have control over their computer.

You may as well have asked this question in 2012 because it’s exactly the same as it was back then, except now there is iCloud. Which in some ways is impressive.

Folders are generic labels, Photos, Documents, Downloads, and within those there is folder structure, but I’ve never seen any Apple user actually utilize them beyond the most basic organizational functions (and even that is not common). Granted, my demographic for the past couple years has been the elderly, but before that I worked with kids and it was basically the same.

If you use Apple products, you don’t need folder structures because you can’t take files off your device easily, it basically has to go through some form of cloud upload, if not iCloud then Google Drive. And you don’t need folder structures for the same reason, cause why are you adding files to your device from somewhere that isn’t iCloud?

This is only like 95% facetious, it’s actually ridiculous how closed off Apple makes their products. By default when you make a spreadsheet with Apple’s software it exports as a .pages file, instead of the actually useful .xls. This is for every. Single. Program. Word files, PowerPoint files, I’m sure there’s even a PDF specific Apple file format.

Idk. I blame Apple, and Android hasn’t done much to really bolster the need for file folders (not a bad thing, just lack of opportunity for learning).

But Apple actively prohibits its user base from engaging with folders, and has been for well over a decade - plenty long enough for my (millennial) generation to phase it out and for the generations after to never need them in the first place. Plus, emails aren’t dependent on file paths, whereas systems file paths are completely necessary.

And from the corporate side of things, it’s not very business savvy to miss out on an entire generation or two of gamers buying games.

If you and I are parents and our Steam library has 1,000+ games, our child likely wouldn’t buy those games. But if they need to create a steam account for themselves, now those games are back on the table, securing future revenue for Valve.

There’s workarounds sure, like family sharing or just ignoring the ToS and sharing passwords. I think the real tell will be for our grand/great grandchildren, for once we are 100 or 120 then Valve will probably start wondering… Is averyminya really still alive and kicking, or did he share his library?

I feel like all it would be would be giving the account via your will, then having that transferred through an attorney, who has a copy of/access to your death certificate.