Right, their DRM is minimally invasive, which is right in line with their argument that piracy is a service problem. If they offer a service where you can pay for games, have them licensed to a user account, and make the experience flow without interruption, people will accept it.

I was really mostly joking and what you’re saying is accurate.

This just in: Steam is actually a form of DRM.

Well, yeah, it’s not our security they’re worried about.

They’re worried about their security. The security of their big mansions, millions or billions of dollars in the bank, the security of being able to be a horrible fucking weasel whose decisions end people’s lives but sleep like a baby at night knowing no one can touch you.

But they’re also small-minded enough to not realize how this compromises everyone’s security, because they were busy only worrying about securing themselves.

Like look at the UHC CEO who just got shot in broad daylight. The company wasn’t even willing to spring for good security for a guy who metaphorically put a noose around countless people’s necks.

They only care about their own security but they’re too myopic to see past themselves enough to understand the cascading consequences of not caring about anyone else’s security, and how that might, in the end, undermine their own security.

We’re not dealing with the cleverest people, here.

fuckin lmao

We told ya you stupid fucks!

Nintendo is a proper shout out.

A Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom aren’t the prettiest games but they have two very big deals about them.

1. Stylization. Games with a specific art style tend to age better than ones with ultra realistic art styles. Team Fortress 2 aged better than a lot of things because it leaned into the Pixar-cartoony style. ABotW and TotK both have their own unique style that will age incredibly well.

2. Instead of the focus being graphics, the gameplay is the core loop. Tears of the Kingdom especially deserves accolades for how well the entire system of combining weapons and items just works. Who cares about the graphics, the crazy shit you do in the game isn’t causing the game to crash or fall to pieces. The game expected this, it was built to handle this, and this is proof that it was way more important to the developers than the graphics.

To be faaaaaaaaaaaiiiiir, a lot of that was tied up in the switch from overhead isometric view to first-person view.

Fallout 1/2 didn’t focus on graphics, they were in many ways point-and-click adventures. A lot of things you had to hover over for “flavor text” and every once in a while something only four pixels wide exists that you need to notice.

So the gameplay actually actively eschewed graphics in favor of things like flavor text and reading.

Further, the switch to first person broke the SPECIAL system, because how to you even manage a gun skill in a first person shooter without it feeling absurd? It made sense in isometric, even if it was often frustrating to miss an enemy when you had a 79% chance to shoot them in the balls. Putting that in a first person when you mag dump into someone standing right in front of you and half your shots feels a lot less realistic, and can quickly become frustrating in a more fast-paced first-person-shooter environment. The SPECIAL system feels absolutely slapped on as an afterthought in Fallout 3.

Also, the writing in Fallout 3 was that shitty Bethesda writing. The writing was just subpar compared to the prior two installments. Especially the fucking stupid ass end of the game.

I’d say a lot of those complaints were driven more by the perspective switch than anything else.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, old games were just as fucking janky on release, and most of them took years of modders fixing all those issues for them to get better.

Fallout 1 & 2 - janky on release

Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 - janky on release

Morrowind - janky on release

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Chernobyl - janky on release

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 - janky on release

All of these were capable of being installed and “just playing” them on release. There were countless bugs and janky behavior and that’s normal and we’re now spoiled by day 1 patches. STALKER 2 has been out a month and has had three major patches for bug fixes. STALKER Call of Chernobyl probably could have used the same but in 2007 the infrastructure to push quick updates just wasn’t there yet. Steam had only released by Valve in late 2003, roughly three and a half years earlier.

I’ve never had Balatro crash or do anything weird on me, either.

Don’t you miss the days when you just installed the game and just played it?

I don’t miss them because they’re still here!

During the roughly 3.5 hours that these services were impacted, about 55% of the logs we normally send to customers were not sent and were lost.

Bullshit ass headline. They only lost 55% of logs generated during a three and a half hour stretch. The headline makes it read like they lost 55% of all their logs ever.

Still a big deal, a lot can happen in 3.5 hours, but not as big as a deal as the headline makes out.

Owlboy!

Smartphones at present are small surveillance devices vaguely dressed up as a tool.

You know, surveillance of those devices is a choice, right? They’re actually a tool with surveillance slapped on top, it’s literally just a computer (and on an Android you can even install different operating systems with surveillance blocked). And what industry wants to surveil those devices the most? Oh yeah, fuck me, it’s MARKETING!

Bill Watterson nailed it down 30 years ago in 1994. Because the brain worms work if they’re repeated enough.

Ah gotcha, yeah, the sign on the door shouldn’t be banned, I agree. That might get confusing if nothing is labelled past an address.

I have a problem with those signs, they’re pollution of a public space.

I remember when Sao Paulo banned all outdoor advertising and their city became beautiful again.

Further, when nearly everyone has a GPS map to wherever they want to go in their pockets, do we really NEED giant fuckoff signs so people know where their local McDonald’s is anymore?

Obligatory: Bill Hicks on Marketing.

Like at least ban ads for giant companies. Everyone fucking knows what Geico and Progressive and Microsoft and Google are. We don’t need fucking ads from these companies. We need ads from companies we have never heard of.

Look I’ve been angry as fuck and leftist since I was a teenager. I’ve had 40 fucking years of proof on my plate that Americans are cowed, uneducated, and don’t give a fuck.

No, police don’t need an extra pretext, but I’m saying that these people didn’t just do it, they were influenced by an outside party who wanted it to get chaotic. If they’re letting their emotional state get the better of them, that’s not organized and disciplined.

We should be organized and disciplined, not burning random shit down.

We both agree on that point. I’m arguing that most Americans are too toothelessly undereducated for that to work, because “organization” and “discipline” both require education which most Americans lack, and due to that they’re more likely to be influenced and directed by someone who wants it to get chaotic and bad. (Gee, I wonder if that’s how Trump became President twice?)

If the populace is too stupid to save itself, we’re done for. Because communism from the top-down doesn’t work, it will only ever work when organized from the bottom-up, and that requires so much more education of the general populace. There are no Lenins who will save us, we have to work together to save ourselves.

I’ve put in my time and effort politically with these undereducated cretins. I am tired, exhausted, really. I have more than enough evidence to trust that Americans will never stand up to tyranny and everyone who thinks they will is huffing massive amounts of copium.

US Americans burned down a police station last time Trump was president

So you’re saying that agent provacateur who started smashing the AutoZone windows, giving the cops opportunity to fuck with protestors more and clear out the street in front of said police station, was successful in his plan to make the situation worse?

Because that was the admitted reason the umbrella guy in all black was there to begin with, and after they started the fire in the AutoZone, the police got way more violent and used the firefighters as a barricade. The “fire” and “looting” were absolutely used as pretexts for more violence against the citizens, which would lead the citizens to burn down the precinct. Literally a white supremacist kickstarted this shit with the aim of kicking off a “race war.”

So, all that really proves is Americans are easily tricked by people who want the situation to get worse.

I mean, we’ve had the TSA for how many years now and the 4th amendment against unreasonable search and seizure has been dead in the water for two decades. We’re cordoned off into “Free Speech Zones” miles from the actual event we’re protesting, but sure, Americans will get angry about all of it… eventually!

Meanwhile the non-privacy respecting Bluesky which owes tons of money to *checks notes… Blockchain Capital has millions flock to it while saying “Mastodon is janky and too hard! I don’t want to have to learn things, I want a slick corporate product!” Americans love getting a corporate boot up their ass.

As someone in poverty who has cancer in his forties, you don’t have to lecture me on how uncomfortable things can get in the USA.

I just have never seen anyone in the USA actually care enough and angry young men will let go of the porn if they’re allowed to own and control women.

Breaking point?

You have a lot more faith in Americans than I do.

They’ll never fight back, they’re cowed by creature comforts and things will have to be absolutely bleak for everyone before they wake up.

It will take millions starving. Like it always has in human history.

You can run it on a Pi via Box64. Source: I did it.