MudMan @ MudMan @fedia.io

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1 yr. ago

How was that your point? You just rephrased the original comment with some different wording.

In what universe would someone have looked at that and gone "ah, some witty commentary on how unnecessarily sarcastic my post was; furthermore, on the inconsistency between my original retort and the subjects of the previous post".

Did you just forget to write that part the first time? Do you think I can read your mind? How was this supposed to work?

You said "there's a person operating the AI" and you referred to separating "the tool from the user".

Please do me a favor and quote the part of that comment that refers to the way the AI is made at all. The point you were parroting was pointing out that the "AI good/bad debate" isn't a judgement of value of the technology underlying the applications, it's an assessment of what the companies making apps with this technology are doing with it on each individual application.

I never brought up the user in this. The user is pretty much neutral. The "person operating the AI" isn't a factor here, it's some constant outside the debate where we assume some amount of people will use the tools provided for them in the way the tools are designed.

Hold on, in this scenario you're mad at the user of the AI app, not at the maker of it?

As in, you're fine with the tools being trained and made as long as people use them right?

I don't think you're aligned with the zeitgeist there.

Negligible amounts of money my ass. I spent as much pocket change as I could get my hands on every day in my local arcade. Back of the envelope, I could have bought a Neo Geo and a copy of the game easily with the coins I dumped into SamSho2 after class (we got kinda competitive on that one). You want to know the worst part? It also led to me paying full price for the crappy home version of SamSho 1 on top. Ditto for Street Fighter 2, although I'm not sure I could have afforded a CPS1 cab.

As for wanting physical gacha banned... well, you're assuming I have a problem with loot boxes, which I don't, particularly. They can be fun. I don't mind them. I don't buy them for real money pretty much ever, but I can dig a gacha game for a bit.

I would age gate both, probably. That seems like a good call. Age ratings exist for a reason. You may be surprised by this, but I also don't have a problem with actual gambling being legal among consenting adults. You're gonna be shocked when you hear how I feel about alcohol and drugs, too.

I'm always weirded out by this because... I mean, from my perspective it's a made up deity anyway, so the idea that they're all worshiping the same one seems a bit needless to me, like nerds trying to reconcile stories from different authors into the same canon.

It's not like they concede that any other deities or metaphisical constructs are more real just because they aren't nominally based on the same entity. These are all exclusive, monotheist religions.

Guess leftists had to learn it from someone.

Things can be newly fucked in new and imaginative ways, but that doesn't preclude things having been fucked in old and imaginative ways. The fuckery mostly just shifts around. Some configurations are worse than others, but a lot of that judgement does have to do with one's perspective, which in turn has a lot to do with what specific pot of slowly boiling water they were raised in as baby frogs.

So no, I do not concede at all that there is a difference between Magic the Gathering packs and loot boxes. They are quite literally modelled on each other. Fun story, as a broke-ass college student I used to work at a comic store/hobby shop. We did keep a catalogue of collectibles we used to trade piecemeal. I'm not sure at all if this was legal in the first place, but we sure did it. It was a big ole accounting book with handwritten card names and prices because I'm old and so is Magic.

I saw kids jonesing for specific things all the time. I once had someone bang on the locked gate to try to get me to sell them CCGs after closing hours like the gacha zombie apocalypse had started. Another time I had a guy, a full on grown man, buy a HeroClix box, walk halfway down the street and then sprint back into the store to show me the rare he had just packed because it was the last of a set or somesuch. I have never stared more blankly.

And yeah, I was there when browser game MTX were all about energy mechanics and I was the quiet old guy in the back pointing out that they were effectively the same as paying for continues in arcades. And I was self-aware enough to realize that didn't mean energy mechanics were particularly good, just that arcades were... kinda exploitative when you think about it. We just didn't think about it that way.

We did think about all the Street Fighter 2 and Resident Evil re-releases, though. People were pissed even at the time. Capcom was the Ubisoft of the mid-90s like that.

So... ok, hold on, this gets complicated.

If I understand this correctly there are three pieces of software here. There's the Switch 1 game, which can be digital or physical. There's the DLC, which is always digital, and there's the Switch 2 expansion, which again can be digital or physical.

So if you buy the physical Switch 2 box you get a cart with the Switch 1 game and the Switch 2 patch in it, but no DLC. Presumably, if you already own the DLC in your account, that's the same SKU, because the base game is the base game, the Switch 2 cart just includes the Switch 2 patch file in there.

Right?

So if you want BotW physically for Switch 2 you ARE rebuying the full game, which is a weird thing to do, but if you own the DLC that's the same DLC for the same base game. Same deal if you buy the expansion separately for your pre-existing game.

If you don't own BotW (or the DLC) this is saying that's not unlocked in the boxed copy, it's available separately.

I think making the Switch 2 version a "GotY edition" pack-in would have been worth it just to avoid people having to do this in their heads to understand what's going on. At the same time I wonder what sort of weirdness happens if you do own the DLC and they put a different DLC key in the cartridge. I mean, they could always just chuck in a download key for the DLC in a printed card inside the box, but I wonder if you can even build that into the cart and keep the same SKU for the Switch 1 game. I genuinely don't know the answer to that.

See, GenZs? This is gonna be you. You're gonna be doing this to justify why your flash games were cool and their gacha crap is crap.

Been happening since books were new technology and it'll keep happening.

I mean, to be clear, nepotism is about hiring relatives (etymologically nephews, not sure if people realize that).

You can be hired on influence rather than skill or qualifications even if you're not blood related. I'm only now realizing that English doesn't have a derisive word for this practice. Other languages do. In fact, had the school been public at least, the hiring process you describe would have been outright illegal where I live.

I think we've stumbled upon one of those cultural differences subtly encoded in language here.

And to be clear, I'm more lenient with it than my compatriots. I find building a team based on personal connection or how well you work with each other, rather than pure objective qualifications, is legitimate and can yield better results in some circumstances. Here it's generally frowned upon culturally if that connection is pre-existing rather than identified through a recruitment process though, family relations or not.

See, that's the opposite. Sheer nostalgia goggles.

I keep reminding people I bought Street Fighter 2 three times at full price AND for a long while before that I paid to play it by the match. Bought multiple expansion packs for shooters from Doom to Half-Life. There were three remasters of Resident Evil in like two years at one point. Sonic 3 came out episodically and they invented a whole cartridge system just so they could sell you physical DLC. Arcades were specifically tuned so you would have to pay more money to keep playing every three minutes on average. They ran studies and playtests with this specific goal in mind. I one had my arcade operator give me a free credit because I was the only one there when he got a new game installed. I played for what he deemed too long, so he went into the system menu in front of me and cranked up the difficulty.

I'm not saying the very olds had it best, I'm saying we ALL have rose tinted glasses. I was out there getting exploited by arcades and Capcom re-releases and it was my dad recoiling in horror. He called it "bug squashing" and kept claiming it was the computer playing, not me.

Igual que los "yankees" con el "a/o", y funciona igual de mal.

The biggest company I worked for was a great place to be, but they were a US company. I kept going to performance reviews, getting managers give me the "good news, you got the big bonus this year". My response was consistently "cool, but I'm a base salary guy, I'd rather just keep doing the same job and getting a base salary bump" and they kept being very confused by this.

Good people, good conditions, I had no complaints, but they just couldn't parse this. They kept explaining to me how big the bonuses could get, I kept not being motivated at all by this.

My PC is made from scraps and some of the hardware isn't that standard. At the same time it's not new, so I'm not giving Fedora a pass, either. It was not waking up from sleep, getting stuck on some power settings, not taking modifications through the GUI and other stuff. I think I have it working now, we'll see.

That was on my third attempt, too. I really don't like distro hopping.

I am screaming into a pillow of art critique frustrations right now.

Okay, look , first of all, that's the point of magazines, they had more than one person in them. There was both some editorial oversight keeping an editorial line AND multiple voices working together, so you were never railroaded into just the one guy. We called those newsletters and the understanding was they were supposed to be obnoxious.

I don't disagree that there is good game critique right now. For every ragebaiting, hyperfocused, the-end-is-nigh culture warrior there is someone who actually knows what they're talking about going "alright, ya chucklefucks, here's the deal". But the point is you don't HAVE to get through one of those to get to the trash. The trash is now algorithmically selected and pushed into your eyeballs, and it's your job to sift through the recommendation engine to personally decide what level of that you want in your life.

You want more than you should. On average, anyway.

With no gatekeepers outside the corpobot gatekeepers there are no concerns but engagement. Hard to get that job done like that, and there's more unexpected damage downstream from that change.

Am I saying that a heavily gatekept media landscape where the reputation of publications drives attention more than specificity and focus? Eh, I'm not NOT saying that. It's hard to argue that the societal outcomes have not been great. And while there's good critique out there it's dense, and dull and itself heavily specialized. Even after we went digital there used to be approachable, good critique, -not "reviews", but critique- in loose, ugly blogs written in good humor with sharp observations and constructive approaches. Newsletters, but good newsletters.

Look, I don't mean it as an insult, but your post is a good example of why there were some positives to having people come for the guides and the "technical reviews" and the personalities and have the rest of the package literally stapled to those. I don't think much of the print world delivered on that potential before the Internet took over. The website-based world had a better go at it, some people did great work. A bunch moved on to make great games from there.

The pivot-to-video, content-as-a-service social media landscape we have today? Nah. Not by itself.

Ah, not being American AOL wasn't much of a thing, on account of the A part. Same principle, though.

Well, for one thing there are plenty of directly purchaseable games on phones these days. I've been handing kids some Peglin and heard no complaints.

For another, 2000s Flash games WERE unskippable ads and yet here we are.

Horrified, you will be. I'm telling you.

Oh, you sweet, sweet child.

I'm just going to say I'm very glad you discovered flash games before you discovered IRC.

Not Macromedia, I'll tell you that.

These days it's all part of the Adobe Standard Model Suite. Can't even get it separately.