blindsight @ blindsight @beehaw.org

Posts

6

Comments

755

Joined

2 yr. ago

Related, The Last Question by Isaac Asimov is a fantastic, timeless science fiction short story.

"She's asking to be objectified."

No, she's not. And this sexist argument needs to stop.

Totally fair, but it's also true that Israel has gained nothing of significance and lost a lot from this war, not getting any of the objectives they set forth.

Unless the actual goal is genocide, in which case they are continuing to "succeed" every day.

Right. That makes sense.

The person you're responding to is talking about when there is a line and it being faster to walk in, though.

Don't forget skimpflation. I can't even eat a lot of the food I used to as a kid because the quality is so terrible now.

Looking at you Tim Hortons.

I don't understand. It's usually faster to park, walk in, place your order, and walk out. Why would being a taxi driver name a difference? You'll be back on the road making money faster if you don't wait in the ridiculous drive through line.

My jaw literally dropped reading that.

I think it's time to go outside.

This sounds like it might be a really interesting book, for anytime interested in politics, American or otherwise. I wonder how closely this parallels to Brexit, the Freedumb Convoy, and QAnon.

I usually don't read books about politics, but this one might be an exception.

Not parent poster, but I'm going to see if I can come up with some.

0: If you get banned from Steam, you lose hundreds or thousands of games.

0.1: You can't use credit card chargeback protection since you will get your account banned.

0.5: If you're blocked by VAC anti-cheat, you're locked out of all your games that use VAC.

1: Steam requiring other storefronts to sell at the same gross price instead of the same price net fees. This means nobody can compete with their 30% cut... On the other hand, they take 0% for activating games sold elsewhere, which kinda balances it. Still, this is probably the biggest barrier that's maintaining their 30% cut.

2: Discoverability since they stopped curating the games list. (Maybe? Not sure if this is a problem, tbh.)

3: Normalizing the concept of games requiring a launcher to run/DRM.

4: Offline play functionality is inconsistent, so sometimes it breaks when people are traveling with no Internet access.

5: Porn games can be seen easily my minors/people who find it offensive.

6: Region-locked censorship, like gore in Germany.

7: Some people would say region-adjusted pricing, but I disagree. Still, might be a valid reason for some.

(Numbering is wonky because I thought of actual real problems later.)

I think I did pretty well! It's hard to find things to fault. It's a pretty great platform.

I expect piracy will be the big winner when it happens.

Exactly my thought. And backing up games and stripping Steam DRM from the games that use it (very easy to do, or so I hear.)

If Valve announces Steam is shutting down (or enshittifies), then everyone who can (and cares) will just backup their games, and everyone else will just download the DRM-stripped versions using their favourite piracy platform.

Right now, it's easier to buy a game on Steam than fuff about with piracy. Even at minimum wage, it's usually cheaper in the opportunity cost of time to just buy games (if you're a patient gamer, at any rate; higher income levels needed for full box price).

EA has made some absolute bangers:

SimCity (1989)
SimCity 2000 (1993)
Dungeon Keeper (1997)
Lots of Ultima games (90s)
The Sims (2000)
Medal of Honor (2000)
Command & Conquer games (early 2000s)
SSX (2000)

... Was Battlefield 2142 (2006) good? They didn't make the first two games.

Does Spore (2008) count? The game was shit, and had DRM that only let you install it 3 times ever per license, and didn't do what it said it would with massive over promise and under deliver. But it was ambitious and different, at least?

Dead Space (2008)
Mirror's Edge (2008)
Dragon Age: Origins (2009)
Mass Effect 2 (2010) (they didn't make 1)
Plants vs. Zombies (2011)

I'm tired of going through this list, lol. There are a zillion "next sportsball version" games and mobile games to sift through. Also, turns out some of the best EA games I remember were only published by them but made by another developer... Until EA bought them out, lol.

Shit. I'll need to check mine tonight. Hopefully, it's not too late to loosen the screws!

Edit: mine is still good. I haven't loosened the screws yet, though...

It might have a chance. If even 100 game owners in France all complain to the regulator, they might investigate and issue a large fine? idk how realistic that is, but it's plausible. Conservatively, if 100K copies sold in France at 50€ a pop (?) that's 5 million €. That might be sufficient precedent to keep other companies from deleting millions of users purchases regularly. It wouldn't cost $5MM to build offline play capability into games, especially if it's designed for it to begin with.

I'm Canadian; I'll do my part once the petition goes live here, but I doubt Canadian regulators will do shit.

Watched the whole thing. I hope this gains traction!

Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do about this yet; I'll set a reminder to check in a month if the petition in my country is active.

I don't think it's reasonable to submit a complaint to the French consumer protection agency since I don't own the game.

Diablo 2 with a mod: Project Diablo 2.

I'd download an offline copy of the wiki, too. And a build guide; 12 hours isn't enough time to come up with a build and play the game!

idk, I think there's more to it than that.

This is another layer of "horse armor MTX", now with selling pay-to-win features in AAA single-player games. In this case, the first (early?) time it's been done, it's "mild", but it's a step in the wrong direction.

I don't like "slippery slope" arguments, in general, but it doesn't cost me anything to boycott this game for having P2W MTX in a full-priced single-player game. If enough people agree, that might send the message to the industry that nickel and diming their customers isn't a good business model.

Edit: Also, not including the MTX in review copies is egregiously sleazy since they were hiding it. Customers couldn't make an informed decision (and their review scores are inflated).

Or, more simply: no cars moving from extreme congestion = no emergency vehicles moving, either.

The infrastructure there can't handle a million people.

You're the first person I've seen say Mario, which I find surprising.

For me, it's Super Mario World, including romhacks. It's platforming perfection. I particularly like the SMW Central level competition compilation romhacks since you can skip the levels you don't enjoy.

Spyro is another one I come back to, especially now with the remastered version.

Diablo 2, with mods now, is another. "Stay awhile, and listen." I sure will, old man.

For a long time, it was Counter Strike and Team Fortress, but I don't really play FPS games any more so it's been almost a decade for me at this point.

I'm really liking Logseq. I started on it instead of Obsidian since Logseq is FOSS. I understand it's not too hard to switch over since they both use markdown files, granted some scripts need to be run to convert markdown differences between the two.

Logseq's business model is to charge $5/mo for syncing on their (fully encrypted with a private key) server, but you can use a FOSS syncing solution (or a property one) if you prefer. I pay to support the project and to simplify sync on work devices I don't have administrator rights on (so most other sync solutions wouldn't work well.)

Simon Tatham's Puzzles is a fantastic set of FOSS puzzle games. They look ugly, but they have easy intuitive controls with good instructions for many different puzzle games. (40, I guess?)