Kobolds with a keyboard.
What’s this? You have a problem with Sally Acorn? The female character that wore clothes, but only a vest and boots, pointedly wearing no pants and keeping the front of her vest open? Whose outfit had to be redesigned to be less sexualized, well after the original cartoon aired?
Let’s not forget…
Or…
Notably, the man didn’t get shot, yet he’s still clearly into it. He knew what he was doing when he told Cupid to shoot it. The bear ‘attack’ was just a pretense.
When you carry a ton of feathers, you also have to carry the weight of what you did to those poor birds…
Completely with you here. “I know Trump would be worse for the issue I purport to be the most important to me, but I can’t bring myself to vote for the better of two realistic options because she’s not perfect, so I’m voting for Jill Stein.” It’s completely nonsensical, and honestly, I have zero respect for anyone who would actually knowingly make that decision.
everything else is small potatoes….
I disagree. It’s all small potatoes compared to climate policy; if we don’t address that, Israel, Palestine, Russia and Ukraine will be fucked, as will all the rest of us. Trump is markedly worse there, so really, it should be no contest.
Look, I get the outcry over this issue, but here’s the thing: Biden isn’t Kamala, and all of this rhetoric is acting like she is. Additionally, Congress passes the budgets that determine where this aid goes, not the president. Furthermore, it’s obviously a hotbutton issue on both sides and chances are she and her team of professionals analyzed the chances of she denounces Israel vs. doing what she’s doing, and determined they’d be better if she took this stance. While I agree that I’d rather see a stronger denouncement of Israel, really, what I actually want is for Trump to lose this election, and any course of action that has the greatest chance of making that happen, I am in favor of.
Let’s talk about Harris’s policy other than Israel. What do you disagree with? It must be a considerable amount if you’re making this comparison, so let’s discuss it.
You’re the hero the internet needs.
Yeah, and at that point I’ll also just wait for a 50% off sale, whereas I would otherwise have been a day 1 purchase.
I feel like this happens a lot, honestly - there’ll be a game I’m really excited for, and either it’s got some shitty DRM, or it’s a timed Epic exclusive, or whatever else, and then a few months later when I could be playing it, I’ve mentally moved on to other things and I end up just buying it much later on deep sale if at all.
There’s a lot of games coming out all the time; if I get past that initial hype period around launch without buying a thing, it’s 50% or more off, or I won’t buy it at all.
It’s really a shame, because I was super excited for MH:Wilds, but the confirmation that it will include Denuvo killed my enthusiasm completely.
They’re just being passive aggressive. “I know the way… but I’m sure as fuck not showing you, scrub.”
The geography is also a huge contributor. To protest something on a national scale needs significantly greater buy-in from the country as a whole than protesting something on a national scale in a European country. We have a huge amount of land area over here and with the exception of major cities, we’re very spread out.
Spain is one of the larger European countries, and is about 500k sq. km, as an example. The US is about 9.1 million sq. km.
Protests happen on local scales but they don’t make national news, only the really massive ones do, and those require a lot of coordination and time investment from the participants just to show up.
It’s all just framing, no? You could frame all of your examples of protesting to “improve something” as protesting against something, and vice versa.
Protesting for improved living conditions is just protesting against poor living conditions. Protesting for higher wages is protesting against low wages. Protesting for lower tuition costs is protesting against high tuition.
Protests by definition are an action objecting to a thing. What are you seeing happen in other countries that’s so different to what’s happening here, when you don’t selectively frame it as “for” a cause rather than “against” a thing?
I’m not going to purchase the document to find out, and the abstract doesn’t really cover it, but I’m curious what the methodology was here. I seriously doubt that piracy is that prevalent. It’s possible that people are upset with certain companies and aim to pirate their games, and the fact that those companies are the same ones that use Denuvo is happenstance. It’s also possible that they’re using total downloads of pirated copies vs. total sales as their statistic, which is misleading, because I’d wager the majority of folks who pirate the game would not have purchased it if it wasn’t available to download for free.
I’d also be curious if the price of the game was a factor; I imagine more people are looking to pirate a game priced at $70 than one priced at $40, for example.
Really, there’s too many factors to consider here and I don’t think there’s a reasonable way to say how many folks who pirated a given game actually would have purchased it.
This is the shit government should be working to correct, if they weren’t all in it for the money just as much as the corporations.
Corporations and the general population have an innately antagonistic relationship. Corporations want to make as much money as possible, the general population wants to spend as little as possible, so their goals are diametrically opposed. (I’m pooling Uber drivers in with the general population here, because they’re in the same position - being opposed to Uber’s goals.)
Corporations inherently hold more power in this relationship; they have more money than even large groups of individuals, so they can hire expensive teams of lawyers and accountants and professionals of all kinds to further their goals, while it’s difficult if not impossible for normal folks to organize against a corporation in any meaningful way.
In a system that worked, the government would be working to protect the population from corporate interests. They’d be spending the bulk of their time identifying and closing loopholes like this one, and enacting laws to make exploiting these loopholes not worth it, and generally would be the arm of the people.
Instead, corporations pay government, and the government looks the other way - if not directly supports them - while they fuck over everyone they can - and the planet, while they’re at it -to reap wealth. And this shit is the result.
I’d actually be interested to see a cost breakdown between this and just buying a newspaper subscription; it looks like he spent about $100 on materials, plus then there’s the ongoing costs of electricity (negligible), printer ribbons, and paper. Ribbons appear to be about $1 / ea if you buy in bulk, and I don’t recall how much printing you get out of a single ribbon, but let’s assume a 24 pack is enough to last you a year. Paper seems to be about $30 / 1000 sheets, so assuming he sticks to the single-page-per-day format, that’ll last almost 3 years.
So up front costs, $100 Ongoing costs, $35 / year, roughly.
Newspaper subscription is about $150 / year, so this’ll actually be cost effective if he keeps it up. Of course, you’re getting a lot less news than you would from a newspaper subscription, so the relative value is questionable there.
I swear some of those long-form video essays on games have longer runtimes than it would take to just play through the game from start to finish, but that’s okay, I’m still here for it. Love me some excruciatingly in-depth analysis of video game minutia.
is it possible to lose the de jure right to install the game in that way due to licensing issues on GOG’s end
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that no, you can’t. When you buy the game, you’ve obtained a perpetual license to install and play that game, similar to what you’d have if you bought the game on a disk. You can lose your ability to download the game, that isn’t guaranteed to be unlimited or perpetual, but installing it via the installer you downloaded, and playing it once you do, are forever. (This is in contrast to something like Steam, where you rely on their servers granting you permission to install the game, and that permission can be revoked.)
The example in the article reduces a recipe print from 47 pages to 1 by using AI to remove all of the filler garbage and leaves just the recipe instructions. Slightly different than just rearranging elements.
I’m still going to question it. We’re literally living through it and I don’t understand it.