as they are privacy focused and have significantly fewer users, not yet.
but, the more users contributing and making requests, the sooner it could be integrated.
you can help by being one of those users!
wallbase/wallhaven as well
Really wild to see MTG appear to be on the correct side twice in a week. I wonder what the goal of the party is aside from distancing themselves from a losing candidate.
When companies deny us avenues to watch / purchase their products wtf do they expect to happen?
Jesus Christ, content warning for that body count you crossed off at the end there.
Fuck. I miss all those shops. Can I get a R.I.P. for Babbages, Game Crazy (pre-hollywood buyout) and Software Etc... while we're at it?
No sense in not going totally dark here. Haha
Buying stock is a risk. If you don't know what you're buying, don't be surprised when it fails.
I'm exhausted with investors thinking they aren't subject to risk. Fuck em all.
I don't believe for a second it would stop at 4 years. We're looking at a real Putin scenario.
Samuel L. Jackson. The L stands for motherfucker.
How about the harmful effects on adults as well?
"Here's a box for your personal items, Steven will show you out."
Been waiting for the tide to turn on Phil. He's a new breed of shifty corpo and a lot of the communities have been fooled by his "aww shucks, I'm just a gamer too" persona.
You don't get that far at a place like Microsoft without creating some bodies. But, we all want to hope the next guy will be different.
Spoiler: they never are.
I've been remote for close to 10 years. In that time, I've had more personal and professional growth than I ever did the 10 before. There's no conditions that would compel me back to an office with any regularity. These line goes up sociopaths are a lot more bearable over zoom and I'd like to keep it that way.
Motherfuckers need real struggle in their lives if this is the shit they're wasting their time on. Art will be diverse, always has been. Get the fuck over yourself and move on to something that caters to whatever bullshit narrative you need to wake up everyday and be an ignorant piece of shit. I mean, the Bible is a work of fiction that's been whitewashed with a cracker ass jesus, how about we start there?
Apologies for the rant, I usually have this type of nonsense filtered outta my feed.
It's a bummer we can't decline Steam Game updates anymore. That would help avoid these types of situations. Being forced to update a game before launching it was always going to lead to this type of bullshit. Same with all the GTA fuckery.
This is a fun question!
So, in the mid 00's I worked for a pretty large software company doing mid level tech support for enterprise customers. One unassuming weekday, we get a notice that the building is going in to lockdown. Nobody in, nobody out.
Not long after we're told to contact our families and anyone that may be depending on us after work. There's a communication stating "we have a strong reason to believe anthrax was released in the building and no one is leaving until the CDC takes a sample and tests it". Awesome.
After the initial chaos wears down the dawning realization that there are a few hundred (well closer to a thousand of us) now stuck in a multi- building complex with fuck all to do sets in. This is before YouTube really had anything and Netflix was barely serving up a few streaming movies. Plus, there's no way I'm installing Silverlight on my production box. Dark times indeed.
In a stroke of pure luck, I stil had a couple of burned "backups" in my backpack from the previous weekends LAN party (jesus, this story just keeps getting more and more ancient).
A few short moments later and the ISO's were dumped and it was game time. Now, we were all saddled with Dell Optiplexes of some random flavor (620's maybe... this was pushing 20 years ago, details are a little sketchy) so there wasn't much we could really run but anything in a pinch, yeah?
Long story long, I'd spend that time playing C&C Renegade, Quake 3 Unreal Tournament and maybe speed run Duke3D one more time. All while listening to some flavor of Scandinavian metal to truly flesh things out. If that got boring, I'd likely watch Ricky-O again or maybe throw on whatever else I happened to have dumped at the time (likely something from Tartan Asia Extreme or an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm).
Despite what an utter shit show this moment was, I have so many vivid memories of playing those games on the test network with a bunch of other 20 something people barely navigating through life while being scared to death that we may never see our families again.
That and trying to teach Ted how to copy a crack to the install folder... again... wtf man, directions are right there in the readme.nfo
The question is, does the responsibility fall on you to choose games that fit your skill level or the developer to compromise their vision to accomodate a broader audience? Would we take the same stance with other art? I find a lot of Foreign Arthouse Films to be slow paced and unenjoyable. Should the writers and directors be required to make an alternate cut to accomodate my preferences?
My last few Pixels have had a similar option when calling IVR systems. "hold for me" it's labeled as. I still have to navigate the initial prompts but once it's hold time, I hit the button and it sits through the hold music, promoting me once it detects an agent.
It will Speech to Text the menus if you press the option as soon as you dial in. That's a little less useful currently.
One of the things I miss after dropping Graphene on my Pixel 8.
Didn't they just sign a large deal with Remedy? Yikes.
If you look at the overall cost of running a platform though, especially one that does several things, you can see where that 30% becomes viable.
A few things to highlight are, long-term storage and availability of purchases. There is not a single game I have bought on Steam in close to 20 years that I can't still download and play to this day. Many of those are games that are no longer available for sale on the storefront yet valve as a content provider keeps them available to me and likely will in perpetuity.
There's an argument to be made that storage is cheap but they are also storing other people's things that are no longer generating revenue for them. Also, they are providing the bandwidth for us as users to download those games whenever and as many times as we like without concern for how many copies of title sold or who the initial publisher or developer was.
When you look at something like a console provider such as Nintendo or Microsoft who will completely shut down legacy stores, it makes the value of valve taking a unilateral 30% all the more attractive. Anything I buy on Steam I will be able to download and play in perpetuity. That 30% goes to making sure this isn't just for big-name or the current hot shit. This is for everything ever put on their platform.
Sure, in a vacuum 30% seems like a lot but when you consider the overall maintenance costs and the fact that they have seemed to be pretty pro-consumer all along, The intrinsic value in what they're offering becomes a lot easier to see.
Those outlets are now suspect as fuck.
Been using WuTangLan for quite awhile. When I started splitting 5ghz and 2.4, we added MyWiFiFu.
I'm now shitting in my bathtub....
I think the counter arguments from the reddit threads are pretty big points.
Good Battlefield plays like something different than the other major offerings. BF2, BC2 and BF4 are all modern military shooters but they "feel" way different than a CoD or Counterstrike or anything else.
The scale is important but so is the struggle of a tight pitched rush push with limited tickets left. Sure, a good pilot is a pain in the ass, but it's part of what makes Battlefield work. Same with tanks. Man, Golmud and the fucking tanks...
Anyways, just because someone is paid to do something doesn't mean they're an expert in all the relative disciplines. I don't really follow any streamers, but I do work in a pretty specialized industry and know that just because a peer and I are technically in the same field, what we bring to the table, how we approach problems and the way we implement solutions can be wildly different.
Don't ask him the best strats for Quake 3 and don't ask me anything about Counterstrike. Otherwise, you'll be sadly disappointed and end up with a worse experience overall.
I'd like to believe Dice made the best call here, despite what a shit show BF2042's launch was (even if basically every BF launch from 3 on has been fucked). They set the standard for rough launches years ago and yet every new release comes with doomsayers predicting the studio being closed and the game dying. Yet the reality is, they almost always, eventually get their shit together and patch things up to the way it should of been at launch. Just like most other major devs at this point.
I thought for a second this was a c/piracy article about the Netflix price hike.
haha. beautiful
Here a pretty good version of it
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/15/1086605684/try-as-she-might-bram-stokers-widow-couldnt-kill-nosferatu
Reddit used to have a free and open API. This allowed 3rd parties to develop apps / interfaces for the site. These apps helped everything from making the site usable for some with accessibility issues to blocking ads to providing a customized interface to tons of other things.
Generally this was done by taking the API feed and re-engineering it to allow the desired presentation.
In a move to make the company more attractive to investors before going public, Reddit changed that API to a paid model. This meant any developer of those 3rd party apps would now have to pay a not insignificant in most cases fee to continue their access to Reddit. As such, most apps closed down and a very small portion of us long time Redditors migrated to Lemmy/ the fediverse.
Yeah, I remember all of the vitriol we spewed at them when it felt like Steam was first being "shoved down our throats".
But they really are a high-water mark for listening to your customers and acknowledging their feedback to produce positive change for your platform.
Now some 20 years later it really feels like most other interfaces don't provide the level of service and usability that Steam does.
Any complaints and grievances are always valid about their business practices, the percentage cut that they take and all of the other things. You can't however say that the platform hasn't been a boon for PC gaming. Especially on Linux where proton has opened up a whole new world of accessibility especially for games that are too old to run with any sort of consistency on modern Microsoft OSs.
Braindead aka Dead Alive is a classic for gore. It also skews to the comedy side so it's more enjoyable on rewatches.
More recently, The Sadness was pretty nasty but definitely more mean spirited. In that same vein, Headless is pretty nasty as well.
Gore is an interesting thing as it can be a single scene or an overall aesthetic i.e. the Evil Dead from 2013 has an insane amount of blood and violence but it's not outright gore like Rikki Oh and definitely a more pure horror film.
Nazi bullshit isn't free speech. That's a trash argument. You need to look inside and find what part of you is broken if you think otherwise. Fuck Nazi anything. They don't have a right to free speech. They lost that when they became Nazi's.
I miss the flash sales and daily deals. Buying at the right time was a game itself! Plus the 70-90% off sales were fire!
Since we're making unfounded, trash statements.
You're dumb.
Fuck outta here with that astroturfing, neckbeard, neet shit.
Comparative Suffering is close possibly.
https://withtherapy.com/mental-health-resources/what-is-comparative-suffering/
I think these thoughts are a bi-product of empathy. When you are attuned to the pain of others, it can be easy to invalidate your own. I once heard an exchange on public transit where 2 strangers were discussing their hardships and a sort of one upping of trauma was occuring. Eventually one of the participants said "we all feel pain in our own way" and that stuck with me as a tool for understanding my own tendancy to under value the trauma I have experienced throughout life.
Hope that helps provide some insight or a thread to tug at for understanding.
Oh yeah man, GameStop was at the forefront of what the industry as a whole is doing now. Acquiring, consuming, shitting out a husk.
I'm of 2 minds with GameStop nowadays. On one hand, it's somewhat nice to still have a physical game store. On the other, it's fucking GameStop and all the baggage that comes with that.
I don't see much of a future for physical shops at this point. Especially with Best Buy, Walmart and Kroger phasing out retail space.
Soon we'll have nothing but digital and subscription and I guess we'll like it? I'll hold on to my dragons hoard of physical games as long as I can (thanks Game Crazy for employing new throughout high school) but it'll be painful the day I realize I'm no longer adding new stuff to it.
Closures and layoffs are always a terrible thing. My questions are, what accountability is on place for the executives and shareholders that pushed for this expansion with no forethought to the industry stabilizing back to expected growth after the pandemic and how many of these are studios that were directed to creat GaaS and live service trash?
I hope the folks actually effected by these cuta find a better place once the fallout has settled.
A new day has dawned.
Of all those, Rich is the least unexpected.
I run O&O Shut Up 10 on every install of Windows 10 and 11 I need to suffer through. There's still a bit of manual config to remove search bar and other GUI stuff but it's a pretty great, free tool.
You also might want to script it to run on boot as Windows loves to revert changes after updates as another commentor noted.
Mike Judge does it again!
A shit ton of services are down right now. Smells like an attack.