MudMan

What nobody is saying is that if you go into a test with a near-empty ink cartridge your hipsterism has outpaced your skill.

Refill that stuff going in or bring a second pen, you pleb.

Man, I’ve had two separate devices fail to install updates the last week, leading to tons of weirdness and troubleshooting. I even had to chkdsk c: /F at one point like a neanderthal.

I have enough coomputers laying around that I’d move more of them to other OSs, Linux included if I hadn’t tried that and found it as much or more of a hassle in those specific machines, be it compatibility issues or just fitness for the application. I’m not married to Windows at all, but there are definitely things that are much easier to handle there, which does justify sticking with it through the reinstalls and awkward weirdness on those.

Hi, yes, I’m here. The user. Of both, in fact.

Both Bluesky and Mastodon have their quirks and their different cultures. The feature sets of their protocols may also be different, but they sure aren’t relevant to the experience at all, because federation is not a user-facing feature for the vast majority of the social media experience.

Stop cheerleading for social networks. Social networks are not your friends, including Mastodon or the rest of the “fediverse”.

I was ready to be mad at you for making me google it, but it turned out to be the same iusnaturalist bullcrap that was already centuries out of date when I studied that stuff and had memory holed, so… meh.

Fond memories of my college years, though. Feeling young and smart and so, so intellectually superior by pointing and laughing at those guys because back then we all thought things were mostly going to get better looking forward. Good times.

That is most likely going to generate less revenue than promoting donations, or a comparable amount at best. WinRAR is the meme example.

From a PR and marketing perspective, if I wanted to maximize my revenue as a single developer I would set up a Patreon or encourage recurring donations through the software by providing bragging rights stuff (merch, insider access, early access to unfinished builds and so on). Single mandatory payments simply reproduce the piracy/license access of commercial software and shaming people into paying without coercion just makes you seem less appealing to people who would donate anyway.

Ah, welcome time traveller. Can you take me back to 2008 with you? It was so much nicer there.

Seriously, every multiplayer game I’ve played the last few years has cross-platform play, both them and Sony have been making PC ports for ages and the reason I own a Series X is that it’s quietly the best set-top media player out there, price-to-performance, and a cheap, convenient platform to play games on a TV.

I mean, if this is a prelude to them no longer making hardware I’d be bummed out, but not for those reasons.

No, listen, get with the program. You’re supposed to be very, very mad that a brand is losing its exclusives. You’re also supposed to be very, very mad if any PC storefronts ever fund a game to sell as an exclusive, unless they’re Steam. You’re also never supposed to acknowledge the contradiction.

You’re being a gamer wrong.

“Unknown” goes from 3 to 6% in the same time period, so I think technically it’s the year of the Unknown desktop. Sounds catchier, if you ask me.

Oh, yeah, for sure. The marketing they did for Guardians was also very bad, it really made it seem of a kind with Avengers, which it really wasn’t.

There will be a lot to say about why Rocksteady is getting to the looter shooter space so late and why it was the exact wrong move for the studio and the franchise. Unless the game is great and everybody buys it, I suppose.

Oh, big difference there, though. Suicide Squad actually IS a looter shooter driven by a wish to chase a business trend from five years to a decade ago. Guardians is a strictly single player Mass Effect-lite narrative action game (which yeah, given the material that fits).

I’d be with you in the argument that it would have been an even better game without the Marvel license, because then they could have skipped trying to rehash bits from the movies’ look and feel, which are consistently the worst parts of the game. But then, without the license it would never have been made, so… make mine Marvel, I guess. Well worth it.

Nah, I’m mostly kidding. About the being my enemy part. The game is, in fact, awesome, and you should fetch it somewhere before the absolute nightmare of licensed music and Disney IP bundled within it makes it unsellable on any digital platform forever.

Seriously, I bought a physical copy of the console version just for preservation, beause if you want to know what will be in the overprized “hidden gem” lists of game collectors in thirty years, it’s that.

Well, then you’re my enemy, because that game is great, Marvel connection or not. In fact it’s a fantastic companion piece ot the third Guardians movie, because they’re both really good at their respective medium but they are pushing radically oppposite worldviews (one is a Christian parable, the other a humanist rejection of religious alienation).

And yeah, holy crap, they made a Marvel game about grief and loss and managing them without turning to religion and bigotry and it was awesome and beautiful and nobody played it and you all suck.

Well, it depends on when they cancelled it and on how much it cost. That thing didn’t sell THAT poorly, but Square, as usual, was aiming way above what’s realistic. Estimates on Steam alone put it above 1 million copies sold. You can assume PS5 was at least as good.

Based on those same estimates it actually outsold Guardians. Which is an absolute travesty and I blame anyone who hasn’t played it personally.

Hey, at least that game came out. Plus Eidos Montreal also made the actually really, really damn good Guardians of the Galaxy game nobody played. I’d make that trade.

Man, these guys really can’t catch a break. That sucks, they make pretty solid stuff.

I am honestly not super sure about this strategy of buying your way into being a major publisher by vacuuming up IP nobody else was bidding for. What did they think would happen? Did they think the old majors were leaving a ton of money on the table and then realized too late that these really weren’t that profitable? Or was it just a bid that the low interest rates would last forever and the portfolion would just pay for itself if they bundled it large enough?

I don’t know what the business plan was meant to be, and it’s kinda killing me that I don’t fully grasp it.

The only one remotely close to being a hit was the first reboot. I guess it depends on whether you count the “I can’t believe it’s not Deus Ex” franchises they kept spinning up for a while. The first Dishonored probably did very well.

Right? I’m guessing this is a teenage thing and we the olds just don’t understand?

I mean, I keep track in the sense that I’m introverted enough to never, ever, ever call anybody socially unless I have a practical reason, but that’s why social media, group chats and extroverted people exist.

No, hey, let me be clear, I don’t think you’re actively an ideologue, but you can absolutely disagree or actively advocate against it and still have your worldview filtered through that lens. None of us is immune to their context or their upgringing, least of all me.

What I do say is that the notion that “it’s not free, it all comes from taxes” is a very active framing, and it comes from an anarchocapitalist perspective, whether you agree with it or not. Yes, there is a cost to public services. And yes, you do have to tax people to fund the government that is meant to provide those services, but paying taxes isn’t the same as paying for a service, and public services aren’t “services you pay with your taxes”, they’re… well, public services.

And in the same vein, having an industry built on tipping is not sustainable and yeah, it’s a fairly (anarcho)capitalist perspective. Screw tips. You can contribute to an open source project, be it with cash, work, promotion or whatever, but you’re definitely not obligated to do so and that systemmust work within those parameters. FOSS is not software paid in tips, that’s not the point. It may be crowdsourced, but that’s not the same thing.

So hey, I get it, you don’t ideologically support those things, consciously. If you take anything from my comment let it be that you’re still thinking about it from that framework and there are other ways to frame it. You’re right that eventually the money has to come from somewhere, but how you frame the situation impacts which somewheres you’re willing to explore.

Yeah, for sure. I’m just wary that the line between cynicism and defeatism is thin, and defeatism leads to conformism.

If the system relies on integrity, it will fail. If it relies on shame or moral obligation it will fail. There is a reason on the other side of the fence they couldn’t root out piracy until they started providing more convenient (but more expensive) alternatives. If you rely on people feeling “obligated” to pay, they either won’t pay anyway or won’t use the software. That’s not a viable option.

So you’re left with the other option. Whether one agrees that FOSS is “broken” or not, the only way to make the system sustainable is… well, to make it sustainable. If that means enacting political change, then that’s where the effort should go.