How to actually do games preservation:
Reform IP laws.
Mandate open sourcing of hardware and software architectures after some period of time. 10 years? 5 years after no more of that hardware/software is sold? Yes texhnicalities are insanely complicated but you get the idea.
Oh, how about government funding for emulator development? We fund libraries that preserve books, and movies, and other stuff.
Hit detection doesn’t work, going into pure darkness makes the AI hallucinate to the point it distorts the map layout, npcs will teleport around ot just disappear… runs at like 640p at maybe 20 fps, textures are a blurred indistinct mess…
Oh and it requires basically a super computer to run this.
Brilliant.
Gaming has not been ‘fine’ since:
Hypercaptialist corporate acquisitions have basically bought all recognizable IP/dev studios and manage them under an increasingly smaller number of actual parent companies who own increasingly huge numbers of IPs/dev studios, and then basically all of these companies are absurdly mismanaged by corporate nonces who make bank, and game devs are routinely overworked and underpaid.
MTX became the new norm / the mobile gaming scene exploded (basically concurrent phenomena)
Nvidia/Unreal decided that actually, having efficiently coded lighting that runs on moderately priced hardware is stupid, what you actually want is horrifically inefficient lighting that runs on absurdly expensive hardware, and then Nvidia plasters a bunch of AI Frame Gen/Upscale all over that foundation to further enforce their monopoly.
… Like, yes, there are still great indie or AA games, but those are the exception to the rule.
The overall industry is a fucking nightmare for anyone who works in it, and from the consumer perspective, we keep getting overpriced, overproduced iterations of the same basic game… sandwiched on the other side by an avalanche of garbage tier indie slop/scams. Something like 80 to 90 % of the games listed on Steam are that, and they are constantly fucking with their algorithms to be able to actually detect them and filter them.
… It also doesn’t even matter if you personally will never own a high end gaming PC.
All the AAA game dev studios need them to develop the games. And now those are all 30% more expensive, at least. Oh and all of the employees cost of living just jumped 30% as well, I am totally sure that their wages will increase to compensate this. Oh wait no, they’ll actually lay them off even faster and exploit them even harder.
Game dev in America is going to largely grind to a halt, with again, the exception of a few, now even smaller in number, amount of new games that can be developed with much less powerful hardware, or an even smaller number of AAA titles that quintuple down on MTX, addiction based pricing models.
But uh hey, basically every other industry in America is utterly fucked too.
Leisure/luxury expenditures crater the hardest during a depression. Which is what we are looking at. Not a recession for a year or two, no, this is a gonna be a decade of you learning how to cook with rice and beans, sewing your clothes back together because you can’t buy new ones, where your Xmas gift to your kid is decent shoes, not a game console.
Sorry to hear you’re in a similar situation with family, but at the same time, happy to hear your story, to commiserate, to have an impromptu therapy session haha.
I had a hunch, looks like I was basically right.
I… come from a family that’s… well let me just put it this way:
The last time I talked to my dad, I think 3 years ago now at this point, he was fully, fully down the QAnon rabbit hole, told me about how Tom Hanks’ son rapes and kills children, after extracting their adrenochrome… and he then proceeded to show me how he partially mills, taps, and assembles AR 15s and 18s in his garage, having sourced parts that don’t have serial numbers… thats what you call a ghost gun.
He is exactly the kind of person that does these 180 flip flops and … either doesn’t remember he did, or has an elaborate nonsensical excuse/explanation.
I am unfortunately way, way too familiar with basically nearly every right wing conspiracy theory that’s existed in the last 40 years.
… I actually have Jewish cousins, and … yeah, basically since as long as I can remember, he’s made bigoted ‘jokes’ either behind their backs or occasionally even actually at family functions.
My dad is my archetype for MAGA people: an abusive alcoholic narcissist asshole with no friends, who is never wrong, proficient in gaslighting, life didn’t go the way he wanted it to, and it’s all the fault of whoever right wing AM radio/ Fox News/ insane facebook posts and shit tier ‘journalist’ grifters told him to be mad at in the last week.
… thats all probably a bit more info than necessary, but I’m still pretty traumatized from a life time of that, and venting helps lol.
I don’t think that’s what is meant by that comment.
Back about a decade ago now, the USS Liberty ‘incident’ was a bugaboo of Alex Jones and many other right wing conspiracy theorist types…
…who were correct in that yes, that is a thing that happened, it was basically covered up for decades, and almost no one knew about back in the 00’s and 10’s, and that the Israeli government and AIPAC have a huge amount of influence over US politicians and political discourse generally…
… but were very incorrect in then just slap dashing it into their growing conspiracy centric view of the entire world, which very, very often actually was just anti-semitic generally, utterly oversimplifying and overnarrativizing their understanding of ‘how things actually work’ into insane nonsense.
Fast forward 10 years, and basically all the people that were really concerned about the USS Liberty attack, you know, anti-Israeli government/military… well now they are basically all ardent Trump supporters, they all love violent Israeli genocidal expansionist Zionism, but also somehow simultaneously think Trump is … anti-war or something?
I am of course guessing and cannot read Birch’s mind… but yeah, if you come from a right wing upbringing and then later realized how bs that worldview is, like myself, and possibly like Birch…
It is indeed quite notable how much of a total 180 shift that is, amongst the right wing conspiracy theory types, and I think that is what they are referring to.
I don’t think they are saying that those (mostly liberals, progressives and leftists) who’ve been vocally opposed to the Israeli genocide of Gaza (and everything else its now grown into) in the past few years suddenly changed their opinions about that in the last few months.
No problem!
Wonderful username btw, haha.
Not a VPN, but you may also want to look into I2P.
https://proprivacy.com/privacy-service/guides/i2p-guide
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FNp0TRDG0BQ
Basically, a p2p protocol for the entire internet.
Its considerably more complicated to set up than most modern VPNs, where nowaday’s its usually as simple as install an app with a GUI, verify some settings and you’re good to go, and i2p is also quite slow…
… but its totally free, and you can torrent over it, and as far as I know, if you’ve set it up properly, it is basically undetectable by ISPs, due to how it uses ‘garlic’ routing: basically, a whole bunch of users net requests are encrypted, anonymized, and then smashed into a big packet… so an ISP would have to untangle all of that for every packet, and afaik, none of them have figured out how.
I2P would obviously be horrible for watching streaming content though, snail speed.
In case people missed or are unaware of the context:
https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/2024/doj-google-must-divest-chrome-possibly-android-google-fires-back
https://www.howtogeek.com/united-states-doj-google-android-chrome-split/
The DoJ recently (before Trump got elected) won an anti-trust lawsuit against Google, and the lawsuit is currently in the stage of haggling over the extent of the penalty actions taken against Google as a result.
One of the things the DoJ is pushing for is breaking off not only Chrome but also Android from Google to just leave Google with its search stuff.
This is like splitting up Bell from decades ago.
What Google is doing right now is strategic positioning to be able to argue that Android can’t be split off from Google without causing them too much pain, and by making Android more and more dependent on, and nonfunctional without being under the same corporate ownership.
This is a powerplay to try to not be broken up so hard by the anti-trust lawsuit they already lost.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2020)
The actual penalty ruling is expected to come down by August 2025… unless the Trump admin fucks with it, somehow they… haven’t seemed to yet notice or care that this lawsuit is going on, despite Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, having a literal front row seat at Trump’s inauguration.
Link to the song, for those who don’t know the reference.
Its actually perfect. No notes. No possible improvements.
This deserves some kind of award.
Did… did people not know this?
I mean, I guess this is a study of how widespread it is, but this shouldn’t be news to anyone.
Apps have been doing this for about a decade, either more precisely determining your location when GPS location is on, by checking it against known stationary wifi and bluetooth things that come into range, or even just guessing your location with GPS off via the same thing.
Most people just blindly give every app every permission it asks for, just like most people don’t read ToS.
You can either deny unnecessary permissions for each app, or just have wifi/location/bluetooth off if you’re not actually using them, and/or keep reseting your ‘advertising id’… or just run in airplane mode as a kind of ‘do not disturb’ mode.
Of course… if apps are actually circumventing those above methods of mitigation, permissions management etc, … well then they are malware.
Apparently 19% of the apps use methods that are so explicit that they probably violate the Google Play Store’s TOS, but 86% of them use methods that are basically allowed.
EDIT: Err, 86 - 19 = 67% use ‘allowed’ methods, a total of 86% use any method from their closed source, built in SDKs.
All malware imo, hooray for closed source proprietary software (the sdks built into the apps are closed source), you can totally trust them lol.
Removed by mod
You said ‘we are in agreement’ to my last post in this thread, and my last post in this thread pointed out that all of those scenarios are terrorism with the definition that you chose as ‘pretty much the definition of terrorism’.
So yes, you did agree.
But now you don’t agree, but also do not disagree.
… Could it possibly be the case that the definition of terrorism you chose is a bit too broad?
Great!
I am glad you agree that by your (the FBI’s current) definition, most police in the US are terrorists, every President going back to at least JFK is a terrorist, everyone who violently resisted the Nazis were terrorists, and every single protest everywhere, ever, that has involved any single member of that protest being charged with resisting arrest has also been terrorism.
Well you accused me of whataboutism, so I explained how… yeah you could see it that way if you only look at the surface, but it’s really a way of illustrating a more complex idea.
And well, here you go again, attempting to distill everything into neat, simple little boxes.
Twice now I quite literally explained to you how context is important in … you know, definitions, which literally are a network of syntactic associations that are context… and now you’ve selectively replied by removing all of the context I gave.
So uh, yes, I’m glad we’ve cleared up that you are definitionally a simpleton, only insterested in very surface level, simple understandings of things.
When the person that started this thread said ‘property damage is not violence’, they likely (I can’t read minds, but I’ve got a hunch) meant that property damage is not of the same magnitude of severity, does not or should not be judged by the same set of standards as violence directly against a person, that the entirety of a scenario involving violence should be considered when assessing it.
IE, they’re using shorthand, and I attempted to unpack some of that shorthand for you.
Sort of like how the colloquial definition of ‘theft’ generally includes shoplifting, but generally excludes wage theft by employers, despite wage theft being of considerably greater monetary magnitude than shrink loss.
If you want ‘a definition’ of violence that doesn’t include property damage, here you go:
Violence is any act that causes direct harm to a thing capable of suffering.
Now you can point out how that’s a flawed definition, and I will redirect you to my comments on your own flawed and favored definition of terrorism from the FBI, and my own previous attempts at better defining violence, and then maybe we can have the actually interesting conversation about violence and property that you’ve thus far done your damndest to avoid.
Oh, are you asking me, personally, for a definition of violence, just flat out, with no context?
I’d say violence is anything that causes unnecessary suffering to a living being, or significant damage to a nonliving thing.
What exactly do I mean by that?
Well, its quite context dependent.
Is burning down a Tesla dealership violent?
Sure!
Is a lesser act of violence in pursuit of a reduction of much, much greater violence justifiable?
Again, context matters, but generally speaking, the world is built upon violence, people just disagree about when it is justified.
If a man has pummeled you with hammer blows, you’d be justified in doing some violence back to him to get him to stop.
If a cartoon supervillain has become either the most or second most poweful man in the world, he has a history of and declared intention to commit mass systemic violence against hundreds of millions of people… and burning down some of his shittily designed and built self-immolating cars stands a good chance at knocking him, his grip on the minds of his idiot sycophants, and his overall level of power and influence down a peg?
When there are no ‘legitimate’ means that will effectively do this, effectively lessen his capacity to do violence against millions?
When this harms only things directly, and not people? When those things are overpriced luxury items?
Well, I’d rather not keep taking the hammer blows.
If you’ve got a more peaceful way to stop the hammering, I’d love to hear it… but my bones are breaking.
Its an Anarchist thing, you wouldn’t get it.
Super simple version?
Violence is defined by the state in such a way that it binds the actions of its subjects, but exempts the actions of itself/its agents.
Look up ‘systemic violence’ or ‘stochastic terrorism’ and you can begin to see how it becomes harder to draw very clear lines than you seem to think is.
Lets go with your definition that violence includes acts against property.
Ok… are… taxes violence?
Is it violent to threaten you with immediate arrest if found operating a car without a valid liscense?
Howabout valid insurance?
Is civil asset forfeiture violence?
Is emminent domain violence?
Howabout clearing a homeless encampment, destroying all their belongings?
Is that violent?
Is it violent to, either intentionally or unintentionally… crash the stock market and knock about 20% off of the value of 401ks of the majority of the population?
Reminder that involuntary assault and involuntary murder / manslaughter… are violent crimes.
… The most basic definition of what a State is, is “a formalized group that has the ‘legitimate’ monopoly of the use of force (violence) within a defined geographic area.”
There we go, hahah!
For what its worth, CyberPunk 2077 is … an alt history that diverges from our own … at some point in the 1960s I think?
Like… the Soviet Union still exists. In 2077.
Point being: The ‘Japanese megacorps taking over much of the American economy’ fear of our own 1980s is very, very much a big part of the lore/universe.
Pondsmith published the first version of the lore in 1988 as the TTRPG ‘Cyberpunk’, originally set in 2013, and this kept getting added to and expanded with subsequent editions.
Arasaka is… well hopefully without spoiling too much, Arasaka corp is basically run by a Japanese fighter pilot ace who pretty much swore eternal vengeance on America after Japan got nuked and lost the war, and his idea of how to do this includes figuring out how to become immortal, so that he can continue to run a megacorp that ultimately usurps American sovereignty and turns the country into his neo-corpo-feudal subjects.
You can get almost all of that by playing through the Corpo intro character path and actually watching the informative slideshow thing in the elevator and on walls/screens in the … megalobby, so hopefully thats not too spoilery.
Also in Die Hard it is Nakatomi Plaza iirc, Nakatomi being the name of the fictional Japanese corp.
Anyway woo random trivia.