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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I watched Apocalypto for a school paper at age 15 (from a list of options given to me), and honestly I think some softcore porn would have been better. Some rated R stuff is fine for a kid to watch, Apocalypto definitely wasn’t.

    Also that same year I researched and did presentations on Chinese history (was a prehistorical to maybe a couple hundred years ago timeline) and at least in my research I covered things like the foot tying thing (to make feet smaller) and that didn’t prepare me for the scene in Marco Polo (I think on Netflix) where that happened (and I didn’t finish the episode or continue the series because it’s just too fucked up).

    Porn can be fucked up, some porn is definitely NSFL, but there are a lot of things that are so much worse than the average porn site.

    I wish they actually tried to “protect the children” but the politicians are very clearly not.





  • Can the Portal really be called decent quality if it’s on a short tether and is beat for quality by nerds on the internet who made Chiaki?

    To me it felt like the Portal was a limited-usage first-party cash grab, and as a Wii U owner that’s saying something (the extra screen was honestly not worth the space it took up, the money and materials would have been better spent elsewhere).

    Most of my experiences with my first-party PlayStation related hardware and software has been mediocre at best, and that includes the operating system on something like the PS4.

    Perhaps I am just jaded after my collective Sony experienced, but I think that Sony could have created an actually decent product, but instead they saw a nice handheld gaming device and wanted to try to muscle their way into the market without putting in the effort or money to make it even as good as the Wii U controller.


  • There’s a difference between calling Gabe Newell pro-consumer (not what I said), and saying he and his company make pro-consumer choices (moreso recently than in the past).

    I can’t really come up with anything Epic has done that is actually pro-consumer, and no “trying to create a competitor to Steam” isn’t pro-consumer when the way they did it was very anti-consumer (just look at all the Kickstarters they swept up and made exclusives even after they had publicly promised Steam keys — it’s not like Epic couldn’t have added clauses to exempt Kickstarter backers from the exclusivity restrictions) or very intentionally locking people to one platform by force. Their support of anything non-Windows for anything besides Unreal is terrible.


  • Honestly saying that Steam killed physical ownership of games and citing HL2 is a poor example. Just off the top of my head Blizzard beat Valve to this with World of Warcraft. You could buy a physical copy but you couldn’t play it without their servers. Keys were locked to a single account as far as I’m aware.

    Ultimately physical size constraints lead to the demise of physical purchases. That said, Valve in theory has a set-up to allow us to retain our games even if they disappear one day. How that works or how long it would take to happen is a different story, but they do apparently have something like a kill-switch in place.

    TF2 was certainly the first major western game to have loot boxes, but extremely similar gacha systems already existed before this. It would be disingenuous to blame Valve for this, they just hopped on the train.

    MFN clause is really only an issue if it can be proven that it is in place for anticompetitive reasons, and Steam’s rule is not completely inflexible. Also, if the copy is being sold without Steam integration, fine, I can totally see why you shouldn’t need price parity — but if you were to sell a Steam key price parity is entirely fair since the end user is getting access to Valve’s servers. Also if a developer sold a game for the same price with no Steam integration on somewhere like GOG, Valve wouldn’t be getting any cut, the developer would just be making more money (though ironically with less feature integration, it’s not like Steam doesn’t add value).

    On the flip side instead of acting like we said all of Valve’s decisions were pro-consumer and cherry picking a few decisions that aren’t, I can cite:

    • Valve’s work on Wine/Proton
    • the open SteamOS
    • repairability and part availability and compatibility for SteamDeck
    • all of the features Valve adds to Steam and the improvements they’re making over time (it has gotten better), Steam is arguably easier to use and functionally superior to something like EGS
    • the community marketplaces and discussion boards that Steam hosts
    • their work to support users on a variety of platforms with things like Steam Link and even cross-platform support for their utilities and games

    It’s really not like they do literally nothing that is pro-consumer.


  • I don’t think it’s Linux.

    I think Tim Sweeney is just like all of the big publicly traded companies where they do not want the best thing for their customers and only want to control them.

    Valve, and thus Gabe Newell, is actually making pro-consumer choices, which is success that Tim Sweeney wants.

    I think the grudge is against Gabe Newell and Valve.

    There is a chance that Tim Sweeney would actively shit on Linux anyway, since that would reduce control over consumers (and yes with all of the deceptive practices Epic does and how they fight lawsuits in court, they definitely are not trying to give control to the users).




  • The (my) comment that you responded to presented you a list of actual monopolies that have no alternatives on their platform. There was no “logic” presented, it was a statement of observation.

    The existence of the lawsuit does not mean there is proof, it means that Wolfire has enough of a case to begin discovery on two of their claims that the court is interested to find out more. That’s it.

    One of the claims is also very weird and I can’t actually find any information corroborating the claim besides the claim itself (re: Valve acquiring and shutting down World Opponent Network). The only thing I see is that Sierra was acquired by Havas who made WON into it’s own entity, then merged it with PrizeCentral under the name Flipside.com and the last WON game was released in 2006.

    The only thing relating to Valve I can see is that Valve announced Steam in 2002 and then they removed WON from their own games, which they had every right to do so.

    WG’s strongest claim is the MFN clause, and they actually have to prove that it’s for anticompetitiveness.







  • A more granular view of your actual traffic/usage habits.

    Let’s say a page you visit embeds a Tweet, you’ll end up firing off a DNS request for twitter.com, and at least one request to load data from Twitter.

    Now let’s say you actually use Twitter. The DNS request will be the same, and you will have many requests to Twitter to load data.

    In both situations a DNS request is sent off, so the DNS provider knows you probably loaded something but they are going to have a harder time understanding if you are a Twitter user or if you are just frequenting a website with Twitter embeds. However the network provider that can see to what servers the HTTPS request for data are going will see just how often you are actually connecting to Twitter and the size of the transferred data and can build an incomplete but still far more detailed picture of your habits, and they would be able to tell the difference between an only-embed viewer and a regular Twitter user.

    Additional dystopian future possibility:

    Also, for anyone with objectively nefarious future goals, even if the data is encrypted, if one day we are indeed able to break encryption en masse the DNS provider can’t decrypt data they don’t have but the network provider definitely could.