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’m not sure about the digital-only stuff, but the OP is specifically talking about yt-dlp as an alternative to ripping the BRs, and I have to agree that ripping the disks will be easier and yields better results.

Hardware availability is the trickiest part, especially for UHD, but if you have a drive that will deal with the disks you have I certainly wouldn’t bother with the stream rip.

But hey, as a fallback, it’s good to have the option.

For straight revenue, yeah, that’d be right. Technically everything else is a rounding error. But if Epic was one of those single game unicorns like Riot or Rovio this would not make much sense. The synergies of Unreal with both the movie and theme park buisness for Disney seem like a better fit. I mean, assuming the move makes actual sense, Disney is out there talking about game collaborations and it’s not like it’s the first time they’ve spent money randomly and poorly in the gaming business. I just think the investment would make sense even if Fortnite wasn’t in the mix.

And either way it’s being blown out of proportion by the news because they haven’t even bought the company. 1.5B is what? 10% as much as Tencent owns?

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.

I… yeah, what? Disney is what does it? You were cool with Tencent, Sony, Lego, the massive fine for mishandling underage information? Disney. That’s your line.

Alright.

Hah. The framing from normie news is so weird. It’s “bizarrely Disney is investing on Fortnite”, instead of “Disney buys a stake on the people making Unreal, which at this point is like half of their and everybody else’s VFX pipeline”.

I wonder if the gaming news guys will have a better picture or the “Disney Fornite whaaaa?!” angle is what people will take away from this across the board.

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.

It’s all usable when you get used to it, but this is a great thread to link for people who develop scripting and programming languages, or just text-based technical interfaces. Because yeah, all that crap is designed with the US layout in mind and screw whoever chooses to use ~ and | as commonplace characters.

FWIW, I don’t even code and I still keep a US layer in the background. I forget which one I’m using constantly, it’s all muscle memory. I just Win-space and try again whenever I type a character and it’s not what I expect.

In fairness, the headlines written around this were generally atrocious, save a few (shout out to IGN and the original reporter, which may or may not have been techradar). Sure, in most of those you could read a more complete quote inside, but… staying at the headline isn’t just a gamer thing. Clickbait is dangerous for a reason.

And also in fairness, the point he’s making is still not great. I mean, he’s the guy in charge of their subscription service, so I wouldn’t expect him to be too negative on the idea, but he’s still saying that it’s a future that will come. Not that all models will coexist, but that a Netflix future for gaming is coming.

But yeah, gamers can be hostile without justification and often default to treating every relationship with the people making the games as an antagonistic or competitive one, which is a bummer. In that context, letting this guy talk was clearly a mistake.

Oh, it makes sense. I think there’s a place for subscription services, absolutely.

I don’t think a transition to subscription as the default model for gaming makes sense, though. Which was the point of the question and the implicit goal in the answer. And even if it did make practical sense (if people “got used to it”) it’d be bad for the art form and the industry on the aggregate.

Alright, I was only gently pointing it out because what he actually said is still a pretty bad take, but at this point it’s just annoying.

No, he didn’t say that.

He said that gaming subscriptions won’t take off UNTIL gamers get used to not owning their games. Wihch… yeah, it checks out.

The all-subscription future already sucks, can we at least limit our outrage to the actual problem? I swear, I have no idea why gaming industry people ever talk to anybody. Nothing good ever comes of it.

So far I don’t know of any services that will just hand you a digital file of a movie outside of physical media.

I say that’s a damn fine business opportunity, because I’d be all over it, but hey.

This basically, which at that point rolls all the way back around to piracy, so hey, if you find an easier way to access a comparable file maybe it’s all shades of grey anyway.

If they have access to remove the media from your library on their end, then it’s a license and not a purchase.

That doesn’t mean they don’t owe you access to it, though. The fact that there isn’t a word for “I’ve acquired perpetual access even if I can’t back up the file itself” doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the right to continue to access the media. Or to demand that right to be upheld in court, for that matter.

I mean, you can “buy” stuff in Amazon Prime Video off service. Unlike Netflix or other platforms, they will let you “buy or rent” streaming movies, which is the same as finding the movie on the Amazon storefront and buying the digital copy instead of a physical copy.

Now, does that mean they won’t yank it? Not really. A digital license is a license, not a purchase. Is the word “buy” or “own” inaccurate? I’m hoping not, because like the Sony thing showed, platforms are desperate to not have the courts improvise what rights they owe the buyers on digital purchases.

I’m still buying my movies in 4K BluRay, though. And working on ripping all of them for streaming at home, now that I finally have the space.

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.