MudMan

It’s not a matter of science vs belief, it’s a matter of law versus dogma.

Law is a consensus that, at least in a democracy, aims to set some rule and the consequences of it in advance so that whenever a case applies it is at least relatively predictable and applied equally in each case.

If you pass judgement based on the things you like, or in the religious beliefs you profess you’re not following the law, your imparting dogma. Imposing it, in fact, over others.

You can absolutely make unjust laws, but at least those are the result of a process. In a democracy you can at least understands what steps lead to rectifying an unjust law.

If a person with power decides they don’t like you and they apply that belief inconsistently, irrationally and without following consistent rules there is no recourse or path for society to correct itself (beyond violent revolt, presumably).

Judges don’t need to listen to their heart. Judges need to apply laws generated in a functional system that captures the will of an informed people in a predictable, equitable manner. Judges ruling based on personal beliefs, whether you agree with them or not, are a tyranical manifestation and a very scary thing.

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.

I genuinely never engaged with Reddit at all, so I’m not in a position to compare, but I don’t think the numbers suggest that Reddit “is dying” or even that it got significantly impacted.

Which is fine by me. If anything, the vibe here is less Reddit and more “late 90s/early 00s forums” and that’s an improvement on my book.

I’m not sure what you think “our” game is.

I mean, in my game there is a functioning rule of law where separation of powers is real and universal access to the justice system is enforced regardless of income level. In that game when you set a rule that rule is applied across the board. And yeah, if the system is not playing that game you’re supposed to make it play it.

Is that the game? Because it’s a good game.

Ah, great, we should just let them run with it and never try, then.

I swear, defeatism gets me so bad. It may just be the most conservative power at work, along with “all politicians are the same”.

Incidentally, anybody thinking about a class action over Sony removing lifetime access to Funimation movie downloads? Because it’s the second time in a year they risk it on that one and I deeeeefinitely want to see that tested in court.

I mean, good luck getting past entertainment industry contracts.

But also… please, please, PLEASE make it so that political opinions and conspiracy theories can’t be used to fire people. I double dare the CEO of a social media network, an electric car company and an aerospace company create a labor market where you can sue for discrimination for that reason.

I mean, I only want to see it if I can reset the timeline back to this point, but still, I REALLY want to see it.

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.

For the record, this guy seems to be based somewhere in Europe and at worst he’d get government subsidies for minimum wage-ish amounts for a year, at best semi-indefinite support while he seeks new employment based on his previous income level.

If this teaches you something besides “don’t make or read posts in LinkedIn under any circumstances” is that a sensible safety net really enables you to recover from shitty situations and everybody should have access to that. Because if you don’t, then you DO deserve better.

Hah. This is me respectfully nodding in your general direction.

Although I’ll admit that in my case this mostly manifests as me buying literally any food I haven’t eaten before and putting super gross stuff in my mouth, no matter how transparent of a marketing scheme it is. I bought that coke they asked ChatGPT to formulate. This is a real problem.

Also, if anybody is curious I put a pinch of salt in my tea today. It was fine, not noticeable. I’ll try a bigger pinch next time.

I don’t even know what some people call “tea” in this context sometimes. It could be they’re having Ceylon in the morning and Earl Gray in the afternoon, but sometimes what they mean is they’re soaking some weeds in the morning and some dry fruits in the afternoon and calling it tea. I lived in a place for a while where all infusions are referred to with the word for “tea”, so you’d ask for cup of tea, be given a camomile infusion and be expected not to murder your host.

Oh, yeah, I know. Brits will just throw a bag of the crappiest tea they have around in a teapot and move on with their day.

Which is a luxury you can afford when even middling supermarket tea is drinkable. Over where I am if you’re doing tea you have an… affectation. Plus even if you don’t want to, finding drinkable tea is hard enough that you end up going to the fancy stuff by default.