This isn’t a smoking gun.

You can’t trust that ChatGPT is telling the truth, but also the use of copyrighted material is acceptable under a fair use standard written into US copyright law. Whether it is fair use or not is up to a court to decide, but “without permission” doesn’t automatically mean “illegally.”

Hence the desire for a single player offline version of the game…

Not everyone believes that devs are the authority on what makes a game fun, which is why mods are so common on PC games.

but that’s part of it, just like irl.

Some people might not want annoying aspects of IRL in their fantasy escapism games involving roleplay…

That’s the part I always hated. It was hostile towards people who liked the lore but didn’t want to group up with some guy named LaserButt4000 who didn’t want to go to the same dungeon as you, but was happy to get your rare loot in a bad roll of the dice.

Private servers with scaling for dungeon soloing were a godsend. WoW is actually awesome as a single player game. It’s unfortunate the devs never realized that.

Find a student at a university whose student accounts get access to jstor.

This is a decent one, but a ton of the HFY stories are just so problematic. Many just feel like they’re congratulating humanity on being vicious and creatively violent, like they think the Terran Empire in the Star Trek Mirror Universe were good guys.

Otherwise, a bunch just feel lazily formulaic and repetitive with others. Take a random human trait or convention from a human culture like say…fried foods. Use an alien narrator to describe how weird they think it is to fry foods. Find an angle to portray humans as plucky and great for their fierce devotion to frying foods and involve it in a narrative about humanity winning against greater odds. “And the human just dumped the entire chargizoid corpse into a vat of boiling oil! And then he took it out with something called tongs and ate it, skin and all! And that’s when I knew I needed humans on my side in the coming galactic war…”

I guess I feel like the subgenre plays on the optimism of Star Trek utopianism, but ditches any real criticism of humanity’s past (or our present). I think the message from Orville’s Season 3 Episode 10 about what made humanity better in their past is a better heir to Star Trek utopianism than most of the HFY stories I’ve read.

The idea that random people pick a select few musicians to be inducted is just more artificial scarcity bullshit. It’s not a legitimate institution if it can’t recognize more people to give a wider breadth of exposure to the legacy of rock n roll. By inducted some, they pretend they have the authority to determine the legacy of rock n roll, but their snubs say more about their deficiencies than about those they snub.

This is less of an issue if you judge everything that isn’t first hand from a known friend or family member as suspect or at least just a waste of time. Facebook used to be a place to talk to people you knew in the real world. You could ignore anything they reposted and still engage with the actual examples of their own experiences that they posted. But now it’s so flooded with ads and listicles and clickbait and video clips that it’s not even worth trying to keep up with the people you actually know.

It’s still not stealing. It’s plagiarism or fraud or any number of other terms, but stealing necessarily requires the deprivation of a limited, rivalrous thing, like money or property. You can’t steal fame or exposure or credit, except poetically. And by that point, the word becomes so watered down that it’s meaningless. You might as well say I’m stealing your life seconds at a time by writing this extra sentence.

The purpose of using the term stealing here is only to borrow the negative moral connotations of the term, but it doesn’t communicate clearly what exactly is happening.

It’s perfectly valid to say you consider it morally equivalent with theft, but it’s not stealing.

deleted by creator

You don’t have to like her music, but you have to respect her ability to sell her image and music.

Actually this is a point of conflict for some of her fans. Some of my friends are swifties and they hate consumerism and high concert prices and collectibles and marketing that incentivize FOMO to spend more money. They jokingly call her their capitalist queen.