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

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  • Yes.

    A bunch of states including NC are just blocking porn to protect the children but it’s literally the laziest solution with some of the smallest impact.

    Twitch, Discord, and Roblox are far more accessible and arguably more dangerous in terms of short term consequences than porn because they are primarily social interaction platforms.

    I’ve never seen Rotten or Liveleaks (at first I thought you meant Rotten Tomatoes that’s how unaware I am), but they could probably use similar regulation.

    It’s not even that I think porn regulation is inherently bad, but the implementation is garbage and the claim to protect the children is extremely weak.

    Social content sites are dangerous because of the opportunity for predators to easily encounter minors (especially age restriction breaking ones under 13), and violent content sites are, well, violent? They should be a higher priority but they evidently aren’t.





  • There’s only one company I’ve found that makes headphone shapes that don’t hurt my ears and they stopped making wired variants years ago. Last time I got an actually authentic pair was ~2017.

    The void they left behind got flooded by knockoff junk that isn’t worth buying (bought 2 pairs in 2018 trying to find a replacement, they were tinny garbage).

    If I could find a wired version that sounded good for under $50 I’d get them immediately so I can stop dealing with Bluetooth connection issues when I’m on my computer.




  • 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).