MudMan

@MudMan@fedia.io

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies⁩ ⁨⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It's a "me" problem in that "I" think the indies vs AAA lines are increasingly inconsistent and nonsensical. "I" also find the concept of "pirating against" to be extremely disingenuous, which is why there is a whole post explaining that after the line you quoted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  The hell does "piracy against big companies" even mean?

  Man, pirate what you can't afford if you must, just... you know, be honest about it. I'm always annoyed by people doing the thing they wanted to do anyway and presenting it as activism. That's not how that works.

  For the record, while I think there's plenty to be critical about in modern gaming, "DLC", "game has a launcher" and "game is ported from other platforms" are not that. "A game I played on the PS3 was too expensive when I wanted to rebuy it" is somebody giving you bad value up front, not some ideological stance you're taking. For the record, I also didn't buy it because I also didn't think their launch price was right. In fairness, it has since been on sale for 30 bucks multiple times, which is a lot more reasonable.

  And again, I'm not saying don't pirate it. Do what you want. Just don't be weird about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you think The Boys is an accurate representation if real people had superpowers?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  No, no, Jeff Ennis worked as an actual superhero briefly in the 1970s you're thinking of John Ennis, who created The Boys as a musical in the 90s, but he was mad about his working conditions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you think The Boys is an accurate representation if real people had superpowers?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  No, it's much more interesting than that.

  It's an accurate representation of Garth Ennis being mad about having to work with superheroes despite not liking that at all and being a bit of a petty bitch with a bit of a dudebro sense of humor that, frankly, we all overrated at the time because when you were a teenager in the 90s you thought Preacher was hilarious and it got to his head a bit.

  And then it's an accurate representation of Eric Kripke who was very much the right age to have gone through that, taking the material and going "well, that Trump guy sure was a thing, huh?" and "aren't you kind of over all those MCU movies, also?" because superheroes in film were at the same point in 2019 than they were on comic books in 2006.

  Don't be the teenager we all were in the 90s and assume that "edgy and mean and over the top" is the same as "smart and realistic". It's not.

  I'll say that the show is at least less callous than the original material and it's at least trying to be political, which makes it slightly more plausible and internally consistent than Ennis' HR complaint of a comic book. Hollywood has a history of taking this edgelord crap (see also: every single Mark Millar adaptation) and making it palatable by applying the same mainstreaming and dumbing down that kills every Alan Moore adaptation. Turns out if the original material isn't that smart to begin with that's actually a good thing to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm gonna die on this hill or die trying⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Well that went places.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm gonna die on this hill or die trying⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a weird pattern in that presumably mass abandonment of the em dashes due to the memes around it looking like AI content would quickly lead to newer LLMs based on newer data sets also abandoning em dashes when it tries to seem modern and hip and just punt the ball down the road to the next set of AI markers. I assume as long as book and press editors keep stikcing to their guns that would go pretty slow, but it'd eventually get there. And that's assuming AI companies don't add instructions about this to their system prompts at any point. It's just going to be an endless arms race.

  Which is expected. I'm on record very early on saying that "not looking like AI art" was going to be a quality marker for art and the metagame will be to keep chasing that moving target around for the foreseeable future and I'm here to brag about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amid EA's unpopular $55 billion buyout, Baldur's Gate 3 director takes time "to remind people that making games faster and cheaper while charging more has never worked before"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, all due respect, to the guy, but this doesn't go down until 2027. At least give them a minute to get in the position where they could feasibly fuck up before you berate them for it.

  If you look at the Internet they are apparently definitely dismantling the company to sell the pieces but also definitely continuing to make what they make but with MAGA politics but also as a muslim theocracy and trimming down and speeding up but also doubling down on live service at the same time somehow.

  And man, one or multiple of those may happen, but almost certainly not all of them and none have happened yet. Given how much of a public-ass public company chasing short term gains they've been historically I can't help but think there's a fair amount of projection going on.

  Here's my stance: I have no idea what this means and I have no idea what they're going to do. This is all weird and I have zero frame of reference for how the new owners are going to gel with that organization or what their new objectives are going to be when compared to the old "make more money this quarter than last quarter" thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you recognize this guy playing video games?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  80s micros consistently look better than any modern computer OR modern keyboard. I'll fight you on this and I'll win.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I suppose it makes more sense the less you want to do and the older your hardware is. Even when repurposing old laptops and stuff like that I find the smallest apps I'd want to run were orders of magnitude more costly than any OS overhead. This was even true that one time I got lazy and started running stuff on an older Windows machine without reinstalling the OS, so I'm guessing anything Linux-side would be fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  After a OS update? I mean, I guess, but most things are going to be in containers anyway, right?

  The last update that messed me up on any counts was Python-related and that would have got me on any distro just as well.

  Once again, I get it at scale, where you have so much maintenance to manage and want to keep it to a minimum, but for home use it seems to me that being on an LTS/stable update channel would have a much bigger impact than being on a lightweight distro.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I'm sidetracking a bit, but am I alone in thinking self hosting hobbyists are way too into "lightweight and not bloated" as a value?

  I mean, I get it if you have a whole data center worth of servers, but if it's a cobbled together home server it's probably fine, right? My current setup idles at 1.5% of its CPU and 25% of its RAM. If I turned everything off those values are close to zero and effectively trivial alongside any one of the apps I'm running in there. Surely any amount of convenience is worth the extra bloat, right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your must-block tags on social media?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In social media? Not much.

  Here I block any and all threads and communities that focus on US news. Specifically stuff that just has a generic name ("News") but is 100% US-focused content.

  Night and day improvement, frankly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don't think an outright ban would be acceptable at all or grounded in any kind of proportionality. It's one thing to use gambling as a guilt-by-association thing, but if gambling isn't outright illegal even in that somewhat fallacious interpretation an outright ban would be absurd.

  Which is something I feel a lot of the people rallying against this practice often didn't think through, but hey.

  I still disagree with your interpretation of that literature review.

  This systematic literature review analyzes 190 empirical studies published between 2012 and 2023, revealing nuanced findings. Regarding compliance, 41% of studies reported high compliance levels, 29% low compliance, and 29% inconclusive results. For effectiveness in achieving regulatory goals, 44% found self-regulation effective, 33% ineffective, and 24% inconclusive.

  Our review also finds that the presence of intermediaries such as industry associations, third-party auditors, and NGOs, along with certain types of state involvement, tends to enhance self-regulation outcomes.

  That's less "it's a crapshoot" and more "it generally works, especially if there is an overisght body".

  Which in this case there absolutely is, given that this all slots into pre-existing age ratings and content warnings. Your misgivings don't line up with the data you provide and don't line up with pre-existing analogous self-regulation.

  I've seen nothing to suggest this is any more problematic than either other types of monetization or other types of content restriction, and the big differentiator between violent/sexual content and this seems to be whether the segment of the userbase that posts online likes it as a matter of creative opinion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just in case you've been living under a rock: The Crew is playable again!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  No, for sure, it's a good thing. I just found the expression funny in the context. The Crew is what it is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  OK, if you want to play it like that, let me start by challenging a couple of assumptions.

  First, the relevance of linking loot boxes to problem gambling. Ultimately gambling is not illegal, so this doesn't inherently suggest that the situation demands new legislation. The worst case scenario here is loot boxes are made analogous to gambling, which is presumably already as regulated as it's going to get on each territory. There's a lot more to question there, as there was on all the frankly sloppy analysis on the links of gaming to violence in the 90s, but there is an implication at the core of the attempt to link them in the first place that I don't think is justified.

  Second, I dispute the need for them being on the wane predating your gate for legislation. For one thing, you're not being explicit about when "regulation" by your definition starts. By the way you've sourced it you can arbitrarily choose any point in time. For another, it makes sense that regulation and self-regulation would happen in parallel. Ultimately bad PR and negative research motivates both public and private action. Again I refer to the 90s violent game panic. If the probes on gaming violence motivated the creation of age ratings agencies for gaming, does that mean the age ratings weren't enough of a mitigation and they should have deployed anti-violence legislation? I'm going to pretty strongly argue that's not the case.

  Also, I feel you're misrepresenting the metastudy you provide on the results of self regulation. High compliance/high effectiveness is the biggest segment on all counts. Granted, on roughly half of the studies, but a lot more studies find self-regulation to work than not, by that metric. Why is "a small but replicable correlation" such a concern but a majority of studies finding self-regulation is highly effective a mixed result you don't trust? Seems to me you're not treating all the references you're using the same way.

  FWIW, I find this conversation not particularly productive because, frankly, with these things the literature gets to be a huge mess. Again, my reference is the 90s violence campaigns, where so many terrible papers were being funded and published the academic conversation became entirely impractical. The fact is gaming did need some age ratings standard and it made sense for national agencies to exist to manage them. And it makes sense for those same agencies to have explicit policies not just on loot boxes, but on all in-game monetization. The industry needs best practices and safeguards. And the public, incidentally, needs a LOT more awareness of why self-declaring age in accounts is important and what safeguards are already in place as it is, because there is a ton of parental control and underage protection that kicks in but nobody is particularly aware of.

  But instead gamers whose concern with loot boxes is primarily artistic have been rooting for overreach in hopes the result is games they like more. I find that risky and problematic, and the idea of Brazil's government passing wide-ranging age verfication regulation and having English-speaking media and social media report on it based on a mostly reasonable mandate of loot box games carrying an 18+ rating more concerning than any of the underlying issues being addressed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A sausage is meat in an intestinal casing so when you have anal sex with someone you turn them into a you sausage. ⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you like flavored condoms I am struggling to find a reason why not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just in case you've been living under a rock: The Crew is playable again!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, good for people getting this up and running, but "in case you've been living under a rock" may overrepresent how much the average person wants to play The Crew.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, no, it can be a report of the authors of the study, but if they don't publish the study I don't know what they're talking about. I didn't poke around much, because if all my security is blocking content and blaring warnings it's probably not a great idea, but at a glance in the direct link I didn't find a link to the contents of the report proper.

  To your question, it wouldn't change whether loot boxes are gambling, in that my position is that they are not regardless. It also wouldn't change whether they're worth regulating, in that my position is age ratings agencies should have a policy about it, but that's about it.

  But in practical and political terms that's not what originated the panic in the first place, so whether the presence of loot boxes is growing or shrinking does go towards whether the PR impact of abusive practices and self-regulation is sufficient to address the issue.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That site rises so many flags on my security software, but I went ahead and opened it elsewhere and... can't find a source. What is "a recent study"? 2024? 2020? Do you have a primary source?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  And we do if you try to buy porn in a bookstore. We still don't like upending the entire framework of the Internet for the sake of replicating that online. Which is exactly what's happening here. The loot box thing is an afterthought that mandates a specific age rating for games that include them and nothing else. Porn is the main focus of the legislation.

  And I disagree on implementing internet-wide ID checks for the sake of keeping kids away from porn. Hard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Less than what?

  Who is still doing loot boxes? Valve, for sure, they still have them on CounterStrike, sports games and then... what? Hearthstone/Magic and that type of CCG stuff and... I guess mobile gacha RPGs?

  Everybody else is doing battle passes now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So is alcohol and I will have a beer regardless of what you or anybody else thinks about it. Screw you, you don't get to baby my addictions, I'm a big boy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Super hard disagree. I do like me some Magic the Gathering and CCGs in general. If anything I'm say more concerned with the increasing trend of real world blind pack collectibles aimed exclusively at kids than I am with online loot boxes, which is something most of the industry has abandoned anyway after the panic went viral.

  But nope, absolutely not. Loot boxes aren't worth forcing online age verification any more than porn was a few months ago when we were all mad because the UK did it. And absolutely no, I am an adult and if I want to gamble online, let alone buy loot boxes in a videogame, I absolutely should be happy to do that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeeeeah, you're way less down on age verification on principle than I do.

  You're also more down on loot boxes than I am, in that I still dispute the equivalence to gambling. It's not absurd, but it requires ignoring a lot of nuance.

  Still, the problem I have with this situation in general is that the loot box element (which isn't that heavy, it mostly establishes by law that loot boxes will make a game be automatically listed as 18 and up) is masking the mandatory age verification element. And the mandatory age verification is baaaad. It effectively does the magical wishful tech thinking thing we've been seeing recently elsewhere where it just... says it should be private and comply with privacy regulations but doesn't explain how that's possible, while at the same time demanding that every single store and service provider both design a perfect age verification system AND somehow magic up an API to share that information with each game while remaining entirely private. Which is pretty much impossible.

  But nobody is talking about that, everybody just wants to dunk on loot boxes. Like four years too late, because most of the industry saw the writing on the wall and moved on to battle passes instead on the PR hit alone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I wrote a first response referencing the one mention I had found of loot boxes, but you are correct, I missed that they did include one in the definitions section.

  IV – caixa de recompensa: funcionalidade disponível em certos jogos eletrônicos que permite a aquisição, mediante pagamento, pelo jogador, de itens virtuais consumíveis ou de vantagens aleatórias, resgatáveis pelo jogador ou usuário, sem conhecimento prévio de seu conteúdo ou garantia de sua efetiva utilidade;

  So yeah, you are right, they do define it as paid. Carry on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Art. 20. São vedadas as caixas de recompensa (loot boxes) oferecidas em jogos eletrônicos direcionados a crianças e a adolescentes ou de acesso provável por eles, nos termos da respectiva classificação indicativa.

  Not as far as I can tell. This translates to "Loot boxes offered in electronic games aimed at children and teenagers or likely to be accessed by them, in the terms of the corresponding age rating".

  You can argue that "offered" here specifically implies "offered for purchase", but... I mean, my Brazilian Portuguese isn't perfect, but I don't think that's explicitly the case, the word means what you think it means in English. It'd be a problem of hermeneutics at that point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A sausage is meat in an intestinal casing so when you have anal sex with someone you turn them into a you sausage. ⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  A sausage is ground meat in an intestinal casing.

  If you wrap a whole steak in a sausage casing that's not a sausage. You need to pound that dick before you can call it sausage. So at the start of the process it may be way less sausage than by the end, depending on how you go about it, I suppose.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  For those protections to have any effect in Brazil, however, they'll necessitate the usage of age-verification mechanisms. Previously, Brazilian law had considered it sufficient for users of digital services to self-declare their age. The new law, however, requires the providers of those services to "take proportionate, auditable and technically secure measures to assess the age or age range of users."

  Seriously, read things before reacting to them.

  It's been decades of social media and centuries of press. How have we not learned about this as a society?

  I mean, if you're cool with this, then you're cool with this and we disagree, but I'm gonna say you probably were going out of the headline alone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Said this elsewhere, but it seems to me a bigger story that it also mandates age verification for 18 plus content, including porn and at the platform level.

  Steam needs to verify your age now if it wants to carry porn games.

  And I do have problems with loot boxes, in that it doesn't qualify the boxes having to be paid, so technically Diablo II should be a 18+ game, along with every single RPG in existence. I have to assume courts or downstream definitions will do a sanity check on that, because the law they passed makes zero qualifiers, it just says "loot boxes".

  So... maybe look into what they passed before being too celebratory about it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The campaign against predatory in-game practices takes a step forward in Brazil, as President Lula bans loot boxes targeted at under-18s⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Whose point is that? Because I don't think it's the previous guy's point, and it certainly isn't mine.

  I mean, the law (not a bill, this isn't the US and it has been approved, as per the text) outright bans loot boxes in games "targeted at children or teenagers". No qualifiers. Doesn't even say "paid loot boxes", so technically all videogames are now illegal if they have a loot table anywhere. I'm going to assume cooler heads will prevail and a categorization will come from courts or specific regulatory development, but it's certainly not in the law.

  So if you don't like this for doing both at once... well, that's weird, that's why laws have multiple articles. If you're worried that the inclusion is meant to stall the bill that's irrelevant, this has been published and comes in force in six months. If you think they're overreaching by outright banning loot boxes... well, I agree, but I don't think that's the point as the rest of the thread is defining it.