No. You don’t get to just decide you have the right to use someone else’s work just because you coudn’t find them to ask, any more than you get to decide that you can use their car. Them not actively selling their works isn’t the equivalent of leaving the car derilict on public property.

'Tis a bit of a thorn in one’s side, aye.

Look to something like wordpress.org or writefreely.org if you want to self host. If you want a free hosting platform, weirdly enough, blogger still exists, or you can use wordpress.com.

Exactly. Nintendo is not our friend, but it’s also playing by the rules it has available to it. It’s the rulemaker’s fault if the rules are shite.

As a publically traded company in the current system, Nintendo is not in the business of making video games, it’s in the business of making shareholder value. Video games are just a tool for doing that, exactly how a PC is a tool for writing documents or developing software. At the end of the day, companies have more than one tool at their disposal, and are going to use all of them to compete.

It’s on us to take away the tools we don’t think they should have access to, not on them to voluntarily not use the ones that are in play.

If you don’t have a 649.2.2 Atmos setup, that’s your fault. Get hearing loss, scrub!

/s because… sigh…

Regular reminder that prices are not based on what something’s component pieces are worth, but what people are willing to pay.

Nah. This is the sort of thing you get when different features are owned by different dev teams.

Didn’t spend all of their time arguing about idological purity online and actually pushed to achieve their agenda.

It’s patently bizarre how a company whose only purpose is transferring money from account A to B can then arbitrarily decide what people are allowed to buy and sell.

This is the whole point of capitalism. Those who control the systems, control the people, and capital exists to ensure that the people do not control the systems.

Yup. This is purposeful mischaracterization from one of the biggest boosters of games-as-a-streaming-product. Ubisoft doesn’t want you to have the ability to play things at your whim, but exclusively at theirs. They sure as fuck don’t want you spending your time on something they sold you 10 years ago.

Don’t worry, this isn’t something they actually believe. They’re just trying to craft a narrative. I worked there for 5 years, and in that whole time nobody on the publishing end of the company said anything that even hinted at them giving a shit about fun.

Quick Time Events; characters that automatically do 60 things just by holding down “forward” on the joystick; the Ubisoft logo.

The Internet is populated by people who think English grammar is cosmic law, so it doesn’t surprise me that they think you should bend over for dogshit urban planning.

Ironically, none of them follow the rule of shutting up if they don’t know shit about shit.

Green spaces: Just for viewing.

What kind of dystopian hellscape do you want the world to be, exactly?

Gotta keep going. Not all signatures are going to be legit, so a reasonable buffer needs to be in place.

NodeBB. It’s a fairly popular webforum, but ActivityPub support is fairly new. It’s really something else to see the Fediverse through a the lens of the old Internet.

Would you be surprised to learn that business is actually a network of cargo cults, where the thing they’re trying to superficially mimic is other businesses that don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing?

I work for an online edtech company that saw massive organic growth during lockdowns, and has been chasing that dragon since lockdowns were lifted. They spent millions expanding their workforce at the time, while they severely pared down their school outreach team. They made multiple moves that only made sense if you assume lockdowns would last forever.

I raised this with management a couple of times, and their only response was “everyone else was doing it, too”.

“We’re the front page of the Internet!”

“No, not like that…”

Voting like this is a bit of a dark pattern, though. Especially downvotes. They come from places where the platform owners want to download the responsibility of community management to the community itself. This has a nasty tendency to silence valid criticism while simultaniously supporting brigading behaviour.

At the very least, we should be having serious, design-focused discussions about eliminating or highly restricting downvotes.

I stand by my OG coorded Dyson Ball Animal upright. It’s almost 20 years old now and still sucks the soul out of you.