conciselyverbose

If you don’t physically control the hardware, it is not secure.

The only valid approach to preventing cheating that matters is to have authoritative servers. Nothing else works, nothing else theoretically can work, and nothing else can possibly be described as anything but malware. There is literally no possible scenario where any entertainment company knowing anything about what else is happening on your computer can be justified.

Server side anti cheat can’t distinguish good players from aimbots.

Neither can a rootkit, which should be unconditionally illegal and send CEOs to jail for putting in their product. There are no exceptions and no scenarios where it can possibly be acceptable for a video game to access any operating system anywhere near that level. Every individual case should constitute felony hacking, with no possibility of “user consent” being a defense even if they do actually clearly and explicitly ask for “permission”.

I don’t think buying used is unethical if the law establishes that, just buying to download and immediately resell, which I don’t think that many would rationalize as any better. I think the people most likely to do it are people who pay to pirate now who might pay a little for a slightly easier experience.

What about bigger games like BG3? What’s stopping me from buying it full price, copying the files somewhere and then instantly reselling it? It would probably force them to implement strict DRM restrictions, and probably the nasty rootkit kind.

The same thing that’s stopping you from downloading the files now. A combination of ethics and the value legitimately owning the game adds to your purchase.

Since getting a PS5, a good chunk of my time has been spent with my PS4 library I fell off of when loading was too obnoxious. I had a Last of Us Left Behind save on grounded difficulty that I had never beat because, while I enjoy the brutal difficulty of the last encounter, waiting to load every time I died was miserable. The much faster (but slower than PS5 games lol) load time got me over the hump.

I’m getting into the Last of Us 2 next.

Suggestion that did a lot for me. Get cheap smart lights or at least a smart outlet. Turn them on before your alarm (gradual ramp up is ideal, but just turning on is better than nothing). It makes mornings a lot less brutal.

No, backing it up is your obligation.

A digital purchase means they owe you access, in the format your purchased, as long as they exist. Nothing short of that can possibly be acceptable if there is any copy protection at all.

A coupon for the same service is not and does not resemble a refund.

Yes, villainizing them is entirely correct. If they sold the license 100 years ago and stopped providing it, they should be legally liable for a 100% refund of the purchase price, plus interest. If they fucked up their contracts in a manner in which they aren’t able to serve the content to purchasers until the end of the time, it’s entirely their own problem.

Nobody is mentioning TV Show vs video game because there is no difference.

Taking away any content a user has paid for is unacceptable without a full refund at absolute minimum.

Try right clicking and “save as”? On mobile Safari it pops up with view and download as options.

Best guess literally a bag of precooked, pre scrambled eggs dumped in a warming tray for breakfast.

Absolutely insane.

I can understand extreme cases, like some sort of disputed IP where their contact to sell the content turns out not to be with the actual rights holder, resulting in no longer serving the content (with an unconditional full refund). But past that they should be legally required to host the content until the heat death of the universe.

Nintendo is incompetent.

PS5 and Xbox both control what runs on their systems perfectly fine.

They could have not given you root access and forced you to install your own OS for it to manage things that aren’t on Steam. They could have locked the bootloader and refused to install anything they didn’t sign.

Neither would violate the license provided they made the source available.

Your morals wouldn’t be changing.

Your behavior would.

That’s kind of cool. I’d need to combine a lot of different sources to get a number, though. I use all of Libby and Hoopla from my library, a scribd subscription (sorry, everand, I guess now), Audible, and Apple Books to handle my audiobook needs (and more for ebooks, though I have less time for that).

I haven’t done the math on “value” read, but I do 15-20 hours of audiobook (because 2x speed) on work days. It definitely can make finding new reads a challenge.

A phobia is defined by being irrational.

Simply being terrified isn’t a phobia if you have a valid reason to be terrified.

It’s why I wasn’t automatically blaming the other options. I never looked at the actual data to know if they were there.

But trying to recreate them was absolutely brutal, and has been with every option I tried. I looked at implementing my own down and dirty tool to make it more manageable in bookwyrm, but there was just too much mental overhead to get a grasp of the code base in my limited dev time. Just making a basic database and a couple scripts to display my favorites on a couple web pages seems a lot easier. Plus I can treat series as first class citizens in lists and pages with their own blurbs, which none of the bigger options seems to think is useful.

Bookwyrm imported my goodreads export more or less fine, but (IDK if Amazon gave me them) my lists disappeared in the process, and trying to recreate them was the dealbreaker for me. My absurdly large book lists were casual and not something I needed to keep, but I have a few 50-100 book lists that I do care about and that would have required manually searching each title, and that’s where I drew the line.

It’s already enough of a hassle to go page by page through the 1000-1500 books I have on goodreads and check boxes. Typing them out is way too much work to migrate.

Eventually I’ll probably roll my own because I have other functionality requests none of the options meet, but goodreads lists are already not great, so not even matching them is a big step down.