Can’t make people pay to stream board games and dnd. Which, coincidentally, I am buying guide books for because shitfucks like this are actively making gaming harder and harder to continue to justify morally to myself.

They: don’t pay their staff but give executives massive bonuses (Game company CEOS are among the highest when you look at pay disparity charts), indulge in layoffs on failure or success (listing non-paid wages in the quarter as profit to shareholders) , continously justify gambling as not because it’s digital (lootboxes, “player packs” boosters), actively erode consumer rights (liscense vs ownership), actively treat their consumers like dogshit (the ps3 WILL cost $700 and if you do not like it you can…get an Xbox? Lol?), cutting content of products to add back as paid extra content (moving up deadlines and prioritizing XYZ at the end so it’s “not done” by deadline so it can be added back later for a price to beat the “we intentionally didn’t include it” allegations)

Gaming’s shitty practices are ruining other markets and the governments of the world’s refusal to reign them in is causing spillover into other things.

They applaud my originality, where I had time between then and now to think of a comeback.

This is because the average arch user does not enjoy their experience. The average enjoyer is so far beyond a mere “user” when it comes to self-flaggelation

I can fucking smell this truck and the layer of oily grime it leaves everywhere.

20k and a bottle of everclear

I love pointing out that in the US, a base ps5 is now what you risked paying a scalper when they were new, except now it’s not a scalper listing it on Walmart, it’s just straight up Walmart charging it.

My ps5 purchase helped a guy pay his rent after he made a dumb fucking decision in 2022, people buying now pads Walmart pockets.

Pretty sure it has the 2016 version of NMS on it. Booted up a ps4 install with it to try and couch co-op only to look around and ask why the UI was so different from what I was used to. It had internet access we thought but it can’t have or it would have installed whatever the latest patch is. It was surreal seeing pillars of Emeril again.

But you point yes, gaming single player offline is a joke now with DRM requiring single player online. We ripped EA Simcity for this. Simcity died to City:Skylines because it became such a movement.

Your Command strip accidentally breaks the paint and underneath is more layers of fucking paint - not drywall

Even if this wasn’t the design from the get-go - they’d been wanting to do this since XOne, capitalising on Sony shooting themselves with bad press now let’s them drop the disk drive and make themselves look like the good guys about it

Damn thats crazy. I’ll just keep sipping on my DDR4 which isn’t stupidly overpriced and still able to play the games I buy.

Had a nokia 3310, had a flip phone, did not like T9. The predictive nature was aweful and never got me to like it before I got a slide keyboard phone.

Something that often gets lost here is high quality gemstones are still rare by comparison. Not saying it excuses their stupid prices, but that we use diamonds to coat sawblades because it is so abundant, yet so much is shit quality.

Large enough to set in jewelry, with few enough imperfections to convince a buyer, and a skilled jeweler with years of practice cutting it, is still rare and worth something. Sure debeers did a “fuck you i control the supply” and we’re still falling for part of that scam, but it doesn’t mean gemstones are suddenly commonplace and worth $10.

Gonna catch a lot of “get with the times” but an ad blocker and watching YouTube in browser on my phone - I’ve never seen the value of needing Premium to do adblocking or a whole ass app like Vanced. Maybe sponsorblock for more but like overall, my impression has always been YouTube Premium is a joke of a service that can never offer anything more than adblocking/sponsor block already just does from a browser on my phone.

I have a list of things that go to Gmail and set up forwarding via proton, the issue I see is I have a bunch of services I have signed up for, but may not have opened in awhile, do I need to open all those apps and “re-activate” them from hibernation to change this or can I just let them go? How did you build a list of priority for what to sign-in to change and what to fall by the wayside?

Yeah they are just so evil bad and aweful, too bad I don’t know their names so I could actively avoid them. If only some good Samaritan would help me find my way to avoiding those.

He sure tagging something

To sort of piggyback, what about loss of people? A parent or spouse is usually a bigger deal to people, how to support those?

Jerboa. It was the first one I found working and installed, and didn’t see a reason to change unless it stops working - like RiF before it. If it aint broke why switch.

Not really big stuff cuz I don’t own a house, or a lawn.

But commissioning art over the years has never really resulted in bad experiences. Of the…10 or 12 times I have commissioned something, only twice I’ve had artists ghost. One did work and I wanted to commission more but then vanished. I assume because I was the only one asking and paying it wasn’t worth keeping the pages up. The second was a 3d modeler, who asked about the character and then never got back to me. This one I have no idea. Not really upset because I had not yet paid for these things and artists are free to decline work, but I wish they’d just said no and I’d have just made new requests to others.

I once commissioned a plush, and she (the crafter) was phenomenal through the whole process with updates and deadlines. I’m glad I can still link to her page on Deviantart, I assume she’s still in business. These have all been…at least a decade or more ago.

Lastly much more recently, I commissioned a piece from r/hungryartists for a discord pfp, a small thing I didnt want to just use AI for, and I’d say it went well too.

For every one of these interactions I’ve used PayPal, and never once had issues with the people getting their money (because PP issues or bank) or people running off with it.

I don’t need anything done, please don’t dm me with your carrd lol.

Something pointed out via a friend is that, while we like to shit on corpos for these layoffs, sometimes in the art/story field they (the employees) really are not needed or not desired anymore. Some places eant to hire a new storyboard person/team, or art directors to make changes to the existing items . The first guy made his impact, now the company wants changes that, as an artist, they just don’t see from their artstyle (of any medium like story, characters, environment etc) perspective. Think the botched Ecce Homo fresco as it was originally painted, and then the restoration - the original artist could not concieve of what it became and therefore is legitimately no longer needed. Paying him his dues and letting him go is the nature of it, if done honestly.

That doesn’t excuse hoarding wealth and trying to get out of paying severance, retirements, royalties for their work, and insurances, but while we often praise that one time Nintendos kept people on at the expense of the CEO, the question is “for what though” if it was a legitimate direction pivot.

But in general fuck epic because thats not what this is. This is almost always"line must go up" behavior. Just wanted to mention it so I can say “ah, there it is” when fortnite skin quality/story direction/landscape changes invariably catches up with and shows the result of these missing staff in a season or 2, as a direct result of these people’s layoffs.