teawrecks

@teawrecks@sopuli.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Funimation Shutdown Fuels Push for DMCA Exemption to Legally Rip Anime Content * TorrentFreak⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Copyright law allows you to make a personal backup, but DMCA law prevents you from breaking encryption. Since you almost always have to break encryption to back up a DVD/BR, that’s always kinda been a fuzzy legal area.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you cheat in games?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t see any ethical issue with it, just an artistic one. To me, it’s akin to altering dialog or story in a film or book. IMO, for a first play-through, you should want to experience what the game’s creator wanted you to experience, even if it’s uncomfortable. After that, mod and cheat to your heart’s content.

  To me, the ability for a game to simulate situations which force you to confront emotions you would otherwise avoid or never have is what makes games an art form. The first time you lose a pawn in Rimworld, getting frustrated at a boss in Elden Ring, your favorite Pokemon evolving, meeting a new neighbor in Animal Crossing, falling in lava in minecraft; all of these moments could be cheapened or circumvented entirely by cheating, and IMO the only person you’ve cheated is yourself out of a unique experience. I call it Emotional Min/Maxing, and I consider it a form of optimizing the fun out of a game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you cheat in games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I used to gameshark on GB/GBA/DS, and that was fun to learn how poking bits changed how the game worked, but eventually I noticed that as soon as I started manipulating the game to my own interests, I lost interest. It became arbitrary, the game disappeared into a pointless matrix of numbers.

  So now I mostly only play according to how the dev intended. Like watching a movie, I’m not going to change the dialogue, or who survives at the end, just because I’m experiencing negative emotions. Those emotions are intentional as part of the art. I want the experience the art intended to create, even if it’s frustrating, or devastating, or hopeless, and to an extent, even if it’s tedious and boring. The lows are there so the highs feel that much higher.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Elder Scrolls VI: Official Name Reveal⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Was really hoping this was edited to say “Sentinel”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Let the Internet Die | Online spaces are captured by oligarchs and saturated with slop—and they’re exacerbating humanity’s worst impulses. It’s time to start over.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, one I think is protected against by the design of the Fediverse for the reasons I mentioned. For the other, I don’t think you’re wrong to say most people don’t know about why the Fediverse is designed how it is, but I think democracy in general faces the exact same challenge.

  As TJ put it,

  If a [social media platform] expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of [non-enshittification], it expects what never was and never will be.’

  I do think there is a sort of balancing act that has to happen to maintain a working Fediverse/democracy, but the hope is that, if you design your system correctly, you get a positive feedback loop that preserves the critical functions that retain power with the people, not the capital.

  The most successful attack against open platforms is the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish loop. And if you squint, that’s the same strategy capitalism employs to attack democracy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Let the Internet Die | Online spaces are captured by oligarchs and saturated with slop—and they’re exacerbating humanity’s worst impulses. It’s time to start over.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re switching your argument. Is your argument that the Fediverse can also be manipulated by the wealthy, or that people outside the Fediverse don’t understand what the Fediverse is? Those are two different conversations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Let the Internet Die | Online spaces are captured by oligarchs and saturated with slop—and they’re exacerbating humanity’s worst impulses. It’s time to start over.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s expected. The difference is the Fediverse gives the users the flexibility to employ our own strategies for dealing with it. When a bunch of money is clearly being spent astroturfing the tiktok/ig/reddit algorithms, you can’t do anything about it. But here, instances can decide to defederate from other instances that aren’t properly moderating such content. Yeah, Elon can make his own instance, he can even spend money creating bots on other instances, but the Fediverse gives us the tools to cull them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MMO players (past and present): what is your attitude towards "forced" group content?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  IMO, the friction between players is the point. The dependency on others in the world is what makes it an MMO, otherwise it’s just a bunch of people playing a single player game next to each other.

  But that’s also not the current design meta of MMOs. Dependency on other players means that it’s difficult to have a clear definition of a player’s experience with the game will be, which means it’s hard for the designers to make guarantees about player retention to investors. Imagine telling an investor who doesn’t play games that “we don’t know exactly what keeps players playing, but we do know that it’s possible for one player to ruin another player’s experience.” So over the last 15y, player interdependence has been optimized out of MMOs.

  I wind up feeling like my lackadaisical approach is probably fucking up someone else’s farming loop…I feel like the person that cares enough to grind a dungeon reward as fast as possible should get right of way over my happy ass

  Those players exist, but they’re not important. I do think most players want to go at a chill pace and have an experience they will remember. Running dungeons as fast as possible to farm gear without interacting with any other players creates a very dependable dopamine loop, and a very forgettable experience.

  I don’t think it’s fun to be forced to interact with others in an MMO, but I do think it’s fun when your best option is to interact with other players. Ex. make it possible to do something by yourself in 5h of play, or with a group in less than 1h, and people will just prefer interact. I think cave quests in wow are a great example of this. Caves can be lethal to a player questing by themselves, very inconvenient, but if they run into another person questing the same cave, there is safety in numbers. Their survivability goes up exponentially, and they can complete the work faster. It just makes sense.

  I think the cave quest has been optimized out of modern/retail wow. Every quest is easily solo-able, everyone can self-heal, everyone can take on 5+ mobs at a time, everyone can just fly in/fly out. My hope is that they’ve learned how unfun this, and WoW Forever will retain that old-style fun where players just have to talk to each other.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'If you can’t show your game to the world without fearing it’ll be cloned, something’s broken' says Moonlighter studio on its canceled demo⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, the thing that is broken is people’s intelligence. The people propping up the mobile games industry, Mr. Beast videos, AI music, “Verticals”, etc. are all people I’ve never met, and yet somehow represent the vast majority of our population. Those are the people who don’t care about the difference between novel artwork, and a half-assed slop recreation that’s designed to poke their dopamine receptors. Those people are why we can’t have nice things.

  Someone will inevitably argue, “no, it’s the billionaires who are thrusting AI on us, we just need to stop them”. And while I agree they showed us the path here, I think we could erase the lot of them from existence, and the remaining population would still use the knowledge leftover to keep going down the same path.

  I don’t know if it’s just that the existence of AI will curse humanity to always very efficiently optimize to the lowest common denominator, or if this will pressure the LCD to not be so far down there, but whatever shakes out I don’t think will be in our lifetimes…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the 3DS worth purchasing despite it being "obsolete" today?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You aren’t ever going to recreate the same experience with an emulator. If you want to experience those games as intended, your only option is to buy physical hardware made for playing them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think probably the most novel thing gold/silver did back I the day was a real-time clock and day of the week tracker. This meant you had to log in at certain times to hunt certain pokemon, or attend certain events. This isn’t as impressive today, but at the time was a whole new level of immersion fans had never seen before, in any handheld game really.

  It was also incredible that they had the new jhoto region, but also the entire gen 1 kanto region also (set a few years in the future). I remember that was just mind blowing that this was even possible.

  But if you’re not feeling it, don’t force yourself through it. The Pokemon games aren’t for everybody.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Control: Resonant

  I think I’m 25-30h in and I don’t want to put it down. Idk how long it is, but all the Remedy Universe games are such a treat, I don’t want it to be over. I’m enjoying the melee-focused combat more than the first game’s TPS combat, I think.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨He escaped⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  …lol I’m trying to decide if you’re informing me that kites predate video games, but also I find it hard to believe that you didn’t know what a kite was until you played video games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This woman has nothing better to do⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, an actual lawyer would know the first amendment isn’t relevant between private parties, on private property.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This woman has nothing better to do⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Easy for a non-manager, outside of Kansas, with prior context of the customer’s interaction with Lily, with hindsight to say.

  Owner or not, she has Burger King lawyers to answer to, not to mention the MAGA community of her town, and she was working with partial information; she didn’t know what had actually been said to the employee, she didn’t know what had actually been captured on video in response, and yet she had to respond on the spot.

  The manager handled it with the patience of a saint, and she was accurate: the policy is for employees to not be rude to customers, to not tolerate customers being rude to employees, and not to record on private property. She then asked the customer to leave.

  I’m confident watching it back, the manager would have done everything differently, but it’s one of those moments you have one shot at, and she did fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨He escaped⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  He literally used video game kiting strats to pull him away from the bike so he had enough time to sprint to it and mount it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BlizzCon 2026 Announcements Summary⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think retail was a misstep when it comes to milking whales, it’s just not a compelling MMO. So to them, it’s remained a massive success.

  I’m also curious about WoW: Forever, mostly because I’ve been hopeful that any studio would see the hype around classic wow and realize there is demand for the old format of MMOs; back before all modern conveniences were added to remove any friction between players. I’ve longed for an experience akin to vanilla, but completely new and unsolved and populated by people who just want to experience organic player interaction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Palworld lead worries Steam early access has "lost its meaning": players treat it like "a normal game" and the program has been "abused for a lot of reasons"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t believe Valheim just left EA. It’s literally been over 5 years!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨KytyPS5 (PS5 Emulator) can now run GTA V at 60fps for few minutes before crashing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But why does that make a difference? Regardless of whether you reverse engineer an API or have the full documentation available, when you translate from it to something else, you’re building the same thing: an API translator. It doesn’t change whether it’s an emulator.

  Traditionally, “emulator” refers to hardware emulation. APIs are reverse engineered, mocked, translated, etc. all the time, but we don’t call it “emulation”.

  Even simply mimicking the behavior of a unified virtual memory space is not called “emulation”, unless there are hardware-specific quirks that need to be emulated (which may very well be the case for PS5 caches, I don’t know).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨KytyPS5 (PS5 Emulator) can now run GTA V at 60fps for few minutes before crashing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah I see. So what makes kytyps5 an emulator given that proton is emphatically not an emulator?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨KytyPS5 (PS5 Emulator) can now run GTA V at 60fps for few minutes before crashing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m trying to understand, what is being emulated?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨KytyPS5 (PS5 Emulator) can now run GTA V at 60fps for few minutes before crashing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok, so if it’s translating to a reverse engineered API, it’s emulation. But if it uses the proprietary documentation and does the same exact translation it…wouldn’t be emulation anymore? What part are we saying is being emulated again?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨KytyPS5 (PS5 Emulator) can now run GTA V at 60fps for few minutes before crashing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Isn’t Proton solving the same problem though?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ontario, Canada 🇨🇦 banned bike lanes and speed cameras. Now their neighborhood streets are turning into a lawless free-for-all⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Claiming that the removal of a brand new surveillance technology is the cause for an untenable surge in traffic violations is crazy. How did we survive until now?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Panic passes Trump tariff refunds back to the Playdate customers who paid them⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Is there an easy to browse website that just lists all the companies that did/didn’t pay back the tariffs? That would be handy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Behold, "the whole story of Steam's economy in one picture": the top 1% of games earn 84.5% of estimated revenue, and most games barely make anything⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks, I knew I was forgetting yet another name for it. Lots of names for the same, very common underlying phenomenon. As it applies to this case, Pareto would be “80% of the value earned by 20% of the games”. But point being: it would be weird if that wasn’t the distribution we saw.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Behold, "the whole story of Steam's economy in one picture": the top 1% of games earn 84.5% of estimated revenue, and most games barely make anything⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It would be weird if it didn’t follow a power law distribution.

  Aka the Pareto Principle. Aka “80% of everything is shit”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m imagining you pulling your head out of your microwave just long enough to type these responses.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Found absolutely nothing about the narrative to be confusing and I’m not even sure how that would be possible.

  I mean, they did have two story lines that take place in parallel with one another, and affect one another. So it’s not like a standard linear timeline, I could see how someone spreading their play sessions out over many weeks or months could lose track of things. But I thought it worked well.

  Joel was a piece of shit who deserved to die, it’s that simple

  I don’t think that was the intended takeaway, nor would I ever dare to say “it’s that simple” about any character’s motives in this story. The entire point of a trolley problem is that it’s an ethical dilemma without a clear “right” answer.

  At the beginning of TLOU2, Ellie clearly also felt like Joel was a piece of shit liar/murderer…but then learns she’s capable of being the exact same person under the right circumstances. If anything, I see the moral of the story as “it’s never simple once it’s you”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I really enjoyed Horizon Zero Dawn, but Forbidden West felt like a less polished slog. I did eventually finish it, and it did have some rad moments, but where in the first game I did every quest and followed every line of dialogue, in the second game it felt like they purposely threw in far more dialogue than I could ever care to listen to. In order to not loath the experience, I found myself skipping a bunch of content that seemed like a huge waste of time.