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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • For work in the public domain, that’s one thing, but for work which is still copyright protected, you can actually be sued for (shockingly enough) making copies of it.

    Generally, though, most countries only care if you distribute copies of something (even if you’re not making money off of it), but that’s not to say that the concept of “distributing” hasn’t been stretched pretty thin in the past.

    Rightsholders have gone after businesses and private individuals just for playing sports events on radio or TV audibly/visibly enough to have an “audience”, thereby infringing on broadcast rights. Even if they’re not charging a thing for it. Feel free to read this and see how far the insanity goes.

    If I buy a book and make copies of the pages to takes notes on, that’s usually fine. But if I make a copy and give it to a friend…



    • Why would they remove GNB-identity. This was the thing we’re known for, and it’s not like it hurts anybody but ourselves since we’re invulnerable.

    I also think it was fine as is, but there is a reason why the Bene-Superbolide situation became a meme. For any casual content where there is not much communication between the tank and healers, it’s hard to trust that people know what you’re about to do.

    If the tank is dying, I can use Benediction, but then they use Superbolide a split second later and my main healing CD has been burned up for nothing. This at least makes it so that if the tank gets bene’d (or any other healer burns all of their resources to get them back up), it’s now only recovery needed from a stable 50% HP rather than 1% HP.


  • I realized this idea long, long ago, when Rare made Banjo-Tooie.

    Banjo-Kazooie was a fun game. You unlock worlds, go to the world, collect 100% of all there is to collect, then continue.

    Banjo-Tooie, its sequel, wanted to be bigger and better in every way. Sprawling open world hub, much larger worlds with more sub-zones, interconnectivity between worlds, more things to unlock, more things to do, etc. etc.

    And I think, despite having so much more, it was a worse game for it. You go to a new world but find there’s a lot you can’t do yet because you didn’t unlock an ability that comes later on. You push a button in one world and then something happens in another, but now you have to backtrack through the sprawling overworld and large world maps to get there.

    And this was just a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64, before the concept of “open world” had really even taken off.

    But it demonstrated to me that bigger was not always better, and having more to do did not make it a better game if it wasn’t as enjoyable.

    Early open world games were fairly small, and the natural desire for people who have seen everything becomes “I wish there was more,” but in practice it ends up typically being that they take the same amount of stuff and divide it up over a larger area, or they fill the world with tedium just for the sake of having something to do.

    When looking at the collectibles and activities on a world map like Genshin Impact, it’s basically sensory overload with how much there is to do.

    But almost all of that is garbage. And this is just a fraction of one region among several. Go here, do this time trial, shoot these balloons, follow this spirit, solve this logic puzzle, and then loot your pittance of gatcha currency so you can try to win your next waifu or husbando before time runs out.

    And don’t forget to do your dailies!

    If a game has a large world, it needs to act in service to its design. It needs to be fun to exist in and travel through, not tedious. It needs to have enough stuff to do that keep it from feeling empty, but not so much stuff that it makes it hard to find anything worthwhile. And it needs to give enough ability for the player to make their own fun, to act as the balance on that tightrope walk between not-enough and too-much.

    Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the most recent games that seemed to properly scratch an open world itch for me. While they weren’t perfect, the way they managed to really incorporate the open world as its own sort of puzzle to solve, in ways that Genshin Impact failed to properly emulate, made them more enjoyable as an open world than most other games in that genre I’ve played in recent memory.





  • Caught me before I was able to edit! I thought about it for a second and decided that estimate was too high.

    10 people is what I would usually say is a normal amount, maybe variable depending on how hungry people arrive and if there are any other dishes to snack on at whatever hypothetical party this is.

    I can only eat 3-4 slices at most before I get full, but my appetite isn’t the biggest.

    Usually what ends up happening is that I still order a party pizza for a group of 5 or so people and then end up with leftovers for a few days. Just can’t beat the surface-to-crust ratio.







  • I think there are two separate but related metrics at play here. Addressing income inequality would certainly go a long way towards improving quality of life for the working class, but Americans don’t care about someone having too much money as much as they care about having too little themselves.

    Despite large movements like Occupy Wall Street bringing the topic of income inequality to the forefront of news for a while, the fact that it petered out and has ceased to be an issue means that enough members of the working class were still contented enough by their bread and circuses, so nothing came of it.

    These voters don’t care if their CEO gets a $10 million bonus at the end of the year as long as they can still afford groceries and housing, but they do start to care a lot when they don’t. Only, blame is being directed at the government (inflated cost of living) rather than their rich bosses (wage stagnation).



  • Part of me blames the collective memory loss of the COVID years and a complete lack of understanding of cause and effect.

    It’s like everyone forgot there was this massive global pandemic which absolutely killed entire industries. And even though the important parts were propped up during the lean times by government support, that support ended eventually, with the economy still a mess that couldn’t just be put back together like nothing happened.

    I mean, people at that time didn’t even have a concept of what was going on. They have no idea how much money was spent keeping the lights on. People lost their shit over the billions it would cost to forgive student loans, but had no idea how many more billions were already spent on—and abused by—businesses whose pandemic loans were forgiven by the government.

    Everyone forgot the pandemic was only as bad as it was in the US because it was so completely mishandled by the Trump administration. We could have had everything back to normal a lot sooner if there was even a little bit of national preparedness, not to mention if we didn’t have all the misinformation spread by his own administration.

    So when the economy went to shit in 2021-2022 during the Biden administration, people shrugged their shoulders and put the blame on the old man in the white house, despite the fact that it’s been on a recovery trend during this last year. And so Trump’s first year is going to start with stronger markets, he’ll get the credit, and then things will get worse just in time for someone else to take the blame for it.