You could put the Sega CD or 32X into this meme and it would still work, the Dreamcast was just the last in a series of flops.

The fact that nobody has done “screen in a controller” since Nintendo toyed around with a handful of Gamecube-GBA games is a crime. It was a cool ass idea that got displaced by internet lobbies before it got off the ground.

edit: yeah I know Wii U too but that’s not what I mean, that’s something else.

If the Dreamcast hadn’t had the misfortune of coming out during the objectively best console generation, it would have done fine - but also, if it hadn’t been the latest in a series of flops (Sega CD, 32x, Saturn), then maybe the Dreamcast’s failure wouldn’t have driven Sega out of the console market. Sega struck gold with the Genesis and they just couldn’t replicate it, RIP to a real one,

This is mine too, I’ve got thousands of hours played and I haven’t even landed on most of the planets lmao

Religion is primarily a social phenomenon, so as long as people want to belong to a larger group then there will always be people willing to believe whatever non-falsifiable truths they need to in order to belong to one.

Bethesda announced that players could download a new series of missions for a group known as the Track Alliance. The problem is that The Vulture is the second mission in the Tracker Alliance, and it costs $7 to buy. But it’ll actually cost players $10 because they must purchase 1,000 Starfield creation credits to afford it.

So they put the first mission out for free, but it turns out the first mission was a fucking advertisement. I remember being super pissed when Dragon Age pulled this shit.

And of course they pull the classic cost-obfuscation trick because it would just be far too convenient to just be able to buy a DLC for actual money and then download it.

If even one person is dumb and rich enough to buy it, then it’s worth it to make the website to try to sell it to them. And we live in a world with many such people.

situations where MIT is the right answer

Genuinely curious, when is this the case? If you’re programming on your own then it just takes the option of controlling what others do to your work off the table for no benefit - if you go copyleft and someone uses it and you don’t “mind” them using it then you can give/sell them an exemption while retaining the ability to go after uses that you don’t like.

If a bunch of security experts came out in the wake of the feature’s announcement talking about how much of a disaster it is, I hope they would.

I’ve got no problem paying money for a service that’s worth it. I still buy games on Steam even though I know how to pirate them because Valve’s service is so goddamn convenient it beats piracy in many ways.

Netflix used to be that good, and when YouTube Red rolled out I bought a year of it. But things have deteriorated significantly since then and the price has only gone up.

Sometime before the end of this decade I think we’re going to see the opposite - regulation that makes blocking ads illegal in the same way the DMCA makes cracking copyright protection illegal. They’ll package it with some kind of anti-CP thing and then call all the people who oppose the bill pedos.

Google ads were originally a panacea for really bad popups of the early 2000s. Google had a strict list of dos and don’ts, and ad revenues were high enough that most websites only ran one or two.

People will say, “but then how could a website like YouTube exit at all?”

To which I say that we should retvrn to sharing funny videos via long email chains.

The movie point blank says

The in-universe propaganda TV show point blank says these things. The film is pretty vague on the origins of the bug conflict - we know that the “Mormon extremists” tried to colonize a bug world and got killed for the trouble, and we know that Zegema Beach in the outer rings also gets nuked like Buenos Aires did, but not much else besides these two totally contextless events. In fact the very first propaganda film we see is about how great the Earth’s planetary defenses are - so why was the asteroid allowed to impact at all? This and the fact that Klendathu is so far away that launching meteors towards Earth doesn’t make sense is why many people who analyze the film conclude that the destruction of Buenos Aeries was a false flag, or at least was allowed to happen, by the fascist government in order to spur the people to support the war.

Also, the cinematography speaks for itself. Look at this shot from the battle of Klendathu sequence, where the mobile infantry are literally swarming over the arachnid home planet like ants. The movie wants you to question who the “bugs” really are, because any time humans and arachnids are on screen together, the humans are swarming around the much bigger aliens, only barely managing to bring them down (except in the very brief shot of the aircraft bombing the valley).

And the ending of the film - Dougie Howser walks out in a Nazi SS uniform and uses his psychic powers to tell everyone that the brain bug is afraid. You can tell it’s afraid just by looking at the fucking thing, the way it’s recoiling from him - it looks like it’s about to cry! Johnny Rico’s whole character arc in the film is being a kid who wants to do some good and who has some humanity in him getting that humanity ground out of him by the military machine until he’s shouting the exact same catch phrase that the older generation shouted at him. An older generation that is without exception portrayed as broken by their lives in the military meat grinder.

Last thing I promise: and really, the film isn’t about the conflict with the bugs. Listen to the director’s commentary with Verhoven and the script writer, and they barely talk about the bugs at all. The movie is really about the ways in which a fascist society perpetuates itself and destroys the people in it. Whether the bugs started the war or not is irrelevant - the war is necessary for that society to exist. It’s a society that brainwashes you as a kid, and then incentivizes you to maintain your brainwashing as an adult. It’s a society of broken people breaking their children. It’s a society where a hundred hot young adults can stand around in the shower together and everybody is so horny for the political ideology that they forget to be horny for each other!

School computers back then were a wild west. I remember having Starcraft on the school shared drive and playing it in homeroom.

Yeah I haven’t had harmful application on my computer in over a decade. I feel like you really have to go out of your way to get one these days (not including spyware that you download intentionally, like Windows 11).

IIRC Valve issues shares to its employees, but the details aren’t public. There are a bunch of different corporate ownership schemes out there that it could potentially be.