Or lean into that passive-aggressive vibe the actress took. She got assigned to some half-naked cat who stumbled into town smelling like an execution, five minutes after he killed a creature of legend. There’s a bit of Commander Kiff in that “I am sworn to carry your burdens.”

On the other hand - I don’t do tagalongs. I sat her ass in Breezehome as it got larger, fancier, and piled high with obscenely rare weaponry. It was kinda sad every time she stands up like we’re gonna go somewhere. Lydia, honey - this is your house. I use the chests, the bookshelves, and the gratuitous enchanting table that might actually be a mod. Go hook up with Farkas in one sense or other. I should come in and find you drunk on mead, out in some dungeon, or improvising whatever a sock on the doorknob is for a culture that has neither.

No dude, you demonstrably said ‘I’m going to repeat your argument so you can think about it.’ Projecting some emotional state onto me is not gonna change how you fucked this up.

This is mockery. I am calling you ignorant.

I am trying to highlight how you joined an explicitly leftist server, whilst remaining aggressively unaware of… genuinely the first things people learn about leftism. So when you try smugly posturing your way out of a pointed question, you’re just revealing you know less than nothing.

To be utterly frank I just lack respect for people who think of themselves as any flavour of anarchist while still dreaming of a system as thoroughly rigid as the artificially created Internet.

Anarchists being naked hippies, of course, not organized laborers. The internet was mostly designed and operated by academics. It runs on half a century of “does this sound right?” collaborative standards. Whatever browser you’re reading this in has its origins in anti-monopolist diehards building better software out of spite.

None of which is even addressing the initial failure. Capital didn’t design your computer. Intel’s founders definitely did, but only because they were workers dissatisfied under Fairchild, who were in turn workers dissatisfied under Shockley. The early history of silicon valley is halfway to semiconductor co-ops.

At no point did shareholders build hardware.

Case in point. You think quoting an argument and sneering is a counterargument. Obviously, because you don’t know the first thing about labor theory of value.

Someone asked if you think capitalists or engineers did the engineering, and you revealed you don’t understand the question.

And that excuses a total lack of awareness.

How the hell did you pick lemmy.ml?

It’s mutual. I don’t necessarily extend my expectations of a machine doing what I tell it to, out into geopolitics.

There’s a lot of overlap in useful terminology and philosophy. There’s a bit of overlap in organizational problem-solving (and problem-having). But you can be aggressively capitalist, and still recognize the benefits of stone-soup development. Even in hardware - RISC-V is going to undercut low-end ARM in embedded applications, and hard-drive manufacturers are not exactly Spanish republicans.

On the contrary, I’d expect individual NPCs to be refined first. Like if the cast of Baldur’s Gate 3 was mostly improvising. Or if you had a halfway genuine friendship with your buddy Superfly.

And that fixes the rest of the industry somehow.

4 AM is definitely one or the other.

Every community without sufficient moderation becomes /r/Funny with different CSS.

Half the industry by revenue is not coming from half the customers.

That’s why it’s spreading. So long as a fraction of people get sucked in - your non-participation does not matter.

Those victims “voted with their wallets” and their vote counts for ten times more than yours. This is why outright vitriolic boycotts barely made a dent. This is why it can creep into existing games, including ones you already bought. They’ve got your money. They want more.

This business model amounts to a scam. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. There is no ethical form of attaching a real-world price tag to anything inside that make-believe. Convincing you that you need some random imaginary geegaw is half these people’s job.

No kidding nobody should throw money at that.

But I don’t know why anyone defends its continued existence.

‘Why are you ignoring the problem?’ cannot be answered with ‘why are you ignoring not the problem?’ The existence of things outside a growing issue don’t make the issue go away.

This is half the industry, by revenue. ‘But it’s only half!’ is aggressively missing the point.

I’d be fucking thrilled if this all just rolled back of its own accord. But it’s not gonna. Outright boycotts accomplished very little - and then dried up. These companies are throwing millions at this crap because it makes billions.

Some of the alleged “retreat” from wallet siphons with no cover charge are just games that will instead have a cover charge. They’re not changing the part where you can pay real money for fake hats. They’re not changing how much of the game is built around shoving players toward that decision, as often as possible.

Sega’s $70M whoopsie-daisy evidently hasn’t ruined the company. Nor has it seemed to stop their plans for Dreamcast-era nostalgia-bait games with the same abusive business model as their hilariously-late-to-the-party battle royale cancellation.

Games built around this are a gamble, but slapping it on whatever’s already coming out remains cheap, low-risk, and alarmingly popular. It’s in full-price, flagship-franchise titles. It’s in subscription MMOs. There is no sufficient back-pressure against publishers asking, ‘but what if more money?’

Media Player Classic still rules. Feature-rich with zero bullshit.

Yeah sure, it’s my fault for describing a problem, that’s what really causes the problem. Not a multi-billion industry where an ever-shrinking sliver avoids this psychological manipulation to attach a siphon to people’s wallets.

Pointing a finger at me, personally, will do less than nothing to fight this trend. Do you want to address that objective reality? Or do you want to project more accusations onto the person describing it?

‘Ignore the systemic problem and there is no systemic problem’ is never sound advice.

No kidding there’s always going to be some games that don’t commit this abuse - but anything with marketing and payroll will be tempted, and damn near all of them will go for it, because the downsides are fucking slim. The market brought us here. The market will not magically get us out of here.

Again, not a Netflix problem. This is becoming the entire industry. More big names are using it than avoiding it. There is almost no cost to adding this greedy bullshit.

We’re not going to shop our way out of this.

Hasn’t worked yet.

As if it’s just Netflix.

This abusive business model is the dominant strategy.

If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.

Only legislation will fix this.

Layer three.