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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • For clarity: Vance did not literally say lugenpresse or fake news, he just performatively complained about fact checking.

    I am the one saying lugenpresse.

    …Because one of the many fascist elements of Trump’s cult is his repeated refrain of ‘fake news’, which is exactly the same tactic as Hitler and many other fascists have used in their rise to power.

    Again, Vance did not literally say lugenpresse at the debate.

    Personal Aside

    But uh yeah, in general, widespread American conservative adoption of fascist culture and talking points is not surprising to me.

    These people it appeals to the most are narcissistic assholes who have largely failed in life, and are fueled by raging against their inability to achieve the American Dream™ … and then that rage is directed toward anything that conservative hate mongers can blame for that failure.

    I grew up in a religious, conservative household and had to do a considerable amount of research and investigation to learn it was all bullshit, then learn how to argue to be able to refute it, and then expend basically all my wit, energy and resources to escape these toxic people.

    Incurious people who grow up in that setting often never really have any inkling to challenge any of it and are basically always ostracized, negged or disowned for doing so.

    They just get more and more indoctrinated, culminating in basically QAnon/MAGA worldview: Just make up a narrative that makes you superior righteous and truly knowledgeable , and all your ideological enemies extremely brainwashed at best, literal, actual demons (reptillians?) at worst.

    My dad went from making me listen to Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage every time we were in the car together, to, last time I spoke with him, attempting to convince me that Tom Hank’s son actually was a pedophile who raped and ate babies for their adrenochrome.

    The… more and more time I spend away from my family, the more and more I talk, either in person or online, with other people, the … more and more I realize just how absurdly insane my life experience has been, that I can best describe myself as a traumatized survivor of it.

    Its taken me around two decades to escape the constant physical, mental and financial trauma inflicted upon me by the narcissistic, moronic hypocrites that raised me, taken me two decades to undo all the brainwashing.

    Its a cult. American conservatism is a cult of rage and hatred.

    That’s why it isn’t surprising to me that it finally went mask off with Trump. It’s always been there seething beneath the surface of begrudging civility.

    You just have to have come from it, been born into it, and then escaped, to know how bad it has been, and still is.


  • It’s actually worse.

    The core MAGA people are utterly convinced that ‘fact checking’ is literally the moderators lying to prevent Republicans from saying what is actually true.

    They are way, way, waaaaay down the rabbit hole of the lugenpresse, I mean fake news, that basically any time the figures they adore/worship are ever fact checked, well actually that is evidence of a vast liberal media conspiracy against them.

    They actively despise fact checking, and when it happens, this triggers their conspiracism harder.

    The reason why Vance made a show of crying about fact checking was partly due to personal anger/embarrassment/whatever, but the other part is that he knows that complaining about it is appealing to core Trump voters.





  • … Its a Korean beauty contest. The country with the highest rates of cosmetic plastic surgery in the world.

    I… I get what you’re driving at, that people in general shouldn’t be so driven toward perfection in outward appearance.

    But its a beauty contest, in a society where over 25% of women under 40 have had some kind of plastic surgery. and a huge cultural emphasis on perfection of physical appearance, where using AI enhanced filters is also hugely prevalent.

    I’m not saying this is good, I personally don’t like beauty contests, I don’t like widespread unrealistic beauty standards… but I don’t see how this question, absent its fumbled lingo adding overt sexual connotations, is surprising at all.

    It’s like being a vegan who is confused and angered by someone asking contestants at a hot dog eating contest how they prep before the contest:

    Why isn’t the issue of meat eating being addressed at this meat eating contest?

    Context should answer your question of ‘why do people at a beauty contest get asked how they would improve their beauty?’


  • It exists partially because many great games, for a long while, before widespread internet access, could not be played if they were no longer directly sold without either paying out the nose for a working, used cart or disc, and console… or via emulation, which is apparently basically illegal, in practice, technically, its complicated, etc.

    Then the video game landscape changed with widespread internet access, much more oriented toward what used to be seen as buying a fancy pants board game into well now you’re just buying a ticket to a fancy pants board game that can be revoked at any time, and now you just have an expired ticket to a box that is magically superglued shut and will light on fire if you pry it open.

    Some of us olds still view software as a product, a good, not a service.


  • The Stop Killing Games concept is not stopping or protecting anyone from buying video games.

    … Neither is slapping a warning label onto games that says ‘hey you don’t own this the way you own a blender.’

    That’s very strange framing to use.

    What SKG does is mandate that your purchased product be technically possible to be usable in perpetuity, or refund the cost of it.

    Everyone knows servers cost money to run, so its not reasonable to mandate every game that is totally online only just have servers up forever, maintained by the publisher.

    But what is also unreasonable is needless, always online DRM that shuts down one day (Games for Windows Live, anyone?) or having a massively online game that could still be enjoyed by dedicated fans, willing to front the cost for one or two servers… but cannot, because reverse engineering network code is orders of magnitude more difficult and costly than the publisher just releasing it to the public when they no longer want to officially maintain it.

    SKG would completely allow you to purchase an online game whose official server support would end someday.

    It… just augments consumer rights by mandating either a refund at that point, or a pretty effortless and costless release of the server files and configs.

    I am really struggling to see how you are interpreting this concept as somehow preventing the purchase of games.



  • It doesn’t make any sense if the whole market is shitty rip offs.

    In this case I’m not saying all games are bad, shitty games, but they are all shitty rip offs in the sense that they all legally can, and many do just suddenly deactivate, and you’re not even compensated for this.

    The whole fundamental legal trick the software industry has pulled is making everything into a license for an ongoing service, as opposed to a consumer good.

    And the problem is that this is now infecting everything, expanding as much as possible into anything with a chip in it.

    Even if the consumer is perfectly informed, it doesn’t matter if the entire market is full of fundamentally unjust bullshit, as there aren’t any alternatives.

    All you get is consumers who are now informed that their digital goods can poof out of existence with no recourse.


  • A while back I was discussing Ross Scott’s ‘Stop Killing Games’ proposal in the EU, in some other lemmy thread.

    If passed, that law would make it so you cannot make and sell a game that becomes unplayable after a person buys the game, or you have to refund the purchase of the game itself as well as all ingame purchases.

    If gameplay itself is dependant on online servers, the game has to release a working version of the server code so it at least could be run by fans, or be refunded.

    If it uses some kind of DRM that no longer works, it has to be stripped of this, or properly refunded.

    Someone popped in and said ‘well I think they should just make it more obvious that you’re not buying a game, you’re buying a temporary license.’

    To which I said something like ‘But all that does is highlight the problem without actually changing the situation.’

    So, here we are with the American version of consumer protection: We’re not actually doing any kind of regulation that would actually prevent the problem, we’re just requiring some wordplay and allowing the problem to exist and proliferate.

    All this does is make it so you can’t say ‘Buy’ or ‘Purchase’ and probably have a red box somewhere that says something like ‘You are acquiring a TEMPORARY license that may be revoked at any time for any reason.’

    US gets a new content warning. EU is working toward actually stopping the bullshit.










  • Firstly, yeah… RDRO is utterly plauged with all sorts of cheaters using trainers and all kinds of cheats is full of crap, at least for PC.

    The standard strategy you basically have to employ is that whenever you see something nonsense like that happen is you have to jump to another instance/lobby. Depending on your luck, you may have to do this every 15 to 60 minutes aaaand some cheats allow the cheater to follow you to your new lobby.

    Secondly…

    A few years back I was in RDRO and was attacked by a cheater.

    I had a broke ass level 15ish character with the just a few of the least expensive guns.

    They had infinite ammo. Teleport hopping. Spawned 10 additional NPCs versions of themselves, then of my character, then zombies, then legendary animals (basically fucking monsters).

    All the while they’re scrambling their name in the scoreboard every minute and create spoofs to make it harder to actually do a report or have the grievance system actually work correctly.

    I killed them all. I died over and over again, but I kept killing them. Whittled down the fake names and spoofs and kept doing the grievance thing until it was actually landing on one consistent name.

    Then the cheater began spawning gigantic props like boats attached to their character, which rotated and hit with physics force when they rotated, which they could shoot out of but I could not shoot into.

    But uh, I managed to juke my way through cracks in the collision mesh, then shoot him.

    He got tired of this at some point… and just turned himself invisible.

    But, by this point I’d been killed enough times that I’d managed to get him showing up on my radar.

    I’d by then long since run out of ammo… and began stalking him, via radar, with just a knife and lasso, sometimes the running tackle with the lasso that leads into a hogtie, other times actually managing to sneak up behind him, executing an invisible foe.

    After an hour and a half of this, he started slipping up, and I could see him attempting to flee me, teleport half a klik away and just stand there for 30 seconds, then move a bit, then pause again, presumably fiddling around in his menus.

    I killed him a few more times in this state, and he quit, he left.

    … I would have just jumped to another instance if he had not killed my horse.

    Do not fuck with a man’s horse lol.

    … anyway, yeah. hung up my hat after that. fucking nonsense.