MudMan

I am genuinely considering moving away from English language social media altogether. I find my native language media… kind of exhausting, honestly, but it’s still better than what the last Trump term triggered, so… maybe? It has the side advantage of countering some of the whole cultural imperialism, because hey, I’ll suffer it from US coastal elites, but I desperately need an alternative if it’s going to be coming form Elon Musk and Donald Trump, so…

Right. So Trump and Musk actively advocating for eradicating income tax and dismantling the government is the same thing as Harris winning and not doing that because the framework of the system is capitalistic and them not blowing up the US economy enables rich people to keep being rich.

That’s the argument.

That is the least serious argument I believe I’ve ever heard. It is a magnificent crystal of disingenuousness. If you could compress unserious, fallacious political arguments into diamonds, they would be that train of thought.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is absurd whenever it pops up. Like, it was absurd on the spectrum of relative centrist Obama against relative centrist McCain. But Trump vs Harris? The degree of detachment is cosmic.

Anyway, adults have an actual real political system to worry about, so you do you. We can always pick this one up after the election if some semblance of liberal democracy remains to worry about.

I mean, one of the two sides is putting forward the poster boy for rich people as a candidate and is largely bankrolled by the richest person on Earth.

So… “vote for whoever” seems like it implies forgetting who the real enemy is by definition.

That’s fair. I do see how it being nominally a new IP instead of a numbered sequel the ways it overlaps with Persona feel like a bit of treading water.

For me there is way more than enough to separate it, though. The bonkers story alone and the super political spin on it are crazy, plus the gameplay ends up being different enough.

But yeah, it’s pretty much one of those. Still better than going full action RPG like Square has done with its franchises, though.

Ah, yeah, but the fun bit is that there are a ton of builds that let you get there. HP-based skills are powerful in this, and you can heal for cheap, so you can get there that way, and once you get a bit overlevelled and can kill mobs out of turn-based combat you’re just cruising.

I may see what happens on harder difficulties, but I genuinely don’t care too much, because just the mechanics of figuring out the sequence for each dungeon and enemy type is so fun to do with the brilliant UI that I just… enjoy doing it, kinda like you enjoy clicking things on Diablo or something. Truly smooth design.

I just wish they had figured out antialiasing better, because woof. I ended up injecting better AA through ReShade and never looked back.

Just because you can grind money easily or some other reason?

In any case on Normal I haven’t felt it at all, mostly because I’ve been single-day completing most dungeons and that gets you a bit overleveled.

But it’s still a lot faster and tighter than Persona on that front. And more flexible and nonlinear, too. For what looks like a long game, this thing moves. Much fewer, shorter stretches of just visual novelling with friends (although there’s plenty of that, too).

Metaphor ReFantazio is amazing.

I doesn’t look like it needs my help, because it’s doing pretty well, but damn, it’s good.

Maybe too much anxiety to play a game in which you’re running for office in a fantasy land, at least until November, but… yeah, it’s bonkers and it’s well written and it’s by far the most political game the Persona-adjacent studios have ever done in some really fun ways.

Also a triumph of UI. Not only does it look great, it’s so frictionless. It’s a turn-based JRPG and it plays faster and more smoothly than that abomination of an action game Square tried to pass as a Final Fantasy VII remake by orders of magnitude. Seriously, go play it if you’re at all interested in that corner of gaming.

Social media killed online aliases and I have a hard time deciding if we’re all worse for it.

Instinctively I still stick by that, though, as you can tell by my anonymous profile with no bio, but when I volunteer any amount of personal info these days people are often confused that I’m not sharing openly who I am or where I’m from. Every time someone does that it weirds me out because in the 90s telling (and asking) people those things would have been such a suspicious, sketchy move.

I had never heard that before. Is that a region or country-specific thing?

Well, there are a couple of caveats to that. One is that it’s far from the first time an emulator has been taken down for similar reasons and it’s historically been pretty ineffective in the grand scheme, especially when alternative forks are available. “Far reaching consequences” is a bit of an overstatement, at least for those of us that went down into the Bleem! mines back in the day. There is a chance that you may be connecting things that aren’t that directly connected here.

The second is that you’re still misrepresenting people not acting out their annoyance the way you’d like with people not being annoyed. I’m not here defending Nintendo, this sucks. I’m here saying that I don’t want to shame Nintendo into the same awkward gray area Google as an intermediary and every other IP holder currently inhabits, I want actually effective regulation that protects legitimate content creators from IP abuse, including from predatory corporations. You are looking to perform outrage in a room of like-minded people, and I get that you want to vent, but it’s not particularly useful to get mad at people that agree with you for not being in your same emotional level while they do.

That’s a good cue to mention that I don’t know the specifics of how this would work in Brazil and how they impact the situation one way or the other. That said, my objections to the current arrangement of IP and copyright are fairly international.

I did not claim that creating an emulator is illegal. You don’t sue people for a crime, either. “Illegal” and “criminal” are different concepts, and making an emulator without tapping into proprietary assets is neither.

We don’t know what Nintendo used to threaten Ryujinx, so we don’t know how likely it is that they would have won. We do know the Yuzu guys messed up and gave them a better shot than in the other times they have failed at this exact play.

You are very mad at an argument nobody is making.

They are absolutely within their rights to approach the developers of Ryujinx and threaten to sue them. Based on how things have worked so far they’d lose, and I agreee with you that the inequality in that interaction is terrible and should be addressed.

On the Yuzu scenario it’s more relevant, because of the specific proprietary elements found in the emulator.

And then there’s Nintendo targeting emulation-based handhelds and streamers for featuring emulated footage of their first party games on Youtube videos, which falls directly under the mess that is copyright enforcement under Youtube and other social platforms.

In all of those cases, a clearer, more rules-based organization of IP that explicitly covers these scenarios would have helped people defend against Nintendo’s overreach, or at least have a clearer picture of what they can do about it. We can’t go on forever relying on custom, subjective judicial interpretation and non-enforcement. We’re way overdue on a rules-based agreement of what can and can’t be done with media online.

The worst part is… we kinda know. There is a custom-based baseline for it we’ve slowly acquired over time. It’s just not properly codified, it exists in EULAs and unspoken, unenforceable practices. It’s an amazing gap in what is a ridiculously massive cultural and economic segment. It’s crazy that we’re running on “do you feel lucky?” when it comes to deciding if a corporation claiming you can’t do a thing on the Internet that involves media. We need to know what we’re allowed to do so we can say “no” when predatory corporations like Nintendo show up to enforce rights they don’t have or shouldn’t have.

Yeeeah, Nintendo sucks.

And it sucks that, despite this not killing the distribution of Yuzu or Ryujinx forks it does make them less safe and reliable for users, as well as hindering ongoing development.

Ultimately, though, Nintendo is acting within their rights. Which is not an endorsement, it’s proof that modern copyright frameworks are broken and unfit for purpose in an online world. We need a refoundation of IP. Not to make everything freely accessible, necessarily, but to make it make sense online instead of having to rely on voluntary non-enforcement. I don’t care if it’s Youtube or emulation development, you should know if your project is legal and safe before you have lawyers showing up at your door with offers you can’t refuse.

He shipped enough clunkers (and terrible design decisions) that I never bought the mythification of Jobs.

In any case, the Deck is a different beast. For one, it’s the second attempt. Remember Steam Machines? But also, it’s very much an iteration on pre-existing products where its biggest asset is pushing having an endless budget and first party control of the platform to use scale for a pricing advantage.

It does prove that the system itself is not the problem, in case we hadn’t picked up on that with Android and ChromeOS. The issue is having a do-everything free system where some of the do-everything requires you to intervene. That’s not how most people use Windows (or Android, or ChromeOS), and it’s definitely not how you use any part of SteamOS unless you want to tinker past the official support, either. That’s the big lesson, I think. Valve isn’t even trying to push Linux, beyond their Microsoft blood feud. As with Google, it’s just a convenient stepping stone in their product design.

What the mainline Linux developer community can learn from it, IMO, is that for onboarding coupling the software and hardware very closely is important and Linux should find a way to do that on more product categories, even if it is by partnering with manufacturers that won’t do it themselves.

You got it. The moment you surface the idea that there are multiple distros or DEs you’ve missed the goal the thread is suggesting. Presintalled, customized software built for the hardware is the way to ease people in with zero tweaking, which is crucial for newcomers.

Oh, that works for me, definitely. It just takes maybe two hours, instead of 20 minutes. Same principle, though.

How do you get motivated in the afternoon? I have maybe three, four hours of semi-effective brain function between waking up and what seems to be some form of power saving mode that lasts the rest of the day. If I’ve eaten food with a fork that day, doing things is a struggle. Send motivation tips for post-lunch humaning, please.

Well, then you don’t need a phone review, do you?

Which is fine. Most people don’t need a phone at any given time. You go check reviews for phones when you need one and when you care about the differences between them. If you just need a phone-ass phone you can just go to your carrier and grab whatever is packed-in, no need to check reviews for that, most phones just fine work out of the box these days.

See, this is the exact process I am trying to describe. I’m sure that made sense in your head, and I’m sure if you think about it for a second you’ll realize that Target will very happily set up an affiliate link, just as Amazon does. And, of course, a whole bunch of the SEO listicles are the SEO hooks of bigger traditional review sites, including RTINGS, IGN or whatever. For the sake of argument, punching in “best bluetooth speaker” on DDG returns SEO listicles from Tom’s Guide, Wired, RTINGS, the New York Times, CNET and The Verge, in that order.

Which is not to say it’s not annoying, affiliate links and SEO have done terrible things to how practical reviews on websites are presented and parceled out. But that’s not to say they aren’t done honestly or lack validity on the sites that do it right, which are also the more successful ones.