MudMan

I haven’t faceplanted, but I have punched myself in the headset repeatedly. Turns out looking at things up close is not advisable when your face happens to have an invisible box strapped to it.

Yeah, I keep hearing the “you don’t get how big it is” thing, too.

I get how big it is.

European agriculture workers just reversed EU-wide policy as recently as last week by blocking major roads throughout the continent with tractors. They didn’t even agree with each other (half those guys are pissed at the other guys for being too competitive), and the regulations they opposed were climate protection regulations, among other more reasonable things, so this isn’t necessarily a feel-good story.

But they won.

They didn’t even have to try that hard, honestly. Besides mild traffic jams and some tense standoffs with police it was all pretty mild. And yet politicians across the entire continent, over multiple countries, were terrified of the optics of working class people protesting in loose coordination, especially with right wing parties trying to co-opt their anger.

I get how big it is. The size is not the reason.

Yeah, ok.

I don’t want to speak for the OP, but… I’m guessing that’s what they’re saying.

I mean, this issue is not on the ballot elsewhere. Even conservatives who are actively trying to dismantle public health care won’t dare suggest that they want less public health care. At most they’ll tell you they found ways to invest more and then turn around and give that money to private managers. You certainly broke through the propaganda. I don’t think I’ve spoken to an American anywhere who has made a case for the current health care system. Polls suggest this issue, among other “aren’t Americans weird” stuff are wildly impopular with the actual population.

But I also constantly hear from Americans that it’s impossible to turn it around, that candidates who support these common sense moves are unelectable and that there is nothing they could ever do about it.

That part is what I don’t get. I mean, I’m familiar with elections not going my way, it happens to everybody, but holy crap. There’s a reason why this is not on the ballot elsewhere. You wouldn’t need an election to figure this out. Even in countries with the bare minimum of democratic guarantees and no money you would have the mother of all endless riots under these circumstances.

Me, personally, I’m not so much judgemental of the American public as I am baffled at their defeatism and conformism.

Honestly? The real feeling I get from this is being scared for the future. I do know that there are powerful forces seeing a business opportunity in that status quo that can be exported. And you can see the impetus towards eroding the safety nets here following marching orders from the far right, anarchocapitalist mothership all throughout the world. In some of the countries I’ve lived in there is already a push towards this model, just moderated by the existence of some sort of universal health care. Sure, even the bare minimum of public service care takes a TON of the edge off. Those ER bills are what some of my friends in those places paid for, say, having major surgery or good care while having a baby… but it’s a slippery slope.

Best guess, the left of the democrats in the primaries, for a start.

It’s not that you lack politicians who agree with the changes that are needed, it’s that they are seen as less electable than the guy who did tons of fraud and at least one confirmed rape, somehow. I don’t know that Americans are “bad people”, but the fact that these common sense positions aren’t the default, centrist view across both major parties is baffling.

It’s a clumsy way to put it, but it’s not wrong that the lack of universal consensus around these things in the US is confusing and unreasonable.

I’m not sure about the digital-only stuff, but the OP is specifically talking about yt-dlp as an alternative to ripping the BRs, and I have to agree that ripping the disks will be easier and yields better results.

Hardware availability is the trickiest part, especially for UHD, but if you have a drive that will deal with the disks you have I certainly wouldn’t bother with the stream rip.

But hey, as a fallback, it’s good to have the option.

It’s all usable when you get used to it, but this is a great thread to link for people who develop scripting and programming languages, or just text-based technical interfaces. Because yeah, all that crap is designed with the US layout in mind and screw whoever chooses to use ~ and | as commonplace characters.

FWIW, I don’t even code and I still keep a US layer in the background. I forget which one I’m using constantly, it’s all muscle memory. I just Win-space and try again whenever I type a character and it’s not what I expect.

In fairness, the headlines written around this were generally atrocious, save a few (shout out to IGN and the original reporter, which may or may not have been techradar). Sure, in most of those you could read a more complete quote inside, but… staying at the headline isn’t just a gamer thing. Clickbait is dangerous for a reason.

And also in fairness, the point he’s making is still not great. I mean, he’s the guy in charge of their subscription service, so I wouldn’t expect him to be too negative on the idea, but he’s still saying that it’s a future that will come. Not that all models will coexist, but that a Netflix future for gaming is coming.

But yeah, gamers can be hostile without justification and often default to treating every relationship with the people making the games as an antagonistic or competitive one, which is a bummer. In that context, letting this guy talk was clearly a mistake.

Oh, it makes sense. I think there’s a place for subscription services, absolutely.

I don’t think a transition to subscription as the default model for gaming makes sense, though. Which was the point of the question and the implicit goal in the answer. And even if it did make practical sense (if people “got used to it”) it’d be bad for the art form and the industry on the aggregate.

Alright, I was only gently pointing it out because what he actually said is still a pretty bad take, but at this point it’s just annoying.

No, he didn’t say that.

He said that gaming subscriptions won’t take off UNTIL gamers get used to not owning their games. Wihch… yeah, it checks out.

The all-subscription future already sucks, can we at least limit our outrage to the actual problem? I swear, I have no idea why gaming industry people ever talk to anybody. Nothing good ever comes of it.

So far I don’t know of any services that will just hand you a digital file of a movie outside of physical media.

I say that’s a damn fine business opportunity, because I’d be all over it, but hey.

This basically, which at that point rolls all the way back around to piracy, so hey, if you find an easier way to access a comparable file maybe it’s all shades of grey anyway.

If they have access to remove the media from your library on their end, then it’s a license and not a purchase.

That doesn’t mean they don’t owe you access to it, though. The fact that there isn’t a word for “I’ve acquired perpetual access even if I can’t back up the file itself” doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the right to continue to access the media. Or to demand that right to be upheld in court, for that matter.

I mean, you can “buy” stuff in Amazon Prime Video off service. Unlike Netflix or other platforms, they will let you “buy or rent” streaming movies, which is the same as finding the movie on the Amazon storefront and buying the digital copy instead of a physical copy.

Now, does that mean they won’t yank it? Not really. A digital license is a license, not a purchase. Is the word “buy” or “own” inaccurate? I’m hoping not, because like the Sony thing showed, platforms are desperate to not have the courts improvise what rights they owe the buyers on digital purchases.

I’m still buying my movies in 4K BluRay, though. And working on ripping all of them for streaming at home, now that I finally have the space.

OK, I had to look this up, VF1 was model 1, like Virtua Racing, but the did ship a backport of Remix that did run on ST-V. More likely you remember people being excited about the idea that Saturn would just be arcade hardware at home and we’d get arcade perfect ports of Daytona and VF, which was extremely not the case.

I mostly remember the arcade being pin-sharp, which it was, but once you got the upgraded textures nobody was complaining. And we got both at once in VF2, so…

Oh, no, I had my entire world redefined at the sight of the first 3D fighting game… when I played it in arcades the year prior.

The launch version for the Saturn was… a different story. Again, by the time I was able to get my hands on a Saturn the version they were bundling was VF Remix instead, which again, mind blown, entire path in life significantly impacted, so I’ve always been morbidly curious about vanilla.

EDIT: For reference, for people who may be lacking some context here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubJSL5GhSZU

That’s vanilla VF1, right? So… disappointed and mildly concerned?

I’m kinda joking, (kinda), because by the time I got a Saturn it came with Remix already, so I wouldn’t know.

I very specifically remember it not being very fun at all, but then at the time they were pushing it as a FF7 competitor and it is extremely not that.

Silver was on the Dreamcast, though. And PC, which is where I got disappointed with it.

Yeah, fortunately softmodding acts as a backdoor to make that part of the system have a healthy afterrmarket replacement. Which is useful because man, that thing had less storage than I remembered.

Man, that’s a museum piece at this point. It’s what, mid-80s? If it looks bright, stable and clean without any maintenance that’s… increasingly rare.