Its not anonymous. Its pseudonymous.

Even if your pseudonym isn’t directly linked to you, even if you are not doxxed, your pseudonym carries its own reputation.

Its up to the pseudonym operator to determine how to manage that.

To prevent a crash in the commercial office real estate market.

… 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?’

Ok, so we are now at the performative ‘I have a family’ stage of our conservative politicians realizing they don’t actually have any meaningful, truthfully held values.

Republicans sure talk about hating post modernism, but they’ve done so, so much to prove that empty signifiers are the entirety of their politics.

Well, that and hurting people they don’t like.

…

Maybe when they say ‘think of the children’ they really do just mean it as an entirely solipsistic thought exercise.

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.

Please reread the second sentence.

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.

QAnon and Trump taught Republicans that its totally ok to live in an alternate reality where they are always correct and never have to admit to being wrong, or if they do want to admit to being wrong, its because of a vast elaborate conspiracy.

They live in a delusional fantasy land. Its basically mass hallucination/psychosis in service of a cult leader, but because there’s a lot of them, its not seriously considered a mental illness.

1. God is punishing us all for allowing the gays and the trans and abortion to exist, and not mandating bible study in k-12.

2. General misdirect toward incompetent government bureaucracy being the culprit, therefore we should get rid of more of it and privatize more stuff.

3. Its all because of private and public DEI hires of illegal immigrants who also don’t work and get too many benefits thus bankrupting us

4. Secret deepstate illuminati cabal runs everything, we need more sweeping authoritarian powers to stop them

1 - 3 basically are the talking points they’ve used since the 80s, 4 has always been there but is now openly used for about a decade.

It could be a cool or lukewarm beverage with caffeine, and I have seen people drink and eat stuff their dentists tell them not to after an oral surgery, and tonsilectomies can leave open wounds if the dentist doesn’t fully cauterize them or bandage them properly… and I have also seen people remove bandages/gauze faster than they are instructed to for all kinds of wounds…

But southsamurai seems confident that the difference between absorption into exposed oral capillaries and just normally through your gums/mouth is negligible.

Could having open wounds in your mouth allow caffeine in a beverage to directly enter your blood stream much more quickly than when it is processed by your digestive system?

Just… taking a step back from the politics… all that…

Imagine attempting to explain the bare basics of this to an 8 year old.

The CEO… of the Anti Defamation League … publicly defamed a Congresswoman.

Oh, this is the first time you’ve left either hexbear or ml then.

The AdBlockalypse.

You really made an account just to post this singular comment?

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.

According to Mutahar:

1. The Anti Cheat has already been bypassed by a free cheat menu on Windows.

2. He’s fairly sure he has figured out some kind of way to temporarily bypass (as in, it’ll probably get caught in a few weeks) the linux block by some kind of custom virtualization method (requiring only one GPU) that he says he may explain in detail at some point.

In general, he’s done with playing GTO.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eMSagozpKPs&pp=ygUSbXV0YWhhciBndGEgb25saW5l

But yeah, obligatory reminder for BattleEye and EasyAntiCheat games that refuse to allow linux play:

All these game devs have to do is flip a switch, click a few options in their developer portals, to allow BattleEye or EAC to work on linux, through Proton.

And its been that way for 3 years, since 2021.

There is literally no reason for games that use these services to not work on linux, the devs just don’t fucking care.

Assuming you aren’t a hoarder, and you properly clean it… well, yes, its weird by the modern standards of our consumeristic society, but in actuality no, this is recycling.

Landfills are full of things that, had they not been placed in a landfill, could likely have been repurposed and reused by someone, somewhere.