Ah yes, because being a good parent and making sure your kid goes to school would’ve certainly prevented them from getting shot at the elementary school 😅🤔.

That, MAUs to brag about to investors, or data harvesting through linked accounts. Or all three.

The weirdest part is how the game was sold in tons of regions where you can’t even make a PSN account. That sounds refund worthy, at least, if not a class-action lawsuit in the making.

PSN accounts, in particular, are pretty bad. In some places, they require a photo ID in order to make an account, and in many regions of the world, you can’t make one at all. Something like 50 of the regions where the game was sold can’t make PSN accounts, and using a VPN to make an account or lying about your region is a bannable offense.

It’s a valid concern, both from paying for something that you can’t even use and a privacy perspective.

From launch until now, creating a PSN account was optional due to technical issues. And while this wasn’t properly conveyed to the playerbase, the game was sold in tons of regions where you straight up can’t make a PSN account. Something like 50+ out of 123 regions where the game was sold cannot make PSN accounts. And using a VPN or lying about your region to make an account is a bannable offense.

The privacy complaints I have more of an issue with since GameGuard, the DRM used, is just as much, if not more, of a privacy issue compared to Sony’s horrible data security and invasive data harvesting. GameGuard has kernel level access to the entirety of your system while it’s running, usually installs itself as an on boot up background process, and has been caught by anti-virus software editing files outside of the game directory.

The first is a genuinely refund worthy issue, if not a class-action lawsuit in the making, while the second one is people being ignorant to how much data they’re actually giving away.

IIRC, the US got involved at the behest of British Petroleum (BP).

I believe BP owned basically the entirety of the oil industry in Iran and ran it like the company towns of old. The living conditions were bad, the pay was worse, and the work was as dangerous as it was backbreaking. So when a beloved leader was democratically elected partially on the pledge of kicking BP out of Iran - which he did by nationalizing the oil industry - BP came crying to the US. Who were all too happy to destroy the biggest democracy in the Middle East in the name of oil.

How many fingers am I holding up? If your answer is 6 or more, I have bad news for you and your data set.

I agree to some extent, but even before then hardware was getting expensive thanks to stuff like the Bitcoin mining craze. Harddrives have been getting cheaper on a dollar per TB basis for a long time (as they should), but I remember the days when it was cheaper to build a gaming PC than to buy a new console, and those days are long gone. And after COVID hit, greedflation set in to declare what the new normal is.

Not to sound snarky or anything, but since when do prices go down? If people were willing to pay the inflated price, there’s no incentive for them not to make that the new standard.

But if you don’t build 'em up, how can you knock 'em down?

I kinda figured that’s what was in there, but the pun was right there and I couldn’t resist.

Gotta get you some City Build 'Em Ups.

If they hadn’t given people the option, I don’t think the site would be up today. I already saw one artist who wiped their account and left the site within a couple of hours of the announcement.

And they couldn’t have picked a worse time to do this after the drama with the CEO banning a popular trans woman permanently off the site last week and threatening to sic the FBI on her for a “threat” of cartoon violence she made after the year-long harassment campaign she suffered had been ignored leading up to her being banned over a transition timeline picture of her face. The CEO then went on to spend hours going into trans women’s dms to insist how he’s not a transphobe after writing a post about how she had been banned for the “threat,” not the picture, even though it had been known for a while by that point that she had been banned for that photo being “nsfw/sexual content,” while he eventually started calling her “it.” He then topped it off by chasing her and harassing her on Twitter, still insisting that her wishing cartoon violence was a tangible threat and posting the names of accounts she had had at various times on Tumblr. All while he was supposed to be on a 3-month vacation.

Between that and the rumors of this AI deal happening that popped up last week as well, people were already looking for alternative platforms. Allowing people to opt out is the least that they can do if they don’t want to run off the users who keep the site running. I don’t think many of them are happy that they even have to do that.

They made an announcement at some point after flipping the switch that noted that some people would be opted out by default based on their blog settings. I think if your blog is set to mature or has certain search parameters turned off already.

It wasn’t on for me or several artists I sent messages to who hadn’t even heard that this had happened, and the general discourse around it was pretty clearly upset about it not being opt out by default.

They must’ve updated the app; at the time I wrote that you couldn’t do it through the app.

For any Tumblr users here, this has already rolled out completely unannounced and is opt-in by default. You need to manually opt out, which can only be done on the desktop website. Odds are good that your data is already being sold to Midjourney and used to train their models.

To do so, click on your blog on the sidebar, click on Blog Settings on the other sidebar on the right, scroll down to the Visibility section, and turn the “Prevent third-party sharing for [your blog]” toggle to ON, not off. If you have any sideblogs, you’ll need to manually do this for each of them as well. It’s per blog and not account-wide.

Once upon a time, I would’ve agreed with you… until I heard that Epic Games got in trouble for trying to create a culture in Fortnite that shames and bullies kids for using the default skins. The advertising around cosmetics is as psychologically exploitative as battle passes and the like, and though they lack the same addictive qualities as lootboxes, they prey upon the same people - namely, kids and those with mental health issues that make fiscal responsibility difficult, like ADHD.

Plus, Blizzard has a history of making in-store items higher quality than what you’d find in the game, so it does affect gameplay in the sense that you get lower quality stuff in the game as a result. Plus, look at what they did with the original Overwatch skins being paywalled when they forced people to switch to Overwatch 2. Blizzard deserves no benefit of the doubt here.

I saw a librarian say on a post that people should borrow from the library anyways, even if they don’t think that they’ll get to it before it’s due, because it means that they can use the higher rates of usage to argue for more funding. Getting something for free and helping the local libraries at the same time? Sounds like a win-win to me.

The best way to fight it is to simply be unmarketable as a community. This is how Verizon ended up having to sell Tumblr for less than 1% of the price they paid for it like only 3 years later. If the cost outweighs the benefit, fewer people will bother trying.

I don’t know if it’s in that video or a separate video, but she did talk about it in a specific video, and the short of it is, she was raised as a boy by her family and it messed her up for many years. Like, to the point where the trans community has adopted her to some degree for having had a similar experience to their experiences with gender dysphoria and other related psychological issues. So her dressing and looking like that is in part her embracing her feminity and the fact that she’s a woman. Kinda like that stereotype of the gay guy who comes out of the closet and starts acting “fruity” or whatever the term is. Or the trans woman who has a pigtails and overalls phase like having the childhood they never got to experience the first time.

No, I fail to see the difference between hating someone for being born and supporting the actions of a genocidal regime against a person because you don’t like them.

I made it racist because you bodyshamed her, called her a freak, and then said she deserves to be silenced, kidnapped, possibly killed along with her girlfriend, and whatever other horrible things the Chinese government can come up with. All because you don’t like her. I fail to see the difference between racism and what you said. Which was my point in going that route.

I’m a trans woman in the US. My life expectancy is 30 years due to suicide rates and how commonly we end up murdered. My colors are supporting minorities against oppression, regardless of whether or not I like them or agree with them.