For longevity?

Satisfactory and Elden Ring.

Honestly, something like Call of Duty or fortnite might be nice too. I haven’t played in years but the skill ceiling is very high so it could at least keep me occupied for a very long time.

Careful with this. Downloading pirated content can definitely be illegal depending on where you live.

It’s just not usually enforced as heavily as redistributing.

Doubt it’s spite.

I will avoid games that “feel” Japanese because they don’t interest me for a variety of reasons. I don’t like the exaggerated voices and facial expressions, I don’t like personified insects and sea creatures, and I don’t care for hamfisted dialogues that over-explain the entire plot.

Games like Mario and Zelda are exceptions because they have just enough of a Western feel to them.

I have to imagine Japanese players like things that feel normal to them the same way I do. And a lot of Nintendo’s bigger games have found a good way to thread that needle between Western culture and Japanese culture.

They should be careful. Plenty of alternatives cropping up. No, they’re not as technically impressive, but anyone with some basic Photoshop knowledge can do the same things on GIMP, paint.net, photopea, etc. Might just take a few extra steps.

All going to be less relevant soon with AI art though. If we are in the rotary phone stage of AI, wait until we get to the iPhone stage.

I think the issue is that these service providers are more than capable of providing “unlimited” data, but choose not to because they can make a lot more when people inevitably go over their limit. The salt on the wound is the fact that ISPs usually have no competition. They usually have a monopoly on the area in which they operate.

Where I live, we have unlimited data that only gets throttled if you use a truly absurd amount (like if you’re constantly pirating large amounts of 4k movies or something). No caps or unexpected fees. Overall, I always felt like I had it pretty good, and I still think that…mostly.

The funny part is that my ISP had competition move to town recently. I kid you not, the week before the competition officially started up their service, my ISP sent a letter saying they were doubling my Internet speed for no extra charge.

They were trying to show how awesome they were but really it was the biggest slap in the fucking face. You’re telling me you were overcharging me that much for years?

Another issue is that advertising, which you never asked for, makes up part of your monthly data usage, as do routine and unavoidable downloads like security updates, video game patches, etc.

I actually like where the Fediverse is now. And I think a long trajectory of slow growth will be very good for it.

Reddit is a great example of the “enshitification” process at work. A community grows way too big, way too fast. People don’t adopt the norms, the norms change. That’s why the front page of Reddit is full of “Am I ugly?” Posts when it used to be (more) high quality discussions with a bunch of nerds. Hacker news is a good example of a slow-growing community which has mostly maintained an environment of intellectual curiosity.

Excellent blog post about this here: https://www.marginalia.nu/log/82_killing_community/