experbia

that’s what they want. we’re entering the “whale economy”. why should they make and sell 10 burgers for $1 each when they could make and sell 1 burger for $10? they make the same revenue but more profit because their labor and materials could be cut by up to 90%. some idiot will keep paying because they’re impulsive or desperate or have enough money to simply not care. if nine customers are alienated for the one that opens their wallet 10x wider than usual, the investors are happy and the MBAs give themselves bonuses and celebrate. it works for mobile/f2p games, it works for saas, it works for software, it’ll work for this and it’ll work for every other industry before long. get ready for surge pricing groceries and gas and internet and power - it’s coming, under the false justification of “savings”. the unprofitable non-whales can die for all they care.

Mario Maker 3 will be the foundation of every Mario title from here on out - it’s Mario As A Service! Levels will be generated and stored in the blockchain, as NFTs, so you can make, sell and trade rare levels! Make your levels memorable by describing them to our AI Waluigi, who will take your descriptions and generate a level for a mere 13 USD worth of Platinum Nintencoins, tradeable on Coinbase soon! Don’t forget to keep your Gold Nintencoin balances topped off to make sure you have the best chances to get rare powerups! Try downloading our new companion app so Princess Peach can watch you use your phone and listen to your real-life conversations. If she likes what she hears, you’ll get free Nintencoins, so be sure to become a top Brand Ambassador for the best value! Wow MBA-level business sure is amazing! It’s weird that we keep losing customers though… can we make it illegal for customers to leave us, please? I learned in business school that getting what you want is just a matter of killing the right whistleblowers.

I always thought it should be “unlock”, because that’s more what is happening. you’re not buying it, renting has a connotation of a fixed term ownership time, but unlock describes the action… they’ve had the movie the whole time sitting there, probably in a CDN near your home already, but you’re not allowed to see it until you pony up. it’s locked away.

same. I buy a lot of software/games and media/music/movies, and before I buy I always make sure I can pirate it down the road if I need to. if I can’t, I reconsider how much I need it. I’ll switch to my pirated copy at the drop of a hat without a drop of guilt. if it has annoying or unperformant drm? it makes me sign up for an account to use my paid software on my own computer? its servers go down and it won’t boot? switched.

interesting, only the most basic info is included about my 19 year old account. I’ve always been very conservative with the info I share online though.

back in the day, everyone was regularly reminded that the internet is a wild west and only by safeguarding your personal information and using pseudonyms and avoiding identifying info can you have a chance to be safe and have a good time. but now that PII is profitable, all the big internet companies tell you the opposite so they can make a buck. I think this is the inevitable outcome of it.

sorry to hear a baddie is clinging to you, that’s always quite troublesome. it can be hard to do anything about it. shitty as it is, your best bet is usually to become an undesirable target: boring. they’re school yard bullies. they do it for the reaction, that’s it. the more you react, the harder they try. fucking assholes.

this was my experience too. kept putting it off because I assumed I’d need to tinker a bit. didn’t at all, worked immediately with only the simplest configuration. genuinely amazing, I wish my software worked that well.

idk, helldivers going from insanely popular to universally reviled is gonna hurt future deals with Sony. why would any indie or medium sized dev risk doing business with Sony when Sony will randomly push the “destroy game and profitability and reputation” button? this will decrease the number of people willing to publish titles through Sony. “oh you went with Sony? you must want to kill your game lmao”

The content, for sure. I’ll just ask they provide their own USB drive, or I’ll buy a good one for them and fill it if they’ll comp me for that.

If you keep trying the support route, I figure I’ll throw in my general tech support 2c, at the risk of it being unhelpful.

I’ve had to fight my natural temptation to “over specify” or “increase specificity” when tech support sometimes doesn’t “get” my problem. the extra words (like “this is NOT about the emails”) can seem like they’re narrowing things down, but can instead make the canned response system or the underpaid human scanning the email confused about the context. I generally now suggest “underspecifying” - go for something simpler that requires someone to engage you somehow to resolve the problem. Like, “my problem is that I unsubscribed from your emails like you told me to, but I’m still getting them, it didn’t work”. Then suddenly, this might be a bug report of something broken. That gets a lot more attention… upstream humans need to look at it to decide if it’s something affecting just you or everyone on the whole system. When they are in the process of determining this, they’ll have to notice you’re referring to the push notifications and not actual emails in order to decide it’s not a big problem waiting to happen for them.

This underspecificity has helped me a lot in getting better customer support. I never intend to lie outright or be rude… I just lower my skill level. A lot. To a low-tech user, the difference between a push notification and an email is not terribly clear. These support systems tend to work better on low-tech users because, well, most people are low-tech.

I have done this. it can be quite messy but it will definitely import the albums of all the music you have either liked or followed or in playlist in Spotify.

I’m not 100% that it will actually organize it as it was originally on Spotify, though, just that it adds the list’s contents as “wanted tracks”. I assume there’s some way to do this but I haven’t looked into it enough yet.

It’s still on my list, along with figuring out how to get Critical Role working with my Sonarr so I can be done with YouTube frontends…

the cutest character on ST:D is also the cutest character on the fediverse. who’d have thought!