Tashlan

Oh yes, I once had someone tell me they wanted my family to die in a fire and suffer while doing so because I didn't think Guardians of the Galaxy was the sort of comic that would make a good movie. I was wrong, but you know, I think I was the only person who ought to suffer for that mistake.

I do tend to think that this is one of those things that the Fediverse, by not demanding everything be monolithic, is uniquely capable of dealing with because instances could provide per-community options (public up and down, private up and down, maybe an actual "fuck you" button) and people could try and figure out what works best for their unique forum.

This tends to assume that each individual is a sincere member of a conversation, but real parties also don't have swarms of robots and clones wearing disguises coming in to try to destroy your house. User reducing visibility is a strong first-line defense against bad actors that doesn't require 24/7 moderators. If you poke through big, popular Facebook pages, like the NYT, and look through their comment sections, you'll often find a ton of copy-pasted spam, scams, etc. ("this psychic saved my marriage! this accountant made me a bitcoin millionaire!") I don't believe the up/down system can be the only way to preserve the ability for people to have conversations, but we shouldn't forget what problems these systems were created to solve.

You sound like a normal person who doesn't take shit personally -- some people really, really do take negative feedback on social media the way that you might someone keying your car, and I worry about the repercussions of downvoting the 'wrong" person who might seek reprisal. An anonymous downvote button feels like an "oh, fuck off" button, a public one feels like "fuck YOU for real" to me.

No great surprise, sadly--Bethesda has been on this road for a while. One of my angriest "gamer moments" was when I bought the Skyrim PC disc from the store and brought it to my PC and I was told I had to install Steam to play it. I wasn't a Steam-user at the time, and it felt very, very bad, especially since at that time (2013), the family home did not have high-speed Internet (they did not run cables to that neighborhood) and instead we shared a cellular modem plugged into a router a friend at an IP solutions start-up hooked us up with. I had just moved back to that house and was specifically trying to find something big I could do that would not require me to be online.

I am a huge proponent of digital media because, as an anime fan, I've seen firsthand that big, important properties like Evangelion can disappear from circulation for a decade at a time if something happens to the publisher, so I would rather own what I can than have to ask a company for permission to use something I've paid for. I am generally distraught that in order to deal with my other major beef with modern gaming (lack of backwards compatibility in consoles leading to having to repurchase the same shit over and over again) I have to use digital downloads and deal with DRM.

I'm a PC gamer predominately, but I can absolutely share and resell my physical discs from console -- that hasn't actually gone away. I would say for sure that the amount of fiddling that I have to do on my PC and Steamdeck sometimes, and the number of bad PC ports in the last year, are dealbreakers for people who aren't quite as enthusiastic. Maybe a bigger part of is just the "living room" aspect -- no matter how many times I've tried using an NVIDIA Shield or Steam Link or whatever, streaming from my PC to the living room is janky, at least for my purposes. (I also do a significant amount of work on my PC, which I don't want to have streamed into my living room, and I multitask like a fiend so even full-sizing a game window is a non-starter for me.) And of course, the second "living room PC" is not a concept that has caught on yet, so people with one PC will probably prioritize that for work.

Which sort of brings me to what I think is the bigger "thing," which is just mental separation. Some people don't want to play games at the same desk they work at, or even the same room they work at, and they want to be in the "relaxing" space. They don't want whatever drama is on their computer (social media, work e-mails, e-mails in general, whatever Windows bullshit is going on that day) to interact with their videogaming.

Also something Steam enthusiasts hate to hear, but it's true: Steam sales aren't what they used to be, and even though I don't buy console games, when I'm trying to price out something I would like to play, 9/10 times I can find a $20 disk on Amazon or Wal-Mart while it's full priced on Steam, because excess physical disks get their prices cut for warehouse space.

I let my character be used as a hostage while I was catching up at work and came home midgame to find out they were stripped naked and whipped, which still gives me weird vibes to this day. I don't really want my shit "in play" when I'm not there.

I don't d20 anymore because my schedule doesn't really allow it, but my other regular DM would essentially work out canonical side-stories "once you're back" if the absence is prolonged, otherwise "generically separated."

Spez mistakes being cynical and greedy with "maturing," as is typical of the cynical and greedy.

Damn, ordinarily I'd follow this coverage at r/anime_titties

Jay Peters has been fantastic in his reporting on this, and generally stuck to observable facts. That Reddit is now being a bitch to him just further cements my impression of their leadership. They cannot even handle their own actions being described.

I assume the desire goal of the John Oliver thing is for the purpose of getting John Oliver's attention.