pivot_root

Fair point with neither being publicly traded. I should have been more clear on that.

Unreal the engine, or the game series? From the perspective of a consumer, I don't think either of them seem to be in good shape these days, unfortunately.

Er... Carmarck is in Id. Epic's founder and CEO is Tim Sweeney.

"Fucking hypocrite" and "Epic Games". Never have any other set of 4 words fit together so perfectly.

It's hard to blame people for wanting to hold on to the hope that the Democratic party* isn't also self-serving. They're wrong, but their hearts are probably in the right place.

Edit: In light of the downvotes, let me clarify: I don't think either the Democrats or Republicans give a rat's ass about their voters. I'm trying to be charitable towards people here.

That's kind of a weird way of doing it, but good to know thanks!

Well, where else do you expect the ~~slave labor~~ private prison industry to acquire ~~slaves~~ inmates? Immigrants? Immigrant children? American citizens who look like immigr--wait, nevermind, I answered my own question.

It's sad to see Canada isn't much better off. Can we please just have one country on this continent that doesn’t consist entirely of political parties who unapologetically act against the interests of their voters?

It’s SO much more productive than me banning your or you blocking me. In the end, I’m so glad we both got to say the things we wanted to say even if it got a bit heated there. I’m happy to call you an ally.

Me too :)

I agree that I’d catch more flies with honey; It’s just been me shouting into the void since I watched Bernie get cheated in ‘16 .

Yeah... they screwed over the only actual progressive politician they had, and it's been sliding quickly down the shit-covered hill since then.

To be totally honest, the DNC caught me by surprise this time. I didn't hold out much hope for anything other than the idea that "Trump = accelerationism," (and the in-hindsight regrettably stupid idea of thinking that delaying it was ever going to help) but they went completely mask-off. Courting conservatives, taking endorsements from ultra-rich celebrities, running on a campaign of "we're your only option tee-hee," and Harris blowing multiple hundreds of millions on useless "consultants." And now Biden pardoning his family after claiming he wouldn't. A complete joke.

I’m sure that my anger at the injustice of our political system (from being constantly gaslighted on Twitter by fake-leftist DNC operatives like Brooklyn Dad, Charlotte Clymer, and people like David Brock and Neera Tanden) is palpable even by way of the filter of text.

Nobody can even blame you for that. Fuck Twitter.

Thanks for everything…even the ugly parts. And thanks for making me aware of my ugly, ugly, highly embarrassing tendency to mischaracterize the person I am debating (perhaps due to years of being gaslighted by people that did fit those highly reductive definitions to a T). I look back at my name-calling (that I left with strikethroughs) and bow my head in shame.

Thank you as well. It got a bit heated, but it was an important learning opportunity and moment of self-reflection for me here. It really made me take the time to look back and think about the interactions where I could have done better and approached things with a more level head and less emotional reactivity.

Ps. I do the SAME thing with the edits! Don’t feel bad.

I'm happy to know I'm not the only one 😄

"Making yourself suffer" by boycotting Steam.

It goes against every fiber of my being to not utterly despise a multi-billion dollar corporation, but I just don't have the energy that I used to. I have to pick the battles I want to fight, and they haven't done enough to make it worth it for me to do that.

Some perspective from someone vocally against Epic:

They entered the market and tried to get their foot in the door not by providing a better service or experience to the consumers, but by being underhanded and anticompetitive while accusing their competition of being underhanded and anticompetitive. Add on that with the fact that their CEO lacks any sort of humility and integrity, and I simply do not trust them to give a single shit about me as a customer. If they achieved their goals, I'm confident that they would leverage their position to extract value out of me immediately—be it through ads, increased prices, or selling my data to third parties. I don't want to support that by giving them any of money.

While I don't think Valve is my friend either, they at least:

1. Have a history of doing things that provide some benefit to their users, even if its clearly out of self-interest.

2. Aren't publicly traded.

When it turns to shit, we have the high seas.

Everything goes to shit eventually, but pre-emptively making yourself suffer is just silly. Enjoy the time you have, and vote with your wallet once they start doing anticompetitive crap like paid exclusivity deals. Until then, we might as well enjoy the fact that Valve isn't a public company obligated to chase short term profits for shareholders.

Epic is the pro-developer storefront.

I think their historically-bad UE5 documentation and laser focus on adding features optimized for Fortnite but terrible for other uses beg to differ.

They're the pro-shareholder storefront. Nothing more, nothing less.

There's one magic command for that:

iptables -A input -s 0.0.0.0/0 -j DROP