About once a year or so I go replay Morrowind, the chaddest of the Elder Scrolls series.

This past year I replayed Morrowind with Tamriel Rebuilt tacked onto it, which has been extremely cool and fresh. TR really feels like official content a lot of the time, it’s quite good and the love that’s been put into it is very apparent.

Currently playing FFVI myself. It’s a treat.

Bit easier than other Final Fantasy games, I’m finding… at least in the early game, Edgar and Sabin are ass-blasting everything in the game with very little resistance, those boys probably don’t even need the rest of the Returners squad. I know that will probably change later but the duo are definitely the MVPs of act 1.

I’m also of mixed opinion about the ability to teach every party remember every spell in the game. It’s obviously not the best idea, that I can’t stop myself from doing. Does Edgar or Gau need to know how to cast Bio or Slow or Rasp? No, not at all, and they’re probably better served leveling up with magicite that gives them useful stats. Will they learn those spells? You betcha.

Quantum physics tells us that nothing is actually chock full of little somethings

What I don’t get, personally, is how this one scratched-in groove wave can contain a bassline, a melody and a singing voice and they all can be differentiated coming out of the speaker.

How speakers work in general is just black magic to me, actually.

I like your funny words, magic man

There’s some attempt to try and make it genuine, and there are guidelines around it to support that (e.g. 1 = barely noticeable, 3,4 = distracting, 5,6 = unignorable, 7,8 = prevents normal activities, 9 = prevents conversation)

But in practice you’re going to get about one in every dozen patients who engages with this scale in good faith and you’re going to get a number between 8-11 from everyone else.

but it would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.

So we can pretty much bank on it definitely happening, got it.

Um, there is more than one type of anticompetitive practice? Amazon uses predatory pricing to drive companies out of business, Microsoft uses tying to sell Teams, Google uses self-preferencing for their own services in search results, Facebook acquired Instagram rather than compete with them, etc.

None of which are related to Steam nor has Steam done anything resembling any of these examples to my knowledge.

One of Valve’s favorite anticompetitive cudgels is requiring “most favored nation” clauses in their contracts, prohibiting devs from selling for less on other storefronts (which Amazon also has used).

Valve prohibits people from selling steam keys for less on other storefronts which I think is perfectly reasonable. You can list your game on Steam for $20 and distribute it on Itch for $5 or even free and Steam has zero problem with this, so long as you aren’t distributing steam keys via that storefront. This is to try and prevent a developer from leveraging Steam for advertisement purposes but making all their actual sales off-platform.

Can you describe where Steam has done anything even approaching that, ever?

EA and Activision stores didn’t fail because Steam bought them out and bullied them out of the market, they failed because they were trash products. Steam doesn’t buy “default placement” in anything. They just have a good product that people want to use over alternatives.

Point out a situation in which Steam has acted anti-competitive and I might agree that you have a point, but I can’t think of any situations to call out here.

You can sell your game for different prices on different platforms, you just can’t sell steam keys that way. If you purchase a game on Itch and it gives you a steam key, that’s still a steam purchase and is subject to this restriction. If you purchase a game on Itch and it hands you an installer then you can buy that game at whatever price they want to sell it at.

Failing to make a product that doesn’t suck shit does not make a monopoly for your competitor.

In fact, Steam is de facto not a monopoly because of the very existence of GOG. EA and Activision tried to break in to this arena but failed to provide a product that actually switched people off of steam, because they failed to provide a comparable experience to steam. GOG did, and they’re doing fine.

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Whoa, back up there. Nobody was talking about CSAM until you brought it up.

Huh. Did that come with an update? I remember trying to play HZD when I first got my steam deck and it consistently hit about 14fps during combat at the lowest settings. Completely unplayable. I just uninstalled it and didn’t try again, but maybe I should now.

The oligarchs use VPNs to make their corporations function. They won’t be made illegal. Blanket banning all VPNs in America leads to an instant grinding halt of all commerce.

The Shadow Wizard Money Gang

Come to my house and I’ll play you some of my CDs

If you could sell this for $500 or less you have yourself a customer