Yeah. That is, and was, some “All lives matter” bullshit that then proceeds to insist that people who had received documented threats in the past and were seeing the exact same attacks occuring were 'inserting themselves" and then insisting the real problem is people is… people who are angry they are being doxxed and threatened constantly?

say, we cannot talk about ethics because you won’t stop talking about us allegedly harassing people. What is the first law of the internet? DON’T FEED THE TROLLS. By pushing this harassment narrative, you are giving these awful people victory and marginalizing the moderate majority who do want a serious conversation to happen about journalistic ethics.

Also: This was not a video on his channel or even his podcast. This was a comment in a relatively low impact video that basically only content creators watched

Yeah. Fuck that bullshit. If Bain hadn’t died he would be right there with the asmongolds of the world right now.

And while I won’t talk about the personal experiences of my friends who were formerly in games media and dev (because nobody believed them back then and sure as hell won’t now…), I will point out that a few outlets, when talking about the current “DEI is the real problem in the world” stupidity have alluded to Bain being the reason they initially stayed quiet until it was too late. Because when you have someone with that audience insisting that all old media is fundamentally evil and lying to you? You don’t pick a fight that will just lead to you getting fired.

You mean the prick who was one of the biggest voices legitimizing the Gamergate crowd who couldn’t even be bothered to speak against the harassment toward devs and games media? The guy whose entire claim to fame was screaming about “lazy devs” in an era where it was still kind of a miracle to even get a PC port of most games?

Regardless of him being a piece of shit, his content creation style was still very much “yell into a camera” similar to Sterling but with a lot fewer skits. That is still a popular style but plenty of youtubers outright build up scripts because they want to tell a narrative about the game they are playing or reviewing. Mandalore is a great example of that.

Which is similar to the old single camera sitcoms. There is a lot of charm to it but there is a reason the vast majority switched to multi-cam setups. And a lot of that is a mix of budget and just being able to do cooler stuff.

Because it takes time and money to make Content.

I’ll stop you right there: I don’t give a shit if they pirate every single game they play. It doesn’t matter. Because, even amongst the streamers, you are looking at hours of prep per game (to dial in settings, weird streaming hiccups, etc) and on the VOD side it is generally accepted that you have hours of footage and editing for every minute of Content.

And all of that costs money. Being able to stay up late to write a script to make that Dark Souls run really cool? Doing insane after-effects editing to do a stupid joke star wipe? Or just playing the same cutscene over and over so that you can get the right background NPC for your gag. That takes time.

And you know what helps with time? Money. Which comes from revenue and “engagement”.

And this is very demonstrable. Plenty of youtubers and streamers have very clear differences from their early work to their new work. A great example is Michael Reeves (who I assume is not cancelled just yet but…). His early videos are awesome. They also are incredibly low budget and often rushed. Whereas his newer videos (even the one where he just drives around in a sandstorm for a while…) have ridiculously good production values and involve some real feats of engineering. The difference? Before he was part time flunking out of school and tutoring for a living. Now? He… nobody is really sure how Michael Reeves makes money but I assume OTV pays him a good salary for showing up a few times a year?

Also: People vastly underestimate how much storage and bandwidth is required for video. Which is why peertube and the like basically exist for proof of concept one offs and for companies to fork and use in their own products.

Reviewers without ANY potential conflict of interest don’t exist (and if you are even considering “Rumble” as something to trust… holy shit).

But also? Nobody has zero conflict of interest. Especially once they get into the “media” side of things. because you are going to meet employees of companies (or have colleagues become employees) and it is inherently going to shade things. I don’t like that Intel are dangerously close to circling the drain because one of my best friends from grad school works there. But also? I have a few people who work at a company that my firm does business with and we get drinks together when I fly out to visit.

But also? That is kind of what journalism(-adjacent) work is. Just because I have drinks with Fred and Sally doesn’t mean I am going to give them a pass for not meeting a deliverable or price gouging us. Similarly, I am not going to buy an intel processor just because a buddy of mine works on their compiler.

What matters is actually looking at how an outlet reviews things and how transparent they are with their biases and policies.

In the 3d printing space? I recently bought a new printer. The outlets that I genuinely trust are Teaching Tech and Maker’s Muse as both of them are very transparent on their review policies and have a good track record of reviewing things. I ALSO just did some youtube browsing to get close ups of aspects of the printer I was not sure about or to see what happens if you print on a stable surface (I love Angus but someone needs to take that table away from him…).

And if the extent of your research is asking randos on the internet to search for you? I recommend reading up on how prevalent astroturfing is and the cases of even “established” social media accounts being purchased/rented to post FUD. Because it isn’t just consumers who learned they can search “best doorknob reddit” to get a “better” answer… And while Lemmy is too small to really care about… it is also trivial to do this kind of stuff on.

“Gaming Youtube” is the same as any other form of media.

If you only watch trash reality TV then “Television is dead”. Whereas, if you only watch prestige TV on FX and AMC you’ll complain that “the sitcom is dead”. And if you only watch NBC or whatever the fuck… you’ll wonder why tim allen hasn’t had his legs broken by the dealers he narced on. Err, where was I?

Anyway. It is the same here. If you just watch whoever has the most views you are going to get the bottom of the barrel trash entertainment because it is specifically designed to cater to people who are browsing, watch for five minutes, then leave it on while it is still going.

Whereas you can also put a bit of work in. Find creators you do like. Yes, there is a massive discoverability problem (that gets worse with every major update…) but watching a VOD that appeals to you and maybe googling to find out if they were “cancelled” yet goes a long way. And, in that regard, people like Mortismal and Iron Pineapple are WAY better than anything we saw a decade or two ago.

Which is no different than TV. Nobody expected the TV show about the dad from Malcolm in the Middle becoming a drug dealer to be one of the greatest shows ever made (in that it gave us Better Call Saul but…). But people watched an episode or two and then listened when everyone else on the planet said “the first season is weird but it gets REALLY good by like episode five or six”.

Or… we can just do clickbait “Everything new sucks except for me” content.

All shit like this does is indicate how little the creators think of their viewerbase… And the fact that people think this is “true” means said creators are right to assume the worst.

I am increasingly disheartened by the obsession over “Desktop SteamOS”. People don’t want Linux or even “a desktop computer”

They want a video game console experience on their PC. Some other company manages everything and they just run updates any time people post stability memes.

Which… is not too much of a shock considering the trajectory of things over the past decade or two. But also more or less confirms that things are gonna go real bad from a computing standpoint (as opposed to every other standpoint where we already know this…) over the next decade or so.

But it SHOULD at least mean Valve can be confident about releasing the Steam Box 2 (meh) and associated Steam Link 2 (woo) and Steam Controller 2 (HELL YEAH!!!) sooner than later. So… silver lining?

Way back at the start of GoG (I want to say year one), CDP did the “joke” of suddenly taking down the entire site except for a text page saying they are shutting down. I forget if they said that people would have 24 hours to back up their games or if they said we were up shit creek, it doesn’t matter.

They then basically said “Ha ha, april fools! But you see, that is why you should buy all your games from us because we are DRM free and you own them”. Which… rightfully angered a LOT of people.

So GoG did a video where a “french monk” (which is really weird since they are Polish but…) apologized and gave away a discount code or something. And in The Witcher 2, an NPC was added who alluded to all this and I think gave away a free copy of The Witcher 1 if you beat him at dice poker or whatever?

Short term? It led to a lot of us actually trying to back up our games. And realizing that was not feasible because GoG would almost never post changelogs or let us know which installers had updated versions and ain’t nobody got time to manually scrape every download page. Long term? You can generally tell who was a “GoG OG” in that we look at ANY “And we are the best site ever because we have no DRM and preserve everything” bit of PR from GoG/CDP because it is painfully obvious this is just advertisement for them.

For “rare” games like some of my oldies from the 80s and 90s (one or two that weren’t even on the abandonware sites last I checked) I have ISOs I ripped and store on my NAS. Same with stuff bought form smaller/sketchier stores (I am sure it is backed up millions of times over, but think Romero’s Sigil).

For gog or steam or whatever games? I just don’t bother. The French Monk Incident more or less taught me there is zero chance of maintaining archives of GoG games. Their servers are “fine” at the best of times (let alone when the site is “dead”) and they don’t publicize when an installer is updated or not.

So if gog or steam or whatever goes offline and I still really want to play… Darklands? Piracy.

Having an AMD or nVidia or even Intel GPU/APU at this point “suggests AI image upscaling tech”

Especially in the case of an underpowered mobile adjacent device.

You’re doing it again.

As a publisher: Yes, Epic stopped the Rocket League devs from continuing to build Linux binaries. To my knowledge, they have not disabled “support” for Proton in any of the anti-cheat solutions.

Similarly, the development branch of CD Projekt (the parent company of GoG), apparently had Linux binaries for The Witcher 2. They do not for The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk.

Both companies decided it was not worth internally supporting Linux and instead rely on Proton/Wine to do it for them. Whether that is good for gaming is debatable, but both are “actively hostile towards Linux” in that regard.

If you do want to criticize the handling of Linux then I would suggest looking into the Unreal Engine marketplace (or whatever they call it now) being a complete shitshow for Linux developers. Which is ironic since the UE documentation is actually great for Linux devs. I cannot speak to the CDPR efforts with their modding SDKs since I haven’t opened one since The Witcher 1 (when it was either a hacked version of the NWN toolkit or an officially hacked version of the NWN toolkit).

But that is Epic and CDP not EGS and GoG.

For a very limited subset of games, they provide linux binaries. For the rest? You are up a creek and in the realm of “Figure it out”. Which… is generally the Heroic Launcher (or Lutris for a subset) which puts you in the same boat as Epic.

If you insist upon saying one store is more virtuous than the other… okay? I personally don’t like defending companies but you do you.

But for the vast majority of games? Epic and GoG are in the same category as basically everything but Steam. And both are in the exact same category regarding launchers and download services since they both heavily rely on the Heroic Launcher (which is awesome).

And, to be clear, neither should be applauded for Linux support.

Well, to be clearer. The folk behind the Heroic Launcher (and Lutris) SHOULD be applauded. And I think there is actually a very strong argument that store fronts should not be expected to build out entire social media ecosystems with attached updaters (what launchers basically are). But both Epic and GoG have decided to half ass that so they should be called out for not doing it “right”.

Yes yes, bitch eating crackers and all that.

But can we maybe focus on what they actually are shit at (which is a lot) rather than manufacturing virtue for other companies?

Epic exists on Linux to the same degree gog does: heroic launcher.

Yeah… fuck off with that?

I am Chinese with a lot of Chinese family. This is not some unique and elevated humor that westerners do not understand. It is the same self deprecating humor that is increasingly prevalent in all cultures (that have been exposed to similar media…) combined with the equivalent of “ha ha, wouldn’t it be funny if we kissed .ha ha ha . What a joke. ha ha. But what if we did? Ha ha ha”.

Same with the truly disgusting misogynistic shit that asshole has said. It is a “joke” in the same way it was “just a joke” when people were testing the water on being magats.

The only thing that is “cultural” about this is the tendency for East Asians (but especially Chinese) to assume that everyone else is fucking stupid and that they just have to say it is a joke to ignore all consequences. And… that has been regularly demonstrated to be true so I guess the joke is on us?

Do I think he was tearing his shirt in agony and screaming in pain? No (although apparently Alannah Pearce and the people in her section saw him crying when he lost…). But there is very much the fundamental truth of “I deserved to win so this must be bullshit if I didn’t and I wasted my time by coming to an awards ceremony that doesn’t understand how amazing I am”.

Which… DOES have a lot of ties to East Asian culture (the idea that you are either best or worst) coupled with the fucked up number that the one child policy did on people.

It comes from a lot of things

A giant one layer sheet is obviously a torture test. But it is also an exercise to properly understand what your print bed ACTUALLY is. Printing across your entire bed can be a bit of a mess due to printers/firmware that reserve space for printing a test line or wiping the nozzle and so forth.

Whether it is worth a full 256^2 mm of filament is a different question

Also… there is the question of how big of a part people actually need and if you aren’t better off printing that in multiple segments regardless.

And… it also isn’t necessarily a good test of this in the first place. Because the “auto leveling” process already compensates for stuff like this and actually getting a fully intact sheet to come off the plate and be comparable isn’t easy on even a perfectly flat bed, let alone one where the contours were compensated for (to whatever degree). Which makes it VERY hard to tell if you truly had a perfectly flat sheet or if there was distortion because your lower left screw is too tight.

But the first layer obsession kind of goes back to the early days of printing when there WAS no “auto leveling”. Already alluded to it, but at a VERY high level, “auto leveling” creates a virtual mesh of the printbed and adjusts the nozzle height (z-axis) in real time. For any “kind of level” printbed, that is more than good enough since the variance for a single “part” is going to be negligible unless you are doing almost the entire printbed anyway.

But, in general, it is good practice to ACTUALLY level your bed and compute a proper z-offset. Which, again, goes back to the early days and The Paper Trick. Which, like most things FDM, was a closely kept secret because it was a great way to identify the newbies and be gatekeeping pricks to them. The importance of getting super precise (while understanding little to nothing about precision…) is a lot less important, but it is still a good way to show off that you are “a real printer” by doing it yourself to the most exacting level possible and then posting to the 'gram about it.

And speaking of the 'gram, the last part is just that everyone wants to be an influencer. Someone like Angus or Michael will do it as part of a printer review because they are showing off how good an advertised feature is or demonstrating fundamental build quality issues. But people don’t pay attention and just decide they are also a cool ass youtuber 3d printing expert and want to do it themselves.

I think there is definitely value in doing a full bed print IF you need to. But as a “normal” calibration test?

Cool

Also, it isn’t a straw man if you are arguing a completely different topic than the one the thread is about. But cool. You learned a word.

As something nice to have? I fully agree (and said as much)

As an alternative to anti-cheat solutions/“solutions” as was being presented?

No, it is not an answer. Because it would indeed be forcing people to tolerate “antisocial fuckwads” or forcing people ti find private servers to play with each other like in the good old days.

It is “overlooked” because it is a non-answer.

Nobody wants to play with all the cheaters and the people who got banned because they couldn’t stop talking about how much they love CSAM in the lobbies.

I mean, look at twitter. After the recent mass exodus to bluesky there is anger because they are realizing their quarantine zone is REAL shitty.

I do wish more games would provide player run servers as an option. but I am under no illusion that that is going to be good for anything other than “Hey, remember when we all played Chivalry 2 for a few years? What say we play that on Friday night and then ignore it for another decade?”