I have officially lost the plot on what’s happening here.

Does that seem likely? Pointing a camera at actors is not inherently difficult or expensive. Even when AI is involved, it’s best at turning whatever you have into whatever you describe - so you film real people in real costumes, and let CGI-for-dummies make up elaborate sets. Or you hire three great actors to play a dozen characters.

Even for CGI films, ‘have’ into ‘describe’ just means you can half-ass the animation and rendering. Productions can focus on writing, character design, and cinematography, then feed in some footage of actors in VR Chat, to get out a scene approaching Pixar quality. Is Pixar itself going to use that process? Probably not. But it’s a million miles from typing ‘funny scene high quality’ and crossing your fingers.

Man, remember when CGI replaced animation, after animation replaced actors? It’s a real shame we don’t have actors anymore, since the moment they weren’t strictly necessary. It would’ve been so much cooler if technology simply allowed new things to exist when they’d otherwise be implausible or unfundable.

It really is the shallowest teenage scribble of a franchise. You can picture him sitting in his dorm room, listening to Tarkus and Olias of Sunhillow until the grooves wore out, doodling weird furry giantess smut, imagining all the claymation he was gonna do to make the bestest sci-fi film since Dark Star.

Have a backup instance in mind, if the culture of your current one doesn’t work out. Especially yours. People are not at liberty to express what’s what with this instance on this instance.

Do not be afraid to block people, because they will keep showing up, and some of them are psychic vampires whom their instances will never punish. Universal Monk has a sockpuppet on every instance and will probably respond rudely to slash angrily report this comment for pointing out they’re a block-evading ‘hmm curious’ spambot.

As on reddit, beware the cult of civility. Some communities (subs) will viciously punish ‘fuck off’ but not any behavior that frankly deserves a vulgar dismissal. Read the sidebar. Don’t be afraid to search for alternative communities if the sole moderator is intolerable. See also the Ye Power Trippin Bastards community on dbzer0.

Huh, I thought Bart the bear was nominated and lost.

Time to rewatch The Art Of Bear Acting.

Worth stating, Australia’s censorship didn’t phase him… but Valve’s would have.

Australia is a significant but minor market. Steam is ‘be on this service or fail.’

Stop calling the secret police’s kidnappings “mistakes.”

I’d be interested to see if reddit has “peaked” since then.

Math isn’t the problem, when you search “tetris attack snes” and the results are all “tetris,” and then clicking “did you mean what you actually wrote?” returns “nothing on the internet resembles those three words, you freak.”

Why.

Not how anything works.

There’s a ‘but the bad things’ buried in the middle, desperately wanting a line break.

I did the same thing initially and tried re-reading it as sass. Especially if “TF2 neglect” was considered positive.

Maybe there isn’t one.

This is what I’m talking about: people think monopoly = bad, so if I say Valve has a monopoly, I must want them burned to the ground. Nah. They’re mostly fine. Having only one good option is precarious, but it is still a good option. For now.

But they’re still a monopoly. We should say so, because it’s true, and important. It shapes the entire PC gaming market.

None of that is what defines a monopoly.

There’s only one store that matters. They have unthreatened supermajority marketshare. Customers go there by default - sometimes exclusively. Developers can sell there, or they’re basically fucked.

What you’re concerned about are anti-competitive practices. But some businesses don’t need those, to lack any relevant competition. It can just happen. They didn’t do anything wrong. They’re still monopolies.

Alan Wake 2 didn’t make its money back for a year despite being a huge game on the second-biggest service.

Steam doesn’t care about other stores because other stores do not matter. They can let other stores sell Steam keys, and it still doesn’t threaten their untouchable market share.

And if his yacht sinks, we’re boned.

While many accuse Valve of monopolising the PC gaming market, others argue that Steam’s dominance is simply the result of doing things right.

These assertions do not contradict. I cannot overstress that.

This whole article is ‘Valve’s monopoly is fine because they did things right.’

Having one good store is not, in itself, a problem. But it does mean we’re one fuckup away from having no good stores.

Saying it’s a monopoly doesn’t mean it needs solving. Anti-competitive behavior is a problem - but being a monopoly doesn’t require that abuse, and you don’t need a monopoly to exercise that abuse.

Yet people get deeply fricking weird about saying it’s a monopoly.

It’s naked taboo. It’s people feeling icky about a word, and actively refusing to engage in rational argument about meaning. When someone has dogmatically internalized that monopoly=bad and Steam=good, the text doesn’t matter. Even pointing out things they just said gets dismissed as some kind of attack against The Good Store.™

We have to start from plain acknowledgement that Steam’s competitors do not matter. They are plentiful and irrelevant. Explaining why they are doesn’t change that they are.

So we’re acknowledging it’s a monopoly? Cool. Defense is still an acknowledgement. I’ve had the weirdest goddamn arguments with people insisting they’d never shop anywhere else, and if games aren’t on there it’s their own fault they’re doomed… but how dare anyone use the m-word! Obviously that can only mean one seller with absolute control, like how Standard Oil owned all 85% of the market.