ThunderingJerboa

I agree with most of that however The King in Yellow was made when he was around 5 years old. People sort of put it into the Lovecraft universe because of the themes but nope has 0 connection at least in its inception. The whole Lovecraft universe is sort of a hog podge of other’s authors work as well who sort of expanded and formalized parts of it. Its honestly very cool what a group of authors can do when IPs and such aren’t hoarded in a huge vault being left untouched until its economically advantageous to use.

Yeah it does make it a bit hard to listen to those audiobooks in the car…

I mean if they have read some of his stories, it should be pretty obvious he was pretty fucking racist. The cat thing is a fun meme but if anyone has read at least call of Cthulhu the work most people know about its pretty on the nose. Every human antagonist is either black or a foreigner and he is pretty blatant about it. Hell don’t get me started on Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (or The White Ape), that one is just so funny with how bloody racist it is because the conclusion is so absurd, you can’t take it serious.

Like I agree with your general point but this has nothing to do with online games licensing besides its being pulled from digital store fronts. Brick and mortar stores can have product recalls as well and this would likely be in that same category of problem (its a bit weird with preowned games since publishers were already given their cut) so they can continue to sell those but a brand “new” copy may have suffered a similar fate but we have to remember Spec Ops the Line is from the 360 era so I doubt there would even been many “new” copies around. Also I can’t fault publishers from just “deleting” a game from existence because spending thousands for merely upkeeping the licenses for a game they realistically haven’t sold in major volumes for nearly half a decade (at minimum) seems a tad bit unreasonable. Most music labels likely aren’t even going to sell a perpetual license as well, so its a can of worms of people wanting to get their cut.

That is funny but not as bad.

Can’t say too much but god I hate this so much. Used to work a call center and someone had a username that was all 1,l,I s and there was no way to easily identify between those 3 characters. For someone to verify who they were they needed to tell us their username and some other info. So I had to waste nearly 30 fucking minutes dealing with this stupid shit before we could proceed forward and we couldn’t just DC the person.

I mean it isn’t but sort of is at the same time. It firstly depends on what kind of kickstarter it is. There are many ways where its just a system for a publisher to gauge interest in the project. Those are typically just preorders however many others are just throwing money into a well and hoping something comes of it. I get people’s hatred of crowdfunding and it can easily be a trap. Where a ton of people are just there to get the money and leg it or who are simply too incompetent to use the funds properly. Hell even experienced developer can be too incompetent, double fine studios/Tim Schafer is a poster child for this. While I love their work, they had a horrid run with crowdfunding and I guess it should have been expected since they are always late and overspend on their budget when they were working with publishers.

Now with all the negatives said, I think crowdfunding in all its forms can lead to wonderful project that simply couldn’t have existed due to a lack of interest by publishers. Hell I doubt we would had Baldur’s Gate 3 without crowdfunding and this isn’t talking exclusively about BG 3 since the Divinity Original sin games really got the ball rolling for Larian Studios. Crowdfunding can lead to the rebirth of genres once thought dead.

While I agree with you, we have to keep in mind even though Bethesda games are pretty fucking shallow. Some people just love them the way they are. Console players are the perfect example of this. I know consoles “recently” added modding but its far more limited than their pc counterparts. Those games had legs even without the modding scene. Its just on the PC market mods are probably the main reason why people play it on that platform.

Yeah like if IGN doesn’t follow their rules. Welp no Witcher 4/whatever its called review copy when that comes around. Even though IGN sucks its probably better to have more voices than less in the review space. Playing these stupid games set out the publishers is the only way to play since I doubt there will be any solidarity done for IGN.

Hell I’m scheezed out by so many games doing this whole “preorder for early access” and getting around reviews. Look at Payday 3, it has done it and there are basically no critic reviews on it. Not sure if its due to an embargo or they literally didn’t even send out review copies, which isn’t a great look.

I mean quite the opposite. Ff you are talking about the plebs, you would have a point but the Unity changes they are now trying to force through are going to other companies who typically don’t like it when you mess with their income unexpectedly. They likely will switch to a new engine with their newer projects, so they don’t have to deal with a surprise change.

I mean it depends, what are you talking about? Yeah I can see the point of not arresting people for dropping the N word or something or maybe doing a Hitler salute but are you referring to people using their own freedom of speech to argue/debate one’s own opinion? Maybe a companies right to associate with only those it choose to do so with (unless that discrimination is against those of protected classes). Like no company would probably want to be associated with a known verbal racist, it just hurts their possibility to get new clients or possibly sever current client relations. The reason why many companies go “woke” or stray to the left is because companies never want to have one of their advertisements right next to a Nazi/race supremacist rant, people will start associating the company with what their ad is paying for. Elon is learning in the most ass backwards way of why Twitter did X thing, in this case why twitter wasn’t the “haven” of free speech is because advertisers don’t want this and advertisers are the ones who pay a hefty chunk of the bills.

yeah not sure about that. Most of human history would say freedom of speech (and most of the concept of natural rights) is a rather newish ideology. In the past, speaking negatively of higher powers (religious organizations, ruling class, etc) could lead to sanctions, imprisonment, or death and that is still very much the case in many countries to this day. We can argue _____ is a “natural right” till you have arthritis in your hand joints but you have to be blind to think governments have nothing to do with it and its enforcement. In a utopia, maybe it is granted naturally on birth but in reality it is a “right” that has to be “fought” for (legally or with arms). Like are you seriously arguing the people of North Kor… Sorry, I mean the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are born with this “natural right” of free speech but if they dare use it they and possibly their immediate family may be subject to torture, rape, reeducation camps, and/or work camps.

that was just one article by one rogue doctor.

That was pushed by many media organizations because its sensationalist topic. Antivaxers are idiots but the media played a fucking huge role blowing a pilot study that had a rather fucking absurd conclusion out of proportions, so they can sell more ads/newspapers. I fucking doubt most antivaxers (Hell I doubt most people haven’t either) even read the original study and came to their own conclusions on this. They just watched on the telly some stupid idiots giving a bullshit story that they didn’t combat at all

I’m not super familiar Dan Harmon stuff. I’m going to assume most of the stuff about that apology was done in private, where things can be properly be talked about. This is a public apology video, so I don’t think they can really get in a very nitty gritty details about what went wrong (especially around the Billet Labs prototype being sold). I agree they should have demonstrated some ways they are improving but I do believe the audience is placing blame on the executives and in some ways they are truly responsible but I think this is mostly them covering for a mistake of a lower level employee did at least for the Billet Lab’s incident. I just don’t think it would have done any good to throw the person who screwed up under the bus since it ain’t going to look pretty for any party involved.

I agree them monetizing the video and having the stupid jokes in it was pretty poor planning for them. They realistically should not had Linus in it seeing as its clear the team is really trying to fix his mistake of a post from Monday.

I mean the Madison stuff is pretty bad. The rest of it, was probably recoverable from.

I think the thing is in these kind of situations they are typically no win situations. When the fuel is burning really the only answer is let it burn itself out, then deal with the aftermath. I don’t think any response would be good enough because right now people are out for blood, some of it very justifiably but people would need to be blind to not see there are people who have an axe to grind and the usual drama chasers. I’m not here to say they didn’t do anything wrong but people are going to try to connect some unrelated controversies to keep the fire burning (Note: This isn’t about the Madison leak) like the mindchop tragedy.

Actually disagree, many of these big corps think these people will just go right back to them even if they get kicked off. Can’t say too much but used to “tech support” for one of the big 3 in console space and one of the trainers made mention of this with lines like “They always come back”. Sad part is, they weren’t wrong. It was such a hard time seeing how some accounts can be basically taken away because someone did something at a moment of panic (chargeback) when there was massive credit card fraud happening and everything on that account disappears even thing you properly paid for unless you paid them back. It is a major reason why the shift to digital online release is horrifying on the console space. The PC market has a similar problem but at least to my knowledge Steam only deactivates your ability buy new things and remove the content that is being contested, its not the best solution but its seems “fair”

We are outsiders in this situation. We don’t know where the failure is, it could be anyone in the chain. From the person who received the requests (who didn’t send it forward) to the people in logistics who were meant to handle the shipping/packaging of it (or any other person in the chain who messed up). My point was people are pinning blame on Linus and he is partly responsible seeing as he is the “owner” of the company but its pretty obvious he really wasn’t in the loop for much of this billet labs thing beside his decision not to reshoot the video.

I say the person who was the contact for Billet Labs was the likely broken link seeing as there were multiple messages and the logistics would probably have noticed the error of a part needing to be sent back being set to the auction for LTX.

I think people are acting like most companies are optimal business where there is little breakdown in these kind of things but from my own experience these kind of breakdowns can happen easily and sometimes very frequently. Many people sort of forget many of these youtube companies are small businesses that happen to expand on short notice. So many of them get stuck in the mindset of small businesses and that causes major problems down the line. A very similar example I see here is like Roosterteeth, who had a major falloff in recent years. They grew very rapidly and many of the problems revealed come back to their small business mindset not adapting with their expansion.

I mean discovery will have to prove intent. What happened was shitty but we do have to remember there are about 120+ people in LTT. Billet labs probably emailed 1 person in the company twice, that person probably wasn’t in logistics or in the team that was organizing LTX. So this is likely a huge fuck up but I think people are acting like they did this just out of spite when really it seems to be an organizational issue that got swept up in the mix. Who ever is the contact for Billet Labs may honestly get their job axed since this is a pretty big fuck up. I know people are trying to paint Linus as the one who did this but I don’t think it is. We can blame him for his shit response and how he made it seem that they were already handling Billet Lab’s with compensation but maybe I’m being optimistic but I honestly think GN’s video was the first Linus has heard about what happened to the prototype besides maybe it being auctioned but I think he wasn’t aware it needed to be returned.

Which in a weird way is an ethical way to make porn with no “exploitation” involved with the process and there will always be a market for the “real” thing for the market. Now the AI art people can be incredibly thirsty but I do feel it is a bit reductive to say its mostly only for porn when the applications of it can be quite useful especially for hobbyists (who I feel aren’t profiting solely on those creations). I see great use for generative “art” for tabletop in terms of character sheets/custom monsters/settings/ and even maps. AI art isn’t necessarily a bad thing its just the fear of what large corporations will do with it that is really the scary part (also bullshit scammers who steal X artists work and try to resell it as that artist)

Yeah and now we just have our social security numbers (if many states have their way) and Driver licenses being a nice database. Like we need a national ID system (not for 18+ material, just in general) since our current system is utter garbage because it was never designed to be used as identification material. The SSN system was hijacked for tax reasons and many banks and institution followed suit.