Facebook got FBI_README.txt at the root of their DC++ share.

And now ableist bullshit.

Well. I guess this is what we get when people leave reddit. Oy

No link, a one week EA period (?!?!?!), and HTML everywhere.

You REALLY screwed up this advertisement.

That’s the thing that the person in the made up story doesn’t understand:

Even the majority of “made in america” products are actually “assembled in america”. Just like the majority of “chinese knockoffs” are after hours runs at the same factories that make the real thing. Sometimes crappier and sometimes actually better because they sourced better materials from a different factory.

And… that is why we are so fucked. Because there will be the “Well, product A costs more because of tariffs so product B can sell for more too”. But also? Product B’s profit margins will go down because they are paying for tariffs too. Which gets passed on to the consumer.

I just wish Tuta put more effort into their product than their marketing.

I noped out because of them not letting me have any control over my emails outside of asking them for a dump. But reading the support reddit is just brutal.

Ah, my deepest apologies. I was not aware there was absolutely no issue or threat to anyone because you didn’t connect a kindle to the network either.

And Kindle supports mobi files? It is just that those tend to get preprocessed into azw or the other one files. Much like Kobo tends to work best if you preprocess those epubs into kepubs.

The issue is that Amazon has repeatedly changed their mobi variants to fight against de-drm tools as well as increasingly locking down their apps and even devices to make it harder to get data off (and now on) to them.

There is absolutely nothing stopping Rakuten from doing the exact same with Kobo. And people should be aware of that rather than just stanning their favorite company.

Profitability as reported by companies, especially tech companies, is complex. Also understand that most of that 20 years (assuming that is an accurate statement) was the era of venture capitalism and infinite funding.

But yes. Amazon did spend decades inventing and taking over e-commerce.

But that is not what you described. You described a “bait and switch” which implies that they designed the old keyboard kindles with built in wikipedia support as some long con to get around the eventual invention of a de-drm plugin for the eventually invented Calibre library manager.

The reality is that this is just a case of locking down walled gardens to take advantage of market share. Everyone is doing it. It isn’t some deep conspiracy and is more just the logical end result of a walled garden with large market share.

The “original sale” in that case is not even pennies. So… not sure why amazon would care?

Also: Many smaller authors basically depend on kindle because of the ease of use of the web portal and incentives to do larger discounts for their audiences. One of my favorite guilty pleasures has talked about exactly this (although he IS investigating alternatives).

And, much like with video games: The Sandersons of the world will be pirated. MAYBE a Dalglish will be too. But nobody cares enough to go after a Samphire or Shel.

… a 17 year bait and switch (or however long Kindles have been around for)?

I recommend actually listening to some authors.

The “gatekeeping” back in the days before ebooks was infinitely worse than it is now. These days? Basically anyone who can fill out a webform can publish a kindle book. And other stores aren’t much harder. And those ebooks can be sold indefinitely.

Contrast that with needing to find a publisher who is willing to allocate some of their limited production time to you. And then hope that Borders et al are willing to put you on the shelf. And then realize that you are never getting another penny for that book because the first MMPB run ran out and you aren’t getting a second because you didn’t sell enough to justify it.

That is no different than Kobo. Thus far, Rakuten have been pretty good about not caring more than the bare minimum. But there is nothing stopping them from doing the same bullshit with firmware updates to the kobos and drm updates to the store and apps.

I am finally migrating from kindle to kobo (tried kindle to boox last year and it was bad…) but I am under no illusions that I am just hoping one company is better than another. I mean, the other is Amazon so it is a pretty safe bet. But still.

Heh.

Apparently the press event also had massive network issues. Iron Pineapple briefly touched on it while giving their take on the game and going over footage. Which immediately explained “weirdness” in Vaati et al’s coverage.

Not overly worried. From are shockingly okay with netcode these days and the big lift is less “get four players into the same session” and more “let players be spread across multiple areas in the same session”.

That said… I was already struggling to put the effort in to figure out if I need PS+ for the network test and… I got a long weekend and an Obsidian CRPG.

Andrew Rea is a special kind of asshole (gotta love how he uses his own, probably legit, stories of struggles with mental health to sell fucking Better Help of all things).

But recipes and paywalls have always been a mess. Cookbooks were, and still are, a thing. And the time and cost it takes to develop a recipe is REALLY high. Brian Lagerstrom has talked about this on and off and half joked about how many lasagnas and cakes he and his partner have eaten to get a 15 minute youtube video up. And then someone else just steals that verbatim without any credit at all. So a lot of “recipe creators” are looking at methods to make sure they at least break even on their IP.

And Rea is very aware of this. Partially because he has a long history of using the exact same techniques that Kenji et al do without any accreditation (Alvin is REALLY good about saying where he got an idea though) and partially because he is pretty good friends with some of the most notorious recipe thiefs out there.

But yeah. If they had done a “going forward, all recipes are paywalled” I would not be too bothered. But he retroactively paywalled all his old recipes. Which sucks because many videos outright contained errors that weren’t in the text recipes because he screwed up the narration.

But also? The good news is that you can generally just google a few of the ingredients of a given recipe and get the “real” name of it and five different versions.

Like, if someone hires me to do a job, and I accept, I cannot go “Oh, I’m gonna do half of it because the rest isn’t my cup of tea. Sorry.” No, I’ll do the job and maybe complain about it afterwards, which IMO, is exactly what reviewers should do—example: “I beat the boss, but the fight sucked because X, Y, and Z.”

How about we have ANY job security before we start playing the “I am paying you sub minimum wage to run that kroger. HOW FUCKING DARE YOU DO RESTOCKING AT EIGHT AM!!! YOU ARE PAID TO DO THIS OVERNIGHT!!” shittery? Hmm

Which is something a lot of old hat games media have actually talked about. It is a lot easier to run a 36 hour day to finish up that JRPG review when you know you’ll be able to rest next week. Rather than be told your contract isn’t being renewed but to check back next month. Or to just have your entire department gutted because an exec decided they didn’t need to have TWO whole people playing video games. And when you know you’ll get something other than “Fucking woke reviewers don’t understand how to play a game” feedback from the “fans” who only ever see your review when their favorite hatemonger youtuber talks about it while making sure EVERYONE knows your social media accounts.

I think there should be standards, otherwise you get reviewers unfairly judging games they barely played like in the infamous God Hand review.

Define “standards”.

Is it “You must finish a game before reviewing it”? Because Jeff Gerstmann kind of infamously made it a point to finish Metal Gear Survive prior to reviewing it (I think it might have been his final print review at Giant Bomb?). EVERYONE, colleague and fan alike, told him he was stupid. And his consensus was basically that he felt the same way after 30 hours of misery that he did after 2.

Is it “You must be good at a game to review it?”. Because, funny enough, Remap Radio kind of talked about this last summer on one of their ridiculously long podcasts in the context of “games media suck and aren’t good enough to play Shadows of the Erdtree” in that short window before basically everyone said “So… this DLC is fucking hard, huh?”. And they pointed out that this is not at all a new experience for them. They are regularly playing much less polished and MUCH harder versions of these games under a strict time crunch where the only “guide” they have is what their buddy who is paid to write a game guide can experimentally figure out.

And how that translates to a review?

like in the infamous God Hand review.

You mean the game which, throughout every re-release, the vast majority of players either nope out after they get their asses beat by random grunts in the first stage? And most of the rest leave when they get to the shop and realize they need to buy and build their own combos blind?

I have no idea what “infamous God Hand review” you are referring to. But the majority I read when I heard about this cool ass PS2 game? It was “Hey, this is a really freaking cool concept and I personally had a blast. But it is not for everyone and a lot of the fundamental gameplay concepts are outright bad. OPM or whatever the hell has a demo of it and we strongly encourage you to get that if it is still on news stands because you are either going to love or hate this”. And, because this was still the era of print (like the VERY tail end), there was money to have one main review and like two “impressions” reviews at most of the major outlets. And, like almost all games, they would make it a point to have at least one sicko persona give it a high score while the rest bounced off. Which kind of represented how players respond to it to this day.

I think there should be standards, otherwise you get reviewers unfairly judging games they barely played like in the infamous God Hand review.

Or is it just “you must agree with me?”. Because, speaking as someone who has loved flight sims and tactics games his entire life (I was the kid in elementary school who liked xcom. The old xcom…)… most gamers don’t have my tastes in gaming. So having someone who dreams of Silent Storm reviewing Fire Emblem isn’t a particularly useful metric for most people.

That said? I learned from an early age to actually look at the by line on a review. I learned which guys/personas at EGM or PC Gamer I vibed with and which I didn’t. And that continued on into the online age and to this day.

Sometimes it is really annoying. Like… I like WW2 RTSes a lot. I fully understand why I need to vet every single youtuber who likes the games I like…

But also? Sometimes it is a really awesome realization that the weirdo audiophile on a podcast is the same guy who wrote some of my favorite reviews over the past decade (Rob Zacny is a treasure). And that the reason I am vibing with his thoughts on Valkyria Chronicles is that I have been vibing with his thoughts on other games for a significant part of our adult lives.

I understand frustration when there are reviews knocking down a game for delivering what we feel games “ought to be” doing.

Yeah… that is a real shit perspective. You are actively “frustrated” that people like things you don’t. That is a very big side effect of the content bubble we all liv ein.

And I say this as someone who has loved squad based tactics since the JA2 and Silent Storm days. I am WELL used to “okay, add about 30% to the metacritic score for anything in that genre” and the like.

Grubb has no ill will toward his colleagues (…) You get short snark because it fits better in a character limit.

Which gets back to what is really “the problem”. It is about building his brand by “lightly ribbing” his colleagues. His colleagues who are perpetually days away from layoffs and who are constantly attacked by the asmongolds of the world who are using the exact same arguments and are glad to say “See, this person gets it. Why can’t they?”.

Its about worker solidarity even amongst competition. It is why so many of his colleagues will make it a point to preface even the skeets with “I get that this probably came from on high but” or would have just removed the “snark” entirely and said something like

I think the complaints about being underleveled and not having the right gear, mostly come from games like these being streamlined to the point where they usually have no friction. The obstacles in this game are the main reason I love it.

And good for you if that aligns with your wants (it sure aligns with mine).

But, at its core, it is “stupid games media” rhetoric. If you are in a mad dash to finish a review or even a game guide (Fandom’s gotta eat), you might not have time or even interest to go back track and do ten side quests in the starting area. At which point constantly hearing “you should get a better pistol” is gonna be REAL grating and is arguably bad encounter design. What is described as “no friction” is often designing encounters so that people can do both the critical path (just story quests) and all the side paths. And its why so many games either have continuous encounter scaling or just big levers you can flip (PoE1 and 2 did the latter).

So yeah. I do have a bit of an issue with someone in the games media space (especially at the company that steals the work of the rest of games media…) “be(ing) kind of a shit” to colleagues in a manner that just fuels the same kind of bullshit they constantly put up with on social media.

Whereas a “real” games reviewer learns to… not be a shit? I forget what game it was, but I remember Mortismal basically saying “The level scaling is kind of wonky. If you just do only the main story quests, you are going to have a bad time and you’ll need to really understand the combat systems to progress. But if you do too many side quests, you’ll be overpowered and just run right through everything” (… actually that sounds like PoE1 after the DLCs came out…). Rather than just making fun of other reviewers for not being able to handle “friction”.

Although I will say, in Grubb’s defense: That is also kind of the Giant Bomb style guide. It ignores that the OGs (Ryan, Jeff, Brad, Alex, etc) had fairly strong “games media” backgrounds by the time the site started and knew how to say something inflammatory to get a point across without angering the publishers to the point of losing ad revenue (… okay, Jeff wasn’t quite as good at the last part). But without those old hats to act as editors (and no, Dan doesn’t count), you get situations where “snark” is just shit stirring that feeds the people tormenting the rest of the industry.

The thing to understand is that reviews are inherently subjective. Decade(…s?) ago, Kieron Gillen wrote a pretty famous manifesto where he basically compared game reviewing to travel writing.

When you are booking a holiday, you don’t care how many grains of sand are on the beach. You probably don’t care too much about the average flow rate of cars on the highway during rush hour. What you care about is whether you will enjoy it.

For some? That means there being plenty of museums. For others it is beaches with accessible parking so that you can leave your crap in a rental car. For others still it is nightlife.

And that applies to “friction” as well. Because let’s take a different example. Many people (myself included) criticized Elden Ring for having a grace outside of basically every single boss room. We half joke that people would lose their god damned minds if they had to play Dark Souls 2 where one of the hardest bosses in the game involves fighting your way through a solid wall of Black Knight level enemies every single time. Others think we are fucking stupid for liking Dark Souls 2 (… they are probably right) and that this lets you focus solely on the boss and not memorizing what a weeb in armor is going to do… before you fight the other weeb in armor. And others still will point out that having to run past those enemies or fight one or two helps to “reset” the mind between attempts and avoids being on tilt against a boss.

Just like some people want a beach where everyone is in a bikini and dehydrated like Hugh Jackman on a film set. And others still want somewhere they can relax and maybe surf for a bit.

Which… mostly speaks to Grubb’s problems as a reviewer. As a “game leaks” guy, he is amazing. I think he lacks the drive to be a full on game journo but that is also a function of him working for the company that steals the work of the rest of games media on the regular (Fandom). But he has a VERY long history of giving “spicy takes” where he has a rudimentary understanding of a topic but still feels the need to shit on others unnecessarily. He isn’t the only one but I am increasingly at the point where I can’t tell if that is engagement farming or “Just Jeff Grubb”.

Shame to not have Mortismal’s “review” since they are probably one of the biggest PoE fanboys on the internet and CRPGs are their wheelhouse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMCS_1ortZk

Wooo. Add some melanin and see how fast those tools get removed.