• 0 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

help-circle


  • I agree to some extent, but even before then hardware was getting expensive thanks to stuff like the Bitcoin mining craze. Harddrives have been getting cheaper on a dollar per TB basis for a long time (as they should), but I remember the days when it was cheaper to build a gaming PC than to buy a new console, and those days are long gone. And after COVID hit, greedflation set in to declare what the new normal is.











  • How close did you grow up to Boston, or did your parents live in a city for a period of time? The closer you get to a city, the more liberal the population becomes, and there are some pretty backwoods areas of Massachusetts. My dad was conservative until he went to Boston College and worked at the bank collecting loans from the poorer sections of the city. Even Cape Cod had MAGA protesters yelling at the Bourne Bridge about the plan to house immigrants on the Air Force base for all 4 years of Trump’s reign of terror, and I could probably still find the Trump 2016 flag that I used to drive by all the time.


  • Yep. I saw a fairly recent study talking about this. The short of it is that they found no correlation between age and political leaning for ANY generation, but a strong correlation between political leaning and wealth.

    As people begin to benefit more from the system, the more they support pulling the ladder up behind them.

    The correlation to age here is that it gets harder to adapt to new information the older we get, so people are more likely to double down rather than change their perspective as society gets more progressive and inclusive. The best weapon against racism is experiences that put people in situations to meet people with different life experiences than them. Get them outside their little white suburban bubbles. This is why conservatives hate college so much. It’s often the first time kids are put in a situation where they’re both out from under the thumb of their parents and exposed to kids who grew up in different circumstances than their’s.


  • If they hadn’t given people the option, I don’t think the site would be up today. I already saw one artist who wiped their account and left the site within a couple of hours of the announcement.

    And they couldn’t have picked a worse time to do this after the drama with the CEO banning a popular trans woman permanently off the site last week and threatening to sic the FBI on her for a “threat” of cartoon violence she made after the year-long harassment campaign she suffered had been ignored leading up to her being banned over a transition timeline picture of her face. The CEO then went on to spend hours going into trans women’s dms to insist how he’s not a transphobe after writing a post about how she had been banned for the “threat,” not the picture, even though it had been known for a while by that point that she had been banned for that photo being “nsfw/sexual content,” while he eventually started calling her “it.” He then topped it off by chasing her and harassing her on Twitter, still insisting that her wishing cartoon violence was a tangible threat and posting the names of accounts she had had at various times on Tumblr. All while he was supposed to be on a 3-month vacation.

    Between that and the rumors of this AI deal happening that popped up last week as well, people were already looking for alternative platforms. Allowing people to opt out is the least that they can do if they don’t want to run off the users who keep the site running. I don’t think many of them are happy that they even have to do that.


  • They made an announcement at some point after flipping the switch that noted that some people would be opted out by default based on their blog settings. I think if your blog is set to mature or has certain search parameters turned off already.

    It wasn’t on for me or several artists I sent messages to who hadn’t even heard that this had happened, and the general discourse around it was pretty clearly upset about it not being opt out by default.

    They must’ve updated the app; at the time I wrote that you couldn’t do it through the app.


  • For any Tumblr users here, this has already rolled out completely unannounced and is opt-in by default. You need to manually opt out, which can only be done on the desktop website. Odds are good that your data is already being sold to Midjourney and used to train their models.

    To do so, click on your blog on the sidebar, click on Blog Settings on the other sidebar on the right, scroll down to the Visibility section, and turn the “Prevent third-party sharing for [your blog]” toggle to ON, not off. If you have any sideblogs, you’ll need to manually do this for each of them as well. It’s per blog and not account-wide.


  • Accurate, though I would say that the rot started earlier than that. Most of the companies we know and love were started and run by people who just liked making games. But those people have long been replaced by money extractors. I think it really started in earnest around the early 2000s, but it took a long time for it to start to show. There’s also the fact that we look back and forget about all the shovelware from decades past. And that’s not even getting into the working conditions, which easily goes back to the 80s.

    The indie scene today is the strongest it’s ever been, thanks to the rise of digital distribution and access to game dev tools. We live in a world where little indie teams can get their games released on Nintendo digital storefronts and there are websites dedicated to just indie games. Social media has made it easier than ever for small creators to gather large followings of dedicated fans. But at the same time, the gulf between the indie scene and the big companies has never been wider. I can’t think of a single time where an indie team has gone on to create a new AAA studio.

    It’s frustrating to watch both as a gamer and as somebody who once dreamt of joining that industry.



  • As they say, there’s a sucker born every minute. The mobile market is gigantic. Like, bigger than the rest of the gaming industry combined big. Activision-Blizzard-King makes more off the mobile company part, King, than they do from both Blizzard and Activision. That’s more from mobile games than from CoD and WoW combined, two of the most golden of geese in gaming history. I think there’s just too many people in the mobile market to have any noticeable impact on the customers of your specific games.

    There might be a case to be made for long-term damage across the market, but even then, you’re talking easily a billion users with more joining all the time.

    I think a good comparison would be to Amazon and those drop-shipping sites that sell cheap junk from China. For every one customer burned, there’s probably a dozen more gobbling up the low prices and “sales.”