In my own homebrew Sword Coast canon, an entire black market network is run by changelings and their mimic masters. They're one of the reasons Xanathar is as paranoid as he is, especially after his spies confirmed their successful infiltration of Acq. Inc. at the exec level during a transplanar expedition.
At this point, the party is slipping into eldritch noir levels of conspiracy theories, and trust in reality itself is worth more than gold. 😶
I’m running an Anything goes campaign soon and one of the recurring enemies will be a variation of a steel golem but one of the incarnations is 5 or 6 mimics forming up Voltron style into one enemy.
No, it isn’t …in response to the rage bait headline. It was an “artist” choice by the show runner(s). Was it good one? YMMV. To me, it looked like most of these abstracty opening credit sequences you see these days. I fully support artists getting opportunities and $$$ they deserve. But this mediocre credit sequence would not have caused any eyes to bat if it weren’t for a few rage-bait tweets and headlines capitalizing on tangentialy related recent news. Who even watches them after the first episode when the “skip intro” prompt shows up? Except GoT…those credits slapped and gave tidbits about the episode.
If anything, I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had about the future generative art in consumer media, and as an inevitable tool -like so many other balked at new technologies- in Art or any other discipline.
I was gonna say, the article says that streaming ruined media preservation for an entire generation, but guess what, the pirates were preserving it anyway.
Usually yeah. I still pirate them but use it as an extended demo. Still more than 80% of those I drop in less than a couple hours and never play again. Then I’m just happy I didn’t pay for them. Others though like Factorio and Stardew valley I had to buy after pirating. They were just to good not to own.
While there are legitimate reasons to pirate certain media, Steam and GoG have great refund policies that perfectly serve this use case.
I use Steam, and recently refunded Stray for my stated reason to them that it’s way too scripted and linear for my tastes, and refunded Street Fighter 6 because I’m still not a fan of the movement in the franchise - they refunded me within the same day for both times.
They still only refund back to your steam wallet though, right? So it’s less a refund and more store credit. Which is better than most digital products, for sure, but still not the same as a non-video game refund.
I don’t, but I definitely don’t think it would be wrong to. IP is an illegitimate idea, and has just as much legitimacy imo as a stranger telling me I’m obligated to pay them to breathe near them. I pay for some games as a donation, not a purchase.
I presume this is in jest, but to be honest I feel like there is less risk of bad operators consuming my computing power and data when pirating than using legit services these days (ads, marketing, poor software etc…). I actually pirate content that I pay for as it gets all my content into a single location, and easily tracks what I have watched, and is better for taking it offline.
I’d like to say I was half-joking but some of the games and movies I’ve pirated have directly affected the performance of my CPU (like 100% CPU usage under light loads)
Edit: I was wrong about movies having mining software packed in but I’m leaving the original comment up
Sorry, when I said dedicated, I meant it. Communities like this have as much information about themselves as they want out there. Reason mainly being to keep low quality users away.
Ah, well I’ve got a lot to learn then. I was one of those that typically just hopped on The Bay, picked a regular uploader and stuck with them there, but I did not know there were stealthier communities dedicated to this. Thank you for the wake up though
This isn’t the reason piracy is coming back in my friend group. That reason would be the diversification of streaming sources. There’s no way I’m paying $100 a month for streaming from all the major players, especially if they include ads.
When Netflix was all you needed, streaming was great and reasonable. It quickly became more trouble than it was worth over the last decade.
I’ve always said, a single streaming service that had everything, from every single studio, for $50/month, I would never need to pirate again. Until this happens, I will continue to pirate.
Cable was always missing a great deal of programs. That alone kills it. You won’t see 20 for the entire catalog ever. I don’t think 50 to a 100 a month is it is the question for all content and is reasonable.
I could afford a hundred a month but having to deal with multiple platforms is a no go for me. Then even when something is available, it might not be available in a certain region just makes the whole system crappy.
When you can do it on one UI and pretty much have the entire catalog available without complexity…
Piracy as a protest should be a legitimate strategy and not be illegal. There has to be some counter-measure to prevent the centralisation of ownership, the predatory and unethical practices like abuse of labour, selling shoddy or even broken products, not to mention conditioning children to become cash cows - or “whales”.
I include reverse engineering servers in that equation.
For our generation, sure, but there’s an entire generation of internet users that have never known a world without streaming services, and never got in to physical media, archived media, or piracy. A lot of them grew up with mobile devices only and hardly ever used desktop or laptop computers.
I was talking to some of my younger coworkers about music the other day. I mentioned something about the hundreds of gigabytes of music, all in FLAC, ALAC, and high quality mp3, and the question I got was “why? Why not just use spotify/Apple Music?” Well what happens when music from your favorite artist gets taken down because it wasn’t profitable? What happens when your favorite show gets cancelled and pulled because it wasn’t profitable?
So much data would have been flat out gone without piracy.
I reached a point in my late 20s where I had enough money coming in and there were only a few streaming services where I decided to minimise my piracy if I could conveniently access something legally to make up for all the piracy I did as a teen. Seven years later and inflations huge, my pay hasn’t kept pace and every tom, dick and Harry have their own service now. So it’s been back to the high seas for me.
This dilution of content is really the issue. If Netflix still had the movies I want to watch, I’d just use it. Netflix is easier than piracy.
But Netflix doesn’t ever have what I want to watch anymore. Now those movies are scattered across half a dozen other services that each cost $15/month. It’s a pain to figure out what’s streaming where and if it will cost me anything extra on top of my monthly dues. As Gabe Newell said, it’s a service problem.
Piracy gets you more centralized access to more content for free. If you’re behind a VPN or use a private tracker (or both) it’s safe. So why spend all my money on Netflix and Hulu and Prime and Disney and Max and whatever else just to have a fifty/fifty chance that one of them might be streaming the movie I want to watch?
thegamer.com
Oldest