That’s a sensible stance and I don’t disagree in principle, the problem is that I feel there are too few people that fall into that camp and a fair amount of them have had their brains absolutely cooked and believe they do, while they absolutely do not.

Of course I don’t have any real data to back those assumptions up, it’s not the kind of thing you’re going to get solid data on, mostly just observations. I’d like to think the Linux kernel devs are a cut above, but given the state of things my faith is in the gutter.

Absolutely hilarious. Another race to the bottom. Enshittifying the shit. Oh did you think as a consumer you were even gonna get the primo slop? The choice slop? No, you get the affordable grade slop that will continue to be ratcheted down as the price squeeze towards profitability continues.

STRAYYYyyyyAYyyAYYY! No regrets cause I got nothing to loooose! Eeeeeverrrrrr stray! 🎶

I remember paying $30 USD for a DVD with 3-4 episodes at most of an anime series. 26 episode Cowboy Bebop season? ~$120 USD.

Sure I downloaded that episode of Excel Saga once (❤️). It was 320x240 and took more than a day on my 56k dialup.

At some point I remember going on ebay and buying the entirety of Witch Hunter Robin (which at the time, I chose over Naruto that had just started airing as well, this would turn out to be an important tone setting point in my life …) and getting it for ~$20 USD. Basically just the cost of someone else to download it and burn it to CD for me. Did the same thing with Wolf’s Rain.

Good memories. Of the anime. This shit always sucked.

I had considered that, but that implies they’re holding onto way more sensitive information attached to those accounts than they should. Which is very possible, but even more shitty.

What purpose could this possibly serve?

Like I understand if the account consumes some kind of resource like disk space or a limited number of reserved connection slots or something, but an account can’t be more than an entry in a database with associated purchases? Like what is the fucking point?!

I grew up largely in the PS1 era and have a nostalgia for the affine texture warping. I’m not going to necessarily defend it as good in its own right, but I think a lot of older games play into that same “temporary suspension of disbelief” we get with movies. When something is less realistic, we are forced to invest more of our own imagination into it, an I believe that in a lot of ways this can form a stronger connection. You see this a lot with the whole analog horror trope, it’s the fear of the things hidden between the pixels that you’re not seeing and lets your imagination run wild.

Striving for realism only has one of two results: success of failure. Success is hard, and the numerous, subtle failures pile up until it distracts you and separates you from the illusion it’s trying to achieve.

I don’t have the time to write out the full response to this I want to right now, so I just want to say there is an almost immeasurable gulf between someone like Linus Torvalds using AI for debugging vs a coked out techbro junior engineer vibecoding the next Spotify but for access to water.

In my heart of hearts I still wish he wouldn’t touch the stuff just for the message this is going to send to all the wrong kinds of people but here we are.

“We want voters to understand that they cannot legally make a bet on an election and cast a ballot in that same election,” WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe said in a news release.

“If even a handful of our users in Wisconsin see this and get scared away from voting, that could EASILY swing an election,” a Kalshi spokesperson told the local outlet.

The sheer gall of it, my god.