I feel like this whole hobby has always existed on the verge of being deleted for whatever reason, and I am forever grateful that there are people who put this stuff up in the first place.

Still need to work out a way for me to help out.

And this is why I consider SSDs to be a downgrade compared to HDDs lol

Yeah, I read. I don’t have much sympathy for him. He sounds like a jerk.

IMO preserving the content is more important than honoring him (or, for that matter, humiliating him).

Heh, more of this shit.

Remember, the only reason we can still watch the highly influential 1922 vampire movie Nosferatu today is because some people didn’t destroy all their copies despite a court saying they had to.

DISOBEY DESTRUCTION ORDERS.

COPY ALL THE THINGS.

“no stakes” my ass.

Hell, Crunchyroll was a pirate site until it converted into not being one.

What with all the stories about the companies taking pretty hefty cuts for things, I’m gonna bet that the “supposedly” is doing some heavy lifting there, heh.

So they lied in court and got away with it? Sheesh.

Do they still do takedowns for videos based on that content IDing if the video isn’t even monetized in the first place?

Like, I know youtubers who try to make money hate this, but what about youtubers who aren’t in it for the money but just want to throw content on the platform? Can stuff like AMVs actually stay up?

Because, frankly, I’ve found that it’s been pretty easy to dodge YouTube ads, by means of uBlock Origin.

Any such verification depends on some other party to verify it. If the game requires online services, then the verification is dependent on the online services; the verification can’t stand alone. But we already have existing systems for that without the need for NFTs.

On the other hand, if the game is a standalone game that doesn’t require connecting to online services, then if the game can be made to run on one computer it can be made to run on another computer. No matter how you choose to assign ownership, you can’t get around this. Videogames are fundamentally data, and data can be copied.

Besides…inventing a new NFT-based DRM? No matter how you do it, it’s not going to be as convenient as simply not having DRM. A DRM-free game is one that anyone can just pick up and it’ll work, too. You’re proposing a “solution” that doesn’t offer anything new, while opening up other cans of worms along the way.

Also, we already have peer to peer game trades/sales anyway, and we’ve had these, long before NFTs were a thing.

Frankly speaking, it’s not like anyone on the internet can tell the difference. And, at least speaking personally, it’s not like I need to know. If they crack stuff well they crack stuff well. If their political views suck their political views suck. So be it.

And what exactly is that NFT, as distinct from the media it’s linked to, useful for? Aside from simply saying that it is unique and one can have ownership of it.

Oh, I see. That’s quite interesting. And I noticed that the Mac version is only split into 4 parts, with one clocking in at 11.6 GB (though others are capped at 4 GB).

I’m very curious why these differences exist.

I thought the file splits are based on size? But maybe I’m wrong. The larger games I have also tend to be Windows-only anyway so maybe I just don’t know this stuff.

The fact that you have some sort of plan for managing your photos is one step ahead of me. I have no plans and my photos are a very messy collection.

I would caution against using a flash drive (a.k.a. pen drive) for any permanent storage. I’ve had multiple flash drives fail on me. Usually it’s this super cheap kind that gets distributed as branded swag, but I’ve had some others fail too.

Ironically I’ve seen some pirate sites that also suggest related items.

Doesn’t mean Netflix is worth using of course.

one day the search bar showed back up even though I’ve told it many times to not have it.

This sort of behavior (and other nastier things, such as introducing advertising for Microsoft services) is why I don’t trust Windows Updates and am increasingly distrustful of Windows being a satisfactory operating system.

Also I’d like it to be less bloated. Sure, fancy bells and whistles are nice to look at, but if I could make things look like Win98 again I totally would. I don’t actually need things like transparency or 3D rotation/resizing effects.

Oh, it’s not proprietary. Then that’s a lot less bad. Thanks for the guide; I’ll try this later.

😈

Well they can revoke your ability to use the Steam client to install and access it.

But of course, fuck that. Steam doesn’t need to monitor what we do with our games 24/7.

Update: It looks like it’s handling the offline installers in game-by-game batches. I told it to download the offline installer for a game that if I used browser I’d have to download two files; it shows as just one item and one download in the client, and I verified that it actually does give me both files.

In addition to installing and launching the games, there are cloud saves, achievements, time tracking, leaderboards for achievements (which integrates Steam achievements for anyone who’s linked their Steam profile), overlay, some multiplayer stuff, and more. In this respect it has social features and game management features similar to what Steam has.

GOG Galaxy is also meant to be a universal launcher so you can use “integrations” to have Galaxy launch other games through their respective clients and even have it close the client afterwards. You can also add your own independently-installed games, as long as they show up in a database of games that they use (I dunno where it’s from but these days it has pretty much everything I’ve looked for, aside from romhacks, but for that matter, I’m pretty sure you could make it launch any executable with any label and Galaxy wouldn’t question you). That said, I’m used to just launching things from game executables directly so I don’t use it for this anyway lol.

Also Galaxy offers more flexibility with managing game installs than the Steam client does. For one, you can set the install directory to anywhere, rather than being locked in Steam\steamapps\common\gamename. And pretty importantly IMO, there’s an easily accessible (though non-default, which is fine IMO) option to tell the game to not update, and the Galaxy client won’t try to force you to update (unlike the Steam client). (EDIT: there’s also a universal default for whether to auto-update games, in addition to per-game settings.) On top of this Galaxy also has more UI options than Steam does, e.g. having a List View option (which Steam unceremoniously junked several years ago in favor of their current mess).

I’m actually about to check out its ability to download standalone installers. I started a couple very big game downloads last night on my browser and they failed so I’m gonna see if the client can do better with stuff like resuming downloads.

Hmm, seems like this is really might be getting to a point where non-viable instances are the exception rather than the rule. At least, I hope that’s the case these days.

I’m too busy to switch to Linux at the moment but if I have to it’s definitely an option I’m making back-burner plans for.

Back when Mastodon was more in the news I told various friend groups to jump on it. I wrote up guides for them too. They largely didn’t, and some of them even got annoyed at me.

Nowadays I see they’re still somewhat mostly using Twitter though some of them have started to slowly warm up to Bluesky. Sigh.

But anything that exists as digital data can be copied. The same applies to NFTs. Make an NFT image or game or whatever, and it can be copied by whoever has access to it. The only way to prevent such copying is to not release it at all.

The only stipulation is that copies made without authorization of whoever holds the rights to it would not be “official” instances of the thing, and there are potential copyright restrictions on the use of such copies…but that’s using NFTs to justify copyright law, and aside from “lol copyright”, legal of ownership of an NFT is even more of a mess than traditional legal ownership of an IP.

I know some people (albeit mainly writers of gaming-related and gaming-adjacent works) use itch.io for this, because it has a built-in ability to let people pay what they want with a minimum amount to get the product.

Edit: Now that I think about it I’ve seen comics there too.

Sidenote: I wish I could do more to encourage friends on the internet to use Mastodon and Lemmy…

Never used Goodreads before myself but Bookwyrm seems really cool.

I’ve seen stuff like ArcGIS on torrent sites the last time I checked. Dunno about Mnova.

Sidenote: their licenses are crazy complicated. I really wish there were just FOSS alternatives to everything. I know there’s QGIS/GRASS GIS for ArcGIS, R for S (or is it the other way around? I forgot), MuseScore for Sibelius/Finale/etc., and so on. And also LibreOffice for MS Office of course. But I think some academic/professional software is just so niche and/or has institutional players (like companies, governments, and universities) that are so committed to it that it can be hard to get people to change.

I really wish GOG made Galaxy for Linux already.

They can revoke stuff from your library.

They just usually don’t have a reason to do so.

(Also, you might not be able to get older versions of the game anymore. Meaning that you may be stuck with unwanted content changes in some games.)

So thanks to not having signed in for a couple months, I actually still had notifications from the last time I chatted about this, and here’s the information someone else found when they looked into it.

https://leminal.space/comment/2351525 (see this excerpted comment chain)

In summary, this “policy” is at best someone (maybe even GabeN) stating back in 2009 and 2013 that games will still be (somehow) made available to customers if Steam shuts down.

As far as I know (please correct me if I’m wrong), there’s nothing in the Steam Subscriber Agreement that obligates Steam/Valve to do it. And even if there were, there’s nothing saying they can’t just update the SSA to remove such a term.

Furthermore, even if Valve wants to do this if Steam ever shuts down, considering Steam’s size I’d say it’s less likely to be shut down and more likely to just get sold off if Valve ever does become insolvent, and the new owner of Steam can’t be held to this promise anyway.

So, while it’d definitely be good if this were the case, this seems to be more wishful than written-in-stone.

And there’s also kids who don’t have credit cards yet too.

Do you happen to know how well this works for old Windows games? We’re talking about random indie things that run in little windows and are native to like Win98. A good lotta old doujin games are like this.

This was the case for me, to some extent, for some time. But then, the more I used of Steam, the more I realized there are a variety of issues, ranging from minor inconveniences like having to deal with the Steam client (and its interface and footprint) to being at risk of losing access to all of my Steam games due to losing access to the account for a variety of possible reasons (some of which could happen even if I didn’t do anything wrong on my end).

These days, if I buy, I buy DRM-free. That’s an arrangement where publishers/developers properly respect customers. If it’s not available DRM-free, it’s ethically justifiable to pirate.

I can agree that Valve has done some good things, such as making digital distribution go big, making indie games viable, and doing a lot to advance gaming on Linux.

But I’d also argue that that doesn’t obligate me to spend money to patronize them, particularly when I can get a better (by virtue of being DRM-free) product elsewhere.

Fundamentally I don’t really know how it’d be viable to truly “own” a specific copy of something, when it’s always possible to make infinitely many copies of it. Any such “ownership” is at best essentially just conceptual, aside from perhaps the legal right to annoy other people about the copies they are in possession of.

So instead my personal take is that I’d rather everything just be offered DRM-free. I don’t necessarily need transferable ownership as much as I just need proper and guaranteed access under my own control after I purchase the product.

Sidenote: I tried getting something off APKPure the other day and it only came in the form of XAPK files. Do you know how to get the APK out of them? (A cursory check suggests that XAPK might be a proprietary thing made by APKPure that only works with their own APKPure app, which feels pretty dirty to me…)

Pardon me for living under a rock, but what’s wrong with uTorrent?

Thanks for looking into that.

Still something that’s merely word-of-mouth promise, not in any sort of legal documentation, and easily ignored if Valve does go down or change ownership. And that’s assuming the information is still current, which itself is questionable.

(Not your fault; I don’t mean to sound like I’m arguing with you.)

The Steam client (which, as we recall, is not optional, unlike e.g. GOG Galaxy) is gradually becoming bloatier in terms of technical concerns (due to moving to a browser-based engine), less accessible (due to that move breaking keyboard usability to do things like navigate through the game selection and launch them), and also bloatier in terms of features (a great example is the What’s New shelf, but more generally, the interface prioritizes looking pretty than being responsive or data-dense with metadata about one’s games).

On top of that, in recent years Steam basically shut off a way to access older versions of games (using a depot downloader). This is on top of Steam generally making avoiding game updates to be a pain anyway. (Yes, updates are often good things, but sometimes it’s useful to have an older version, for a variety of reasons.)

As icing on the cake, if you try to suggest any of these features on the forum, be prepared for forum regulars to endlessly argue your thread into the ground, telling you why your idea is oh so wrong for Steam and how you should not have the right to play games you bought unless you do so in and only in the ways expressly authorized by the publishers who control all rights forever and always with zero recourse to you if anything goes wrong such as an errant update that breaks functionality.

Yeah, piracy is better than that shit.