I think that funding creators is great if you have the money and the inclination. I just don’t think that it makes you an asshole if you don’t.

There are creators whom I fund because they give me exclusive extra content on their Patreons or sometimes if I just think that their work is important enough and I want to see it continue. If I decide that I need that money for something else, that’s up to me.

So, when you’re licking the boot, do you start at the heel or the toe?

If we were selfish, we wouldn’t be sharing our files in the first place, and the system would fall apart.

It’s the fact that we aren’t selfish that filesharing works at all.

Piracy is. Filesharing isn’t.

When you steal books from a library, you’re preventing others from accessing those books. When you download a digital copy of a book, you aren’t.

Same thing with money. If you stole my money, I’d be upset, but I wouldn’t be upset if I had infinite money.

Why should I?

It was a cost-cutting measure to save money on tapes by reusing the old ones.

Lots of people come have a choice in who their ISP is. I don’t. For my area, there’s one provider. If I want to change that, I have to move.

To me, updates and DLC serve different purposes. Updates are for bugfixes, new features, feature enhancements, etc. DLC is new game stuff, like additional characters and levels and so on.

There needs to be a tech-workers’ union. (Not just for gaming.)

Define “anonymous”. I use Soulseek, but you need an account for that.

Such as?

I don’t use Wine.

Love seeing you guys bitch on every software launch for a Linux release lmao.

Yeah, no. I don’t want any Windows software. Everything I use is free/open source.

Inkscape and Krita are not capable of professional work.

How so?

Are you a programmer?

I started gaming after I switched to Linux, so all of my gaming is Linux-based. It helps that I use emulators for everything, and Linux has excellent emulators. When I built my new computer and discovered I could emulate a Switch at a playable speed, it floored me.

I still have a soft spot for Kubuntu, but I had to move to Arch because I wanted my software up-to-date. It really fucking sucks when a new version of something comes out and you have to wait for somebody to get around to updating the repo. Sometimes it would take months.

What makes the EU an easy target for copyright lawsuits?

“Intellectual property” is a corpo term, and using it accepts their framing. They’re trying to conflate copyright, trademark, and patent law with property law.

Back when “FOSS” was “Free as in Beer” and fuck that Richard Stallman with his “free as in speech” bullshit

FOSS has always been about “free as in speech”, and Stallman has said that it’s more ethical to illegally download closed-source software than to pay for it.

FOSS vs. proprietary is tangential to the discussion over filesharing, anyway, because it addresses different issues. FOSS isn’t good because it’s zero-cost, it’s good because it respects user freedoms.

Emulators run ROM images of the cartridges. There are some rather arcane devices that can create these for you, but most people just download them (usually from a website or torrent).

None of this had to happen. We could have had a real quarantine, just a month or two back in 2019, but that would require making slightly less money for a brief period of time, so instead we get to live in eternal plague world.

Even if you could have gotten an entire country to agree that this was a good idea and pull it off, you still have other countries to worry about. Stopping it in one country wouldn’t have stopped it anywhere else.

Now, what I do agree with is that the response could’ve been a lot better, and many lives would’ve been saved as a result. But completely defeating COVID was always a fantasy.