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mindbleach

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mindbleach ,

“Oops.”

mindbleach ,

One is obviously made-up by ancient peoples who knew fuck-all about the world, but insists it’s eternal truth beyond debate. Even the parts that contradict the other parts.

The other is an openly hypothetical idea based on what we expect is just beyond our current capabilities… and it relies on that we’re-just-atoms materialism.

Pirated video games SOURCE CODE

So there are multiple sites&groups that pirate video games especially on PC. I was wondering if there are places on the internet where you find source code for games especially the highly modifiable ones like Half Life 2/Portal and Skyrim. Or groups that crack into the source code of games (or even software in general), not only...

mindbleach ,

Machine code tells you what it’s doing. Source code tells you why.

mindbleach ,

Incorrect.

mindbleach ,

Still wrong.

mindbleach ,

Open Watcom is a compiler for DOS. Every search engine will try ten ways to politely tell you that you obviously meant Wacom tablets, you illiterate goblin, and then shrug and direct you to the project’s own single-page FAQ.

Asking questions about DOS itself is even worse. Say you want the scan codes for arrow keys. Then say it a hundred more times, with increasing specificity and occasional vulgarity, because you are getting nothing but “how to use a terminal window in Windows.” Or at best, Ralph Brown’s big fat interrupt list, rearranged into the most Geocities-ass jumble of pages, where you can easily look up what any specific hex code does, once you already know which code to look for.

mindbleach ,

‘We didn’t find many results matching the terms you wrote.’

THAT’S WHY I FUCKING WROTE THEM.

mindbleach ,

Grounded vampire mythos is suspiciously similar to the symptoms of rabies.

If you get Form Of Mist, though, I’m in.

mindbleach ,

If that’s a symptom of rabies then Harper Lee undersold it.

mindbleach ,

ship it.

Only if it deploys other tanks. Otherwise you’d boat it.

mindbleach ,

One bullet hits the body and the crew goes deaf.

mindbleach ,

Do they make those for lungs?

mindbleach ,

Plungs.

No wait, that’s terrible.

mindbleach ,

A tank designed by Bill Wurtz.

mindbleach ,

“Behaved” would fit scansion better.

mindbleach ,

Yeeeup. Every eighteen months or so, we get a fresh pack of assholes trying to trick us into answering to the name of some guy who never even lived here.

mindbleach ,

Copyright’s explicit purpose is to encourage new works.

Any form of “unpublishing” is theft from the public. You wanna say a guy can’t make money on a thing? Great, fine, go nuts. But nothing any human being put effort into deserves to be lost forever.

mindbleach ,

Demand reform.

30 years from publication, no exceptions.

mindbleach ,

Fuck off.

mindbleach ,

People have a right to culture. If you grew up with a story, it’s yours now, no matter how dead the author isn’t. Past works are the foundation for everything you can make.

And if the purpose of copyright is not to encourage new works, burn it to the ground.

mindbleach ,

You can’t sell something to a million people and still own it.

Copyright is a gift, from us to them, to encourage new works, for us. Why would that mean some old fart gets to stop people making new stories for the characters they grew up with? They’re our characters, now. We bought them. That’s what the money was for.

And if thirty years of revenue with zero additional labor required somehow isn’t enough - oh well.

Can you imagine making your argument for any other industry? Why in the name of god would art be the place where doing real good one time is a ticket to retirement? Not farming, not medicine, not engineering. Homeboy wrote a song once, so he gets to ride the gravy train until he fuckin’ dies.

mindbleach ,

Word salad.

Again: the explicit purpose of copyright is to provide the public with new works. After a fixed limited time, all works belong in the public domain. If you want copyright to be anything but that, I would rather not do copyright at all.

It’s not a right. That name is a lie. It’s a monetary incentive. And once someone’s made their money, that’s that. It’s ours now. The deal worked.

mindbleach ,

Suing the creators

JRR Tolkein has been dead for fifty years.

mindbleach ,

‘The artist, the artist, the artist! And whoever owns their corpse. Same difference, right? Just semantics.’

Every fucking thread with you cultists. Do you listen to yourself?

mindbleach ,

Working toward change, but not making normative statements or highlighting problems in rationale. Obviously a real copyright reformist goes around tutting at those “semantics” while parroting the status quo.

Troll harder.

mindbleach ,

Yeah nothing says “write a book” like all revenue going to whichever corporation bootlegs it on the fanciest paper.

mindbleach ,

Gosh wow if only people like me had a solution for that.

mindbleach ,

“Why is Hideo Kojima so popular?”

“Why this is” is an explanation. “Why is this” is a question.

mindbleach ,

To actually answer the question:

Consistent novelty.

Metal Gear on MSX2 was a genre that didn’t exist yet, and which sounded boring when he proposed it. The real Metal Gear 2 built on that in ways that would still be noteworthy features in Metal Gear Solid. Snatcher and Policenauts were little more than visual novels, but they were well-executed. That’s largely thanks to Kojima insisting on artist-driven tools for scripting the exact timing of graphics, text, and music.

Metal Gear Solid fucked with the player by constantly breaking the fourth wall. MGS2 cranked that ten times higher, along with prescient comments on memetics and populist narratives. MGS3 was just polished as hell. MGS4 opens with fake commercials starring the voice actors and only gets weirder from there.

MGS5-- calling back to artist-driven tools, I recommend the article about the game’s rendering engine. They developed a little rectangle you can drop into a screenshot, and then however you adjust the screenshot in Photoshop, copy-pasting that little rectangle back into the game will perfectly match whatever you did. Kojima productions have a certain “just solve the problem” vibe behind a lot of their technical direction. MGS 1-3 had too much focus on the minimap radar, so MGS4 has a holographic ring around your feet. Why? How? Who gives a shit, it’s a video game.

P.T. was a horror game demo set entirely in one hallway. And it was terrifying. And weird. And full of promise. So when Kojima handed that gift to Konami, reviving one of their beloved franchises, with several big names on-board thanks to his weird industry connections… and then Konami booted his ass out the door… people noticed.

Death Stranding is the ultimate illustration of why he became well-known and why he remains well-known. It’s a ridiculous product. It forces comically long sequences that are not technically gameplay. Its writing is completely bonkers and longwinded. But every aspect is deliberate. It is that way, on purpose. A premise that sounds boring becomes interesting because it’s well-executed. Balance and stamina aren’t floating UI elements; they’re represented in your character’s movement, so you keep your eyes on your dude.

Basically, Kojima is the sort of lead who can insist on a ten-minute opening cutscene, thirty seconds of actual gameplay, and then another eight minutes of cutscene, and still have people’s attention.

mindbleach ,

Install Everything and type some guesswork filenames.

mindbleach ,

Hearing those three notes of “Foregone Destruction” for the first time in umpteen years fired off a neuron that’d been hoarding the good chemicals.

mindbleach ,

Exceptions will be made if having a behind-the-scenes money fountain means tuition is basically free.

Still looking at you, Harvard.

mindbleach ,

Having coded a 3D engine: sin and cos are cool. Tan can fuck right off. Atan doubly so.

And radians are the devil’s work.

mindbleach ,

Sticking with image compression, see Quite Okay Images. It treats each pixel as three numbers and expects mostly small changes. Recent pixels get hashed and can be referenced in a few bits. This is enough to compete with PNG filesizes, an order of magnitude faster, while handling each pixel exactly once.

mindbleach ,

Yeah I fuckin’ love dealing with transcendental constants and fractions just to describe a right angle. A quarter-circle being one-half just makes so much sense! It’s awesome seeing all these mantissa-only numbers, because you can totally tell apart sane results and srand() without doing floating-point math in your head!

mindbleach ,

Yeah X is the other hellsite.

mindbleach ,

By your powers combined, I will run Arch Linux!

mindbleach ,

We’re the Martians!

mindbleach , (edited )

“Bone spackle” being the #5 worst part of this comment, at most, is quite a fucking achievement.

mindbleach ,

That’s what you get for bringing the gun into an environment.

mindbleach ,

Products aren’t services.

So much bullshit has come from pretending otherwise.

mindbleach ,

Professional Icelandic maniac, Björk.

mindbleach ,

TCP is a process server.

UDP is a brick in flight.

mindbleach ,

If you needed one terabyte, SSDs have been affordable for a while.

If you needed ten, nope. Not until recently.

If you need a hundred, to-day, still no.

mindbleach ,

ITT: people bragging about the 32 GB they paid $700 for so Oblivion would load faster.

If you dropped five grand on a PC a decade ago, yeah, of course you’ve used SSDs exclusively. Each gigabyte only cost two bucks! Meanwhile, on hard disks: ten cents.

If you built a PC three years ago, SSDs were finally approaching that ten-cent figure… while HDDs were pushing two cents per gigabyte.

The gap is closing. The low end for SSDs is trivially affordable, now. Key word: now. There’s no reason not to have your OS on SSD, now. And the capacity of spinning plates can only be pushed so far within a 3.5" module. There will be a point where there’s no reason to buy new disks. But if I want another dozen terabytes for network storage, like hell I’m gonna pony up for neon-spangled M.2 drives. $200 versus $600… how badly do I need those milliseconds?

mindbleach ,

100 TB of HDDs is negotiable. $2000, maybe. You could blow more on a GPU. There are people who will buy that much hard disk storage, on this website, on any given day. Data hoarders could nitpick the dollar figure I just named, without double-checking.

100 TB of SSDs would cost at least three times as much. Nobody should buy 100 TB of SSDs in 2023. Most likely, nobody should buy 100 TB of SSDs in 2024. Gavin Free of the Slo Mo Guys has a ridiculous RAID cluster… suitcase… for downloading and editing obscenely large video files, and it’s still only 48 TB, and he got it for free to advertise the company that sells such ridiculous objects. If money means anything to you, or “time is money” is not as literal as it is for a slow motion photographer, I cannot recommend buying one.

It's funny how google pretends the music on YouTube isn't straight up piracy and everyone just goes along with it

Most people have extremely weird ideas of what’s considered piracy and what isn’t. Downloading a video game rom is piracy, but if you pay money to some Chinese retailer for an SD card containing the roms, that’s somehow not piracy. Exploiting the free trial on a streaming site by using prepaid visa cards is somehow not...

mindbleach ,

Paying money is technically bootlegging, which I would argue is massively worse than piracy. But only because piracy is whatever.

mindbleach ,

Wow, Toyfare flashbacks.

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