comicsansstein
No bio...
User ID: 582
comicsansstein
8mo ago
The business justification is that he current CEO of Unity formerly occupied a high position in Electronic Arts, and suggested that the publishers should experiment with e.g. charging players for reloading their guns past some point in a gameplay session, when they highly price-insensitive.
Single-player, paid (as in, you pay for them once) games are a rounding error to this kind of a business-brained person. The pricing was made with Genshin Impact in mind, in an attempt to extract more money from Mihoyo (sp?). In a mobile world of freemium games, using "installation" as a measure makes more sense because accounts are revenues are usually tied to that.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
Parentheses are rot13.
That thread did indeed prompt this question. I wondered if having no preconceived notions of what a (Freen Natry) is would make the people less likely to be stuck on an incorrect answer. I tried to give all the info a (Zntvp cynlre) would have, without tipping the hand too hard. I may have overcomplicated things.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
It's what TVTropers of yore called a self-demonstrating example, I believe.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
My engagement ring was an armillary sphere (much like this one, only with a gemstone), which had a disadvantage of being impossible to resize. I had to be extra careful when picking the size, so after some back and forth with the jeweler he sent me a few measuring bands that he uses (turns out that much like shoe sizes, the actual dimensions of the "same" size can vary slightly depending on the vendor). That left me no choice but to present them to my now-wife openly, so she new that a proposal was coming, eventually. In the end, it was a good outcome because she tends to get overwhelmed when presented with sudden situations and that setup enabled her to have just the right level of surprise :)
Because the engagement ring is elaborate, for the wedding rings we decided on a simple design.
comicsansstein
3mo ago
Yep, that's the one. By the way, if anyone has a better, more mainstream source to read up on the history of AIDS crisis, I'm all ears.
comicsansstein
3mo ago
I don't use cloud saves for photos not because of privacy, but because I'm afraid that inevitably due to an error on either side an empty folder is going to get synced the wrong way and I'll lose five years' worth of photos. As for music, movies, and ebooks: lol lmao, as if I'm going to vendor-lock myself to a single storefront.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
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Echoing my question buried deep in the thread: can anyone recommend a good historical source to read up on the AIDS crisis, that's less opinionated than the Salo forum?
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Has anyone here ever had an experience with hiring a private detective? Is they way they are portrayed in the movies or books pure fiction?
comicsansstein
11mo ago
Do you believe the reports of mass repression happening in the Xinjiang region in the past decade+ to be exaggerated or fabricated from whole cloth? Do you expect a random Chinese expat (?) to have accurate knowledge about the inner workings of her country, and to share that knowledge publicly?
It's June 4th tomorrow, why don't you ask her about that on Monday to calibrate how much she's willing to say about China's recent history.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
I can't hear you over the sound of my novelty suit :V
(The sound is ゴゴゴゴ )
comicsansstein
11mo ago
My impression w/r/t fanfiction is that it runs kinda "orthogonally" to being a fan of a specific franchise: people doing it are fans of a specific modes of expression and specific story tropes, and they move across franchises an communities squashing the characters as they're actually written into their preferred archetypes, AUs and story beats. (As opposed, in the other extreme, to an obsessive curator on a spectrum who spend time cataloguing all eleventy gazillion kinds of spaceships that appeared tn the screen for 5 seconds in one episode in 1974.)
The publishing model of contemporary "young adult" book series and netflix shows seems to cater to such audience. I see it on my sister-in-law's tumblr - every other month there are new gifs with a new cast of completely interchangeable Blorbos, and the show inevitable won't be renewed for the 3rd season, but it doesn't matter, the viewers did their share of shipping and moved on. These days the viewers/readers don't even have to hallucinate homosexuality like they did in the case of Kirk, Frodo or Steve Rogers - the shows come with the batteries included, so to say.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
Somebody, representing "Polish fandom", even started a petition to rescind the invitation.
The letter/petition was issued by the Union of Polish Fandom Associations, i.e. a council of representatives from various cities' fadom organizations that has supervises the organization of Polcon conventions and the Janusz A. Zajdel Award. If someone has had their hand in organizing a non-manga convention in Poland in the past 20 years, they're probably one handshake from the letter's issuers. If one's been to a non-manga convention in Poland in the past 20 years, probably less than three handshakes away. So, I'd say that the claim to representation is accurate.
(I've been at the council meeting where a draft of that letter was first (?) proposed)
comicsansstein
2mo ago
Yeah, that one
comicsansstein
2mo ago
The trick is to spend a lot of time theorycrafting outlandish ideas, so that when somebody asks an out-there question you have a ready fully baked take instead of coming up with one on the spot. The downside is that it's slowly making you insane and unable to carry a normal political conversation because you jump to faraway conclusions ;)
comicsansstein
1yr ago
Why wouldn't the Yalta Treaty be condemned? My country was stuck on the wrong side of the curtain for 45 years because Roosevelt used us as a bargaining chip.
Edit: And before you answer, I would like you to think very carefully about the role the Red Army played in WWII, in the context of Poland.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
In Poland, they shifted to w Ukraine in the 90s.
No we didn't. Some people shifted from "na" to "w" this year, after the Russian invasion, but it's pure wordcelery, trying to justify word changes with sort of made up stories about prejudiced connotations you're describing, like how this week's document from Stanford (?) tries to connect "hip hip hooray" to the Holocaust. Somebody using "w" became a pretty good litmus test for determining if that person is a prog.
comicsansstein
7mo ago
I am a very weird person so my feelings probably don't generalize, but for as long as I've remembered I've had the feeling of getting the implicit signal that "high" art is not for me.
Specifically, I've felt that one's supposed to interact with high art with preconceived notions of what's good and what's not, with the actual act of viewing/reading/listening to something being a bit of an afterthought. You're supposed to like the things that have been declared Good and Worthy, with little room for discussion. I'll take people slinging their personal flaming uninformed opinions about the latest vidya with great fervor over that consensus-driven stagnation every day.
Incidentally, there were attempt to bring that top-down consensus "its Art and it's Good" enforcement to the world of video games, but they failed miserably. Remember The Path, Graveyard, and Bientot l'ete? The auteurs that made them eventually quit game development after having a meltdown about the uncultured gamers. Meanwhile, people like Daniel Mullins prove that you can be high-concept without ghettoizing yourself.
comicsansstein
11mo ago
See my other comment - I'd say that they are not superficial, but fanfic writers engage "across" the media, not "with" the media.
comicsansstein
11mo ago
Idk, I'm quite fond of refrigerators and dishwashers myself.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
It's been quite some time since I've seen it, so I may have forgotten some details, but I don't think the family elder is a good person. Yes, the movie wants us to see him in a sympathetic light, but why should I care about the authorial intent?
His children are portrayed as an ungrateful bunch yes, but as the meme goes "My brother in Christ, you raised the children". What I see here is a story of a man who lucked into having a world-class talent in something (writing), and when his kids turned out to be only ordinary people he used his status to instill lifelong inferiority complexes in all of them. Taunting them about how they didn't manage to escape the long shadow of his fame, and when they grew up resentful and bitter using that bitterness as a proof that he was right to taunt them in the first place.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
It's not unique at all, it was standard fare for half of my parent's lifetime doe to them being born in People's Republic of Poland, a vassal state of the dearest USSR. The standard fare for getting a passport was to become an informer for the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (Security Service), spying on your family and friends. And that was during cold "wartime", not war-wartime. While I'm not much a fan of Zeleński, calling wartime conscription of males a very rate precedent show only one's narrow historical and geographical perspective.
And "Ukraine's government is corrupt, therefore their cities getting shelled and their people getting warcrimed in a manner typical to Red-- I mean Russian army is just business as usual in the region" is an embarassing non sequitur.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
To be honest, I just jumped at the opportunity to speak about something I have first-hand experience with, for a change ;)
comicsansstein
1yr ago
In 1939 Eastern Bloc was formed during the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. This possibly saved those countries from a worse fate.
As long as you weren't a Jew but an ethnic Pole, being invaded by USSR was the worse fate, both in 1939 (Katyń, to name one thing) and in the last phase of the war when the "liberating" red army was marching westward, raping and pillaging to its heart's content (estimating the number of rapes during that time in hundreds of thousands is possibly lowballing it, about 9% of the Polish population had syphilis after the war).
comicsansstein
1yr ago
Oh okay, I consider 4K to be a meme and never looked into any tech adjacent to it, which explains why I haven't heard of this. Still bad for the future, I guess, but not immediately concerning.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
Can you elaborate on the HD signal?
On the other hand, people who are the furthest to the other side are often very antinatalist, which should have a moderating effect over the generations. But it's hard to speculate, the current demographic transition is literally unprecedented in the world's history.
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