lilac

lilac 💀🦋🌺

@lilac

i'm lilac

professional games industry web engineer and games hater

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lilac
@lilac
erica
@erica
mogwai-poet
@mogwai-poet

You've seen the study going around saying that only 13% of games released before 2010 are still commercially available

The Video Game History Foundation intends to cite this data to try to change copyright law to favor preservation over corporate interests, and I wish them well.

While we're waiting for hell to freeze over, there is a moral imperative to teach our children to pirate. There should be workshops at your local library showing groups of 8 year olds how to install a VPN, safely bittorrent Goldeneye 007 and configure a Nintendo 64 emulator. There should be public service announcements exhorting kids to download Frozen rather than paying Disney to acquire and bury even more of human culture.

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Xuelder
@Xuelder

Oh boy, I wish we could teach our college students that. What Millenials, most Gen X, and some Boomers would consider basic computer skills has become lost due to the rise of smart phones and tablets. My old university is now imploring the state education board to bring back typing classes to teach people how to touch type and learn file structures.

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4gateftw
@4gateftw

this threads full of boomers who think they’re computer scientists because they can install nordvpn and type at 60wpm. and that if you use Netflix you must not know how to pirate things.

(I kid, but looking at some of these comments, only partly)

(It’s still not easy to get good rips of a lot of movies/shows at 4k or anywhere near the bitrate the big streaming sites offer, and also storing all that is a pain, and also downloading it will take forever on a public tracker, so streaming sites can be a good option, tip from your friendly neighborhood gen z pirate…)

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Xuelder
@Xuelder

Even if you think you are joking, technically speaking, being able to do the things you describe would actually be a high level computer skill in comparison to the rest of the population. As the study states, the first thing you need to learn in UX (as well as an SDET, which I can attest to) is that you the programmer are not the end user, Gary is. And Gary is walking techbane, and will somehow always crash the system. So you dummy proof it as much as possible. The problem now being that we have dummy proofed our apps and tools that it has made many users atrophy their computer skills.

Also, if you live in the south and/or the country, good fraking luck getting a decent bitrate from the streaming sites.

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4gateftw
@4gateftw

i agree with almost everything you just said, but that’s because nothing you just said is about the damn kids these days not knowing how to type and thinking piracy is evil. every age group naturally has cohorts with different interests, the gen z people who care about old games enough to want to start archival projects for them know how to use emulators. there’s no need to lose your mind because the average TikTok user types slow on physical keyboards, the average millennial does too, literally the average person who uses a computer for their work types slow, we youths will be fine

also a lot of things are polymorphic these days. a lot of less technical people i know pirate movies/tv but just on streaming piracy sites (and yes the quality is shit), or games but with Google drive links from friends (that’s how i used to share GOG installers with my friends in high school). or they might emulate but with apps on their phones. these things aren’t unknown to people they just use the means that is easiest and don’t get more involved unless they want to, that is not a bad thing, that is progressive disclosure of complexity which is a very good thing

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4gateftw
@4gateftw

i was, though i should have clarified i meant you can get good bitrates through download not streaming directly (i get good bitrates streaming but i live in a major city with excessively fast internet). the streaming piracy sites i'm talking about are sketchier than either mainstream streaming or something like kiss anime, i'm talking the kinds of sites that you watch sports on without a subscription or that come up when you google "\insert show name\ streaming free." those were super ubiquitous when i was in high school (2014-18), almost everyone i knew used them including people with no special technical knowledge.

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