Lurker > adjl

DirtBasedSoap posted...

Ive posted on this stupid website for more than half of my life so i would be a little disappointed

Exactly this. It wouldn't be the end of the world, but I've been coming here in some capacity or another for over 20 years now. It'd be pretty weird to have that go away.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

And that's why YouTube alternatives are a good thing.

Unless you're paying for it, there will likely never be an alternative that's genuinely okay with you blocking their ads. Ads are how most free sites make their money, and given that video hosting and streaming isn't cheap (not to mention compensating content creators well enough to choose this site over competitors), nobody's going to run such a site without at least making enough money to more or less break even. Blocking ads is using the service without paying for it. Most sites just accept that that happens because fighting it is significantly more trouble than it's worth, but there's always going to be a risk that they start cracking down on adblocking and trying to stop blockers from using the service. That's just the simple reality of adblocking.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

It sounds like we're talking about contract law at this point

We're not talking about law at all. We're talking about Google telling you the circumstances under which they're willing to revoke your access to their service. Google's never going to sue you for adblocking, they're just going to stop you from using their service because you're using it in a way that violates their terms.

Yeah, kittens are fun. We specifically went looking for an older cat because shelters so often have difficulty finding somebody to adopt them, and that's how we got the 8-year-old. The 15-year-old was an unexpected charity case, where her owner had died, his roommates were moving and unable to take her, and his family planned to throw her out on the street (as a 15-year-old declawed cat, so you know how that would have ended). We ended up adopting them within two days of each other, which was less than planned but ultimately worked out. Though our plan to give the ancient one a few good months before she died of old age hasn't gone so well, given that she's now 20 and still going strong.

Oh, then I guess it's fine. 180's my personal cutoff.

Well then maybe he also sucks.

If it's a republican, odds are all of them have covered up sexual assault at some point or another, so might as well go with the one for whom that's his only documented fault.

I don't regret adopting our cats as adults (one was 8, one was 15), but kittens are cute and I do kind of miss not getting to experience that phase. My childhood cats were born in our backyard and were like 6 weeks old when we took them in, so lots of kitten fun times there.

SinisterSlay posted...

Who would dare come here without an ad blocker?

Especially given that I expect the ads to become even more aggressive now.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Fox gets punished and discredited for not going along with the center but they ever go so far as to oppose it. They serve as an example and nothing more.

No, they got punished for committing defamation, by being sued by the company they defamed. Anyone that is harmed by fraudulent, defamatory news coverage can do the same, regardless of who's publishing it or where they fall on the political spectrum.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

That was neither understood nor implied. I never agreed to the condition that by watching a video I was agreeing to any conditions.

At this point, you should assume that any apparently free service you find online comes with some kind of terms attached to it, especially one offered by a large corporation. If you choose not to go looking for them to understand what you're agreeing to, that's on you, and you're still just as subject to them as anyone else. This applies in most contexts: ignorance of the rules is only accepted as a valid excuse for breaking them if the rules have been hidden well enough that you can blame somebody else for your ignorance.

It's also worth noting that this would only be relevant if Google were looking to punish you for your past transgressions. Right now, they have informed you that using an adblocker violates their ToS. You can no longer claim ignorance of that, and any future adblocking you do is done in the full knowledge that you are going against their terms. Any past use is irrelevant.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

I don't have a YouTube account. I never agreed to anything. I'm not subject to YouTube's terms of service.

The terms apply to anyone watching videos. You tacitly agree to them by choosing to watch something, whether you actually read them or not.

Saying that, though, you're never actually going to get in legal trouble for violating them, simply because of the extensive precedent of EULAs and ToSs not holding up in court because it's such common knowledge that nobody reads them (and in Youtube's case, you actually have to work to even find it) and there's no explicit agreement to the terms required before accessing the service. It does, however, mean that Youtube is completely within their rights to block adblock users from watching videos. Per their terms of service, they make no commitment to provide videos to people who block ads, and that means they can cut you off if they want.

You aren't "subject" to the ToS in a sense that you can be positively punished for it (that is, punished by doing something to you), but you can absolutely be negatively punished as far as Youtube's service delivery has the power to (which pretty much just extends to "no videos for you"). The only people that are actually entitled to watch Youtube with no ads are Youtube Premium subscribers. The rest of us just do it anyway because advertisers have made the Internet browsing experience intolerably miserable without ad blocking. They have killed my capacity to care about any potential wrong I'm committing by blocking ads.

Lokarin posted...

again, how did they manange to snipe a BBC reporter in Tel Aviv and a journalist in Lebanon?

"These things just happen in war."

thatauthor posted...

I dunno. He ran a website for like 15+ years He can't be that inept.

He ran *GameFAQs* for 15+ years. That indicates very little about aptitude.

Jen0125 posted...

So many comments recognizing our unhinged nature.

You do have to be a special kind of crazy to keep hanging around a site this obsolete.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Just from my viewpoint, solely via pop culture osmosis, one of those games is dramatically more well-received than the other.

Like it or not, that's a factual statement - and literally nothing you say or do will actually alter that in any way.

It's a factual statement, but the significance of that factual statement hinges on the sort of content you're delivered and the biases that colour your perception. As you enjoy reminding everyone whenever you get the opportunity, you don't care about Zelda, the Switch, or Nintendo games in general. You do, however, care about CRPGs and TTRPGs. Obviously algorithms are going to deliver you more positive BG3 content than positive TotK content, and even when you're seeking things out without being manipulated by algorithms, you've primed yourself to be more receptive to negative TotK content and positive BG3 content.

More pizza for you, I guess. It sucks, but look at it this way: If this is the kind of person she is, you wouldn't have wanted a relationship anyway. In a way, she did you a favour by letting you know now instead of after you'd gotten more invested. You'll find someone more worth your time eventually.

Blightzkrieg posted...

I thought this meant two American fighter jets had been engaged in an aerial dogfight.

Paintball, but fighter jets.

Ham is specifically cured pork. Whether that's them trying to make it sound fancy that they stuffed it full of salt or whether they actually blended cured and uncured meat to make it, I couldn't tell you, but that's probably the salient difference.

Lokarin posted...

ya, that's what I don't get about big corporations. If they break up unions then your poor workers are taking up health care and welfare and everything abounds from your personal tax dollars... but if they got these benefits as part of a union it would only be taken out of pretaxed income, saving you probably millions

This assumes Walmart actually pays their fair share of taxes instead of hiding as much income as possible in offshore tax havens.

5 years maximum? I'm generally all for rehabilitation, but I'd rather see them chained up in one of their rings and the dogs let loose on them.

Indeed.

rjsilverthorn posted...

While ignoring the whole 'if there was such a powerful conspiracy opposing him how did he become President in the first place' problem.

Clearly, that was just a triumph of brave patriots who managed to overcome the conspiracy against him. After their bitter defeat in 2016, however, the conspirators redoubled their efforts and were able to overwhelm those brave patriots in 2020.

darkknight109 posted...

I, the baby-decapitation story is now generally believed to be a hoax, as there isn't any evidence substantiating it.

Doesn't surprise me, but I'd also consider it largely academic. Hamas is a terrorist organization and they do terroristy things, regardless of how true that story was. I personally didn't think any more or less of them for decapitating babies, and I won't think any more or less of them if they actually didn't do it.

The prevailing belief among the sort of people who took Fox News as gospel in the first place is that Fox was forced to admit guilt by the same massive conspiracy that kept Trump from taking power in the first place. Within that belief system, Fox isn't actually guilty and they didn't actually lie, they've just been victimized by a justice system that doesn't want the American people to know the truth.

All admin decisions will now be handled by ChatGPT.

DirtBasedSoap posted...

lol you can tell he hates fandom

Indeed. There's no reason to specify that he's leaving them in particular, but they got singled out. Not surprising, given that everyone hates Fandom.

argonautweakend posted...

Places like Wal-Mart and Starbucks are scared of unions, but I have to ask why...because we all know these companies don't actually care for their employees but somehow when it comes to unions they care enough about their employees livelihood to make sure they make the right choice.

There isn't much need to ask why. They're scared of unions because it takes control away from them. They've become as large as they have by cutting as many corners as they can legally get away with, particularly when it comes to wages and employee welfare. Unions take power away from them, limiting their ability to watch their 10-figure bottom lines keep going up indefinitely, and they don't like that. Any narrative they spin about how unions cost employees so much or are somehow bad for them is 100% propaganda to protect their bottom line, not any sort of genuine concern for their employees (usually, those concerns are outright false, since on average union wages exceed non-union wages by significantly more than their dues).

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

All this does is to show bias in what gamesphere you dwell in.

This is something that really can't be overstated. The social media we consume (which includes virtually everything that comprises the public discourse around a given game unless there's enough controversy to make news headlines) is actively tailored to our interests. That means people who are interested in BG3 and other CRPGs are going to see lots of BG3-related content, and people who are interested in TotK and other Zelda games are going to see lots of TotK-related content. Those who aren't interested in one or the other are going to end up seeing very little content related to it.

Personally, I saw TotK-related content for much, much longer post-release than I did BG3 content. But that's because I've played TotK, actively sought out discussions about it, watched youtube videos that seemed interesting, and paused scrolling through Facebook when TotK content popped up. I haven't played BG3 (not for lack of interest, I just have a sizable backlog of older CRPGs that I want to play before dropping $60 on a new one) and haven't sought out discussions or media content around it, so very little shows up in my media feeds. When I finished TotK and stopped engaging with related content, it slowly disappeared from my feeds, not because content stopped being made, but because the algorithms delivering content to me figured out that I was less likely to engage with it. I expect that if I got back into it, there'd be plenty more content. I also expect the same would be true of BG3 if I picked it up and started looking up videos and articles and memes.

It's always been the case that people tend to underestimate how popular something is if they don't care about it, just because not caring enough to engage with discourse around it introduces a bias, but that bias has become quite dramatically enhanced by media algorithms preferentially showing us stuff we've shown we care about and hiding stuff we don't. Now more than ever, you really can't draw conclusions about how little attention something has received if you haven't been paying attention to it personally.

If predators don't exist, who's eating all the prey?

Xenoblade 3 again.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Why do people keep leaving out the part where the frog is lobotomized first?

Mostly because it works as a metaphor regardless of the methodological nuances of the source material. If you gradually makes somebody's environment worse, they're more likely to not notice/mind than if it happens suddenly.

shadowsword87 posted...

I think that's price priming. You walk in and make them expect a $100 product, but low and behold, you can get it for the low low price of $15.

It's a little different. That's manipulating their expectations so you can pleasantly surprise them. This is proposing something outrageous, then when people get upset about it acting like they've convinced you to do something much more reasonable that they don't notice is significantly worse than the old status quo because they're satisfied that you "saw reason."

Lokarin posted...

ya, I find fextralife almost impossible to use cuz of that.

NoScript will say something like only 3 scripts are blocked, so I'll allow fextralife.... and then suddenly there's like 30 scripts being blocked

Yep, that's always fun. I think I've managed to get a couple fextralife wikis working with far more experimentation than is reasonable (a testament to how enjoyable Dark Souls is that I'm willing to do that, I guess >.>), but the explosion of new domains when you let one through is crazy.

Yep. I tend to enable those on a temporary basis only if the site won't work without them, since they show up everywhere with varying degrees of necessity and if I can avoid loading them, I'd prefer to.

See also: How willing people have been to accept Unity's new-new pricing model.

The number of times I've tried to load a website, checked NoScript because it failed, and found that it was trying got load 20+ different domains is really quite alarming. Even here, on a relatively barebones site, it's trying to load 7 different domains, with zero loss of function from my end for only having two of them enabled (gamespot.com and fandom.com, and I could probably kill fandom without issue). And that's with uBlock stamping out the actual ads, so I imagine it'd get significantly worse if they were trying to get through NoScript as well.

Yellow posted...

Is YouTube struggling financially? Eh, these companies are impossible to predict.

Youtube has struggled to make money for pretty much its entire existence. I expect the only reason it's still around is that the data Google collects from it has enough uses that benefit other branches that it ends up being worthwhile in the larger picture (that, and the niche would be filled by somebody else if Youtube died, so part of it may just be aiming to prevent competitors from being too successful).

We've come full circle.

papercup posted...

Whats the ad block situation?

They've stopped playing videos if they detect an ad blocker. As always, it's an arms race between the blockers and the blocker blocking efforts that means periodic blocker updates are needed to keep up with Youtube's updates.

It's honestly kind of baffling. There's absolutely no way the time, effort, and money required to fight this battle is going to be recovered by the tiny handful of people that give up and accept ads, especially given how inevitable everyone knows it is that the blockers will ultimately outlast Google's willingness to fight them.

pedro45 posted...

Read a trade paper back, read comics, read star wars, play blue stinger, play D, play anything, watch something halloween related, etc.
I'm also overwhelmed. then again, I'm not, cause I'm on vacation just chilling.

Random number generator. If you don't have a preference, it'll make the decision for you. If you do have a preference, you'll realize it as soon as you get the RNG result because you'll be disappointed you didn't roll the "right" number. Either way, no more second-guessing.

Idiot_Savant posted...

They demonetize channels at the drop of a hat...

They demonetize *small* channels at the drop of a hat. Larger ones, they'll bend over backwards to protect because they're the only ones they care about.

Looks like I've actually caught a window where Youtube is ahead and updating uBlock doesn't fix it. How bothersome.

Yes. Very yes.

Revelation34 posted...

Ublock doesn't exist on mobile

It's available in Firefox for Android, if that's an option.

https://imgur.com/7UmBdSz

I've had to manually update uBlock's filters a couple of times to make the popups go away, but otherwise it's been pretty smooth. Youtube's being extremely aggressive this time, but uBlock is keeping up very well.

ReturnOfFa posted...

I'd probably compare it to apartheid tbh. Even if the retaliation has gotten extreme it still closely represents it.

South Africa's apartheid? Absolutely. Remember that Mandela was quite unambiguously a terrorist. He didn't decapitate any babies, obviously, but South Africa had a very similar situation going on where whites were institutionally oppressing blacks, blacks were lashing out violently, and that violence was met with further retaliatory violence from whites. Mandela was released from prison not because he was innocent, but because South Africa's leadership chose to stop the cycle of violence and oppression and forgive him.

ReturnOfFa posted...

I always consider the more powerful actor the one most capable of implementing measures to dial things back. Israel vs. Palestine at this point is a reciprocal terrorist mill. Civilians are massacred for little reason. I'm a lot more grossed out by Hamas this time around, so I don't like slogans like "Resistence is not Terrorism!" because there are both. But the entire complicity around Israel displacing tens of thousands of people is nutty as all hell.

Exactly. Retaliatory terrorism isn't going to help. It's just going to further radicalize Palestinians who see no hope except whatever Hamas offers them. Calling Hamas "freedom fighters" isn't altogether accurate because they aren't really prioritizing freedom in their actions (if they were, they'd be a lot more strategic about trying to take control of land/resources that instead of just racking up a civilian body count whenever the opportunity presents itself), but they are the only ones fighting for Palestinians' freedom in any capacity. Hamas would lose a ton of support if Palestinian civilians had better lives and weren't being oppressed by Israel, and most of their power would go with that.

Asking the real questions.

Robin in the corner getting ready to procreate with it.

SomeUsername529 posted...

I'd like to think there's a number and then every once and a while I get a dose of totally unfiltered internet and I am literally shocked at how terrible the internet has become. I thought it was just stuff like Google being worse and Twitter being garbage but it goes far beyond that.

Pretty much this. I get that ads are essential to support the content I keep consuming, but holy tinglebadgers it's miserable to try browsing without a blocker, and so many ad services (because it's so commonly outsourced and not curated by the site itself) don't do nearly enough to ensure the ads are even safe for computers. In the case of most bigger sites, I'm fairly certain they're just deliberately making the problem as bad as they can for the sake of selling a solution to it, and I'm quite happy to tell those ads where to go.

That said, of the numbers presented, $200k+ would improve my quality of life to enough of an extent that I probably would agree to stop blocking ads if somebody were actually to offer it to me, as tempting as it is to insist that there's no way I'd ever tolerate it.

Got the lock screen again, though another uBlock update fixed it again. They're being particularly aggressive about it this time around.