I often agree with Jason, but he is completely missing the point, to such an extent that I will say he is either being intentionally misleading, or is displaying an extreme amount of ignorance/laziness/intellectual dishonesty.

He’s a game dev, he is obviously familiar with how game architecture works, and he just is not even reading the entire text of the initiative, nor does he seem to be at all familiar with the specific solutions Ross has proposed.

Jason is acting like this initiative will require that all future games with online servers will be prevented from being made, because the servers would be required to just be kept up, forever…

Or that multiplayer games would have to somehow be made into entirely single player games before a server shutdown.

That is not what this is calling for.

What is being called for is that if a game is online only, and its servers go down someday…

… you have to freely release the dedicated server tools, so that a group of enthusiasts at least have the possibility of running their own servers.

Obviously it would be ludicrous to demand a business keep operating servers at a loss in perpetuity.

Fucking obviously duh, this is one of the first things Ross explains in his earlier videos on this.

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Jason cherry picks from Ross’s later videos on the subject, which focus on ‘how could we actually implement these solutions’ without including the actually pretty specific solutions Ross lays out in detail in his earlier videos on the subject.

Jason tows the line of ‘well technically you’re not purchasing a product, you are licesnsing a service’… when the whole entire point is that this is a bullshit paradigm, which allows businesses an insane amount of leverage when compared to consumers, who have basically 0 rights under this paradigm.

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Jason repeatedly says that this initiative is trying to kill all live service games, all multiplayer games, when it very much is not, and he is either being intentionally misleading about this, or somehow has not actually read the text of the initiative he is confidently critiquing, nor watched any of Ross’s videos other than than the one he spliced in.

What this proposes is that if you buy a multiplayer or live service game, that when the official servers for that game go down, the developer/publisher must release some kind of server code so that people could run their own servers legally, without having to resort to hacking together or reverse engineering a server emulator, which is currently something that often gets such players/server operators into legal trouble.

There is no text anywhere that says what Jason says it does. He has not read the text, he doesn’t actually read more than a few sentences.

This is like your average science illiterate person cherry picking a sentence or two from a 40 page peer reviewed paper and just critiquing only that.

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Jason spends a lot of time critiquing Ross’s reasoning behind the strategy for pursuing Ross’s previously outlined, detailed proposals… and Jason bases basically all of his criticisms off of a total non understanding of those actual proposals, by basically making up his own extremely misleading interpretation.

He calls them disgusting and gross, because the language is vague and damaging, and there’s no way you’ll change his mind on this… but he doesn’t actually even read the language he calls disgusting.

If he spent 10 minutes reading the actual text, a few hours watching all of Ross’s videos, he would know he is spouting a completely bullshit misrepresentation.

He is strawmanning, and I find it highly unlikely that he does not know he is doing so.

This is Jordan Peterson freaking the fuck out over C16 throwing people in jail for accidentally misgendering someine… when the law does not actually do that, at all.

…

What Jason proposes is simply making it obvious to players that they’re not actually acquiring a perpetual liscense.

Ross has already addessed this!

It doesn’t solve the problem!

It actual codifies the practice of making killable games further into law!

… I find it very hard to believe Jason’s video is in good faith.

…

Video game publishers do not like the idea of having to deal with competiton from already existing, older, often cheaper games.

They want everyone to be forced to keep buying their new products, and they’ll murder their old products to force people into doing this, into upgrading their hardware and their OS to keep up with games that are increasingly unoptimized, buggy as fuck, shoved out the door as a product 6 months or a year before they’re actually ready for release.

If you did that with any other physically tangible consumer good, it would be considered fraud, selling a defective product, using deceptive and misleading marketing, etc.

As the head of a publishing studio, Jason obviously directly stands to benefit from intentionally not understanding the actual proposal here, strawmanning it, and spreading disinfo.

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EDIT: A whole other swath of shady, shitty game publisher practices that this addresses is not having broken, no longer maintained, always online DRM verification bullcrap for single player games.

Games for Windows Live, anyone?

Anything on PC that uses that, when GFWL ate shit you literally had to rely on cracked, pirated exes until GoG came around.

Oh you wanna play your legit purchased PC version of Halo 2, Fable 3?

Fuck you, impossible.

Oh you wanna play your legit purchased Steam version of GTA IV?

Oops, GFWL filled its pants and drowned in it, now you gotta buy the game again after Rockstar releases it again with GFWL stripped out.

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EDIT 2:

Another entire element of this, when it comes to online, and now even many offline games, is the ephemerality of microtransactions.

The business model of such games is very often not that the game itself is the product.

The business model actually is the game is a platform for a monopolized market, where the core point of the game existing is merely to be good or popular enough that a large amount of revenue can be made off of mtx.

The game is thus either a free or paid voucher that allows you access to a localalized monopoly market, where the monopolist has the legal ability to evaporate, at any point in time, all the goods sold in that market.

From a user/consumer pov, when a live service game shutsdown, all of your mtx have now just vanished into the ether.

If you mandate that dedicated server tools be released upon EoL of such a game, as well as a PII (name, banking data, etc) sanitized version of the db that connects userids to their game inventory, you can now, if people are willing to split the bill or otherwise cover server costs, actually keep people’s persistent accounts alive.

If you do not actually mandate this, then functionally what this means is that in addition to the game itself being a total write off for the consumer, so are all the ingame items they purchased.

This would also massively negate the basically FOMO drive that causes many people to buy the sequel of a live service game, or a new one that is fairly similar.

If there actually exists an option to just keep playing your favored game, keep all your ingame purchases, there is more likely to be a cadre of people who would prefer to just stick with their old game, and not buy or switch over to a new one.

Game publishers don’t like this, they do like having the ability to evaporate your old account and a release of an official new one.

Imagine if Warframe just nuked your account every 3 or 5 years, forcing you to start over in Warframe 2 and 3 and 4.

That is unfortunately, basically the existing industry norm.

Nope, this isn’t real, I’m high as balls and back a decade ago when AdultSwim did the SmartPipe joke informercial, I’m just hallucinacting being in 2025.

Yep.

Just really high right now, certainly not living in the pedophile toilet future timeline.

Its only a matter of time.

‘Affirmative Voice’ is not really a thing, as far as codified English grammar goes.

They may mean active voice:

Active Voice: The soldiers shot the man.

Passive Voice: The man was injured by the soldiers’s gunfire.

Or they may mean to simply be affirmative, as in, polite, reassuring, informative, non-confrontational, etc?

Or, if you take ‘voice’ to be the more technical definition within the realm of phonetics, they could mean that you should be pronouncing consonants and vowels in a manner that they personally find affirmative…?

Anyone who is telling you to ‘use an affirmative voice’ is ironically being vague and not really demonstrating a great understanding of English themselves.

It would be less confusing if they said something along the lines of ‘phrase your questions in a non-hostile, affirmative manner.’

English does not have a formally defined ‘affirmative voice’ the way that it does with ‘active voice’, ‘passive voice’, ‘reflexive voice’, ‘reciprocal voice’, etc.

John Wick x Airbud

So, similar to, if not the same as with the build up to Iraq 03.

Yep. Thats actually even less bone thickness in the way than the roof of your mouth, and is more likely to destroy more of your brain, with the bullet trajectory going through most of it.

Short version:

Basically, the roof of your mouth presents skull bones which are much thinner than many other parts of your skull.

Longer Version:

If you hold the gun with the grip facing downward, as others have said, I guess the hope is you get a shot straight through your medulla oblingata.

If you obliterate that, bam, instant brain death basically.

But if your angle is off, you may only sever your spinal cord, now you get to be mostly conscious, in extreme pain, as you collapse and asphyxiate.

Or you may just blow part of your jaw off. That might not even kill you.

If, on the other hand, you go grip facing up/out, the ole’ Bud Dwyer…

You have a much greater liklihood of obliterating a whole lot of your brain’s frontal lobe, the executive decision part.

probably? You’d lose consciousness completely within seconds, 10(s?) of seconds at most, your brain activity would grind to a complete halt as the massive bleeding would just stop the remainder of your brain from working.

But also: Phinneas Gage.

Sometimes people can survive insane bullshit like this.

Personally, I once met a guy that claimed he’d been shot with a .22 in the forehead, that that was the source of his scar there, and that his forehead skull was actually just thick enough that it stopped the .22 without the fracture creating any spall of loose bone fragments into his brain.

Nope.

If Trump can get alway with almost all of his bullshit, if the Supreme Court can just hurr durr away a hundred + years of legal precedent, then this whole system is bullshit.

Anybody that is charge of or oversees the systemic application of violence toward great numbers of people, who is legally allowed to do so, in a system where the common person has 0 chance of ever altering this system to police itself and actually enact justice by preventing said person from doing that and prosecuting them for their crimes against the people…

Anyone in such a position should be afraid, should keep suffering consequences until theyfinally figure out that they need to acquiesce to a reformation of the system, need to stop fucking over millions for the grotesque enrichment of thousands.

When the game is rigged against you, play by your own rules, otherwise you guarantee your own defeat.

While the justification for this is primarily based on TikTok being a privacy and data security risk due to it being owned by a Chinese State Organ/Corporation… which is hilarious bullshit because the US does exactly the same thing with all the net data that goes through US corporate social media…

Brainrot is a real thing.

Shortform video platforms are addictive the same way cigarretes or heroin is, extended use ruins your cognitive ability, ruins your attention span, increases depression and anxiety, and fhe format promotes an absurdly fake, narcissistic culture, scams, and mis or disinformation.

Algorithmic profiling is definitely not unique to TikTok, but it is used by the app, and this often pigeonholes the user into content/advertisements that often becomes more and more extreme, manipulative and exploitative of the user.

Though this is being done mostly for stupid reasons, and it isn’t stoping US Corpo brainrot inducing social media platforms, I’ll take what I can get.

Yep, Signal has been the obvious best combination of actual security and ease of use for quite a while now…

But most people that I interact with are still on the level of ‘everyone knows Apple is more secure than Android, so anything on an iPhone is fine’ or ‘wtf undont have a SnapChat? Everyone has a snapchat’.

Derp, you’re correct.

Ah!

I did not know that, as I have always despised, and never used Twitter.

Added a correction in, thanks =D

Autistic elder gamer (I’m 35 rofl) at your service lol.

I reformatted my post and added a bit to it.

But yeah… its not that the newer terms / usage of terms is like, objectively incorrect.

It is that language is actually nowhere near as objective and unchanging as most people seem to think, and words have a whole bunch of connotations and implied meanings that most people don’t even realize they are taking for granted.

Net terminology just changed over time.

It used to be, both in games and on forums, that a ‘ban’ typically implied that it was permanent, or for a considerable amount of time, like multiple weeks or a month or more, or until removed from a banlist.

If a ban was temporary, it would be qualified by clarifying that it was a temporary ban.

Otherwise, just using ‘ban’ almost always meant a permanent ban.

A ‘kick’, on the other hand, usually meant direct ejection from a game in the moment, and maybe 15 or 30 minutes of inability to rejoin, or an inability to rejoin that temporary session… though the terminology varied more from forum to forum.

This was just the common lingo used by many earlier games and forums in their own code, in their own technical documentation for server administration.

…

Likewise, ‘pm’ (private message) became ‘dm’ (direct message).

I’m pretty sure Discord is entirely responsible for that.

They started calling private chats ‘direct messages’ even though basically every forum or what have you up till Discord called them ‘private chats’ or ‘private messages’.

EDIT: Evidently Twitter actually started this trend 2 years before Discord, I did not know this as I have hated the concept of Twitter since its inception and never used it =P

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‘Mods’ / ‘Modding’ / ‘Modder’, as in game mods, used to exclusively mean that you (and others, in a multiplayer game) were using or creating additional community content that altered game mechanics, almost always in a constructive way that added to the game experience for everyone.

‘Warez’ / ‘Cheats’ / ‘Hacks’ used to specifically refer to … things that are arguably, technically ‘Mods’, but manipulate your experience of the game to give you a (theoretically) covert series of advantages over the game such that competiton is now blatantly unfair.

Those terms are still used to mean that… but, as less and less games support modding, and more and more switched away from having server browsers to just having a ‘find match’ button… with a whole lot of those kinds of games, ‘Modding’ now just means cheating or hacking.

If you got to a GTA V game or community and say ‘I’m a modder’ they will interperet that as ‘I am a cheater’, not ‘I make and have made mods for one or many PC games.’

…

All of these newer uses of the terms are still ‘correct’ in the sense that you can justify the meanings of the newer terms, its not like they’re misnomers…

… but a lot of zoomers / casuals have little to no understanding of how the terminology changes are confusing to an older gamer who finds themselves in a community of younger folks.

Well there you go haha.

I got that part wrong.

Thanks for the update =)

The sun is fairly low in the sky, just a bit to the right of the guy on the dirt path, whose shadow is almost but not quite straight vertical.

The guy casts a darker and more crisp, or less diffuse shadow because he is less translucent, or more opaque, than tree leaves, and because the total distance from the heighest tree leaves to the ground is greater than the total distance from his head to the ground.

The lines of the tree trunk and lamppost shadows all converge toward where the sun is, if extended toward it.

The illuminated square in the one tree’s shadow is likely a reflection from a window or some kind of metal fixture from a building or object behind the pov of the camera.

Probably the tree is shadowing the same area that a window in or near the building the picture is being taken from is illuminating.

A lot of universities with large campus grounds take the approach of observing the natural foot traffic wear patterns on grassy areas, and then build walkways where the most worn down parts are.

Its… pretty obvious.

If everyone is taking an alternate, non designed path… your design sucks, modify it to facilitate what people find more effective.

I mean we literally just saw the same kind of thing play out with Ukraine.

The West spent a long time giving them weaponry that could either only or mainly be used defensively, and then slowly over time gave them more and more potent weapons.

Its not like this is some revolutionary new idea.

The US could have started doing this after like month two or three of Israel carpet bombing Gaza, shooting up UN food/aid convoys…

But nope.