Do you know how easy it would be, if money was not transferred, for the new and old owners to both outright say so? Yes they could also lie but that’s irrelevant. if this wasn’t a capital driven transaction, they’d assuage many fears by telling us it wasn’t. They haven’t done that.

The main problem in your setup is you installed Vortex. It and its prior incarnation Nexus Mod Manager have always been a thorn in actual mod developers’ sides. Mod devs can easily tell you where to extract the zip to, and what dependencies you need. Any load order manager type thing will always be better when designed specifically for the game you’re running. Having an “easy one click GUI!!!” doesn’t actually help anybody because modding different games isn’t a universally systematic process.

+1 for Walmart Onn, very easy to debloat and degoogle, supports SmartTubeNext, S0undTV (Twitch), Jellyfin, Plex, whatever else you want.

Game of the year. Also, if it didn’t have the RNG component, it would be a worse game. A puzzle game that inherently prevents you from stubbornly blundering down one thread is genius design, the fact that the house forces you to look at rooms you aren’t looking for leads to so many natural “aha!” moments and encourages you to be actively tracking multiple story/puzzle threads at once.

So few puzzle games care about also being good games, and I can confidently say that if Blue Prince didn’t have the excellent roguelite-inspired gameplay loop at its core I’d have dropped it without even giving it a chance. Giving you “stuff to do” as you process the lore and puzzle hints is the secret sauce. The game’s themes of inheritance tie in perfectly to the strategic mastery curve of learning how to influence the manor. Having a source of “payoff” emotions other than “solving a puzzle” keeps the moment to moment gameplay fresh, and if you’re playing it for long enough that stuff like allowance tokens and stars stop feeling like rewards, you’ll also have access to so many luck-mitigating tools that I can confidently say it’s a skill issue if you’re still fighting the drafting system.

The natural progression from “the objective is to wrangle the house into giving me what I KNOW i want” to “the house is just like this, and I can search it to find new things to want” to “I know how to make this house sing” is perfectly executed ludonarrative harmony. You learn the rooms so much better when you’re forced to walk through them on consecutive days. Upgrades and rarity tweaks give you so much power. The drafting system isn’t a barrier to you solving puzzles. It’s a strategy game that you can be good or bad at. And a lot of people that are frustrated at that system’s existence are refusing to treat it as something you can get good at. It’s a Dark Souls boss fight - practice with intentionality, explore solutions and ideas, fail frequently, learn from failure, be rewarded with mastery.

People just aren’t receptive to the idea of “challenge” in a game that isn’t precision timing or stat sheet optimizing. The house mechanic of Blue Prince is a relatively challenging strategy game, and part of the challenge is recognizing how to interface with it at all. A lot of people come to the game ready for challenging puzzles but not a strategy game, and for those BP will feel like “RNG getting in the way of my puzzle solving”. That’s fair, but I’d liken that attitude to coming into Elden Ring and complaining that all these boss fights are in the way of the lore. Strategy games might not be your thing, and maybe you didn’t know BP would be one, and that’s okay. But for those that like challenging strategy games and intricate puzzles, there’s nothing quite like Blue Prince.

That’s a series where people learn how to use magic, not a thing about “how it works”. The series is very careful to never explain anything about the mechanics of magic, other than “incantations are a thing unless they aren’t, willpower maybe matters, and quality of the magic wand is relevant except when it isn’t”.

I’d take an Apple loss over an Epic one any day here. Apple’s walled garden philosophy has permanently damaged the tech literacy of an entire generation, and the fact that ~half of all people that want to use a smartphone to do things simply can’t just install a FOSS application downloaded from Github to do the thing is an atrocity. Apple getting away with it also emboldens Google to make their phones/tablets into “gadgets” instead of “computers” with stuff like file permissions policies (that became so restrictive that the devs for Syncthing simply gave up on Android as a platform).

Meanwhile, Epic’s greatest evil that affects me is that I don’t play some video games because they’re exclusive to Epic’s store, and also some video games are worse because it “just makes too much financial sense” for AAA devs to release UE5 slop. Operating systems and programs are more important than video games, and video games as a medium are more restricted by stuff like what Apple’s doing than what the AAA devs do to generate shareholder value.

With a phone, there’s a type of controller that wraps around the phone, turning it into a Switch form factor. That’s probably the middle ground between atrocious touchscreen d-pads (or only playing games that actually work well with touch controls) versus lugging around a Dualsense and some mount contraption or kickstanding your phone on a surface.

Sure, and you can definitely get that message from the story, but that’s not what the story is saying with its text. It’s saying “this hippie chick is actually a real wizard”. Same as when a character’s evil abusive mother turns out to be not her real mother at all! like in Tangled - Mother Gothel probably does inspire lots of real children of abusive parents to be okay with hating their (hate-worthy) mothers, but then the movie ends with Rapunzel meeting her real true family that loves her and cares for her and there’s no way her real parents would ever do anything cruel and selfish to their child.

She didn’t know, but then the story happened and she learned that magic was real and she could do it because she was Wiccan and descended from a full blooded witch.

… But then she does a real magic spell that, because of her magic beliefs and/or bloodline, stops the real supernatural monster. There was even a bit about how someone else doing the exact same mumbo jumbo didn’t work because “you’re not a wiccan”

The villain saying “I want to make everyone Super, so that it’s not just natural Supers that get to have powers” is absolutely an objectivist-adjacent plot. The fact that Syndrome also wants to murder (genocide?) Supers with his droids and “spend his life getting all his kicks from being the only (artificial) Super until he gets bored and then shares the tech with the public” is a classic example of attaching blatant evil to the ideology you want to villainize.

It’s not the movie saying “if everyone’s super, no one is”, it’s the movie saying “the dude who wants everyone to be super instead of only the genetic lottery winners is evil bad murder villain, look, we wrote him doing so much evil bad murder!”

Like, let’s say you want to have themes of anti-environmentalism in your movie. What’s your villain? Eco-terrorist that bombs coal power plants to stop them from polluting the earth. It’s the oldest framing technique in the book, especially for all-ages media: just have the character that expresses the ideology you want to defeat also be a mean bad murder villain. Bonus points if you can somehow make the murder bad villain evil plan relate to the ideology in some superficial way.

Server costs? Plex’s serverside only handles auth and verification. Once the client connects to the server, any media is sent peer to peer. There’s no stage where the video goes “to plex” or “from plex”. Saying plex needs to charge a sub fee to make up for bandwidth is like saying qbittorrent should do the same.

Unless you’re talking about the content Plex serves, the ones you have to walk every user of your Plex server through deleting from their apps’ homepage.

I dunno about that. Plex has lots of market share and plenty of “well I bought the pass when it was $60/$90” people aren’t gonna be personally affected by them locking more and more functionality behind the pass. So they’ll keep using it and recommending it and talking about it, and the centralized account management stuff (which Jellyfin won’t copy, because not having that is the point of selfhosting) will always be more convenient than setting up VPNs or other tools like external auth for Jellyfin sharing over the internet.

Discourse about this everywhere always boils down to the same comment: “I bought the plex pass and honestly I’d do it again for $300 just to not deal with handling my own authentication system, plex remote play Just Works”. Or something like “I refuse to use a $20 HDMI android TV box instead of my ad-ridden smart TV or PlayStation 5, and those don’t have apps for JF”. These guys are literally in this thread, on Lemmy, the Reddit for people so FOSS-friendly they use Lemmy instead of Reddit.

Yes, that is correct. It’s because the people that read the email only, or read the email and click one (1) link, are likely to be less familiar with Plex as a platform than the server owner. Plex the company would very much like people to pay them $7 a month forever for literally nothing.

but it’s not, because “i got it so cheap for $60 ten years ago / $90 five years ago / $120 yesterday” and “securely opening a port and enabling OAuth for jellyfin takes more than one click”.

The “lifetime” Plex Pass was a genius marketing move, because people are permanently inertia-locked into the cost they sunk. For nearly a decade now the refrain is “I just have a Plex pass. I bought it for $30 less than its current cost and it works great for me, sucks that it’s now $90/$120/$240 but IMO it’s worth it :)”. Don’t forget that making you pay $60 or $90 or $120 or $240 to use your own GPU for hardware encoding was always a scumware tactic, even if they put up a $15/mo subscription next to that one-time cost so that the one-time cost looks like “a good deal”.

It’s scummy advertising, yes. Designed to prey on a Plex server operator’s likely-less-tech-literate users.

Yes, they’re being advertised to. In theory this is because they might be clients for non-Pass servers in addition to yours. In practice, Plex could easily verify Plex client accounts that don’t run a server or have access to non-Pass servers and skip sending this marketing email to those accounts. What they’re doing is trying to convince your users they need to pay a sub fee (even though they don’t), because it’s free money in Plex’s pocket if the users do click the thing and say “welp, still cheaper than netflix”

Any users of your plex-pass verified server do not need to pay anything to keep streaming it. You had to pay a lot more for the lifetime or subscription to enable it, but by doing so any users you share with don’t need to pay a dime. You reading this press release and seeing your users get emails and assuming that your users now need to pay for something isn’t you being stupid, it’s the intended result of their deliberately confusing messaging. One user shrugging and saying “guess it’s $7/mo now” is free money for the company.

FOSS?

Mihon is great right up until you’re trying to read ultra high quality manga with screentones. Mihon doesn’t have modern scaling algorithms, so anything significantly larger than your screen resolution will moiré like crazy.

CDs and DVDs are digital media. There is no degradation of the content when you convert a fragile physical disk into a dumped ISO, and the dumped ISO can be stored on an arbitrarily large number of devices. Stuff like physical books or analog media (vinyl records, for example) are worth caring about physical degradation for, but a “physical copy” of a PC software disc is just a more fragile way to store the exact same ones and zeroes that can be stored on actually resilient media.