"A Knife And A Fork"

[kane_magus]

Link to comic

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I don't think I necessarily agree with Tycho's blog, though, which seems to be siding with Epic, at least somewhat.

Everyone else doing the same shit for years (i.e. "long-standing industry practices") actually isn't the valid excuse for doing something shitty that they (and Tycho) seem to believe it to be.

I'm not sure that vast government overreach is the answer, mind you. But then, nothing else has slowed down the rampant anti-consumer dumbfuckery that the modern video game industry has been doing for the past decade or three, so... *shrug*

Also...

"Honestly, I think Epic's statement is pretty good. I think it's reasonable for them to be somewhat surprised, because as I said above, the things they're being made to account for are practices that have been in use broadly. This is like getting pulled over for speeding after somebody literally just passed you, going faster than you were." (Emphasis mine.)

That exact scenario literally happened to me, back in the far off year of... um... let's just say "at some point between 1996-2000," because I don't actually remember the exact year anymore, and that was the time frame when I was still driving my sister's old Nissan Maxima station wagon, prior to the Maxima getting totaled in a wreck in... 2000-2001. What happened was this. I was coming back from an outing in Greensboro with my best friend from high school, who was riding with me. We got passed by a bunch of other cars, who were all doing roughly warp 9 or so. I stopped at a red light, whereas all the other cars blasted on through while it was still yellow. Imagine my surprise, after I started to go again on the light changing back to green, when I saw blue lights in my rear view mirror. The cop who pulled me over said "You were doing 70."

Which, as it turns out, was bullshit. (I mean, I already knew it was bullshit, because the fucker pulled me over from a red light, because I happened to be the only one who got stopped by the red light, so he just decided to fill his quota with me instead of going after the ones who were actually speeding.) We got the speedometer on that car checked and it was reading way higher than the speed I was actually going. In other words, for me to have been "doing 70" like that fuckhead cop said I was, the speedometer would have had to have been reading around 90 or so, and I know for a goddamn fact I wasn't doing fucking 90, much less 70. I was doing, at the very most, around 61-62 (in a 55 zone), at least according to the speedometer, which I thought was still speeding (but not fucking "you were doing 70" speeding), but as it turns out I was probably actually doing below the speed limit, given how fucked up that speedometer was.

That was the only time I've ever been pulled over, and yes, I'm still salty about that shit even now, over two decades later, at least on the rare occasions like this when I'm reminded of it, anyway.

With all that said, I doubt Epic could have argued their charges down to the modern video game industry equivalent of "operating with improper equipment," the way I (or, rather, the lawyer that my sister hired at the time) was able to do.