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Another reason paywalls suck.
May. 31st, 2025 01:51 pmYou know what most people tend to do when they try to read something on a news site or blog, and then that news article or blog entry they were trying to read is hidden behind a paywall? Besides not immediately whipping out their wallet to pay for whatever was hidden, they also leave that site behind entirely and go to another site.
And here's the kicker. It hasn't quite reached this point yet, but... when it ever does reach the point where most or all of the good news/blog sites are locked away behind paywalls, you realize what will be left, right? The shitty, clickbait headline-spewing, fake news-infested, propaganda-infected, AI-written, worse-than-worthless slop sites, that is what will be left. And that's where most people will get their "news," then, because all of the actual news will have been safely protected from view behind paywalls that very few people care to deal with.
Not that there aren't any shitty sites that also do the dogshit paywall thing, but there are so very many more that don't. More than enough so that anyone who doesn't want to pay for the real thing will have their choice of poison to consume for "free."
(Today, aggravatingly, I had to click "Hide all stories from" on Rolling Stone in my Google News app, because when I tapped on one of their articles, like I've done many times in the past, this time, I was able to scroll down only maybe two paragraphs before the text quickly faded away into a paywall. To hell with that horseshit and any site that uses it.)
And here's the kicker. It hasn't quite reached this point yet, but... when it ever does reach the point where most or all of the good news/blog sites are locked away behind paywalls, you realize what will be left, right? The shitty, clickbait headline-spewing, fake news-infested, propaganda-infected, AI-written, worse-than-worthless slop sites, that is what will be left. And that's where most people will get their "news," then, because all of the actual news will have been safely protected from view behind paywalls that very few people care to deal with.
Not that there aren't any shitty sites that also do the dogshit paywall thing, but there are so very many more that don't. More than enough so that anyone who doesn't want to pay for the real thing will have their choice of poison to consume for "free."
(Today, aggravatingly, I had to click "Hide all stories from" on Rolling Stone in my Google News app, because when I tapped on one of their articles, like I've done many times in the past, this time, I was able to scroll down only maybe two paragraphs before the text quickly faded away into a paywall. To hell with that horseshit and any site that uses it.)
Just yet another reminder...
May. 24th, 2025 11:43 am...if you ever run a news website or a video game blog or something like that, and I ever even once see you hold your content hostage behind a paywall, then just know that I'm going to go out of my way to make sure that I never see your website or blog show up for me again, whether that's in Google searches or in my news app or whatever. It's actually worse when you have it set up to let people read two or three articles/entries for free, before throwing up the paywall. ("FiRsT oNe'S fReE" says the skeevy drug dealer or the scummy casino barker.) Your content is not something I can't do without, so don't even try to act like it is. Your content is not that valuable to me.
(Then again, for the most recent site in question [which I won't even name here, so as to not give them even that much more traffic], I suppose I should have heeded the earlier red flag that was them trying to get me to sign up for a monthly or yearly subscription just because I happened to hit reply on one of the comments under one of their articles to see if I could make a comment without having to make an account [since some rare few websites still let you do that]. Merely having to sign up for something for free is bad enough, and I usually don't bother with even that much. Being faced with an option select for a $7-$99 monthly/$70-$999 yearly subscription is on a whole other level entirely[1] and is a "fuck right off" moment.)
Find less obnoxious, insufferable ways to make money.
[1] - And even for that link there, I had to replace the original one with an archive.is variant, because the original one was, yes, partially behind a paywall.
(Then again, for the most recent site in question [which I won't even name here, so as to not give them even that much more traffic], I suppose I should have heeded the earlier red flag that was them trying to get me to sign up for a monthly or yearly subscription just because I happened to hit reply on one of the comments under one of their articles to see if I could make a comment without having to make an account [since some rare few websites still let you do that]. Merely having to sign up for something for free is bad enough, and I usually don't bother with even that much. Being faced with an option select for a $7-$99 monthly/$70-$999 yearly subscription is on a whole other level entirely[1] and is a "fuck right off" moment.)
Find less obnoxious, insufferable ways to make money.
[1] - And even for that link there, I had to replace the original one with an archive.is variant, because the original one was, yes, partially behind a paywall.
"They are not the same thing"
I have never once used Discord for anything, nor do I ever plan to start. The replacement of forums with Discord has made the Internet as a whole much less useful to me. Just yet another example of enshittification. And, again, Discord is nothing but just Johnny-come-lately IRC.
And, no, I seriously doubt that this will be the "one last time" that I rant about this. Fuck Discord. To hell with Discord. For me, "Discord" is either "like Q from Star Trek" or "that goddess from Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" or... you know... the actual word. And the simple fact that one would name their communications platform after the concept of "disagreement" is just asinine, but also fitting, in this case.
(Please welcome the new "fuck discord" tag, because I knew I'd posted about this before.)
I have never once used Discord for anything, nor do I ever plan to start. The replacement of forums with Discord has made the Internet as a whole much less useful to me. Just yet another example of enshittification. And, again, Discord is nothing but just Johnny-come-lately IRC.
And, no, I seriously doubt that this will be the "one last time" that I rant about this. Fuck Discord. To hell with Discord. For me, "Discord" is either "like Q from Star Trek" or "that goddess from Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" or... you know... the actual word. And the simple fact that one would name their communications platform after the concept of "disagreement" is just asinine, but also fitting, in this case.
(Please welcome the new "fuck discord" tag, because I knew I'd posted about this before.)
"It's all interchangeable to them. It's all the same slop"
There's already too much slop in vidya gaem jurnlizm as it is. The very last thing anyone needed was for two of the actually halfway decent video game industry news sites to be destroyed and replaced with more fucking slop.
Oh well, time to remove Polygon and Giant Bomb from my Google News feed, I guess.
(Assuming I can figure out how to actually fucking do that, since it doesn't fucking work on the Android app. If I remove a source I had been previously following, it stays removed for all of about two seconds, then it just pops right back into the list again. Similarly can't rearrange sources up or down the list, either, because they just pop back to their previous positions almost immediately. [EDIT] It seems to be the case that I can remove sources via the actual desktop website version of Google News, at least. I still can't fucking rearrange them, though, because even on the website, they just reappear back in their original positions on a page reload. The ones I removed seem to stay removed, though, at least. And then they also appear to be gone if I check the phone app version as well. [/EDIT])
There's already too much slop in vidya gaem jurnlizm as it is. The very last thing anyone needed was for two of the actually halfway decent video game industry news sites to be destroyed and replaced with more fucking slop.
Oh well, time to remove Polygon and Giant Bomb from my Google News feed, I guess.
(Assuming I can figure out how to actually fucking do that, since it doesn't fucking work on the Android app. If I remove a source I had been previously following, it stays removed for all of about two seconds, then it just pops right back into the list again. Similarly can't rearrange sources up or down the list, either, because they just pop back to their previous positions almost immediately. [EDIT] It seems to be the case that I can remove sources via the actual desktop website version of Google News, at least. I still can't fucking rearrange them, though, because even on the website, they just reappear back in their original positions on a page reload. The ones I removed seem to stay removed, though, at least. And then they also appear to be gone if I check the phone app version as well. [/EDIT])
...because when I'm trying to do Google searches about the video game Aquaria, unless I do very specific, persnickety searches, most of the results are about the drag queen now, and it really sucks.
"Back to a Website"
Apr. 16th, 2025 02:02 pmA thing on homestarrunner.com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com .com
Look at the first posts in these two threads, and then look at their last posts. It's bullshit, and Valve (along with the entire rest of the Internet) needs to stop doing this bullshit.
But then, I've already made my opinion about "necroposting" known, and obviously it's never going to change because the Internet has become increasingly enshittified.
But then, I've already made my opinion about "necroposting" known, and obviously it's never going to change because the Internet has become increasingly enshittified.
I heard at least part of this story on the car radio yesterday. It's the story of an old woman who was scammed out of over half a million dollars by savvy con-artists pretending to be law enforcement agents fighting against fentanyl drug cartels. One of the things that they kept repeating was that it was not this woman's fault that she was scammed, how it is kind of ridiculous to expect an 80 year old to catch all the "red flags" (such as how the emails she was receiving from the scammers came from a spoofed "USA.com" email address, rather than anything with ".gov" at the end), and how scammers like this have been perfecting their technique for decades.
And...
...
...(you can probably already see where I'm about to go with this if you've read my blog at all for the past decade)...
...
( Obviously incoming Trump rant behind cut )
And...
...
...(you can probably already see where I'm about to go with this if you've read my blog at all for the past decade)...
...
( Obviously incoming Trump rant behind cut )
"Slopstream: The Old Console Wars"
Mar. 28th, 2025 04:45 pmSeveral things...
- "bRaVe FeNcEr Is At LeAsT bEtTeR tHaN zElDa 64." Yep, this is exactly what it was like back in the Console Wars™. Personally, I thought the whole thing was immensely stupid, even as a kid, because for the longest time all I had was the original gray brick Game Boy that I bought "myself" (with allowance money). I never had a NES or anything Atari or whatever. I absolutely knew what I was missing. And I didn't go around trying to claim that the fucking Game Boy was better than the Sega Game Gear or whatever. Even when I did finally get a SNES, years later, I was always trading it back and forth with my best friend in middle/high school, who had a Sega CDX. They were all cool. It mostly depended on what games you wanted to play, anyway. Just for RPGs alone, if you wanted to play Earthbound or Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger or Super Mario RPG or Secret of Mana or whatever, you needed Nintendo. If you wanted to play Vay (first RPG of any kind that I ever played) or Lunar or Shining Force or Phantasy Star or whatever, you needed Sega.
- Reggie claims that ZSNES is "the goat," but it was either ZSNES or SNES9x, depending on the game. Some SNES games just played better (or at all) in one or the other. I mostly just use RetroArch these days, though, as it basically combines just about all the old and newer emulators (among other things) into one client.
- I'm kinda feeling called out with that "Magus" bit. >_>; I still go by that shit now, let alone way back then. And, hey, at least I combined mine with another 90s edgelord character, and didn't just call myself "Dark Magus" or whatever. ¬_¬ Though my AFK nick in ye olde IRC dayes (i.e. the nick I would switch to when I wasn't actually paying attention to IRC all that much) used to be "Kage_Magus" (basically "Shadow Magus"), which was pretty damn close to that, admittedly.
- The fact that Woolie doesn't know what The Elder Scrolls: Redguard is should already tell him pretty much everything he needs to know about The Elder Scrolls: Redguard. *nods sagely*
- That one guy, keeping it fucking real. (Not the ALL CAPS masturbation guy, but the very last one, Ted, who they brought in on top of his shit.)
A post by Athena Scalzi on Whatever.
Yeah... it's pretty cool, I guess. I played through the first three levels, after the tutorial thing, and thought that would be it, but there was more after that. I stopped at that point though.
Yeah... it's pretty cool, I guess. I played through the first three levels, after the tutorial thing, and thought that would be it, but there was more after that. I stopped at that point though.
I swear...
Feb. 6th, 2025 12:29 pm...at least eighty to ninety percent of the spam I get now (and have been getting for the past few months) has either some variation of the name "Trump" or of "Elon Musk" in the "From" line now (not to mention the "Subject" line). Like "ELOn M.U.S.k portable heater" or "FreeTrumpTShirt" or some stupid bullshit. I'll say this much, though, it certainly makes it easier to filter into the trash folder, at least. I don't even want potentially legitimate communications from those shitstains, let alone worse-than-worthless spam in their name.
Full headline, because it wouldn't all fit up there: "'Predators' Review: A Damning Look at the Legacy of 'To Catch a Predator' Argues that We're All Complicit in America's Perverted Sense of Justice"
An interesting article that happened to pop up in my Google News app.
Disclaimer: I have never seen a single full episode of To Catch a Predator. The most I have seen are short clips on Youtube. And the memes, of course. The memes were pervasive and inescapable for a while, back when the show was on the air, and they're still a thing even now, too. And prior to reading that article, I'd never heard of this documentary, either. I'm not sure I would want to see the documentary, any more than I ever wanted to see the show itself, but... still. An interesting article.
An interesting article that happened to pop up in my Google News app.
Disclaimer: I have never seen a single full episode of To Catch a Predator. The most I have seen are short clips on Youtube. And the memes, of course. The memes were pervasive and inescapable for a while, back when the show was on the air, and they're still a thing even now, too. And prior to reading that article, I'd never heard of this documentary, either. I'm not sure I would want to see the documentary, any more than I ever wanted to see the show itself, but... still. An interesting article.
Trump is a lying piece of shit, as usual.
Just remember, though he may be being hailed now by lickspittles with the memory of goldfish as a "savior" for having supposedly "saved" TikTok from this ban, his stupid, hypocritical, corpulent ass was one of the first to want to ban it five or so years ago, and he was the one who got the ball rolling on the whole thing, but then he changed his tune when he realized Biden was going to actually follow through on it. If Biden (or Obama before him) wanted a thing, then Trump must do the opposite of that thing, even if said thing was something that he himself originally came up with. *eye roll*
(Personally, I don't really give a shit one way or another if TikTok gets banned or not, as I don't use it and will never use it, thus if it went away, I would never miss it, but the fact that Trump is using this shit to score cheap political points now, when he was the main one who wanted to ban it before, is just typical Trumpish diarrhea, and his sycophants are lapping it up like it's chocolate, as usual.)
Anyway, it's less than an hour (EST anyway) until January 20, so... merry doomsday, I guess. *shrug + weary sigh*
Just remember, though he may be being hailed now by lickspittles with the memory of goldfish as a "savior" for having supposedly "saved" TikTok from this ban, his stupid, hypocritical, corpulent ass was one of the first to want to ban it five or so years ago, and he was the one who got the ball rolling on the whole thing, but then he changed his tune when he realized Biden was going to actually follow through on it. If Biden (or Obama before him) wanted a thing, then Trump must do the opposite of that thing, even if said thing was something that he himself originally came up with. *eye roll*
(Personally, I don't really give a shit one way or another if TikTok gets banned or not, as I don't use it and will never use it, thus if it went away, I would never miss it, but the fact that Trump is using this shit to score cheap political points now, when he was the main one who wanted to ban it before, is just typical Trumpish diarrhea, and his sycophants are lapping it up like it's chocolate, as usual.)
Anyway, it's less than an hour (EST anyway) until January 20, so... merry doomsday, I guess. *shrug + weary sigh*
Even ignoring how it affects MMOs, which I do not and will not ever play and vastly do not care about[1], the whole "Discord has replaced dedicated, semi-permanent forums," just in general, is one of the absolute worst, most dogshit things that has happened to the Internet. To hell with Discord.
Aside from that specific bit about Discord, the entire first two thirds of this video can be considered reason number four billion and whatever of why I do not play multiplayer games with randos anymore, in general.
Also, Woolie apparently completely forgot he was a streamer until Pat reminded him at the 33 minute mark. And the discussion that followed after has been added to the list of reasons why I will not ever be a streamer, either.
[1] - Outside of the rare few that have a decent solo-player experience, like Star Trek Online and The Secret World (or Secret World Legends or whatever the fuck it's called now), neither of which I've touched in over two years and eight years, respectively. And the one time I touched STO more recently, I barely got out of the tutorial shit before quitting out, uninstalling, and not touching it since, so the last time I really played STO was much further into the past.
A couple posts from WIL WHEATON dot NET
Jan. 18th, 2025 04:56 pm"smash that subscribe button" - in which Mr. Wheaton explains why he's abandoning the trashfire website that is Facebook (which is long, long overdue, in my not so humble opinion). Oh, and I did subscribe so that I get his stuff sent to my email. I mean, they were coming to my Feedly thing already, which is how I saw them to link to them here, but still.
"odds n ends" - in which Mr. Wheaton talks about... well... a bunch of odds n ends, i.e. a series of small blurbs spanning various topics.
I'm going to have to make time to come back and read these more thoroughly later, as I'm in a bit of a rush and need to leave to be somewhere in about 30 minutes or so, but here they are for anyone else that wants to read them.
"odds n ends" - in which Mr. Wheaton talks about... well... a bunch of odds n ends, i.e. a series of small blurbs spanning various topics.
I'm going to have to make time to come back and read these more thoroughly later, as I'm in a bit of a rush and need to leave to be somewhere in about 30 minutes or so, but here they are for anyone else that wants to read them.
The relevant-to-the-video-title discussion doesn't start until around 7:18 in the video, but when it does, boy does it get real depressing real quick. Or, at least, as depressing as any Woolie and Pat discussion in which they're constantly cracking jokes about depressing shit can get, anyway.
For me, I do look at the Google AI blurb thing, but only out of anticipation to see just how ridiculously wrong it can be sometimes. Like, back when I was watching Twin Peaks, I typed a search for something like "how long does the 'james leaves town' subplot last" or whatever, and the Google AI came up with something like "The 'James leaves town' subplot lasts until the end of the series, which is when the dead body of James is discovered. This is a core storyline in Twin Peaks," or some such dogshit like that. (Spoiler alert: James Hurley does not die in Twin Peaks at all.)
Usually, like say 80% of the time, the Google AI blurb is fairly accurate, but for the times when it is not even in the same city where the ballpark is located, it's kind of hilarious how confidently wrong it is... until you remember that random people are seeing this horseshit and taking it at face value that it is accurate.
"Hi. Today we're looking at AI-generated images, why they look like that, why fascists love them, and how corporations want to use them to cheapen the valuable work of creatives."
Very small aside, I loathe everything about that "based" modern slang bullshit, so Cody mildly mocking it once and loosely associating it with alt-right incel MAGAt dildos in this video brought a vague quarter-smile to my face.
"Let me explain"/"Hear me out"
Dec. 20th, 2024 11:32 pmWhen people write either of those two phrases or some similar variation of them in an article or essay or blog post or whatever, when the whole point of whatever they're writing explicitly is to explain the thing they're writing about... I don't know if this is just the Baader Meinhof phenomenon or what, but I've seen it quite a lot in just the past month or two (though I've definitely seen it well before that, too), and it has bugged me every time. You really do not need to write "let me explain" in your thing when you make some assertion somewhere in the first paragraph or two of it. You really don't. I already assume you're going to explain, considering that I can clearly see that there are several more paragraphs after that in your thing.
The only thing I can think of is that it has somehow become shorthand for "I know I just made a potentially ever so slightly off kilter statement and I want you to know that I am fully aware that it may seem off kilter but that it may not be as off kilter as you think it is, and now I'm going to tell you why." Still don't think it needs a lampshade hung on it, though.
(I'm talking only about when those phrases are used in writing, not in verbal conversation.)
The only thing I can think of is that it has somehow become shorthand for "I know I just made a potentially ever so slightly off kilter statement and I want you to know that I am fully aware that it may seem off kilter but that it may not be as off kilter as you think it is, and now I'm going to tell you why." Still don't think it needs a lampshade hung on it, though.
(I'm talking only about when those phrases are used in writing, not in verbal conversation.)
The worst thing about these stupid takedowns is the automated nature of it. Funko doesn't like that some rando user uploaded something to itch.io? Just fire off a bot that results in the entire site being (temporarily) removed from the Internet. Some dipshit doesn't like your Youtube video content? Just fire off a few dubious DMCA takedown requests that results in your entire channel being permanently shitcanned without so much as a "Hey, just to let you know" response to you from Google/Youtube.
Also, Woolie and Paige seem to be very vexed by Funko Pops in particular.
I don't think I have ever seen a Funko Pop in person. Just images of them on the Internet.