The disposable black market & associated disproportionate rise in youth vaping in Australia results from the illegality of all vapes, not just disposables. It’s hard to imagine it becoming a burgeoning black market predicated solely on that vapers find the highly available, better value, relatively environmentally friendly option untenable. Overall a sensible move I think coming from a pro-vape perspective
This app live captions any output to your sound device locally https://github.com/abb128/LiveCaptions
Whether I mute my output device, or selectively mute a tab or app it still works fine.
There’s a similar feature baked into Win11, not sure whether that is processed locally/privately though
On the other hand, it’s not like we have 600lb bears charging around. Pretty much all kinds of attack by our land animals can be thwarted using the ancient & mysterious art of wearing enclosed shoes & pants.
I’m sorry, I meant to respond about the lack of BBC archival footage, as it had to be archived to be able to compile it. You’re right that it was probably shot straight to VHS.
I remember the VHS we watched was presented as a compilation of episodes with a new introduction and interludes so my guess is there was some kind of professional reproduction of the episodes themselves
The groups forming the roots of digital media piracy established ‘the scene’, which holds itself to rules and has particular distribution methods. For example Usenet was popular for many years. https://scenerules.org/
By P2P I’m meaning these are ‘non-scene’ releases, just something a random person on the internet cooked up and released somewhere, in these cases by feeding some prior standard definition release through an upscaler and creating a torrent from the output, which involves certain considerations.
We can’t exactly determine the pedigree of these files, but we can say they are lossy transcodes, that is they first existed in a compressed format and later were re-encoded by the upscaler to another compressed format.
While the upscaled may look sharper to your eyes, data from the files as they were before that process was inevitably lost due to this transcoding. If we define “quality” as the amount of information from the original presentation that was retained in the output, then the standard definition versions are definitely higher in quality than the upscaled ones.
I’m not meaning to use the term in any perjorative sense, but it’s useful information to have. If an official HD presentation is ever made from the original film, it would certainly get a ‘scene release’ that would look better than these ones.
D4 has shortcuts for battle pass tiers, i.e. cosmetics. There aren’t any level skips like there is in WoW.
You can skip the campaign at the time you create a new toon, if you have already completed it. It is faster to level that way, because you can stick to activities that reward more XP and don’t have to turn in quests/listen to dialogue. You still start at level 1 though, so it’s not really a shortcut. Rather there are certain things in the game that you’re only required to earn once, given it’s intended to play multiple characters/builds. It’d be a slog to have to continuously go around the game world collecting the minor stat boosts for finding altars, for example. Instead the ones you’ve found will carry over between characters and seasons.
Yeah, P2W is what I mean by paying for power and it’s a good thing for players that it isn’t in D4 (like it is in Immortal for example). I edited my earlier comment to include that other games have come up with more creative ways to monetise cosmetics like you mentioned, but that they aren’t really possible in Diablo for technical reasons. It is very poorly optimised for online play by design - when you load an instance, your client loads the full loadout of every player character in that instance. Their full inventory, stash, everything. That’s part of what I mean - it’s an opportunity to monetise which many players would be amenable to, totally missing from the game.
Personally though, I think that there being minimal compulsion to buy MTX post-game purchase is exactly the way it should be. I wouldn’t expect them to continue a live service with no ongoing revenue, so if MTX is how they do that it should be relegated to rich fuckers with nothing better to spend their fortunes on, so I can point and laugh at them while they fund additional content for me. It’s just weird that a dev would subsequently use “hey 150m big number” to try and claim the situation as some sort of business success, as much as it’s weird players (like some in this thread) would consider this revelation as additional points against D4. Are they completely oblivious to the absolute hellscape in which we exist?!
From a developer perspective, tonnes of stuff. Shortcuts, power (edit: see Diablo Immortal for some live examples). From a gamer perspective, it’s really the ideal scenario in this day and age, but Blizzard’ll cop hate all the same.
Other similar games like Last Epoch are doing paid alt animations for skills, but Diablo team just aren’t that creative, and the game wasn’t designed well enough to accommodate something like that.
Yes, that is the quality of the original presentation. If anything it looks worse because it has been converted from film to a digital signal, as well as being stretched to be a bit larger than normal. Lmk if you young whippersnappers have any questions about this, I grew up watching this on VHS back in the dark times 👴
Yes, both are upscaled p2p releases
My experience: I do the game sharing trick on xbox where you and a friend can mutually access both of your digital libraries. Preordered collector’s edition, which included 5 days of early access before launch. Blizzard had implemented a special access control on the server side which checked for a unique collector’s edition license. My friend could download and launch the game using my license but couldn’t login during early access. I refunded my purchase because the point of the extra cost was invalidated by that.
I later bought the standard edition. My account still had all the preorder and collector’s edition bonuses, including MTX currency & a battle pass token. Said token was later redeemed by mistake via Blizzard’s dark pattern implementation at the start of S1. There was some backlash about that at the time which was certainly valid, but personally I didn’t feel affected because I got it at no extra cost.
I’ve played for 1000s of hours since but never spent the free in-game currency. I had never seen another player in-game using MTX cosmetics until the wings items were recently added as preorder bonuses for the upcoming expansion. It’s not surprising that only 15% of the revenue came from MTX because the paid cosmetics are pointless, expensive and they aren’t substantially better than the free ones. Using transmog at all robs the player of any sense of cosmetic progression. Paid portal skins are kinda cool the first time you see them, but the free activity-specific ones like for infernal hordes are cool too.
I’m left confused at why someone would boast about these figures given they’re evidence of not having implemented any solid post-launch monetisation strategy, and more generally the half-baked nature of the post-launch development for the game. The MTX is purely for vanity and it doesn’t even achieve that. The skins might as well be a dork sign. I wouldn’t be surprised if their revenue figures included my original purchase as well.
tl;dr my read is that this dude has done more to unintentionally subvert blizzard’s MTX sales than he’s done to generate them
You could just refund it if it doesn’t work well for you. GOG are usually pretty generous
Just used this to load up some concerts for my long haul flights tonight and it worked great, thanks for the rec
Everyone is better off without game pass (though MS have had the capability to do it for a long time before they launched it, and that infrastructure was largely just going to waste). IMO it doesn’t change that the millions that show up to buy CoD every year will be direct marketed game pass as a way to get it for $20 instead of $70 and that will be highly successful
Game pass numbers stalled out because Microsoft stalled out on adding blockbuster games since Starfield, which was poorly received. Check the numbers once the new CoD, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., ARK, Indiana Jones all get added towards the end of the year. CoD in particular will likely show the reports about them reaching full saturation to be false
I’m really meaning the lack of option not to consume fast-moving consumer goods, rather than the option to pay a premium for them elsewhere. When their market position is similar to like an outlet for government rations except for private profit, their net is essentially what was skimmed off the top of free enterprise. 2.66% is just the current maximum amount that is justifiably worth without doing societal harm
That’s an expected tradeoff of operating an essential service is the point. It’s not as though their margin is that slim by mistake, or out of goodwill, or bad business sense. It’s meant to lead to the situation where we shop at Walmart not by choice, but in lieu of other options.
Same shell, mine has Intel CPU though
I’ve had a lot of thinkpads and currently use an ideapad flex 5. I prefer the smaller form factor for a portable machine I take travelling or out to biz meetings etc. The autorotate and touchscreen work great in Debian with gnome-shell out of the box. No pinch-to-zoom but I believe that works on KDE plasma out of the box.
To address youth vaping. The outcome of that has been that youth vaping is significantly higher than in other OECD member countries, and kids are now getting them from the ‘vape dealer’ whom may have other illicit drugs available. Cigarettes aren’t banned, only made unaffordable via progressive excise tax. That’s had its own unintended consequences of launching a new market for “chop chop” i.e. illegally grown unprocessed tobacco, as well as black market imports that sidestep the plain packaging laws, and tobacco gang wars in Sydney and Melbourne.