Wow. Is this normal behavior for you?

Well, I certainly can’t make my point to you. You have bested my patience, my fellow lemming.

Newton’s Long John Silver was a solid enough performance to warrant a sequel / spin-off, so TTAPD would be like a day to honor Bela Lugosi’s Dracula or even James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader.

These people have absolutely made their mark on American culture.

Black Friday, the shopping day is a gimmick taking advantage of an already popular shopping day. Not necessarily the most popular or most profitable or even the worst day for shopper shennanigans and violence. But then, it’s difficult for capitalist phenomena to not be turned into gimmicks used to market more sales.

Nah, I’m good.

I think an athiest would have a better chance trying to deconvert a Catholic Bishop than I’d have getting you up to speed.

I kind of inferred the /s by the end of the post, but respect that such inference isn’t universal. Also there are many /s comments that I wouldn’t infer if it wasn’t explicit.

I’m even more baffled by your criticism that YT cares more about shareholders than creating an egalitarian society. Thats true of literally every business including the one you work for. YT never said they were trying to make society egalitarian. Where do you even get that shit from?

The pissed-off engineers that develop effective adblockers, for which there remains robust support.

Much like the west coast oyster monopolies of the 1880s that were scourged by oyster pirates, YouTube is fighting a losing battle.

PS: I take you’re aware of the cord-cutting epidemic of cable television, yes?

Yes, but I’m curious what Nintendo is talking to the courts about, or if this is merely a weaponization of litigation.

It doesn’t, which informs the rise technical mitigations of YouTube’s terrible ad schemes. YouTube isn’t interested in a more egalitarian society but serving its shareholder masters, and it sucks even at that.

YouTube subscriptions are not a good deal for the consumers, so they’re not going to be popular, which might serve to explain to you why everyone is not a paying subscriber, nor will they ever be.

The Jessica Fletcher problem?

The ratio of income to bills is way lower on our side than YouTube’s.

We need that money more than they do.

Are you talking about some heist on Nintendo’s blueprint vaults?

Because IP infringement is never theft.

So Nintendo is suing them over the monster design similarities? I thought it was a patent suit, not copyright.

For-profit tooling tends to get usability right

Until enshittification happens and the photo-editer that’s turned into the shorthand slang for editing a picture is suddenly an unaffordable subscription.

If we crowdsource such tools, or otherwise make them FOSS then they dont fall into that trap. Even one that sells out can be split off back into a FOSS project.

Sony will pirate from anyone who isn’t Sony. Same with Time-Warner. Same with Columbia. Same with every studio, every label, every publishing house.

Absolutely no-one in the industry takes piracy seriously until it’s their own stuff being pirated by someone else.

Moreover, they all are used to Hollywood accounting, in which lawyers try to justify not paying someone for work whenever they can.

Hollywood. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany.

Have you played Pokémon and PalWorld? One is a pit-fighter-trainer where the other is a base-builder. Or does the capturing of creatures and the similar art style make them too much alike?

In a truly competitive capitalist market there should be room enough for both. But Nintendo wants their players to be obligated to own only Nintendo approved products.

About as special as an arrow on the screen that points towards your destination (Sega, Crazy Taxi ). Not saying that’s particularly special either. The US Patent Office has allowed for some pretty broad-reaching patents, which fuels our patent-troll problem, as well as giving large companies legal grounds to interfere with each other’s innovation.

IP law has become so far removed from serving its original intent (according to the Constitution of the United States) we’d be bette4 off with no IP protections rather than the licensing system we have. Not that anyone is near doing something to fix it, or unfuck the courts that are unable to rule consistently about it.

For everyone’s edification, Geigner’s take on Techdirt. I suspect this won’t be the last TD article on this trainwreck-in-the-making.

We know they’re stealing Palestinian land. They were stealing Palestinian land when the British Empire installed Israel there. And yes, at that time George VI was glad to suggest it is right and proper to push out the lesser peoples so that the Jewish folk could settle there. And that’s exactly what they’ve been doing since.

However, since then, the international community has become more aware of the humanity of peoples who are not as wealthy or white as westerners, so much like the Church in the middle ages advocating only for Jus Bellum (so that expansionist kings had to find a way to justify their rightful ownership of the places they conquered) modern nations have to find a way to legitimize the regions they annex, or the peoples they war against.

So yeah, Israel was glad to have the excuse when Hamas or Hezbollah were there to provide it. And Iran props them up (provides them materiel support) so that they have the opportunity to take shots at Israel, knowing it will drive them to cruelty while the world watches, de-legitimizing the Zionist movement in the eyes of the international community (and the public).

While Israeli patriots can politely talk about the propriety of (say) price-tag killings or the treatment of Palestinians in Hebron, the State has to be more delicate. All the more so when IDF troopers are expressing glee in the opportunity to massacre Palestinian civilians down to the last child and grandmother.

But there are no humanitarian interests at the international level. All the states are still propped up by oligarchs wanting to clear land and seize resources for their own use, and at this point, as far as I can tell, we’re all going to be killed by famine and water shortage due to ecology collapse before that changes.

A lot of things.

For one thing, Trump / Project 2025 wants to kill NATO. Trump has already sown enough distrust that Germany is looking to secure military independence from the US.

Another thing is Trump and his companion ideologues are manipulable, as per his relations with Putin, Kim Jong Un and the Sauds. Even if they can’t turn him against Israel, they can certainly goad him into making brash decisions.

Then there’s the matter that the MAGA Republican Party favors loyalty over principle, which scares away its own intelligentsia, and creates a brain drain. We already see the Project 2025 plan to replace government department staff (who have education and experience) with Trump and MAGA ideology loyalists (who do not), which is going to speed the regime’s plummet into corruption and decadence.

The latter 20th century was defined by the US being the baddest dog on the field, tempered only by the USSR being right there to harrow the US and keep it busy. Now the cold war is ended, the US has just turned into a military bully for the interests of its own oligarchs. (It doesn’t help that the white Christian nationalist movement has been pushing the US towards fascist one-party autocracy since the FDR’s New Deal, as explained in Behind the Bastards two parter How the Rich Ate Christianity ).

Genuinely free, fair states are a threat to autocrats, far more than other autocrats, so seeing the US fall to one-party autocracy is absolutely on Iran’s holiday wishlist.

They may get it too, depending on if Trump wins the election, or his coup d’etat is successful, or civil war breaks out in the States.

Yeah, Iran made me do a genocide the way a wife made her abusive spouse do a domestic violence. More that Iran knew the Israeli administration (Netanyahu and friends) were totally eager to accelerate the genocide (it has already been happening), and provided them an easy excuse, because drunk daddy can’t help himself.

This is why the US has been screaming at Bibi, Don’t! It’ll be just like Fallujah! It’s a trap! And Bibi couldn’t listen with that kind of temptation.

(And yes, this is one of those hazards whenever Trump is in the White House, because Trump can’t help himself either.)

Israel, and the current western response to Israel is laying plain for the entire international community that we are at our base, imperialists who won’t suffer non-whites or non-Christians. The US has yet to demonstrate otherwise, and in on the verge of possibly installing a one-party autocracy. Iran got all that it hoped for and more.