Love how it takes them 3-5 business days to return the money they stole from you.
We had to remove our credit card from our account because Amazon kept charging us for Prime and I would have to call them to get it cancelled and refunded (and wait 3-5 business days to get our money back).
We were very careful when checking out that we didn’t have anything checked saying “sign me up for Prime”, even had it happen on a day where we did not place an order (and therefore weren’t on the site) for at least a week on either side of us “signing up for Prime.” Once we took the card off the account it stopped happening, so it wasn’t anything we were activating.
It’s annoying to have to re-enter our card information if we want to order something, but less annoying than having to call them every month to cancel Prime again. And anything that increases the barrier to using Amazon is probably a good thing anyway.
Looks like a 3D puzzle with some minis in front of it.
The difficult steps in FTL are no joke. I was having no difficulty clearing on easy and was just trying to unlock all the ships. Once I did I switched to normal and had to restart 3 times before getting out of the first sector.
I’ve been taking part in the beta, as far as Steam is concerned me and my friends are a thrupple. Works pretty well, other family member’s games just show up in your library. Haven’t had any issues, Steam will tell you if your copy is in use by a family member and you either play something else or ask them to quit.
Poison the food, burn down the houses, kill all the villagers, then migrate a couple loyal believers to breed me some new followers.
So much easier to grow new ones than to convert existing ones.
Scared the crap out of me when it happened too. Wouldn’t work today though, as my wife named our user accounts and I doubt they have a recording of someone whispering “Mr Bitchtits”.
I need everyone to pay attention to this: if you stop paying for this bullshit the prices go down.
Only if you’re 10 years old.
Looks like gamers got comfortable with not owning Ubisoft games, just like he wanted.
You’re allowed to say gamer
They’ve always been like this
When I worked at McDonald’s I used to keep the DriveThru headset on after closing while I was doing paper work to tell people “sorry, we’re closed” if they drove up to the speaker board. (Mind you, the building lights and menu board lights are off at this point. Something we call a “clue”.)
That stopped after one too many people screamed “FUCK YOU!” into the speaker board (for us following our posted hours and me politely informing them instead of ignoring them.)
You quickly adopt a policy of “just ignore them and they’ll figure it out.”
There’s no way your order is worth me turning everything back on, unless it is way too large to be something quick.
I agree: training an AI on random crap from the internet and expecting it to be useful is a terrible idea. That should have been obvious before you made it.
Same reason Facebook won’t let you look at your messages through the website on mobile. (Unless you request the desktop site).
You keep repeating the same things that I’ve already invalidated.
Ditto
- All ads are skippable and with the right player will skip automatically
Not on mine. Buying a different player isn’t exactly “easier”, they sure as fuck try to make is difficult for me to avoid the ads on the media I paid for, and I shouldn’t have to.
- You can digitize your movie collection. No need to insert any disc if that’s what you prefer
So once again, piracy is easier (My entire thesis here). I can acquire it already digitized for me.
Blu-rays have much better video and sound quality. If you do find a Blue-ray rip you’ll quickly run out of storage unless you spend a thousand dollars on harddrives. Each Blue-ray rip takes between 50 and 100 GB of storage. No, don’t even start with shitty compression. I don’t want that.
I frequently spend time looking for torrents of lower quality because the most popular, easy to acquire files, are higher quality than my system is capable of.
The easiest to acquire file will have identical quality to a Blu-ray for me because the source is not what is limiting the quality.
Some people want the Blue-ray menu. They are actually really nice sometimes. There are even movies with director commentary, recording functionality or other fun gimmicks. You don’t have to use it. But you have it as sold and intended.
Bully for them, I don’t. Most torrents include all sorts of special features, from multiple sources, that sometimes you wouldn’t be able to get them all on a single Blu-ray. Different audio tracks exist for files, it doesn’t require a disk to have the commentary track.
But all of the points above are irrelevant when you consider that pircary does not support the creators at all and ensures that companies make even shittier content and services. They need the money to produce the content so they will squeeze everyone else even more if they don’t get anything from you.
I’ve already agreed that the only reason to buy a Blu-ray is to support the creators. The fact that companies apparently need you to purchase Blu-rays or they will go out of business is all the more reason for the companies to not enshittify the Blu-rays with ads.
Piracy makes everything worse.
Capitalism makes everything worse. That’s why ads are on the Blu-ray in the first place. It’s not enough for the company to make money from the sale, they have to make more money selling ads, which makes my experience as the purchaser of the product worse.
If companies allowed me to pay them directly for a digital download of a video file, without any ads included in it, I’d be happy to do so. But that’s never going to happen because of [see meme above].
In any other setting if you tell a journalist something without an NDA, and outside of a personal setting, you should expect it to get published.
In any setting, if a journalist is asked not to publish something and they do anyway, the journalist should expect to not have people willing to talk to them or show them things anymore.
Acquiring:
Blu-Ray - Drive to the store, find the movie you want, (In some cases make sure it has the special features if you want those, which will cost more), wait at the checkout, pay, drive home.
Alternatively - Go the the store’s website, type the movie name, enter credit card details, wait for delivery.
Piracy - Go to Torrent site, type movies name, download. (Optional - spend an extra minute looking for the torrent of a lower quality because your TV can’t display 1080p anyway, and making sure it has special features if you want those)
Movie is ready to play in less time than it would take to drive to the store.
Playing:
Blu-ray - Find the disc, put in player, wait for ads on media you have purchased and own, (alternative - pay more for a better player that skips ads you don’t want to watch on the media you paid for and own), wait through needless menu animations, watch movie.
Piracy - Go to your movies folder, open the file.
There is no metric by which Blu-ray is more convenient than Piracy unless you live somewhere with lousy internet. I have on more than one occasion downloaded a torrent for a movie I own the Blu-Ray for because that was faster than finding the disk with the added bonus of skipping all the faff on the disk (ads, menu transitions). The only argument for purchasing a Blu-ray is to support the creators, and if they want me to spend money for a worse experience then the studios should not be making it even worse by including ads.
Every time I purchase a Blu-ray to support media I like, I watch it and I am immediately reminded of all the annoyances that make me regret my decision.
Netflix was so successful because it was easier than piracy. Now there’s a dozen different “me too!” services and I could check each of them to see if they have the movie/show I’m looking for, or I could just go to a torrent site that I know has it.
Make sure you remove your credit card from the account, or check your statement each month to make sure they didn’t sign you back up.