We’re talking about TV shows and movies.

There’s normally one unrealistic conceit, eg aliens existing, that the audience believes. But then, the regular conceits like “The scientists studying the aliens speak like a bunch of robots and act like total idiots” become harder to believe.

I’ve heard this said, can you verify for me where the lawyer stands?

If his position is truly still behind his table, what if the witness/jurors are hard of hearing?

There’s a trillion ones around unrealism, so I may as well pick something that would be more enjoyable if fixed.

Professional chatter. Let’s say a team of 30 scientists have been trying to communicate with a dimensional portal for 5 years. They wouldn’t be using speech like “Identity verified. Doctor Faris, you are clear to approach the anomaly.” Often, they’d have extremely abbreviated lingo for everything they need to express that happens on a daily basis, and otherwise are chatting about other stuff.

“Ok, approach endorsed. Bob wasn’t so chatty yesterday from what I heard, we’ll just aim for 2 logic points for this cycle.”
“Ryan was suggesting we spread the cycles. Bob has to sleep sometime.”
“Yeah, 90% of us would rather listen to Ryan than Mick, but Mick signs the checks.”

So the only actual order comes from some obscure phrase like “Approach endorsed”, which they may only say verbatim for safety reasons. The rest is just workplace banter about how best to accomplish their task, none of it being essential. EDIT: And, to make clear, in the above quote, Bob is the portal/anomaly.

One plot point I liked of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. The Tolmekians are growing a Warrior. Enemies are on the way. Their princess orders them to unleash the Warrior. Her second says it’s not ready. She ignores him, it’s sent out. It’s not ready, and melts almost immediately.

The version of Lutris I installed used a file opening GUI to select the exact EXE to run. I was using simple unzipped folders, not installers.

Even if the fault of the game in question ends up being simple:

• It’s not fun to correct that fault on every single game I run
• It could be a slightly different fault on every single game

I am fine with one-time setup configuration for my OS to get preferences right, devices working, and settle myself to my steady workflow. I am not okay with doing laborious one-time setup for every single game I ever try.

I get that, and I like it. When it works. (Hitman 3, which I know works under certain distros/Linux hardware, did not load levels for me on Linux Mint 22) Even on Bazzite, Helldivers 2 needed command line args to avoid a white border around the game in fullscreen.

Plus, much as I like Steam, I like competition, and I buy games off of other stores pretty often. Some of those stores just give you a zip file to download in your web browser.

I knew I had whole folders of indie games that are just a folder with an executable, so I trialed those with Lutris. It needed a huge setup form just to run one of them, and when I finished, it wouldn’t run and gave no errors.

Having that as my experience for, as I said, a whole folder of games, wasn’t really in my interest. It takes too long for the community to say “Hey, I got Assassin’s Creed running! Just use Proton 8.13 beta, and add these 8 command line options”

It’s not just learning curve. It’s feature set, compatibility, and user experience.

Certain distros’ window managers may work just the way you like, or they might not and it may not be so simple to change it. The preferences menu on some of them is tiny.

That’s before getting into just how perfectly it will work on your hardware. I tried Mint 21 first on my machine, and even though my hardware is ancient, it didn’t support the wi-fi card at all. That stuff is kernel level. I even looked up version numbers and it was supposed to work.

(Mint 22 worked but that’s ridiculously late to finally start supporting this hardware. And, it could not run games as well as Steam Deck)

In the last month, I made a genuine effort to switch to Linux Mint, then Bazzite, as my daily driver. Mint could not run Hitman 3 for unexplained reasons. Bazzite frequently got graphical corruption issues when returning from sleep. Neither could run niche indie games and gave no error codes.

I knew I’d be doing some tweaking to get Linux working how I wanted, but it was missing configuration as well as being unreliable by default. I like the principle of using a non-MS OS, but I need it to work.

Not for the Dead by Daylight survivors, who path like mad parkour masters!

Of course, it could be because they’ve already died hundreds of times.

I’m sometimes annoyed at the trend of celebrating a dev when a game turns out well, but blaming the publisher each time it’s bad. It’s quite often a two way street…

I’ve had a few sites ask me to set up a passkey, only for it to immediately break and fail to log in. For now, I’m giving up in the technology until it matures. They need to move beyond “It’s easy - just click once and you’re all set, nothing to configure” to acknowledging many of us use different browsers and devices by different manufacturers. I don’t want login locked to one device.

I’m arguing no such thing. Artists can, but don’t always, choose to be generous with the product they make, just like bakers sometimes give extra loaves to homeless people. Would it be true to say that free food has no value? In either case it’s an act of generosity. Bakers and artists can both choose to set whatever valuation/price they want on their work, and can adjust if their chosen price point doesn’t make enough sales for their goals. It so happens many artists already have enough money, and simply want people to enjoy their work, or spread their name. The vast majority of artists don’t have enough money, hence the sardonic meme of the starving artist.

If you’re the guy that developed a game, you only get so much enjoyment from playing it - and most of your enjoyment from selling 1,000 copies of it to feed your crippling addiction to novelty PEZ dispensers (and paying rent).

On that note, if an indie developer tries to popularize his niche “aardvark slapping game” by selling it for 10 cents a copy, he might quickly flood the entire limited base of consumers that wants to simulate slapping aardvarks, and only makes $100 in the process. By destroying his game’s scarcity, even though he discovered an eager niche, he can no longer sell copies at his original price of $5 each - enough to pay rent for the month. That’s how scarcity of a game can be valuable.

I don’t doubt plenty of pirates are doubting the legitimacy of those studies, if just for selfish “my entertainment relies on my not believing this” reasons.

That said, companies also don’t have much to gain by winning internet arguments. Their exact sales data is often very valuable information - something they actively work to safeguard. Thus, you only get vague selective metrics when they want to show harm from pirates.

This is like saying that pointing a loaded gun at a puppy isn’t technically murder or assault. You’re still admitting it’s a harmful and illegal act, and are fussing over the terminology used.

It’s also ignoring how labels and word usage shift for the sake of modern convenience. Words like “insane”, “sick”, generally weren’t used positively in history. If I said a game “technically doesn’t have loot boxes” you’d be pretty upset if you found it still had paid randomized loot, even if they were not technically contained in a six-sided “box”. You’re being overly specific about the words when much of the world agrees you’re taking something you’re not entitled to.

The difference between what you call theft and copyright infringement doesn’t have effective benefit to the seller, especially since even in physical retail, the supply of an item is often largely irrelevant for a store’s financials. As such, I am okay with referring to both as the same thing, even if you’d currently find dictionaries that separate them.

EDIT: Fun. It looks like after I posted this comment, someone went through and downvoted all of my comments listed on my profile, even on completely different topics. Don’t anger pirates, kids! You will never beat their pettiness.

If someone forged 80 quintillion dollars, it would remove the usefulness of $1 from everyone else. (and that is in fact the economic fear that’s generated through excess inflation, something that has happened in many countries)

And, fun fact, in order for GPL software to operate commercially, they sell “licenses” - yes, foregoing the antipirating software, but still pursuing people with lawyers.

And guess what Oracle has to spend so much time doing?…Because, as it turns out, even businesses are cheapskates.

They do - which I happily mock the same as other people. But it still means it’s a sample situation where just about every other variable remained the same. Nothing else could easily explain the jump in sales.