You raise a good idea - replace this as Trump’s official portrait wherever possible.

And for retro games, emulators have left even that in the dustbin of time.

Sick of the last RPG save happening 20 minutes before a boss fight? Save at literally any moment with save states.

That too much work? You can rewind the entire game.

The language is intentionally ambiguous, of course

“Third-world” means Mexico to some, China to others, Africa to others. They all think this message is personalized to them. It’s how Trump’s coalition of the worst elements of our country holds together.

The federal agency ICE is completely captured by fascists. They are arbitrarily staging immigration crackdowns using hastily deputized agents who arrest people off the street while hiding their identity. They came to Los Angeles, a fervently anti-fascist area. It triggered massive but mostly peaceful protests, and some protestors wave Mexican flags. Trump is using the protests as a pretext to claim this is an invasion, so he can mobilize the federal military against citizens. The protests are getting more chaotic (by design, since military presence is exacerbating tensions), which causes the police violence to increase, in a vicious cycle.

I’m not sure what the hostility is for. The very thing the protesters are standing up for is the correct idea of America. The flag should be for real patriots who believe in the Constitution, not Trump and his insurrectionist ilk.

The Tech CEO Bubble is real and one of the most harmful, even if it doesn’t get talked about like our respective political bubbles, geographical bubbles, etc. I believe he was actually that deluded that people were as hyped about AI replacing workers as he was.

That’s a hell of an act. What do you call it?

The term in the industry is “gross-up.”

Is this a thing? This seems like a very high learning curve.

The entire reason why there is a thriving global market for manga is that these off-books sites have existed for decades, and have raised a generation that treats manga as core culture. So they’re strangling their continued relevance in a blind enforcement frenzy.

The other big problem of publishers acting this way is that if we start buying more manga after this, the message publishers get is that this works, and to do it again and again. They’ve created an incentive for manga fans to therefore not buy more manga for now. Which is exactly the opposite incentive publishers wish for.

My father loved this meme. My favorite memory is of reading this meme with him sitting on the couch with the family puppy. He died tragically ten years ago, hit by a runaway dildo delivery truck while taking our puppy to the vet to have puppy aids treatment. I cry every time I see this meme.

How can you shame that which is shameless?

This may seem like a cheeky answer, but Limbo.

Sometimes it’s not about what you say, it’s about what you don’t.

Just to respond to the people here resigned to or encouraging the switch to all-digital, I get it. But let me rage against the dying of the light just a bit. There are some still-good reasons for preferring or demanding full-game cards:

• Having a complete release-date-version game on a cartridge, even if it is later (or instantly) patched, is typically 99% percent of the game experience. Yes, there will be fixes and DLC and so on. But in a preservation discussion, looking to 50 years from now, having preserved 99% of the experience versus 0%, the gameplay, the complete original graphics, the original sound, is still functionally the difference between a game being preserved or not.
• Hacking the Switch 2 will be required to independently preserve key-card or digital-only games. Full stop. Hackers have been to some extent been our preservationists since the dawn of DRM, but in the world of game-key-cards that Nintendo has chosen to accelerate, they will be the only preservationists. I have no issue with hacking, but it’s unreliable and eventually may stop being viable when hardware DRM and TPM-style modules are part of the core chip design. Our preservation future is a gamble that hackers will continue to defeat DRM.
• The only preservation alternative is to have era-complete sets of games on physical Switch 2s, which will eventually break down. Repairs will require, again, hacking, because hardware DRM already will never make repairs simple again. The game working on one system, versus 100 million (or whatever Switch 2 will sell) is the difference between it being playable for entire generations of people or not, even if the game is never hacked and dumped.
• Digital-only experiences are not incompatible with game preservation. GOG is the model here. Nintendo is not acting in the only way feasible, they’re acting according to a specific corporate business plan that seeks to enforce scarcity and capitalize on long-term capture of any resale markets.
• Yes, competitors are already doing digital-only, DRM-locked distribution. But resigning to this because of that is an all-or-nothing fallacy. Every bit we can preserve helps.

Closing more philosophically: Games are shared culture. When you grow up with a game, or as an adult have a profound experience, that game becomes a part of you. At a societal level, that game becomes a part of us and of human culture - at that point it doesn’t even “belong” to Nintendo exclusively.

Nintendo (not only, but focusing on them here) is choosing a path where there will be no alternative to re-paying to experience that memory throughout your life. SaaS is capitalism’s most tragic 2000-era “innovation” - tether us to a subscription for our whole lives, if possible, extracting value - and Nintendo already has shown they will lock old games behind their subscription service rather than re-release them. Experiencing these games through museums 50 years from now may only be at corporate behest (if Nintendo still exists, which is less sure than it may feel in this moment).

So this may seem “duh, they’re doing what everyone else is.” But it is actually a bellwether moment. The future we’re pointed, that we enable by treating these key-cards as viable, is re-purchasing or subscribing to access basic parts of ourselves and our culture, even after we’ve paid for it.

And to respond to the “but it’s Nintendo’s property” crowd: That is also actually antithetical to modern copyright law, which is vehemently not an inviolable property grant, but meant (since the Statute of Anne) to only give incentive to make more expression. Broader public good and culture is always the end-game of copyright. These works eventually are supposed to belong to us. These game key-cards are just one step in capturing that long-tail - the long-tail that belonged to preservationists, to museums, and to the public - from us all.

I had Breath of the Wild on Wii U with DLC and actually called Nintendo to try to get it transferred to the Switch or reimbursed. They outright refused, and said they were different products and I needed to buy it again.

My guess is they’ll demand we pay again.

The IA doesn’t have funds to pay what they’re demanding, so if there’s a settlement, it’ll be other concessions.

They’re going to burn down part of the IA library, aren’t they.

Also 2016, that was a big one.

Shinichiro Watanabe directed both.

Senator Thune will receive an Industry Champion Award for his work on policies that encourage innovation and competitive choice for customers. We’re not aware of any pioneering copyright policy the Senate leader was involved in, but he did extensively advocate for consumer freedom, including the Filter Bubble Transparency Act.

The MPA hasn’t mentioned Thune in any communications on its website before, aside from the fact that MPA’s Senior Vice President of Federal Government Affairs worked for him previously. That said, the award shows that the movie industry group values his work and achievements.

“Here’s an award!”

“What for?”

“For what you’re going to do!”

Honestly looks like a lost 90s arcade game.