cobysev

Oh no! Not Steven Universe! Anyway…

(Goes back to watching SU on my Plex server)

I think it’s great for a ground-floor investment in a YouTube competitor. It draws more people to the platform, gets a chunk of money flowing up front to help boost the service, and they can always sunset the lifetime option if the site gets popular and revenue starts to get tight. As long as they continue to honor it for everyone who paid initially.

Like I said in my original comment, a Nebula subscription is only $6/mo. A lifetime access payment is over 4 years of subscriptions up front. That’s a nice chunk of change to help get them established.

I saw someone’s video about how Nebula works (I think Legal Eagle? He was advertising it hardcore on YouTube for a while) and the subscription service is how they pay content creators. He said it’s a more stable income than YouTube, where your videos earn advertising money based on trends and visibility. If you’re not YouTube famous (and the algorithm doesn’t make you visible), you’re not going to make any money on the platform. But Nebula gives you a more solid income, plus the freedom to make the content you want. No AI moderators flagging videos because it thought it detected the word “suicide” or something. No forcing you to include key words or pushing regular videos on a tight schedule to ensure the algorithm keeps recommending your channel.

Yeah, like I said, it needs more content creators to dump their libraries there. It could be a fantastic competitor to YouTube if only more people knew about it and used it.

I got into Pokémon when the card game and anime first came to America. I was in jr high school at the time and collected so many of the original cards. Never finished my collection, though.

I got into the Pokémon craze at first, but stopped following it in my later years of high school. I was too busy preparing to be an adult, so I set it aside and forgot about it for years. I didn’t even know there were more than 151 Pokémon until over a decade later.

I learned some of the newer generations with Pokémon Go, but I still remember all of the original 151 Pokémon. The newer stuff is just weird to me.

EDIT: I never got into the games, even though they started releasing when I was a teenager. Pokémon Go was actually my first game in the franchise; although I watched my friends play the classic Red and Blue games back in the day.

Find me a self publishing video platform with the reach of YouTube that doesn’t require self hosting and I’ll happily move my content there.

Nebula is the next best thing to YouTube, but not enough content creators have moved their stuff there, so it’s easy to run out of interesting videos to watch after a while. Some of the bigger folks I follow share their content on both platforms, and the incentive to watch on Nebula instead of YouTube is that content creators have more freedom with their videos on Nebula. They can post bonus/extra footage that would be automatically flagged and blocked by YouTube normally. Don’t need to dance around the censors on Nebula.

Nebula is subscription-based, so they don’t show ads anywhere on their site. But if you don’t want to pay for another subscription service, you can also do a one-time payment to have lifetime access to their site. It’s $300, which is the cost of just over 4 years of their subscription service ($6/mo). Considering I’ve had an account for over 3 years now, it’s almost paid for itself.

There was a big deal about Ubisoft removing Assassin’s Creed 1 and 2 last year, and I remember it because I was in the middle of a replay of the first game, and I quit as soon as they announced they were pulling it. Honestly, I haven’t checked to see if they actually removed them; they may have reneged on that decision over the backlash. I’ll try to reinstall it tonight and see if I can still access it.

But that announcement was when people really started to hate on Ubisoft for their poor business practices, which led to the comment mentioned in this meme. It started because they talked about removing access to paid-for games.

Ubisoft removed Assassin’s Creed 1 and 2 from their online game library, claiming some BS like they want to focus their attention on newer games. The original games had no online services; it shouldn’t take any effort to provide access to them online.

Everyone who owns them through Steam or Ubisoft Connect can’t play them anymore, unless they still have a physical disc for the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 consoles. If you bought a digital copy, you paid for a game that you can no longer play.

THAT is why this quote is especially evil. Not because of some choice of subscription vs. buying, but because Ubisoft has the ability to make our fully-paid for games unplayable.

Calling her princess but as degradation

That looks like vocal chords. The white part, it’s what vibrates and changes shape to make sound and pitch when you speak.

I’m terrified of Gabe retiring or passing away. He’s been amazing for the company and I don’t trust anyone else to not want to use Valve for their own greedy purposes. The next president of Valve will likely ruin all the good things about it, thanks to late-stage capitalism.

I firmly believe in voting with your wallet; I normally don’t invest much long-term interest into businesses because you never know how they’ll change over time, but I’ve been so happy with Valve that I’ve gladly given them thousands of dollars over the decades for Steam games. My library is sitting at just over 3,500 games right now. I don’t know what I’m gonna do when Valve crumbles one day. I really hope they give me an option to download and play offline all the games I’ve bought, because that’s a massive library to lose.

I’ve never given a penny to Epic Games, and unless they get on-par with Steam’s functionality, I won’t ever buy or play any of their games. The one thing that might make Epic Games competitive (and could convince me to use their platform) is letting Steam users copy their libraries over, so we’re not just starting over from scratch with a new service.

That’s what got me on Steam in the first place. Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library. That’s how I got my collection of early Call of Duty titles on Steam, as well as Half-Life and some others. I moved my physical game library over to Steam and I’ve been a Steam loyalist ever since.

I would’ve gone with:

Crocodiles! Do not swim here

I feel like this is more accurate:

My guess is he’s trying to say “Kama-BLAH” as an insult. But no one’s picking up on it.

I’ve avoided his content because something about him just creeped me out. After several years, I think I’ve finally pinpointed it: he doesn’t smile with his eyes. It makes his grin seem cold and emotionless, like a sociopath trying to blend in.

AskJeeves and Hotbot! Man, that takes me back. I also enjoyed Excite and Infoseek back in the pre-Google days.

Proton’s top tier service for individuals (Proton Unlimited) is only $7.99/month if you pay for 2 years of service. Gives you full access to all their services.

Proton just announced last month that they’re turning the company into a nonprofit organization, because security is more important to them than making money. That’s why their services are dirt-cheap; they want to ensure it’s affordable for everyone, and the only reason they collect money at all is to keep the servers online.

I’m currently de-Googling my life. Moving all my services over to Proton, testing other search engines, etc. Trying to slowly cut out/replace all services that Google provides me.

Oh, and I’m sticking with Firefox with Ublock Origin, to ensure Google can’t ever advertise to me, even incidentally.

I knew a guy when I served in the US military who got caught cheating in a semi-related way. He got assigned to a base in a new state and his wife refused to relocate their whole family for the few years he’d be assigned there, so he went by himself, leaving his wife and kids in his home state.

Turns out, he was sexting one of his younger subordinates at work. One of his daughters found out when she tried to use an old tablet and found out his account was still synced to it. She saw all his texts updating in real time.

He was ultra-conservative and didn’t believe in divorce, so he was doing everything he could to save his marriage. His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended. He was basically on house arrest until his job was done and he could move home.

The last I heard, he told his wife the landlord needed to paint the walls, so he removed all the cameras, dunked them in the bathtub, then played dumb when none of them would work when he set them back up again. He was seen inviting young women over to his apartment after that. So, you know… he didn’t learn his lesson.

I came here to reference this book as well. It was required reading back in my elementary school (in the early '90s) and, as a white American male, opened my eyes to racism for the first time. I still have my original copy of the book; my school made us purchase a copy so we could highlight passages, take notes in the margins, then have our own personal copy to keep forever so we had a quick reference to grab. This was, of course, before the days of the Internet, so if you needed a reference, you had to go to the library and search for a book.