But that’s the point. It’s already in their hands. There is no ethical and helpful application of AI that doesn’t go hand in hand with these assholes having mostly s monopoly on it. Us using it for ourselves doesn’t take it out of their hands. Yes, you can self-host your own and make it helpful in theory but the truth is this is a tool being weaponized by capitalists to steal more data and amass more wealth and power. This technology is inextricable from the timeline we’re stuck in: vulture capitalism in its latest, most hostile stages. This shit in this time is only a detriment to everyone else but the tech bros and their data harvesting and “disrupting” (mostly of the order that allowed those “less skilled” workers among us to survive, albeit just barely). I’m all for less work. In theory. Because this iteration of “less work” is only tied to “more suffering” and moving from pointless jobs to assistant to the AI taking over pointless jobs to increase profits. This can’t lead to utopia. Because capitalism.

I’m talking about the arrangement of how companies have worked since the deregulation 80s. Multiple huge bands have tried to change the monopoly Ticketmaster/livenation hold in the industry. And most bands that aren’t global phenomena are beholden to their record labels, who are beholden to Ticketmaster. Blaming the bands is pretty shitty. They’re about as powerless as we are, honestly.

Also, ISPs famously have divided the country up and all collectively decided to stay out of each other’s territories for the most part—and they are all running on OUR lines that are public. They supply the “last mile,” but we are still paying them to allow us access to our own infrastructure.

I’m just saying, there are so many examples of this. Airlines are the same. Greyhound busses. Trains. Search engines. Google. Credit reporting agencies. Big movie studios. Capitalism is beyond fucked up. Ticketmaster is one small part, and their lobbying power keeps their control. I buy plenty of tickets through smaller distributors like Dice. These are all pretty similar situations. Money = power, and the more power you have, the more power you have, on and on until you control whatever it is.

You technically have some choice, but your route, your band, your internet, your cell phone carrier, your search engines…a lot of them have pretty much cornered a huge share of the market through power brokering/lobbying/VCs funding them. Look at ride shares. VCs drove the price down by operating at a loss for like a decade+. And now that they took over the market, they have all the power.

Your problem isn’t with the bands trying to make a living. It’s with capitalism.

In the presence of whom

Well, you’re also then leaving the bands you love hung out to dry.

No one is fuckin happy about it. I don’t like record labels and their practices either, but you have to end up supporting them when you support the artists. Capitalism is the problem. And it’s pervasive. The Ticketmaster problem is also present in ISPs and cell phone companies. Did you forego giving money to both of those industries to make this comment?

I can make you feel entertained, baby!

lol what? “Use the arrows to move the object into the indicated orbit?” There’s not a better way for them to write those instructions? Dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

Hm. I am on iOS. Sorry, I just assumed the app would have same functionality, if maybe even a different layout. Check your settings, in the “link handling” section maybe

Yeah, voyager is the one I use most often on my tablet. Open the link normally, make sure your links are set to open in-app, and as the page is loading, look across the top, where the “done” and “share” buttons are. You’ll see the “Aa” button switch to what looks like a rectangle with lines across it (mimicking a page with lines of text). If you catch it while that icon is showing, it opens right up. But if you miss that brief icon change, you can still click the “Aa” and it’ll bring up a drop down menu. Click “show reader”

Get Firefox, or any of the lemmy clients that offer reader mode. Avelon, voyager, Thunder, I’m sure there are plenty of others.

Reader mode is a must for everything I read these days.

Don’t protect the major retailer. Who screwed you

But can’t crappy design be mildly infuriating

Are they outside of Asheville? Wicked weeds? Because I know they got bought by Budweiser and Asheville was up in arms

I mean, the guy had a few decent points. I definitely agree with you as well—my constant replaying of gta V and rdr2 go to show that I love rockstar games. And I’m a different gamer than this guy. I have the same approach to movies, too. I work in film and all my friends are super film snobs and I’m like, “oh shit, I really liked it.” Because the story is my bread and butter. Rdr2 was an incredible story. I’ve replayed the entire campaign three times and each time I still felt the story, felt the characters…it worked for me. However, what this guy said is also true. For “strategy” gamers, yeah, their system is super limited. I mean, for a replay their style is super limited. You have “choices” technically—you can be good or bad, say yes or no to helping people, you can find interesting items off them when you decide to be bad and kill them, or sometimes they’ll reward you with cool items if you decide to help. The open world has some secrets to uncover but…ultimately, there is one track for the story (even if you can be white hat or black hat), and the open world experience, you can only discover what’s set out for you. You can’t “create” an experience that isn’t placed for you to find or that you decide to do differently than their predetermined triggers and paths. Basically what I’m saying is your “choices” in the game only serve to limit your path if you make the decision to, say, not help Mary—that storyline is just gone. You get a few new pieces of dialogue. That’s it. It’s all funneling you to their predetermined path. And that can get boring for some people.

All this said, I fuckin love rdr2. I love just fucking around in the open world when I don’t feel like playing missions, I like trying to survive a Saint Denis shootout by holding up somewhere or refusing to run. Shit, I’m STILL playing rdr2. That doesn’t happen when the game is bad. But I also agree with what he’s saying. Being able to actually alter the game, with your creative input having a consistent logic you can manipulate, would turn this game from an 8.75 to a 10. As it stands, the only time your in-game decisions truly make a difference is when they wipe out a side story line opportunity—or if they happen to be the final decision or two in their predetermined story.

I opened the video thinking, “pfft. Fuck this dude, these are some of my favorite (and in my opinion the best) games of all time.” But after actually watching some of it, he had good points.

Not to mention they’re stopped fully in front of the stop line.

Yeah, I’m absurdly suspicious of pretty much everything connected to the internet these days. I’m suspicious of any cameras, of people randomly happening to take a picture with me in the background. I’m suspicious of talking out loud around my phone…the future sucks.

Although, thankfully the pandemic has given me a seemingly never-ending excuse to wear something over my face at all times.

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Honestly, I don’t really read reviews. I can usually sense based on the marketing campaign and the feel of the trailer whether a movie will be up my alley. I also work in film and have a huge group of super pretentious movie buffs around me at all times. I’m definitely an outlier in that group because I’m a pretty easy critic lol. And I know which friends of mine are too pretentious for their own good or ones who are more geared toward blockbusters than I am. And from there I work backwards to see what interests me. Or I just tag along and find out the hard way.

I will say, though, I like letterboxd. You do have to start scrolling and see which people you’re going to discount and which ones that point out things that are important to you.

The “tomato meter” is literally manipulated into irrelevance. There are outfits that specifically pay critics during a certain time period to either hold off with their review or change it to give a shitty feature a 100% during previews so they can market the hell out of it. The system was shoddy and broken before. At this point it’s just useless.

That’s the thing, the COVID conspiracy people now posting this shirt saying, “SEE!?! IT WAS LAB LEAK!!” as if that justifies every single other insane thing they’ve ever said about COVID. Because there’s a huge difference between “covid CAME FROM a lab” and “lab leak possible origin.” One implies conspiracy, the other implies carelessness. What’s the old saying? ‘Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to greed?’ I very much think the same applies to stupidity—and honestly, in this case, greed probably caused the stupidity. How much funding-slashing has led to calamity in recent times? Plenty.

Your move, creep.