MudMan

It's not general cocaine, but it approximates the behavior of one for some applications. People are still worried about how many resources are going to making this cocaine now, though.

You have context to define normalcy. I'm the speaker and I'm from a place where it's not normal, so it's not normal.

But of course that's not the point and has never been, because the line isn't about whether the practice is standard in some regions, which it obviously is, it's about whether it makes sense to the general principles of general mores on gender for modern society, which it doesn't.

Which you understand fully and always have. Because this is one of these dumb ones, so we're now on loop two.

Man, social media sucks and is so not normal.

Oh, cool, this is the easy part of these dumb things where we get to just copy paste the original conversation and go down the loop. Hold on:

You added "a lot of places". It's not typical or expected here, so it's not normal here.

So "normalcy" on this is geographically bound. So is it normal if my normal and your normal are different and the Internet is making us rub our normals together?

Told you it was a waste of time.

You're going pretty deep into a rant to say the same thing I'm saying.

Read the previous post again. The point I'm making is that reselling a cartridge is not detectable in itself, but that the same cart being simultaneously found more than once is.

So that'd be the exact same thing you're saying.

As far as anybody can tell, this was a false positive in that process and once the guy provided proof of purchase, even for a used game purchase, his account was reinstated, but you do run the risk of finding yourself in this position if you end up accidentally buying a cart that has been dumped and shared on the Internet.

Well, in this case I'd guess because his indie dev studio just got royally hosed by Microsoft, so he definitely has good reason to hot take the hell out of the relationship between major publishers and indie studios at the moment.

I don't know if I agree. Size has some impact. Risking the livelihoods of you and your friends working for peanuts in your bedrooms is one thing, being at the helm of a billion dollar business is a bit of a different beast.

But yeah, it does matter whether you're public or private. A whole bunch of indie games are made by public companies, though. Definitely by corporate-owned companies and companies with big corporate investors.

By that bar a lot of the "indies" being touted here aren't really... that.

That's why the intent matters. If your concern with meat is that you're unwilling to inflict any suffering to an animal for food, then sure, that's independent from the wider effects. If you don't care about the larger impact beyond the small impact you have then by all means, your individual actions are all that matters.

But if your concern is systemic: how the meat industry functions, the climate impact, sustainability and so on, those things are a bit different. One, because you can bypass those issues and still eat animal products, on a personal level, but also because your not eating animal products doesn't have much of an impact at all in the overall issue.

The other thing is misunderstanding how products, brands and commerce in general work. I mean, if you can go and fund the, what? Fifty to a hundred million dollars Mario Kart World must have cost, by all means be my guest. I have a couple of pitches I may want to run by you.

But even in that scenario I'm afraid people don't particularly care for your open source knockoff. They want to play Mario Kart. Because it's Mario Kart. For some it's branding, for some it's because their friends are playing and they want to play together, for some it's nostalgia from their childhood, for some it's just that they don't care or know and that's the name they recognize.

You could fund half the game's industry to be free and open source and people would still play Mario Kart.

So if you want Nintendo to not be dicks about it you need to regulate them, not put your money where your mouth is.

That's exactly what I was saying. Which is not the same as what you've been implying I was saying but is the same as what I was saying I was saying earlier.

Hopefully that clarifies it.

He then ran down a string of recent hits developed by independent devs and studios: Balatro, Baldur's Gate 3, Helldivers 2, Clair Obscur—even the venerable Minecraft, an archetypal indie superhit before Mojang was sold into the Microsoft stable.

I mean, by that definition he's not wrong.

It's just that the way that works is indie devs become big enough to either become whatever the hell triple A means or get bought by whatever the hell triple A is.

Magicka was an indie game, I really struggle to fit Helldivers 2, a Sony-published sequel to a Sony-published game, into that same bucket. Ditto for Larian. Divinity OS? Sure. Hasbro-backed multi-studio Baldur's Gate 3 with its hundreds of millions of budget? Myeaaaaah, I don't know.

I think the real question is how you keep the principles that make indie games interesting in play when the big money comes in. I'm all for an indie-driven industry, but I'm a touch more queasy about a world in which major publishers use tiny devs as a million monkeys with typewriters taking on all the risk and step in at the very end (sometimes post-release) to scoop up the few moneymakers.

You are confused. In theory, for the purposes of this conversation in the way it's being carried out.

The key to your confusion would be apparently lacking an understanding of the word "but" and how it works in a sentence, though, which may be a bridge too far.

No, we are not talking about them. I said "they think it's normal, but it's not normal". That's not what you say it is.

See? Now the fact that you're misrepresenting the conversation for trolling purposes becomes a problem, because we have to talk about what I was actually saying, so the whole thing falls apart.

But I didn't ask if you would say it's "their normal". I asked if you would say it's "normal". Not qualifiers, no possessives. Also, I wasn't talking about how women being socially expected to alter their identity based on having sex with a man as a habit "consider it normal", I was talking about how I don't consider it normal.

So that's kind of a lot of sneaky adjustments you made there. Wanna try that again?