You can do it yourself with a toothpick or compressed air, but it often won’t get everything especially if it’s deeply packed. They apparently have special tools for it.

Unfortunate that this won’t help Android users, but I had a trove of lint stuffed up my iPhone port, and the Apple Store cleaned it out for free.

I don’t know if anyone needed a harmless (slightly dark) laugh on the subject, but I recently played an indie PnC game called “3 Minutes to Midnight” with a joke around this. You open a wall medical kit, and there are sheets of paper inside, which read “Thoughts and prayers”.

What if my local coffee shop owner admits that he sought profit right from the beginning? And, so happened to aim for that by building a loyal customer base?

Free game for throwing rocks and stealing espresso brewers?

Or, maybe it’s worth establishing a system of nuance where you actually pay attention to the individual acts of particular companies, rather than grouping all businesses as “Corporations”?

I’ve always wondered - what qualification do we use to decide when a “business” (run by a kind guy behind a counter he built himself from scrap wood) evolves into a “corporation” (evil and scheming, part of the global capitalist conspiracy)?

Like, if the guy who runs my local coffee shop opens a second cafe further down the street, should I start tapping his phone to find out how the YouTube Content ID system works, now that he’s a part of The Corporations? Should I start breaking into his cafe and start stealing scones? Or do we want to wait until he has a third location

I’d be more likely to reply if you’d actually withdraw the argument. Say “You’re right, sorry, that was a dumb thing to focus on since it has nothing to do with the point about intellectual property. But the point stands.” Don’t just put the onus on me to “ignore the times I say something I can’t substantiate.”

Basically, if I know you’ll never walk something back from being convinced, you’re not arguing in good faith, and addressing the rest of it (something you can imagine I’ve wasted my time doing before in previous online discussions) is really not worth my effort.

Yeah, you’re right, sorry, we can’t have a concept of intellectual property without Disney mandating we attach a murder clause into it. That’s certainly not stretching the argument.

You Wouldn’t Look At A Peach…

You’ll need to juggle several different services if you want what you can otherwise get for free on a central hub.

This one, while common, I kind of take issue with. You’re basically complaining that there is no one, all-consuming media oligarchy that owns EVERY show/movie, and distributes it on their singular massively overpriced service (and yes, with that market stranglehold, they would massively overprice it)

Shouldn’t the principle of competition mean there are multiple services, each trying to present better content? People reasonably contend with only being subscribed to a few they care about - I don’t know who is assuming they should get access to all media, all the time, without paying truckloads of money.

I will grant that for games, no service beats Steam, but I will absolutely buy games from other platforms like Itch and GOG in the spirit of competition when their prices or better or the dev has avoided Steam for reasons of adult content censorship.

Semantically doesn’t matter much.

If a peach seller has a harvest of 1,000 peaches that will go bad in a week, he doesn’t care about “only having 940 peaches” when someone steals 60 of them. He cares that he spent all that effort and money growing the peaches on the bet he’d make a profit, rented the shop space in the market, hired an assistant to bag and sell them, and some douchebag still didn’t pay for them.

The quantity of product a seller maintains is generally almost completely irrelevant to the costs. It’s about the societal expectations of paying your due to people who have put work into something you want.

“My name is Stabby McKiller! Yes, I clearly stabbed four people in that home, and yes, I was convicted! BUT, I am also running for president! For total fairness, I demand my sentencing be delayed, so my sentence does not sway voter opinion!”

What fucking bullshit. THIS is bias.

Who said that?

Be specific, include the word “only” as you quoted, and very important: Don’t lie.

I can’t speak towards whatever you might be misinformed about. The only other close thing I can think of is when a support staff told a user that their account was going to be deleted, which prompted a huge backlash. But, one of the determinations seemed to be that they only do so for inactive accounts that have never purchased anything; and was in fact a GDPR requirement. So, it was another nothing article based on rumors.

Which makes sense if you think about it - actually put some kind of motivation behind the “evil schemes” you’re reading. Greed is very much expected, but removing people’s old games doesn’t gain Ubisoft anything but poor press. If you told me they were selling cheat codes for old games for $30 each, I’d believe it. There’s no profit in what people are actually suggesting though.

The other thing I worry about is for people to be genuinely too blinded by reputation to give games a chance, or to give meaningful feedback that helps those diamonds come to existence.

I feel like there are some timelines/realities where big publishers like EA / Ubisoft put out a genuinely good game. And it has happened - Titanfall 1/2 are darlings to a lot of people. I’d say Mario + Rabbids was genuinely fun and had great music. I’ve watched streamers play Star Wars Outlaws, and while no, it’s not a fantastic game and I don’t plan to buy it, I can see a few touches I can appreciate. The fact that players basically chuck it in the “Ubisoft = shit” bin to go on hate-tirades without having much of substance (or better yet, to put their energy into praising games they liked) to say seems to doom us by our own expectations.

Remember that Valve had to work with Sierra (a big evil publisher) as they were starting, before eventually going solo. I worry that the next decade’s Valve is going to get trashed because at the time of their next release, they were “Ubisoft Southern Northland” and “ubisoft = shit”.

Man, I really want to assume our lords and saviors will keep putting out perfect games, and yet we’ve been burned in our history.

CDPR put out a half-baked Cyberpunk after a year of hype. Valve put out “Artifact”, the Dota card game. It feels like the really inventive studios sometimes get tired of the working formulas they’re adored for and end up putting out things not many people like - possibly as a way of doing a personal passion project.

I’ll be happy if that never happens for Larian, but it’s a worrying possibility.

At least we have that fanmade expansion for Heroes 3.

Is this at all accurate?

The closest thing I could find when I searched for this topic is that the multiplayer and online services related to those games were being taken offline. Given you can still play Counter-Strike 1.6, I can see some frustration on that, but I also didn’t think many people knew AC1 had any multiplayer features.

Anyone reading can go and take a look at current reviews on Steam for Assassin’s Creed 1 and 2. The newest reviews come from the last few weeks, and no one is highlighting “Ubisoft STOLE this game from me, CANNOT BE PLAYED” etc.

Which makes it hard for me to respect memes like this one when the reactions, at least in part, seem to be driven by constant misinformation. Ubisoft games are absolutely mediocre, I can agree with that, but there is absolutely no need to lie about them.

I am aware of the game preservation movement, focused on The Crew, and I’m in favor of that. I still don’t think it had anything to do with the quote. No one in game publishing makes a business around taking away games people were already playing.

Still confused about this one.

If there’s a reason Star Wars Outlaws is mediocre, for example, it doesn’t have much to do with microtransactions or game renting.

And the quote that was offered was between investors when asking why Ubisoft+, their subscription service that lets you cheaply rent games, wasn’t doing well.

Might be a point of obviousness, but: Most of us own most of our games. Those of us not owning games via subscription rental are choosing to do that, because we don’t care about completionism or playing a title once a year for nostalgia.

Ubisoft is low on creativity and their games don’t interest me, but I’m sometimes weirded out by the illogical way they’re painted as evil, or the way this stupid quote suggests they’re “Cumin’ for muh game discs”.

I abandoned it. One of the specific things I could tell disappointed me was the foley effects. There’s a 5-10 second sequence of Bean escaping from some evil queen that’s taken her captive, climbing over obstacles and up a rope, and it was basically silent except for the music.

I understand in isolation it comes off as a nitpick, but it’s maybe the most direct explanation I have for the show feeling low budget and incomplete. On top of that, the writing seemed to want to be higher stakes than Futurama by wrapping a larger story, but things just got resolved so unceremoniously. (That escape being one of those instances - it went from a moment of capture and peril to just going home out of nowhere)

I might enjoy this, but I’d have a requirement: Every participant join via webcam, not text posting.

Yes, that gives away much of your identity and makes you vulnerable. That’s the shared price we’d all pay to have a little bit of trust in each other. It would make it much harder for one person to be a bot posting from multiple accounts.