#what the fuck is microsoft people

[gender-euphowrya]

damn looking at all the Garbage Useless Clutter Shit apps and widgets and whatevers that come pre-installed (and sometimes can't be uninstalled!) on a windows pc is nauseating

[megafreeman]

I love this AI imagine for the ultimate mayhem in creates. I love that apparently they're stopping the attackers with smiles on their faces, but also the fact that there are two more airplanes in the background. Not only that, but both towers have already been hit, implying that the attack already happened. Is AI trying to say WTC was supposed to be hit by 5 planes but Tom and Jerry stopped it?

[vilelittlecritter]

I hate when I'm trying to enjoy something and then I turn around and there's a hoard of gatekeeping assholes going

"THAT PERSON ACTUALLY SAID SOMETHING SUPER CONTROVERSIAL 8 YEARS AGO AND IF YOU LIKE THEIR CONTENT YOU SHOULD GO STRAIGHT TO HELL BECAUSE NO ONE LIKES YOU AND YOUR INTERESTS ARE SHIT"

Like nice as if I wasn't already self conscious about letting myself just enjoy a piece of media which has helped me cope through my increasingly declining mental health because I'm scared of coming across as "cringe" or "weird" because I've forced myself into this mindset that I need to constantly be super mature which has led me to just straight up not be able to just enjoy doing things.

I'm tired, feel nauseous and angry and I just want to enjoy something and not feel like I shouldn't enjoy it at all.

[theygender]

I'm trying to find a decent cheap laptop but the way search systems work pisses me off. Searching "non chromebook" or "-chromebook" just makes the search results show exclusively chromebooks. Filtering to only show Windows 10 Home and Windows 11 Home operating systems still shows almost entirely Windows 10S and 11S which are fucking useless and usually mean the computer has shitty hardware. There's no way to filter out eMMC storage systems or refurbished computers. I'm going to commit a crime and it will be the fault of whoever nuked google's search capabilities and then decided to never set up the search settings on any other sites correctly in the first place

[weirdosyringe]

just told a close friend that I was schizophrenic (came up in a conversation) and she responded “I don’t think you see stuff, like, wouldn’t you be going crazy?” my sister in christ I am going crazy

[a-soft-fluffy-nerd]

TL;DR: Steam just made library sharing so much fucking easier and so much fucking better. Instead of login-trading, it's just a simple goddamn invite.

Read this. Really. It's a good read. Because it shows that, full-stop, Valve isn't just doubling down on their stance to make sure that people can and should be able to share their copies of digital goods as easily as they can physical ones, but they're making it better and easier than ever.

But you know how Steam allowed you to, with either friends or family, link accounts with another person to be able to establish an ability to share game libraries with one another? The general gist of Steam Family Sharing was that, with a limit of five people plus you (six in total) on a limit of ten computers total could share account access to willingly mix your libraries. You could play theirs. They could play yours.

This was a huge boon. It was meant to emulate sharing a physical copy of a game. A way to allow children to play games their parents or siblings had bought without having to fork over double the cash to buy it a second game. But it had some major limitations and drawbacks, and was archaic to use.

If a person did not share the same computer, you had to manually log into that computer to give it and the accounts on it access. This wouldn't be a problem if both accounts were used on the same computer, but many households (and astronomically more family and friend groups) had multiple computers, all used by different people.

If that computer, at any point, was hard reset to any point before the sharing occurred, you lost access. And had to do the whole process again. This was also an issue with computer transfers. The whole kit and kaboodle needed to be redone on upgrades. On top of that, the old computer is now just dead weight that you may not realize you have to manually revoke access to.

Putting your account information on another person's computer opens up security issues. They could, intentionally or accidentally, land themselves on your account if the login information was stored. Which could easily lead to purchases or bans you did not want to happen.

If anyone was, at any point, playing any game on their own library, you had no access to their games. Even if it was a totally different game, you had to wait your turn as if waiting for their computer to be freed up to sit at. (Admittedly this is kind of like the "mom said it's my turn on the xbox" meme, but hey, kinda archaic.)

You could not choose whose library you accessed a game from. Not at all. It always prioritized the first library it gained access from, DLC access and multiplayer be damned. If another friend you were accepting games from had more DLC? Too bad.

And yet here we are. Steam Families Beta fixes EVERYTHING about the above issues. By just going through Settings > Interface > client Beta Participation and clicking onto Steam Families Beta? You get:

No more login sharing. No more computer links. You can now choose which person's library you borrowed from. And you can play any other game from someone's library, even while they're in-game. It just needs to be a different game than what they're playing.

Pick five people. Invite them to your family. And now everyone has access to everyone's library. My goddamn library went from 150-ish to almost a goddamn thousand in ten minutes of setup.

Account sharing and password sharing are dirty words that "lose" billions of dollars. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Max. They aren't game storefronts, but they still allow you to access massive libraries and scream like you murdered their firstborns for daring to share your password with your mother after you moved out.

Microsoft tried pushing to demonize and undercut used games sales and borrowed copies of physical games. Remember the first attempt to reveal the Xbox One? People forget, but these vultures tried to make an always online console that checked to see if you were the account that owned the game, even if you had a physical disc, and prevent access to the disc's contents if you weren't the original downloader.

Valve walked the fuck up. Valve tapped the mic. And Valve dropped the fucking thing right onto the ground with one feature's revamp.

About the only issues I can see with this are twofold:

If someone sharing your library gets banned from a game's servers... so do you. No one else in the family does, but the both of you do. This is... rather unpleasant, because banhammers can be dropped quite frequently by mistake. I'd urge Valve to rethink this one, but I see the logic: don't cheat and effectively bite the hand feeding you. Still making me side-eye that, though.

If you leave a family you've joined? You have to wait a YEAR to join a new one. It's to prevent people form jumping ship to another group and screwing over who's in the former one in the process, but a YEAR? OUCH.

Problems aside, though... it's probably the biggest fucking power move I have ever seen a media distributor make in the current economic climate. It's the kind of thing that would let so many new games be available in a way that's easier than ever. Just a few clicks to send or accept an invite, and bam. Permanent access to dozens or even hundreds of new games with so much more freedom than earlier drafts of the system.

It's the kind of thing that slaps you in the face with positivity after so many Ls from the games and media industries. And I'm all the fuck for a W like this.

[prismarine-biologist]

that glow squid post haunts me. i genuinely love glow squids but it reads like a dream stan thing in retrospect and i did also like the other choices i just disliked people not having any vision for what glow ink could do

[ussenterpretivedance]

Look I recognize that it is fundamentally bitchless behavior to laud excel spreadsheets on tumblr dot com but truly. Google sheets? Google fucking sheets?

[isopodhours]

that "microsoft in talks to acquire discord" post is over 2 years old

oh whoops lol

[gonzodangerfeels]

Know Brahmin 3 Cub you

[tavarillasgalen]

i miss when it was the norm for movies and shows to come out on dvd and blue-ray. i want to have physical copies so i can keep them forever to watch whenever i want, not subscribe to all these different streaming services and have to worry about whether the things i like will be removed or not.

[loverboybitch]

gang i have to go to the office tomorrow for the first time since covid started for a big meeting thing with my whole department and im nervous.//.

[vexwerewolf]

The thing is, D&D is not a game.

I know that sounds insane, but hear me out: D&D is not a game, it is a games console. You don't actually "play D&D." You play "Dragon Heist" or "Tomb of Annihilation" or "Ghosts of Saltmarsh" or "your GM's homebrew campaign" or "the plot of Critical Role Season 1 reconstructed from memory" on D&D.

For quite a long while now - possibly literal decades - D&D hasn't even been the best games console, but it's been "the one everyone knows about" and "the one my friends have" and in fact it's "the one whose name is almost synonymous with the entire medium of TTRPGs," like how "Nintendo" or "Playstation" could just mean "games console" to people who didn't understand games consoles. They might not have heard of a "tabletop roleplaying game," but most people have heard of "Dungeons & Dragons."

For this extended metaphor, D&D is Nintendo back in the 90s, or Playstation in the 2000s. Sometimes you say "oh let's go to my house and play Nintendo" or "c'mon dude I wanna play Playstation" but you're not actually playing Nintendo or Playstation, you're playing Resident Evil or Super Mario Bros or Jurassic Park or Metal Gear Solid or whatever on a Nintendo or a Playstation.

Now, this metaphor is going to get even more tortured, but remember how when the PS2 and the original X-Box came out, they used a standardised DVD format, but the Nintendo console in that generation, the Gamecube, used discs but they were this proprietary tiny little disc format that they had control over? That essentially meant that it was really difficult to make third party titles for the Gamecube that did literally anything that Nintendo didn't want them to do, and also essentially gave Nintendo an even greater ability to skim money off the top of any sales?

So that must've seemed like a smart business decision in their heads. But the PS2 and the X-Box used DVDs. This was a standardized format which gave Microsoft and Sony way less control over who made games for their consoles, but that actually turned out to be a good thing for gaming, because it meant that the breadth of games that you could play on their consoles was massively increased even if some of them were games Microsoft and Sony didn't really approve of. (Also it's worth nothing that the PS2 and the X-Box could just play DVDs, which meant if your household was on a budget, you didn't need a separate DVD player - your games console could do it for you! This was actually a huge selling point!)

What Wizards are currently trying to do now is kinda-sorta the equivalent of Sony suddenly announcing that the PS5 will only accept a proprietary cartridge format they hold the patent on, will control the content of and charge money for the construction of. This possibly seems like it could be a moneymaker in your head because you hold market dominance (apparently the PS5 has 30 million units shipped compared to X-Box Series X 20 million units) and so many people make games for your console, but what it actually means is game devs and publishers will abandon your product. If it takes so much more work, the scope of what they're allowed to do is so much more limited and they're going to make less money off of it, they just won't bother. They'll go make games for the X-Box or PC instead.

To use another computer metaphor, D&D is Windows - it might not be the best system but it's the system most people are familiar with and so it gets the most stuff made for it, but there's is an upper limit on the bullshit people will take before they decide fuck it and get an Apple or learn how Linux works.

TTRPG systems are a weird product because you're not selling people a game, you're selling people a method to play a game. All the actual games are created by the community - even prewritten campaigns needs to be executed via a game master. Trying to skim money off the community will mean they'll eventually give up on you.

[dexaroth]

want to format my pc sooooo badly bc it shat itself yesterday to the point I had to button-shutdown it and this happens like every year I'm going insane.

[hunter-rodrigez]

Microsoft is putting its foot down when it comes to unauthorized controller use. The company has begun banning any third-party Xbox controllers and accessories that aren't part of the "designed for Xbox" hardware partner program.

Source

Wow, what a great move, microsoft... I bet all the disabled people out there who rely on custom-made third-party controllers will just looooove this change...

Or the fighting game community who like to custom build their own fighting pads...

Or the hardcore racing game players who build custom steering wheel setups and whatnot...

Or just the people who can't afford to dish out $70 for an "official" controller.

Or pretty much anyone who doesn't use one of your controllers for whatever reason...

Well anyway, in conclusion:

Go fuck yourself, Microsoft