Anonymous asked:
y r u lonely.
orteil42 answered:
to live is to yearn, my friend
Yearning and lonliness are feelings born from love. OP is not a girl, but expresses a feeling that a girl might feel for another girl.
Conclusion: This is yuri.
See more posts like this on Tumblr
#this too is yuri
ALT
ALT
ALTthis is the most tumblrified man to have ever existed
I know a guy, but the guy is Google
Me: Thank God I’m not experiencing Tumblr’s new UI update that everyone’s complaining about. I would absolutely hate it.
Tumblr: …
Tumblr: Here is a different UI update than what is being talked about.
oops
think i figured out how to replicate this (you're welcome dev team (btw hire me @staff))
I think that’s enough for the night.
I think i’m finally starting to get the hang of this painting business????
Only 13 percent of video games are readily playable and accessible. No other form of media is as endangered as video games. There is no legal path to preserve or archive video games. You can go to libraries and archives for books years out of print. You can rent a movie or download a pdf. There is no legal equivalent for video games. Games companies do not double as archival organisations and they never will. They have never been about preserving. They are about selling. Which is not inherently evil compared to anyone else but they along with the law are directly preventing archivers and preservationists from doing their job and allowing this entire medium to be experienced in the future.
Think of some of the most influential video games of all time. How many of them can you play right now. Without piracy. How many of these could your not very technology literate friend play. How do you think this is affecting not only the wider industry now but also people in the future. And for completely arbitrary meaningless reasons.
Actually I'm curious.
When we DO include romsites and so on, when we do include piracy - how much does this percentage jump up?
I know a lot of games are lost media, but rom enthusiasts have archivist-like zeal to find anything possible. People dump games that don't officially exist, like bootlegs (though 99% of bootlegs aren't actual real games and just minimally changed pirated romhacks, people still dump them for the few diamonds in the rough that are genuine original games)
so the thing is: it's a bunch, but it's nowhere near 100%. I don't have numbers, but I've been keeping an eye on a lot of efforts in this area, especially involving the most at-risk games collections, like Apple II games (they were on floppy disks: floppy disks die way faster than cartridges or CD/DVD-ROMs).
The problem is that piracy is generally focused on the popular games. You're gonna have a lot of people lining up to figure out how to pirate the new Mario game or the newest AAA shooter, but the smaller more niche games don't get the same attention. It doesn't take much copy protection for those to not get preserved, just because no sufficiently skilled hacker took the time to focus on cracking them.
So while consoles like the NES or Genesis might have nearly 100% of their games preserved (and it's only "nearly" because there's so many weird bootlegs out there), a system like the Apple II or DOS PC will have literally hundreds or thousands of games that have slipped through the cracks (no pun intended, I promise).
There's also the problem for newer system that piracy is not preservation: See, newer games are not as one-and-done as older games, where you get a disc/cart and you put it in the console and it plays, and that's the full experience. It's now super super common for the game on the disc to require a bunch of updates downloaded to it to bring it up to a more functional version, because the version that went to manufacturing still had a bunch of bugs that they needed to fix, and they fixed them between release-to-manufacturing and when the game actually hit store shelves. We can argue about how games "shouldn't" do this, but the fact of the matter is: they do. A lot.
And here's where piracy is not preservation: These consoles have complicated anti-copying systems built in. The mod chips and softmods hack around that, and convince the console you have a legitimate copy, right?
You know what they don't do? INCLUDE THE UPDATES. The console now thinks you have the game legitimately, so they can go get the updates from the normal, legitimate source: the console's servers.
So what happens a few years down the road when those servers get discontinued? Well, legitimate users will still have the discs, and you can always download pirated copies of the game onto a modded console... but the updates are now gone. Pirates don't have a reason to preserve the updates, that's not a required part of piracy. But it means that piracy won't save the game, not 100%. We'll still have a playable copy of the game (hopefully, unless it shipped literally broken) but it'll be limited to the launch-day version of it, minus all the fixes they applied later. Depending on how much they patched the game after launch, that could be anything from a minor difference (a few bugs that speedrunners take advantage of) or a game that's nearly unbeatable due to crashes and glitches.
So yeah. Even with piracy we're still doing kinda abysmally.
Also, a key point from the article is the "readily playable" part. So even with piracy an NES game is arguably "readily playable". 30 seconds to find a ROM, a couple minutes to install an emulator, and bam, playable.
OKAY, what about a PC game from 1997? How readily playable is that?
Because right now there's a huge gap in PC gaming. "relatively recent" games, meaning like ~2005 and onward, are playable natively on windows, usually without major problems. Really old games, like DOS stuff (so like, 1981-1996), is readily playable in DOSBox.
That still leaves a gap of nearly a decade where it can be very difficult to get anything to work. Games made specifically for Windows 9x may not even install on a modern windows (They used 16-bit installers, which 64bit windows refuses to support), and those that do may not handle running on an NT-based OS. Let alone if they want older 3D acceleration like 3DFX cards, or other deprecated APIs.
Most of the playable games from that KINDA IMPORTANT PERIOD IN GAMING HISTORY (you know, from when Fallout 1-2, Half-Life, Starcraft, Unreal, Age of Empires 2, System Shock 2, RollerCoaster Tycoon, The Sims, Deus Ex, Counter Strike, Max Payne, Warcraft III, & Doom 3 came out?) are that way because they either got official updates long after release, they got HD remakes, or they got lots of fan-patches. Which is great, except not all games get that. If your favorite game when you were a kid was Microforum's SoulTrap, you're probably in trouble.
And believe me, I say that as someone who has virtual machines for days and a pile of old computers on hand! I can (and have) literally put together a Windows 98 machine for fun, and it's STILL hard to play a lot of games from this era. You may be able to pirate them, but can you actually play them? Like, you know how I have porn tapes I can't watch? They certainly aren't preserved, not in that format at least. I can "have them" all day, but if there's no way to play them, they aren't terribly well preserved.
So yeah. tl;dr: piracy helps (and piracy has always been an important part of game preservation, don't get me wrong), but it doesn't really alleviate the problem.
