Oh no, it’s gonna steal all my crypto. the crypto i totally own. my crypto. you know, the crypto i use so frequently that i need an extension in my browser to manage it. that crypto.

For whatever reason, a game company can make your “physical copy” require a digital download to function. If a company decides they don’t want you to play a game (or version) anymore, it being on a cart or disc is not insurance against it.

And if this practice continues for Switch 2 games, or was in practice for the Wii U, or etc etc…

It’s a bad practice, even if right now there are ways around it for one game. It’s a bad practice even if it’s only for the current console on the current firmware. It turned a physical copy someone bought into a keycard. I’m of the opinion that all physical console games have been keycards since the day they started having day 1 patches, but at least that argument has the reasonable counterpoint of “you can still play the buggy incomplete v1.0 that’s on the cart/disc, that makes it better than Switch 2 Game Key Cards, which are better than account-locked Digital Games”.

This is direct and complete proof that your physical copy means nothing. The company can still restrict your access whenever they want to. The Switch 1 still gets firmware updates, after all, and firmware updates can’t be rolled back. The physical copy guarantees fuck all in the face of every preservation concern that’s a criticism of digital downloads. DRM-free digital and piracy are the only trustworthy methods of preservation.

This is still yet another point against those people insisting that physical copies mean anything. Right now, it’s “just update the game and you can play it”. But that’s exactly as limiting as a digital copy - you still need an internet connection, an account in good standing, the company’s CDN to be online, and everything else to play the game that’s “on” your glorified $60 DRM key.

As more Switch 2s get firmware updated, this change means every “physical copy” of Mario Wonder has become a “Game-Key Card” retroactively. The only difference is that the download is slightly smaller for a GKC.

I’d love to see an extension that, instead of removing the client ID tracking information, instead randomizes it - and does so on inputting a link too. Removing tracking parameters needs 100% certainty, a single link clicked while signed into Google or whatever on another browser can be enough to establish a connection between you and the friend who sent the link. If I show up as clicking one link from Bob and 9 links from null, I’m still connected to Bob. But if my 10 links are from Bob, Jane, Alice, Fheism, Bggur, Daxi8, Michelle, Sssssssssss, Mgke7d, and BRomgi, good luck targeting any ads with all that noise. Especially if the systematically replaced clientIDs are recycled within the addon’s database and end up creating ghost profiles on the advertisers’ end.

Plugging *arrs into public torrent trackers is always a losing proposition. Consider either paying for usenet or getting into some entry level private trackers (lurk on Reddit’s /r/opensignups)

I use Navidrome for music because Jellyfin’s Android TV client still can’t handle playlist lengths above 300 songs.

Yeah. If this is a case of “publisher buys out studio, replaces leadership, runs game into the ground” or “leadership of indie studio sells out, coasts on gold parachute, provides no leadership to the game’s dev team” or anything in between… The game won’t be good. It certainly won’t be good in early access. It’s an easy “skip unless it turns out to be completely mindbogglingly phenomenal on launch” for me. A downgrade from its prior status of “the only thing that’ll prevent me from buying this after early access is if it’s complete dogshit”.

I didn’t buy and don’t have the console. But either way, refunds wouldn’t “hurt” Nintendo the way they would on a platform like Steam - you can’t refund Nintendo digital products, and even if Walmart accepted a return on a Switch 2 with the digital account-based (non-transferable per TOS) Mario Kart redeemed, Nintendo already made their sale by getting the thing on a Wal-Mart shelf in the first place.

It’s just silly to see a comment about “keeping” giving Nintendo $80 for mario kart when the people affected by stuff like this… Already gave Nintendo $80/$500 for Mario Kart. The “support” has already been delivered.

Anyone who knows how Mario Kart World works well enough to be bothered by this change already gave Nintendo $500 for the game. What are they gonna do? Refund it to Walmart?

you’re not particularly worried about “someone”, you’re worried about bots that are scanning IP ranges and especially default ports. A lot of people will install a program, not really understand what it does, and forward a port because the setup told them to. Then proceed to never update the program (or it’s a poorly secured program in the first place).

if they got in…

You’re trusting Jellyfin to not have some form of privilege escalation attack available. I’m not saying they do have one or that anyone’s exploiting it in the field, but yeah. Also if your Jellyfin admin account is allowed to download subtitles to content folders, a “just fuck shit up” style vandal-hacker could delete your media probably. If you mount the media read-only that wouldn’t be a concern.

Do note that without that layer you were using Pangolin for, your system might be compromised by a vulnerability in Jellyfin’s server or a brute force attack on your Jellyfin admin account.

I settled on Tubesync. Pinchflat mysteriously stopped downloading new vids from a playlist I had it monitor. Surely I could have fixed it by checking logs or whatever but Tubesync has the exact same feature list and no downsides, so I just killed my pinchflat container and spun up tubesync.

Can “your apps” access it when their device isn’t on your home LAN?

Well if you’re already a pirate you don’t need the MIG or benefit in any way from using it. Presumably you’ve got an Erista Switch or a modchip. The MIG is only for pirating stuff on modchipless Lite/Mariko/OLED/Apparently 2 (but watch out) consoles. It can’t pirate updates or DLC or eshop-only games so it’s always worse than CFW or modchips for those that can use CFW or modchips.

Game of the year. Also, if it didn’t have the RNG component, it would be a worse game. A puzzle game that inherently prevents you from stubbornly blundering down one thread is genius design, the fact that the house forces you to look at rooms you aren’t looking for leads to so many natural “aha!” moments and encourages you to be actively tracking multiple story/puzzle threads at once.

So few puzzle games care about also being good games, and I can confidently say that if Blue Prince didn’t have the excellent roguelite-inspired gameplay loop at its core I’d have dropped it without even giving it a chance. Giving you “stuff to do” as you process the lore and puzzle hints is the secret sauce. The game’s themes of inheritance tie in perfectly to the strategic mastery curve of learning how to influence the manor. Having a source of “payoff” emotions other than “solving a puzzle” keeps the moment to moment gameplay fresh, and if you’re playing it for long enough that stuff like allowance tokens and stars stop feeling like rewards, you’ll also have access to so many luck-mitigating tools that I can confidently say it’s a skill issue if you’re still fighting the drafting system.

The natural progression from “the objective is to wrangle the house into giving me what I KNOW i want” to “the house is just like this, and I can search it to find new things to want” to “I know how to make this house sing” is perfectly executed ludonarrative harmony. You learn the rooms so much better when you’re forced to walk through them on consecutive days. Upgrades and rarity tweaks give you so much power. The drafting system isn’t a barrier to you solving puzzles. It’s a strategy game that you can be good or bad at. And a lot of people that are frustrated at that system’s existence are refusing to treat it as something you can get good at. It’s a Dark Souls boss fight - practice with intentionality, explore solutions and ideas, fail frequently, learn from failure, be rewarded with mastery.

People just aren’t receptive to the idea of “challenge” in a game that isn’t precision timing or stat sheet optimizing. The house mechanic of Blue Prince is a relatively challenging strategy game, and part of the challenge is recognizing how to interface with it at all. A lot of people come to the game ready for challenging puzzles but not a strategy game, and for those BP will feel like “RNG getting in the way of my puzzle solving”. That’s fair, but I’d liken that attitude to coming into Elden Ring and complaining that all these boss fights are in the way of the lore. Strategy games might not be your thing, and maybe you didn’t know BP would be one, and that’s okay. But for those that like challenging strategy games and intricate puzzles, there’s nothing quite like Blue Prince.

I’d take an Apple loss over an Epic one any day here. Apple’s walled garden philosophy has permanently damaged the tech literacy of an entire generation, and the fact that ~half of all people that want to use a smartphone to do things simply can’t just install a FOSS application downloaded from Github to do the thing is an atrocity. Apple getting away with it also emboldens Google to make their phones/tablets into “gadgets” instead of “computers” with stuff like file permissions policies (that became so restrictive that the devs for Syncthing simply gave up on Android as a platform).

Meanwhile, Epic’s greatest evil that affects me is that I don’t play some video games because they’re exclusive to Epic’s store, and also some video games are worse because it “just makes too much financial sense” for AAA devs to release UE5 slop. Operating systems and programs are more important than video games, and video games as a medium are more restricted by stuff like what Apple’s doing than what the AAA devs do to generate shareholder value.

With a phone, there’s a type of controller that wraps around the phone, turning it into a Switch form factor. That’s probably the middle ground between atrocious touchscreen d-pads (or only playing games that actually work well with touch controls) versus lugging around a Dualsense and some mount contraption or kickstanding your phone on a surface.

Waterfox does this with an improved implementation of tree style tabs. Also zero Mozilla Corp telemetry, opt-in or otherwise.