Ironic that a government overthrow led by a shadow cabal of tech billionaires basically comes down to “they plan on turning it off and on again”

I kinda feel like Terra developed a bit more over the course of the game, from orphan half-fey under the control of the empire to joining a rebel group while finding herself and discovering her past. In the end she doesn’t get assigned a “love interest” and become mother to a bunch of war-orphans as she gets in touch with her humanity.

Celes comes in a bit more badass to start - as a super-soldier-serum (magic infused) general who turned against the same immoral empire - but a lot of her side story aside from the island is a bit… weird what with the whole Locke Ultros opera thing. It’s like the story writers couldn’t decide whether she was a superhero or damsel in distress.

Locke’s own backstory with the Phoenix quest is neat though.

Yeah that was my first thought. Better learn about corporate greed from a “smart display” then a >$1k appliance (but better not to buy them at all).

The irony is intentional to show they’re immune to consequences

Isn’t FTL more of a base (ship) builder than a space dogfight type game?

Sounds good until you think on who is buying the “family farm”, and that would be some megacorp that’s going to dominate the market to jack up prices, go cheap with filler or unhealthy shit, and probably be owned by at the top by some equally racist, fascist fucker who is helping support the whole Trump agenda

Honestly if he really is ill, I very much wouldn’t put it past them to off him themselves and blame the “radical left” in order to kick off the civil war they keep trying for.

The next few years would end up being “weekend at Bernie’s, Trump edition”

It was everything for awhile, but the end architecture design did allow people to choose to not use secure-boot or to load their own keys on some boards. It did make some devices - mainly tabletized laptops - pretty much unusable for anything but the installed OS though.

Browser DRM though… That’s just getting started

I setup a mini PC that runs as a PXE server. Pretty much anything with an Ethernet port can boot from it and play a bunch of of classic games I’ve got on disc, plus some GoG titles etc. It’s awesome.

Projects like OpenSpy also make some of the old dead titles playable again

This is one reason why the changes to the boot process on X86 were a major concern, if machines only boot an an OS with a “trusted” signing keys then it is a pretty straight path to MS-only. Lack of published architecture assist gets here and there are X86 machines that will fail spectacularly on Linux due to this (weird EFI boot stuff, certain chipsets for such drivers can’t be had or made, etc). Hardware-level DRM is a major threat.

Then add in stuff like browser-based DRM. Oh cool, you can install whatever you want but this differently stuff will only play on Chrome with the DRM extension enabled, maybe sending CPUID info, and doing a bunch of other stuff for lock-in that makes the IE6+ActiveX/MS-JS pale in comparison

Meanwhile, the DoD is like: “Hey, anyone else kinda wondering why these bombs, ammunition boxes, and rifles are all kinds bat-shaped. Wayne enterprises is weird”

I much prefer owned media over subscriptions, but this is perhaps one area where they’re actually good. A bad business decision that drives away customers can have a pretty immediate and visible impact on revenue. It’s not “hey nobody bought our latest release, blame racism/sexism/wokeness” or whatever other whipping-boy they choose to bury their heads in the sand with, it’s “we did a thing and within days to a month people were leaving us.”

In many cases, this drives them to actually pay attention to customer reactions. We’ve seen the same with Disney in regards to Kimmel and I wouldn’t be surprised to see recent changes to Gamepass have a similar impact. I hate to say it, but subscriptions like this really do allow customers to vote with their wallets.

Which is also why many are probably going to try to lock more customers in to longer terms, add gimmicks, and generally make it harder to unsubscribe. Kinda like phone companies. We’ll likely end up with a “streaming sign-up/connection fee” and offers like “**free Frozen tablet with a two year Disney+ subscription”

** regular price $599, applied as a discount from your regular bill over 24mo

Yeah but there’s different stages of crazy. There’s “micro-managing credit-stealing dick boss” level, and then there’s “help foreign enemies hack the government while throwing Nazi salutes” level.

Initially, he looked to be on a similar level up Jobs or many other narcissistic upper-management types in a gadget-cult, which - sadly - is not so uncommon and that many people accept

Well, that and the murder-friendly administration publicly announcing that you’re going to pursue the death penalty hard probably makes it a whole lot less likely people are gonna try a plea

Yeah I’ve had more than a few things where the ONLY thing that shows is the ad, and then the content roll fails and/or it just keeps looping ads with no content

Kid can just move on to something else. There’s plenty of content out there even without sailing the high seas

I’ve never heard being elected official as a criteria for the term, the dictionary definition of assassination is

“the premeditated act of killing someone suddenly or secretively, especially a prominent person.”

And there have been plenty of non-electoral assassinations, including those by (or of) mob figures, journalists, and many others.

Touch volume control and digital on/off is the stupidest shit ever