I’ve held off rewatching Rogue One until Andor season two finishes, so the former isn’t fresh in my mind, but there is plenty of character development in Andor. He’s the “guy who gets shit done” but at the beginning of the show, he’s reckless and only in it for himself. In that season he sees first hand how the evils of the Empire affect his life, recognizes how his selfishness negatively impacts those around him, sees what it means to be part of something bigger than yourself, and is able to (sort of) move on from a life that revolves around his missing sister. The Rebellion gives him something to focus on and be apart of.

The ending of episode 6, exactly halfway through the season, is also a perfect midpoint for this arc. He’s approached by somebody that’s in it for themselves, and the reckless, reactive part of Andor reflexively shoots him. He’s refuting the selfish part of himself that would have done the very same thing, but the reckless “shoot first think later” part of him is still alive and well.

is all knowledge based on faith

It’s based on assumption, not faith. If we can trust our senses, and if things will continue to be as they have been, then the things we are learning have value. As long as you can recognize that everything could in theory end or completely change at any moment, it’s not blind belief.

Doesn’t really seem spoilery to me at all. Alan Wake - and Remedy in general - is very into surreal weirdness and world fuckery. He’s mostly talking about audiences being receptive to pushing creative boundaries.

This does not apply when you can move or make your own instance. It’s like complaining about tyranny inside your own house. Like, what?

I think a perfectly acceptable line to draw is “Is it reasonable to expect a large majority of the people on this instance would want this other instance blocked?” If the answer is yes, block them. If somebody has a problem with that, move to a different instance.

I don’t really understand what the problem is.

“Instances” at the bottom of the page will take you to a list of, I believe, federated instances, and at the very bottom, blocked instances.

I favor free speech over censorship any day. Alex did not cross the criminal line which is where I think free speech can be ignored.

I refer to my original reply. Your bar is so low that it would turn any forum into garbage.

You claimed “he shouldn’t have been banned”. Yet by your logic, any service is justified in banning any user for any reason, thus there is no reason that he should not have been banned in the first place.

Yes? The point is that his rules are shit, thus his website is shit.

The left doesn’t want free speech.

You’ve placed the bar so low that this suggests there is nothing an individual person can say or do that would warrant being banned, which is frankly bullshit. Every forum has rules, including this one, as it should. This is critical for maintaining a place of a discussion that is actually useful. I see no reason why “yeah but they’re popular” should give license to skirt the rules.

Freedom of speech, in the US at least, exists specifically to prevent the state from restricting speech. That’s all it is, and all it needs to be. Banning users from a private website does not contradict this.

The suggestion that unbanning Alex Jones makes the service less susceptible to ‘ignorant propaganda’ is also laughable.

My hot take is that you don’t actually want fewer streamers. As it stands, pirates benefit the most from content wars because the services are paying more to produce shows than they are receiving in subscriptions.

The obvious losses are legacy content and access to it. I don’t know that there’s a good solution. A streaming service benefits most from surfacing content that will keep you on the platform, meaning either a modern series with promised future seasons, or older content that’s still popular. Any old obscure media is going to lose money for rights holders on a $/stream deal because they could potentially make more $ from a single physical media sale than any amount of streaming would net them (if it’s $/stream, and only 2 people stream it, that’s very little return). And nobody subscribing to these services is going to shell out more money for specific titles because to them, that’s why they’re subscribing in the first place.

I don’t dispute they provide value, but why 30%? Why not 35? Or 25? or 80? or 3? or 29? I don’t know.

I’m curious, how much of that 30% do you think feeds back into making Steam better and keeping it running?

I think it’s better to reframe the question as “Are there downsides to Valve’s PC market dominance?” or “How is Steam’s 30% cut different from Xbox or Playstation?”

For the latter: it’s worth noting that Microsoft and Sony sell their hardware at a loss, and make up the difference through software, so there are obvious developer benefits to the 70-30 split. For Steam, the equivalent value-add for developers is only the platform itself, and I would wager for many of those developers the biggest reason for selling on Steam is not the feature set - though obviously useful - but because that’s where the users are.

So, users get a feature-rich distribution platform, and developers (and by extension users) pay a tax to access those users. So the question is, how fair is that tax, and what effect does that tax have on the games that get made? Your view on that is going to depend on what you want from Steam, but more relevant I think is how much Steam costs to operate. How much of that 30% cut feeds back into Steam? My guess is not much; though I could be wrong.

But anyway, let’s imagine you took away half the 30% cut. Where does that money go? Well, one of two places: either your pocket, or the developers (or publishers) pocket (depending on how the change affects pricing). The benefits to your pocket are obvious, but what if developers just charge the same price? Well, as far as I’m aware, a lot of games are just not profitable - I read somewhere that for every 10 games, 7 fail, 2 break even, and 1 is a huge success - so my personal view is that this is an industry where developers need all the help they can get. If that extra 15% helps them stay afloat long enough to put out the next thing without selling their soul to Microsoft or Sony or whoever is buying up companies these days, and Steam isn’t severely negatively impacted, I’d call that a win.

But of course, that won’t happen, because Steam has no reason to change. That’s where the users are, and they are fine with the status quo.

I wonder if people would be interested in a “lurker” instance that disables comments/posts/etc. entirely. A “read-only” instance for the people who really hate the idea of being defederated, lol.