emptyother

A cookie banner with "Yes track me" and "Choose how much you want us to track you" button (on the retailer for my country, doesn't seem to appear on the dot com site) doesn't inspire confidence.

Hows their ink screens? I stayed with kindle primarily for their paperwhite, which is darn comfortable even in direct sunlight.

The most active famous person I've found on Mastodon is @georgetakei@universeodon.com .

Other famous people:

• @JenMsft@mastodon.social - Popular Microsoft engineer. Active.
• @neilhimself@mastodon.social - Neil Gaiman. Not very active, mostly do reposts. He said he'd answer on Mastodon though, if he can.
• @shanselman@hachyderm.io - Scott Hanselman. Popular Microsoft dev. Active.
• @adamconover@mastodon.social - Adam Conover. Occasionally posts a youtube link to his show. Not much more interaction.
• @JeriLRyan@mastodon.world - Jeri Ryan, another Star Trek actor. Not active for 2 months now.
• @gretathunberg@mastodon.nu Greta Thunberg. Not posted anything for a few months now.

Terrible Star Wars fan fiction is what we get anyway, just look at Disney's trilogy. Its already changed. Its creator(s) doesn't even have a say anymore. If anyone could make Star Wars, we could vote for the one taking it in the best direction with our wallets.

Theres of course a bit room outside of established universes, but why should we, when its the in-universe story that has occupied our minds for decades? Why re-invent everything for every story now when we once didn't have to? What gives modern people this permanent ownership of an idea that past people didn't? Why aren't we allowed to use Hobbits, but we use halflings which everyones know is just hobbits in all but name. Why can't we use Beholders and Illithids when its common knowledge what they are? What if Santa Claus was a copyrighted character belonging to Coca Cola? Or still belonged to the Dickens family so Coke never hired an artist to create the Santa Claus as we know today?

Also this obsession with "canon", its stories not actual events. Its fun to have a shared understanding of past fictional events, but obsessing too much over it isn't healthy for the fiction. But thats a different discussion.

If your idea of retelling and improving upon a story is to carefully create a similar-ish general plotline in a different setting that doesn't overlap enough to be sued by the previous author, for "retelling and improving"... You miss out.

How crazy it is that creators have to go out of their way to not name something that looks and act like a lightsaber, a lightsaber. For a century! Everyone knows what a lightsaber is. It is part of our culture now. But we cant re-use them as is in any creative work (except for parodies) without begging Disney to pay for the privilege to use it if we are well-known enough. Its silly.

That we've retold and improved stories for the most of human existence, suddenly we don't. Thats what I mean with holding culture hostage.

I agree there should be some protections for artists, but not a hundred years. It should be close enough that the media is still relevant to the generation that it was presented to. Yeah, it would take drastic changes, but we got ourselves into this, we should be able to turn it back.

I find it insane that tvshows regularly show people watching 70+ year old tvshows. Nobody does that in real life. Doesn't feel authentic.

I find it insane that we've reused characters in stories for thousands of years, but just a century ago it suddenly became illegal until almost every character was old enough to be forgotten and culturally irrelevant.

Fan fiction of relatively new IPs should be sellable, imho, without having to beg a corporation for permission. Its stuff we've grown up on. Disney and others are literally holding our culture hostage and dictates terms.

It hasn't yet? Jeez.

Only when Im on a remote computer that doesn't support winget. I'm too lazy to download the installer.

I too got burned on music streaming services. When Spotify replaced my Hotel California with a cover song bad enough to make my ears bleed. Local files forever.

Store your mp3s on a cloud storage, and use androids CloudPlayer to stream them anywhere. I got 24 gb of mp3s on onedrive. And it takes up no space on my laptop because I've set it to download on demand. And the files are always downloaded to my main computer so that my backup picks them up.

Same. Haven't found one I like the smell of yet. I'd rather shower more often than use them.

World of Warcraft released. Before that only nerds and losers played PC games, according to some.

Eh.. Mirage is back to the old. Very minor skill-tree. Everything dies easy. No real sidequests. Social stealth works better.

But... It feels like a copy of AC. Like someone else without access to the source code of the originals tried to re-create it in Origins' engine. Also the cutscenes kinda suck. And the city is a bit un-impressive and repetative.