Finding out AI companies are chewing through - literally, they’re pulping and burning them as they go - millions of books often including 1/1s and old texts that cannot be reprinted
Meanwhile there’s always some dipshit telling me AI is the future and we’ve got to just let companies erase human history and literature so they can train their abomination machines to pretend to think like people because a judge said it’s fine
Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.
They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.
Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.
You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.
This article specifically notes:
For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.
GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.
Other important quotes:
What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.
Two things back that up:
There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.
Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.
Here's the complaint filed to the court, the primary source for the case mentioned in the article. You can find mentions of GDID on page 30 of the document or 34 of the PDF.
I was telling a dude about a TTRPG project I'm working on where you play as wizards whose magic is incapable of harming living beings, so you must find non-violent methods of solving violent situations, and his immediate response was, "You're alienating too many players! The game should be about finding loopholes in the magic rules so you CAN kill people!"
I don't think I've ever had such a visceral reaction to a single sentence.
He understands both the wizard mindset and the TTRPG player mindset perfectly. The very first thing players will do is ask whether there's a tree or a rock nearby they can magically drop over someone, or if they can summon something non-magical that can still bite a human to death.
Like, this is the default approach to "magic immunity" enemies.
One thing that makes me kinda sad is seeing people who feel like TTRPGs just aren't for them because they bounced off of some element that is clearly just a symptom of them trying out D&D5e. Like people who have had a hard time with learning the rules would probably do well with any system where the rule formatting and play culture around learning them aren't a mess. One friend of mine didn't like waiting a long time for turns to come up in combat, not even knowing that many games don't even use a turn-based structure.
A lot of D&D5e defenders on here like to claim that asking someone to learn a new system is "gatekeeping" somehow, but I'd argue that acting like one game is emblematic of the entire medium to the exclusion of people who don't click with that one game is way more meaningfully a form of gatekeeping, even if it's fully unintentional.
I strongly believe that not all RPGs are gonna appeal to everyone, but there is an RPG out there for everyone, and I just hope that people who haven't clicked with the most common option to be introduced to can find something that works for them.
The irony of positioning system-obsessed gearheads as the ideological opposite of Collaborative Storytelling wonks who think all tabletop RPGs ultimately have identical creative goals from which the actual text is a mere distraction is that if you actually talk to both, the second guy is considerably more likely to be the one who's never heard of any tabletop RPGs other than Dungeons & Dragons.
Like, you can totally see how one would get there. If you start with the false assumption that collaborative storytelling is the central creative goal of all tabletop RPGs, and compound it with the false assumption that all tabletop RPGs are essentially similar to D&D, "the text of tabletop RPGs is unrelated to their goals" is the inevitable conclusion – but you'd have to be tremendously incurious to just let that conclusion stand rather than thinking "hey, wait a fucking minute".
You can have a little contempt. But your love for the source material should always be much bigger than said contempt. Otherwise it's no longer a fan project, it's a tear-down of the original.
How many video games are in your backlog right now?
Feed your dashboard by answering my question, blogger.
Bigods, there's a lot. Like maybe a couple dozen at the least. I haven't even played most of the stuff I bought in the last 12 months, because my free time has been devoured by the monster known as World of Warcraft.
The whole "this isn't a real problem because ultimately the GM decides" thing annoys me not only because it's a cop-out, but also because it's vacuously true of any game which adheres to the trad many-players-one-GM model. I could shit on a page and say what it means is up to the GM's interpretation, and that would technically be a true statement, but unless your group are a very particular kind of freaks, the circumstances in which it's a useful statement are very limited!
Trad games' biggest advantage is having rules to shape the game without requiring nearly as much buy-in or GM interference. If the argument goes "the GM can fix it", it's not an argument, it's an admission of defeat.
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