GP didn’t say that they were playing them on disk, only that they owned them on disc. Backing up PS3 games is relatively easy these days. I fully expect PS3 emulation to be good enough long before working PS3s are unobtainium.
“Plays are ephemeral and should really be enjoyed in the now. Even if you can perfectly preserve a play, and the means to perform it, tastes change so quickly in theatre that a play that’s entertaining today might not be enjoyable even a year later.” - you, in the 1620s, probably.
Now imagine that the play cannot be altered (game build), it can only be performed on a specifically shaped stage (hardware requirements), actors can only be replaced by lookalikes (‘remaster’ tweaks), it can only be performed with a full theatre (online requirements), and the playwright retains the only copy of the play (source code).
Then you start to approach the problem that is gaming.
Which is exactly why more needs to be done by governments to stop this. A simple fix would be to say that in order to qualify for copyright protection, a national archive reserves the right to request a functional copy of the work in a form compatible with any future data migration projects.
People have been altering plays for ages without much issue (just look at the mod community), emulating and porting plays to different stages, and even reverse engineering their own copies of the script.
The only real catch has been online stuff and even that is sometimes worked around or recreated. It's not an impossible task to solve the problem of making games playable into the future, but it'll probably require legislation to force game companies to preserve their game and server code to allow for it.
Is it? I can install every version of Minecraft all the way back to Alpha if I want. I can roll Factorio back to any version until 0.12. I can pick exactly which of thirty seven thousand OpenSSL commits to install. Many arcade ports of games targeted at enthusiasts come with every revision on disc and let the user decide. My copy of Blade Runner came with three different versions in one box. We have had the technology to preserve every version of every significant work for decades. If the re-issue doesn’t preserve the option to experience the original, it’s entirely because the publishers chose to not make it available.
You’re making my point for me. The original is still available. Issuing a new version does not destroy the original the way that person destroyed that fresco.
In most cases, the original is not available. I was listing exceptions showing that it was possible. People don’t reprint if there’s still lots of copies sitting on store shelves. Even going to eBay and dealing with scammers, fakes, damaged discs, and scalpers, the new thing and the old thing have the same title, so finding listings for a specific printing isn’t always possible, and information about what’s changed isn’t readily available. And of course, if you’re ‘buying’ digitally, the new version does often destroy the original, even if the original was what you paid for.
Listen to yourself. You’re equating the destruction of an original piece of art to the horrors of buying something from eBay. It’s utterly pathetic. The world isn’t obligated to cater to your desires. “But there are scammers!” Sometimes getting what you want takes a bit of effort. Requiring you to spend more than thirty seconds obtaining the original is not equivalent to destroying it.
I never said that; you’re just straight-up lying about me equating those two things. I wasn’t even responding to that. Maybe you should listen to what people are saying before telling them to listen to themselves.
You're in a comment thread where correcting errors in a movie was compared to the destruction of a fresco. I argued it was not the same because the original is still available in the former case. Your argument is that it is not actually available. I don't know how else I'm supposed to interpret this. If the original is not available then it's an act of destruction. If the original is available then it's fine.
Where it goes off the rails is when you say the original is not available when it plainly is, you just don't want to deal with the very minor hassle of buying a used copy.
I think perhaps more interestingly, they presumably had the opportunity to create a phonetic system like Hangul or hiragana, and certainly the institutional power to force any change through if they really wanted to, but elected not to.
Ah, yes. The romanization movement of Chinese characters[0]. We do have a pinyin system that bacame extremely important when computers came into China. If you didn't know pinyin, you would have to use other complicated methods (e.g. Wubi) to type in Chinese, which requires memorizing a whole new system.
I have never once heard anyone pronounce the ‘l’s in ‘tortilla’ as if it was a Germanic word. And if anything, I hear people hypercorrect and insert ‘ñ’ where it shouldn’t (It’s not ‘habañero’, dammit) more than I hear them drop it from ‘jalapeño’.
I say we should double down and say ‘English is no longer phonetic. There are 26 symbols which are arranged into words arbitrarily, and you just have to learn every reading by rote.’
Every sentence should be like trying to read: ‘Siobhan Llewellyn-Nguyen ate the jalapeño and dulce de leche gyōza that she kept in her Versace bag alongside an unopened bottle of Moët-flavoured weißbier.’
All those non-English words you used do actually come from languages with phonetic alphabets (albeit only in one direction for French).
And while English spelling is inconsistent an educated native speaker can often pronounce newly-seen words with decent accuracy based on previous encounters with similar words so it’s not completely arbitrary.
English spelling gives you a pretty good idea of a word’s origin, which gives you a hint to its pronunciation. And this phenomenon of importing foreign words unchanged is hardly new so I think it’s something most native speakers would be familiar with.
Personally I really like English’s spelling. I like being able to look at a word and have a good idea of what its origin is, I think it adds something to the language. Reading English is like looking back through time. I understand the arguments for phoneticisation but I really think we would lose something great in the process.
I have an awesome circle of people on Bluesky that I'm connected with that very much care about each others feelings. I'm sure that's not universal on there, but the corner that I'm in on there has probably been my most pleasant experience on the internet ever.
No it isn't. I have plans to meet people I originally connected with on Bluesky in person. I have received physical mail from people on the other side of the world that I connected with on Bluesky. I connected a person I met on their with my mother due to related personal struggles. Making this claim is really weird when you don't know anything about me or my friends.
I think it’s notable that your examples of people caring on Bluesky all involve moving to a channel other than Bluesky. Surely if the emotional connection were real, you wouldn’t need to move off social media to facilitate it?
This is one of the weirder contemporary "anti-woke" takes. For one thing, that which is performative can easily also be genuine, and quite arguably if one feels genuine about something then one ought to perform it, hopefully in a way that makes it attractive to other people.
But on the subject of whether things are genuine or not, I see lots of actual, cash on the table, give money, mutual aid in these communities. I could understand performance as being artificial, but if someone is dropping cash to help a person out of a bad situation, that seems a pretty good definition of authentic to me.
In any case, "it's performative" simply does not imply it is not also real.
‘Slop’ was a 2024 Oxford Dictionary word-of-the-year candidate, and what most of the people using it probably don’t realise is that it originated on 4chan as an abbreviation of ‘goyslop’.
A better phrasing is ‘If you were wrong, how would you know?’. It has the same end state, but positions things as an internal revelation rather than a potential loss of face, so is less likely to trigger a defensive response.
