MudMan

It’s not just the games that support it, it will also tag other metadata it knows automatically on all games, like achievement unlocks. And you can manually add tags, too. It’s all telemetry that Valve and the devs are already extracting from you, of course, plus whatever you volunteer in manual markers, but it’s still a bit creepy to see it laid out on a timeline like that.

Well, it’s two different things, one is the background record, which is less “freaking out” and more “not for me on PC”.

The other is blending the background recording with metadata on a timeline, which starts getting Recall-y in terms of logging a video recording of what you were doing where there is also a data record of what you were doing. I do think that part starts stepping over to kinda creepy.

It’s more useful here than as a OS feature, though, because yeah, I can see it saving one the trouble of recording different matches separately or having to scrub back and forth to find certain things.

Yeah, I get that, but that’s also true of Steam Link and Steam’s general streaming solution (which I presume is what this is using) and it’s trivial to get a different window to show up or even to get to the desktop from the in-game streaming, particularly if you have a non-Steam app in your library.

So yeah, it’s gonna be on demand recordings from me… assuming the quality holds up (Nvidia’s kinda sucks). Otherwise that’s what OBS is for.

Well, that was MS’s argument and I don’t think it flies there either.

On a console it’s fine, it’s only ever gonna catch a game. On the Steam Deck as well, same deal.

For a desktop PC that you also use for work and media and other stuff… yeah, I want to be extra sure that if I alt-tab from a game to quickly answer some work email that’s not going to accidentally be recorded anywhere, even locally. Like Recall, I can see people who would not mind that as long as the data stays in their computer, I myself like knowing that I don’t accidentally leave exposed files with potentially sensitive information laying around without my knowledge.

I mean, it’s fine, it just means turning the feature off. I don’t use the equivalent feature from Nvidia for the same reasons. I still think it’s funny that MS got (rightfully) put on blast for basically doing this and then Apple and Valve both announced similar features immediately afterwards. It’s made for some awkward mental gymnastics on the Internet recently.

Hah. So if you turn the background recording on it keeps a browsable timeline with metadata about which modes you were playing, presumably based on your rich presence data?

How freaked out do you think everyone at Valve was this past month watching Microsoft’s Recall feature get ripped to shreds?

All joking aside, I do not trust background recording on PC. I’ve seen how easy it is to bypass Steam Link’s restritions on streaming your desktop, I guarantee that some of these clips would end up with something I don’t want in them. I do think metadata annotation on long manual recordings is potentially interesting, but it IS creepy.

Neat. Not the version I played, and arguably a lot of those issues were fixed in the PC port. But then, there are a lot more options for accurate hardware-level emulation and preservation of period-appropriate Amiga than the much muddier explosion of PC specs, so it’s weirdly a cleaner way to preserve an optimal version.

I’m never sure how much to push early releases like these, though. Is the clumsy one-unit-at-a-time approach to Dune 2 worth messing with? Or do you just go play the (extremely good) remaster of Command & Conquer at that point?

Even better. There’s a solid chance Bumble wasn’t even born when loss.jpg happened.

What a life.

“Under the age of 30”, huh?

Alright, nerds, just so we’re clear, that was more than 15 years ago. Assuming this is current, which it probably isn’t, that “53yo” dad was in his late 30s at the time, could very much have been posting about it when it happened. Given the current average age for having kids, “bumblebeebats” was probably wearing diapers by the time the Internet got to the point of entirely abstracting it to shapes. There is a longer period of time between loss.jpg and now than between the first rickroll and loss.jpg.

If it makes you feel any better, all of this is hurting me just as bad as it’s hurting you.

I wonder, too. Pro-EU centre-right parties and social democrat parties still hold a majority, so on these things I’m not sure we’ll see a major shift, but I genuinely haven’t checked the voting record to see if the far right parties generally take a different stance on the more pedestrian consumer protection regulations or not. I probably should do that.

I see next to zero discussion about Gaza here.

People seem to be arguing about whether vandalizing libraries is good or bad. It’s bad, for the record.

Of course that’s only failure if your goal is for people to talk about the thing you’re supposed to care about. If your goal happens to be to get people to talk about you, screw Gaza or anybody else… well, then yeah, mission accomplished. We can all go home now.

Hah. I can tell.

My politics are real world politics. As in, from lived experience. So no, they don’t line up with your cosplay categories. Because it’s not a football match, or good guys vs bad guys. It’s people’s lives, where what you do has real consequences.

So while I’m way to the left of Biden, I am also not an idiot and precisely because I saw what 4 years of Trump did I am telling you that a second Trump term should be avoided by all means necessary. It’s not even a lesser evil, Biden has done pretty alright, by most counts. But even if it was a lesser evil, Trump is a Netanyahu ally, a Putin ally, a fundamentally incompetent anarchocapitalist fascist, an overt racist, an authoritarian with plans to persecute his political opponents and… you know, an actual rapist. You’d think at least one of those would be disqualifying for anybody not pretending to a be a progressive.

And no, I didn’t “live in anecdote” I live in a whole ass country that was a fascist dictatorship for decades. It’s pretty statistically significant, that.

I’m less worried about what will change if people vote for Biden (which hey, I’m actually pretty sure whatever change happens will be for the better, as it has been this term).

I’m way more worried about waht will change if people don’t vote for Biden.

Also, how do you figure the Palestine situation would have gone under Trump, who is the actual guy who reversed 70 years of foreign policy to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and made West Bank settlements legal? How do you think that situation develops the day after Trump wins again?

See, the difference is that when you protest police violence to a future Biden administration he’ll have at most a political problem to manage for the next election and may feel the need to enforce some change in regulation to address it.

When my parents protested the work camps and death sentences for political prisoners during actual fascism (they were both involved to different degrees with banned socialist and communist organizations) the government found that to be a nuisance at worst, a chance to enact more political cleansing at best, so they sent people like that other guy.

So yes, there is a difference. And yes, that guy sounded suspiciously like Trump and not at all like Biden. By the way, like Trump, he was actually funny and charsimatic. I didn’t hate him or dislike him. This is a weird thing to talk about because cosplayers talk about this as a hypothetical or a disingenous argument for online clout, but I’m telling you about a real person I knew and had a relationship with.

Oh, I can help. My best friend’s grandpa was a cop under fascism. He still had the gun he used to hunt down communists in the mountains. It really painted a picture to hear him talk about it and defend it.

I mean it, go vote for Biden.

As a person from a country that was actually fascist within living memory, the US cosplay left is infuriating.

Go vote for Biden in November. Seriously.

Oh, so it’s even worse. They aren’t trying to get any practical effect, it’s just pointless vandalism that won’t achieve anything. Cool.

Please explain to me how this keeps climate change in the public consciousness. We haven’t spoken about anything even vaguely climate change-related in this entire thread. None of the discourse around it is about climate change. It’s a distraction, at best. It’s the sand the “people and the media” bury their heads in.

I hate the defeatism, too. If it doesn’t do anything, then why even bother? Let the people who are… you know, actually working on it do their thing and get out of the way with the cornstarch and the stunts.

I also don’t get the necessity to be defensive about it. I get to very much advocate for climate change action (and take action myself, by voting accordingly if nothing else) and still acknowledge this was a dumb thing, which is… honestly pretty obvious. Speaking of bad optics that make you lose the culture wars, denying how dumb this was just makes you seem delusional. After all, if climate activists are so obviously wrong about the obviously wrong thing why would they be right about the other thing? There is literally no upside to this.

No.

And you can’t make me.

And since a protest is ultimately an attempt to manipulate an entire people into shifting the national consensus over to your opinion, if I’m refusing to stop being dramatic about the optics of what they did then what they did was an abysmal failure.

That’s the point people are trying to make here. That ultimately this thing is marketing, and that if everybody is pissed at you after your marketing impact you just did bad marketing.

Alright, you want me to tone it down? Here it is toned down: it’s not the puppy coat.

It’s Apple’s hydraulic press iPad advertising.

You do realize that isn’t any better, right?

Nah, when you deface a one-of-a-kind prehistoric monument that not only is of genuine historical relevance and recognizable worldwide but also a key cultural touchstone with deep identitarian components for a whole country you are deep into Cruella territory. In good faith. Genuinely. I’m not even English and I am pissed. You don’t even get the usual excuses about bourgeois art these idiots have used for other stunts like these.

This is literally supervillain stuff. It’s the stuff they put in Superman movies to show he’s gone bad. In the zeitgeist of normal humanity it’s shorthand for “these are the bad guys”, right alongside suspiciously spotted fur coats and shooting your minions for failing to catch somebody.

How anybody wouldn’t get this makes me not only question their ability to socially engineer a planetary revolution of the ways we generate power and consume goods, but the ability to function as an adult and put their pants on in the morning. If I hired a PR consultant to advertise “climate action” and they proposed this I wouldn’t just fire them, I’d sue them for trying to sabotage me. It’s incredibly stupid. Seriously. Genuinely. As somebody who wants these people to actually succeed.

Oh, is it? Man, this is such a Rorschach test of a thread.

Is the point of a protest to be in the news? I guess the clout economy has rotten our brains after all.

I mean, yeah, you can make news by acting like an idiot, in that the people that oppose your cause will thoroughly cover it. It’s not hard to be in the news with a protest, as long as you don’t care why you’re news. Stage a mass murder of puppies to protest against the lack of gun control and I guarantee you’ll get a spot in Fox News every day for a year, very much accompanied of a pro-gun lobbyist commenting the footage.

That may be the core of the confusion here. I’m saying that turning climate change activism into the puppy murder cause is not an effective way to curb climate change. I’m saying that feeling powerless doesn’t make it any more effective at curbing climate change just because it gets news coverage.

It’s not making anybody aware of the issue who already isn’t, because everybody is already aware of the issue. It’s not explaining anything about the issue to anybody, because all we’re talking about here is the stupid stunt. It doesn’t convince anybody who was neutral or hostile to the cause because they came off as complete idiots at best, malevolent assholes at worst.

So I guess my answer to your question is that even if the jet thing did nothing it still was more effective than this. Because it’s not about being in the news, it’s about making effective action more likely to happen.

This is such a clarifying post.

It’s not about being useful, it’s about feeling useful. It’s about the impotent frustration of feeling you’re not having an impact being channeled through a media stunt whether or not it in fact changes anything, or even if it makes things worse.

That is what’s going on here, I think. Strategic thinking about this is slow and involves a long road and political concessions and compromises and getting involved hands-on with very out-of-sight things for a long time. This takes a second and it makes it to the news, so it feels like something got done, even if it wasn’t the case.

And that’s 21st century activism in a nutshell, basically.