The side stories were mostly absent and not interesting at all.

Then

I did the story for Far Cry 6 and some of the side stuff in about 12 hours, then uninstalled the game

Come on pal, I don’t disagree, it felt the weakest of the series… But this feels like you wanted to dislike the game before even playing it. Plus, you can’t really criticise something as being absent if you just chose not to engage with it.

You’d use a big ass gun upgraded with special armor piercing bullets, shoot a regular dude right in the head and he would just shrug it off and keep going.

Yeah? I had the opposite problem. Using the first rifle you get with a silencer and some armour piercing rounds you could one shot every enemy with a head shot. Took away a lot of the fun by making me have to ignore that and use different guns that were substantially weaker just for some fun firefights.

And a phone.

I ended up in an argument with some Americans about the British stealing the tradition of Halloween from the US.

“How can it be British?! You didn’t have pumpkins”.

I had to point out that we know the British didn’t ‘steal’ the tradition from the US because we know we stole it from the Irish.

I just sighed so hard I put my back out.

Just because you don’t know something doesn’t mean it is untrue.

See also, “this is new to me therefore I have discovered it”

This is like reverse appropriation and is just as bad.

Fleetwood Mac and cheese.

Yeah, OK. I’m in.

Yeah? Cool.

I don’t think that’s true. There’s a great video here that highlights the fact that even a lot of modern slang is far older than you think.

https://youtu.be/BFgg-Gy0E2g?si=4qXv92KZaMN0odKO

Mate, the thing about gen x is that they dont care. This is boomer energy being projected.

Which is cool, I guess, whatever.

Pretty sure we had Halloween before the US even existed.

Admittedly we had to carve turnips.

Some still do.

Looks legit, what’s the point here?

That’s really cool for you.

Dead drops and one time pads.

Set up a numbers station if you can afford it.

You’ve managed to get the affinity stuff working under wine? I can’t get publisher to work correctly. I just wish they would make a native version. I’m happy to give them money for it even.

It’s hard to make money from Adobe when they charge you £66 a month.

I suspect most memes are just 1980s British mid stand-up routines in disguise.

Not viruses as such, at least according to the inventor of the term, rather they are already part of our inheritable structure, our DNA (so to speak) seeking new ways to be inherited.

We are our memes.

I’m telling you this as someone that works in the arts, that’s just not true.

You can pirate digital material and repackage it. I see illustrators getting their designs ripped off by large scale clothing manufacturers all the time.

Similarly, I know some acts that have heard their music on adverts and films and haven’t been paid. It seems like it is being stolen if you ask me.

There needs to be protection or the creation of art becomes a luxury for those that can afford to not make money from it.

What’s wild here is that when you talk about IP you are talking about entertainment and art and not lifesaving drugs and technologies on a global scale.

It’s a very privilidged western view of copyright and IP.

And as I said in my comment, it isn’t my customers that want stuff for free, often they want to pay to support me. Those laws stop big multinational corporations from taking my work and selling it on their t-shirts.

We are social creatures, but fuck me, we need to eat and pay rent.

I see you make art. What if I said to you, I’d like to give you some money for that art, for maybe a print of it. Not just so that I can own some but because I want to support you.

And then someone just copies your art and gives it to me free. You get no money for it.

Are you genuinely OK with that? Are you saying that everything you make is copyright free?