Media is transient, it's ephemera. We will remember the big names but forget the small things. There's more media being produced than I could consume in a lifetime, so if something disappears I can move on to the next thing.
I find that experiencing media in the moment is part of the allure - this is something happening now and it's something I'm interested in now.
That's not to say we shouldn't have archives and history, but letting go of my collection has been a huge weight off my back.
There's nothing about any of this that looks like a ticking time bomb. Everything was fine until one day some part of the world around us unceremoniously disappeared, for no real ascertainable reason, in a way totally beyond most peoples control.
This is shit. Unqualifiedly just shit.
Good for you that you feel free & clear for casting off the past, but it's cavalier & mean to tell people they're better off that their hard work & things they've enjoyed have, for no real reason, self-destructed.
It is a fact of life that everything, if it isn't destroyed, unceremoniously self-destructs.
Have you stopped to think how cavalier & mean it is to tell people how they should create things that others enjoy?
I went and played some turns of Civilization that I haven't touched in half a decade a couple weeks ago. Every couple years I like to play a couple matches of Mechwarrior 2. These things don't self destruct. They harken from an age before online services, when personal computers let us manage & operate our own systems, let us backup our saves & our games.
> Have you stopped to think how cavalier & mean it is to tell people how they should create things that others enjoy?
In a way that doesn't explode unexpectedly? Yeah, right, I'm the mean one here. Please, this is just more facetiously cruel antagonizing. What is with the anti-social cruelty?
It takes time.
> In a way that doesn't explode unexpectedly? Yeah, right, I'm the mean one here. Please, this is just more facetiously cruel antagonizing. What is with the anti-social cruelty?
It doesn't explode unexpectedly. It explodes in a way that the creator made it explode. So, yeah, it seems that you are the mean one here.
There's been a pretty fair & reasonable deal in computing for decades. Preservation is getting harder, worse, impossible. This is- pretty clearly to most of us- a loss.
As far as I can see the only think I'm saying here is that creators should be able to create things as they see fit. I did not say a word about consumers or what they should be doing. I would love to know what gives you the impression that I'm being cruel to consumers here.
You did insult me first, why are you surprised that I would defend myself? You are even doing it in this post to.
So you support the abolition of copyright law? That would certainly go a long way toward solving the problem of media self-destructing within human timescales. But if creators get to benefit from government granted monopolies, it's only fair that we introduce some consumer-protection law too. Copyright was intended to benefit both consumers and producers. Deliberate destruction of media is a sign that it's drifted too far in the producers' favor.
As for my opinion on copyright laws, I guess I'd be for their abolition. But that is just my opinion that isn't really based on any real knowledge of these laws or what consequences they have/removing them would have.
> But if creators get to benefit from government granted monopolies, it's only fair that we introduce some consumer-protection law too.
With this I wholeheartedly agree.
True. The Parthenon, the work of classical authors and philosophers. Michelangelo’s David. The work of musicians, artists, architects and authors from bygone eras. They all fade and disappear without the tireless effort of conservationists and historians everywhere.
And thank goodness for their work. Its an indictment of our modern technology landscape how much tomorrow’s historians will be missing. Perfect digital copies are trivially easy to make, but that doesn’t seem to help. Is it possible to run old iOS apps? Play old Xbox or PlayStation games after Microsoft and Sony shut down their old online services? Install and run old copies of adobe products? See what GMail looked like when it launched? Or play earlier versions of multiplayer games like WoW or EverQuest? No. In a few years it will all be gone, rendered inoperable, “upgraded” or purged.
The work of pirates, software crackers and emulators has kept some of what we had in the 90s alive. But so much software we have today has been intentionally artificially made to be ephemeral. Chess has survived for thousands of years. How long will DoTA, Diablo3 or Hearthstone be playable? These games will be lucky to survive a generation.
What an inhumane way to treat a creator’s life’s work. What callous disregard we hold for the curiosity of tomorrow.
How many of Michelangelo's contemporaries still exist?
Some games will last forever, some will not.
Or any web services, like Notion or Google Docs?
The way we’re going, I’d be surprised if modern games last 25 years; let alone 2500.
Not, statistically, on a meaningful time scale. All my data will probably one day be gone... But I have enough backups and replicas and remote repos that it's unlikely to happen before my own death.
Yeah, but on what timescale?
Saying it's justified for software to break as soon as the company dies because it would be destroyed on it's own anyway is like saying "we all die anyway so we might as well be slaughtered".
Nothing lasts forever, my attitude is more about being ok with that.
I literally did the opposite of suggesting others just think the way I do.
And new media can replace old media, and still be a mindful, thoughtful experience. Impermanence does not mean mindless.
Medianis ephemeral, but art very often not so much. If someone decided to throw the works of Bach or Beethoven away we would have truly lost something for example.
Of course not everything is art to everybody, not everything has value to everybody but there are things truely worth of preserving — and often for other reasons than we ontuitively would think.
However, I don't think it justifies the artificial loss that happens with renting software. There is no logical reason why would a program stop working on my computer if my computer has not changed. Software on my computer must not depend on any third-party-anything.
Of course, that computer will break one day, and the software will stop working on it eventually. But it will happen when it is natural to happen - not when some CEO decides to pull the plug.
This bad boy right here!
Same here, I gave up on some AAA games because of this reason. I frequently return to old games. Some of them are from 1997,some of them are 2000,some of them are 2010's. Most of them have patches but if stadia and likes become mainstream, I don't know how its going to end up in 20 years.
There's a lot of issues with the switch - and Steam Deck is expensive, but maybe if it sells really well, other companies will make similar offerings and we might get some actual competition in "consoles" or handhelds that can play games up to about 6 years prior to the release of the console, perfectly.
I imagine with the shrinking of transistors and whatnot, someone could theoretically release an extremely low power version of, say, a 9800GT, or even a 1050ti in a couple of years - Rather than needing all this active cooling and heatpipes and a huge PCB to spread out the RAM and everything, just put the same IP onto a 5nm process or something and get the same performance in 1/10th of the wattage.
However I have found myself preferring to use geforce now for game streaming from a Chromebook. It is much more convenient to pull out a small light and cheap Chromebook and start playing a new game immediately (no downloads) than to get out the heavy, bulky gaming laptop, wait for it to boot, plug it in, apply Windows updates etc, download and install new game/patches/steam updates/etc, hear the multiple fans whirring like crazy and feel the heat and so on and so on.
I love the game streaming from a Chromebook because you are up and running in seconds. I started doing this after I had my first kid and realised that I had small windows of opportunity - perhaps 15-20 mins - to do something "for me" and I didn't want to waste that waiting for a patch to download it whatever. With Chromebook and streaming (I use stadia too, but less so as the catalogue is poor) I can go from a closed laptop to in-game in like 20-30 seconds.
We already have the save games synced to Steam, so nothing is really changing in terms of data location (at least for geforce now - stadia is different as you cannot use steam, which was a product-killing mistake for stadia in my opinion)
The only thing that I personally miss is that I am not able to poke around the game data files - many a happy hour lost decompiling Unity-based C# code or spelunking through data files with a hex editor (sometimes more fun than the game itself!)
And it's the worst thing ever.
And keep in mind that when people say "owning a game" in this context it doesn't necessarily mean having the game in its original (physical) format, if you have a ROM of a gameboy game on your PC and play it via an emulator, in some ways you "own" the game more than if you had it as a physical copy because you can ensure the permanent preservation of both the game and its saves, unlike with the physical version.