I see what you mean, but I also believe that the value of places like Beehaw often lies in the intermediary stage before they become an institution or wither away and die.

Right now Beehaw is pretty close to the peak of what it can be. It’s the equivalent of a large online block party. If it gets bigger than this it will need to institionalize or wither away. What you’re asking is for it to institionalize sooner than is necessary, which is what will kill the feeling.

Beehaw has a lifespan to it, we should all recognize this now. Beehaw is great because it runs on good faith and trust. These are limited resources and they’ll run out eventually, either sell out or burn out.

The best way to approach it is to put into it what you get out of it, and stop putting into it when you stop getting value out of it.

I mean it’s still a soulless piece of corporate propaganda.

As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service issue.

I’ve selected this text as I think it’s the heart of your post, if you disagree then let me know. I don’t agree with this statement, I think that it is a rights issue, and I think I can prove that with a thought experiment.

Suppose for example, game companies took this idea to heart and did not do anything to stop piracy, they only focused on providing the most seamless storefront and gaming experiences possible. They create a store that works perfectly, has all the features you’d want, and has no DRM of any kind - this includes no log in needed, they go by the honor system. They expect people to only download a game that they’ve paid for. Here’s the question: will people pay for the games or not? I have a view of human nature that people generally go along the path of least resistance, and I think this is born out by evidence (but I could be wrong about this). Some people will pay for the games on moral grounds, the vast majority will not. If a developer wants to get paid, they have to make sure people pay for it. And now we have DRM. The goal of DRM is to make piracy annoying enough that the path of least resistance is to just buy the game.

This, to me at least, proves that piracy is only a service issue in a world where DRM exists. Because DRM makes piracy annoying. If people find the DRM more annoying than piracy, it has failed to be effective DRM.

So to get to the heart of things, I agree with you that when DRM is more annoying than piracy something has gone terribly wrong. Denuvo, in my life, for the way I play games, is not and never has even gotten close to being more annoying than piracy.

But at the end of the day, I don’t think it is morally or ethically wrong to put DRM on a game or storefront. I just see it as something to work out on a practical level, case by case. But I made my original comment in the first place because it seems to me like a lot of people have issues with it on a moral level, which I think is silly.

It’s not evil. DRM as a concept is not evil. There is actually no real philosophical justification for why it is wrong to use DRM to protect your software. Because if you made it, it is yours and you get to decide how other people use it.

The paranoia that surrounds things like DRM show just how laughably selfish and entitled some gamers are.

As someone who’s been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There’s an incoming “demographic collapse” coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren’t.

Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.

As someone who’s been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There’s an incoming “demographic collapse” coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren’t.

Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.