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3 yr. ago

  • You don't live in a village. You live in a nation with easy access to products and produce from boarder to boarder (until someone decides to mess that up). You're "local" farmer is easily both that white and that black farmer.

    And if you're tired of the focus of things being on skin color or sexual orientation, even more of a reason to level out those statistics because, while those statistics continue to show a disparity of opportunity between White and POC/Queer individuals, you're damn right the focus should and will remain with the latter.

  • To flip this argument... Are the vegetables from a black farmer worse than a white farmer? Do queer farmers make worse cheese than a straight farmer? I somehow doubt it. Therefore, if output is equal, maybe it's time to spread the love to these black and queer farmers.

    You say, "in the end, it's a matter of skill and you can have that regardless of your sexuality or skin color"... and that sounds great, on it's face, but using that as your argument now, when, statistically, it's shown over and over again that skill is rarely the factor that matters, is disingenuous. When we, as a society, can get to a point where we can regularly show that, statistically, race and sexuality (or any other reason humanity chooses to use to make "others" out of our fellows) truly do not effect ones prosperity, then, and only then, would your statement hold any meaning.

  • To start with, you're right. Digital distribution in general is volatile for consumers. While I will say that Steam, at present, is leagues better in that you must download the game purchase in order to play it (meaning, you have a direct copy of the game on your hard drive, which will remain there even if the game is removed from the Steam store), it is not outside the realm of possibility that this could change in the future.

    That said, publishers having their own launchers, I'm sorry to say, has absolutely nothing to do with their fears over "the valve guy" retiring (his name is Gabe Newell, by the way), and significantly more to do with making more money. These publishers figure if they can get you, the consumer, to buy their games directly from them, they can make 100%+ of the money, instead of having to pay Steam a percentage for any transaction. Due to the limited scope of these Publisher-run launchers, purchasing a game from them is even more volatile than purchasing from Steam (at least in the current climate), in such that if the Publisher suddenly finds their launcher is not bringing in customers (which, on average, compared to the draw of Steam at present, they generally don't) publishers could simply drop their launchers and the catalog of games you, the customer, may have purchased from that launcher would go with them... again, yes, this could happen if Steam went down, but presently, pound for pound, the publisher's launchers are far more likely to fall than Steam will.

    Also... for any of these services (Steam or publisher launchers), you have to download the game locally in order to run them. The games are not streaming as most movie and music content is. As such, once you install a game, you could crack them to remove any DRM attached to them (barring any game that's strictly online), then, yeah, you can self-host/store these games yourself all you want. If you buy games from GOG they make this even easier for you.

  • This does bring up an interesting observation... The Temporal Agents apparently have no qualms about coming to not only take back their gadgets and gizmos after someone from the past uses them, but seems to just drop in on the past and cryptically hand out missions to those same ancestors out of literal nowhere! This time travel stuff can be so mentally damaging that even those agents trained to directly work with it (Captain Brackston, for example) can mentally break. Whatever stress La'an was shouldering at the start of the episode has now surely compounded.

    You would think that Starfleet of the future would have put together some form of "Temporal Psychology" department, or something. People who's jobs are to go back to ancestors emotionally effected by time travel, and help them deal with any trauma. Telling La'an to, basically, just "shut up and suck it up" is a horrible way to deal with someone who, essentially, just saved your existence. I get she can't talk to any of her contemporaries, but surely someone from the past could pop-in and act as a counselor of some sort.

    IDK... I felt the temporal agent's cold response to what La'an had to deal with was rather un-starfleet.