It’s usable-ish, but still kinda crashy and prone to occasionally imploding.

I wouldn’t really use it as my sole daily driver, but for certain people doing certain things, it’s probably fine.

(It needs another year, honestly.)

“As you can see, the computer clearly indicates I’m the winner of this discussion. Once you’ve talked to the AI and understand your failures, we can talk.”

Sounds like he’s a lot of fun.

Secondary market.

I’ve been playing since my local comics and games store told me I should totally check out this cool new thing they got, back in 1993.

It’s just a case of 30 years of hoarding and being in early enough that I have a fair pile of things like the Power Nine (Though, sadly, mostly the poverty-spec ones, since they’re in the Unlimited printing), dual lands, and basically everything else of any substantial value that’s been printed at any point in the last 30 years.

Best guess is I’ve got something like 60,000-70,000 cards (I store in 800 card boxes because they fit in the wine holder in a kallax shelf, and I’ve got like 80 boxes, plus a giant pile of commander decks).

I’ve been playing a very very long time and honestly the last decade has been a downhill slope of little nibbles of enshittification, but nothing that made me feel that if I’m ever going to get out, I should do it sooner rather than later like what’s going on now is giving me.

Well yes, and I don’t, in any way, own any cards worth more than $5000.

Or uh, maybe have a MTG collection that’s probably worth nearly as much as my house.

Nope.

Not me.

Collectors booster, but still: it’s a stupid amount of money for 15 pieces of cardboard.

The crossovers are mostly meh,

Good news! They announced today that fully half the printed cards going forward are going to be crossovers! This has been met with uh, less than overwhelming enthusiasm and support.

Genuine question: is the fact that banned cards skew towards the newest sets a new phenomenon in Magic?

Not really.

If the card is stupidly powerful it gets banned not too long after it’s printed, because, well, that’s when someone figures out how to break it. So, ultimately, you don’t end up with a lot of old cards being banned because if they’re not broken as fuck when new, they’re probably not going to suddenly* become broken as fuck in 10 years.

*Something new could be printed that makes them broken, but that’s not especially common.

The issue is that this is a boiled frog situation: things have slowly gotten worse, and people have grumbled the whole way down, but it’s at the point where WotC is adding the garnish and seasoning to the soup and everyone is suddenly realizing that they’re also the boiled frog, not just people who play insert-format-they-don’t-play-here.

Modern players rolled their eyes as standard got shittified to the point it’s essentially a dead format in paper, and then commander players rolled their eyes as WotC printed super powerful cards into modern and it also shittified to the point that it’s also mostly dead in paper format.

Commander players are now freaking the hell out because they realized they’re absolutely next up on the shit-train to crapsville, but their response was to scream death threats to the one and only independent entity that could have made ANY sort of difference, resulting in said entity giving up and handing over full control to WotC.

As someone who’s been playing this stupid game since 1993, I’m a little sad because it’s both obviously clear that it’s time to sell all my cards, and never think about MTG again because there’s absolutely no way back to what the game was since Hasbro has to milk this cow until dust is coming out the udders because they literally have nothing else of value left to squeeze.

I was at Gamestop and saw their CCG wall.

Thirty dollars for a single pack of cardboard.

They’re out of their damn minds.

(Yes, I know that’s the collectors edition nonsense and not representative of the actual pricing and blah blah blah blah, but the fact it exists at all…)

Is it Lorcana?

It’s really what it sounds like: the format rules were, mostly, defined by a group of players on a shockingly named rules committee.

They banned some cards, and some of the fedora-wearing stinkbears that play MTG threw a fit, and sent an absolute flood of shit to them, including piles of death threats.

The rules committee decided the $0 they’re paid for doing this isn’t worth this bullshit, and then turned the governance over to WotC, effectively giving the fox the keys to the hen house and probably destroying the last remaining playable form of MTG because some assholes had their fee-fees hurt because they were no longer able to just bullshit steamroller everyone they played against.

TLDR: this is yet another example of why we cannot have nice things.

the hybrid route of “Yea you can play as long as you want, but as soon as you give us money you will be required to give us money forever to play” route is counter productive

100%.

There’s a couple of games I would probably be playing and spending money on that follow that monetization method and the problem is that… I don’t play one game endlessly.

If you cancel and go away, you’ve made returning to the game a pretty substantial hurdle, and for me at least, I’m just… not going to.

(Also FFXIV’s utterly incomprehensible login system that requires six logins on five thousand different pages under nine names doesn’t help since every time I try to come back I can’t remember how to even log in to anything.)

I have both my TOTP and my Passwords in the same program

What’re you using for this?

I’m using Bitwarden in a similar configuration but given they’re being funky about their definition of ‘open source’, I’m maybe looking for an alternate.

If it was Chris Roberts, it’d just be a JPEG of a dinosaur and a promise that the mount is in the pipeline for early pre-production to be added to the next major quarterly alpha release once it’s ready.

Also it’d be $499.

Which is exactly what anyone who wasn’t wanting to just snort some concentrated outrage knew was the case.

And you can argue as to if OFAC list should apply to things like this or not, but the problem is that the enforcement options for OFAC violations include ‘stomp you into the ground until you’re powder’, most people are just going to comply.

The announcement video they had a while ago made this look fun, AND it lasts for more than the week they usually do.

…I should probably buy the new expansion or something at some point but man, $50 for a video game.

refuse to go into caves in Skyrim

Well there’s giant spiders in those caves, so he’s got the right idea.

(I do not like spiders, I do not like giant spiders, I do not like giant surprise spiders the most.)

So he’s added 50% more severance (6 -> 9 months) to this round of loyalty purges, AND is snooping on employees email?

Part of me is sad, but the rest of me wants more popcorn since I can’t wait for Act 3.

Eh, someone who just discovered that there’s more to Linux than just desktop uses probably.

It comes as a shock that the world mostly runs on Linux to some people and they have to let us know that “HEY GUYS! Your phone uses Linux!”.

It’s cute.

Unity although it was mostly still Gnome with extra Compiz plugins

Don’t forget the added value of the Amazon ads!

No, not value for you, value for Canonical.

That makes a lot of sense, and I’m going to blame me coming off a flu and seeing a wall of math and my brain going ‘uh what’.

So I was looking at the way they’re doing pricing, and is it just me or did they go for the most complicated way possible to define usage?

I’ve been mostly using “discount” S3 providers for stuff/Cloudflare, but they look to have gone for the needs-a-maths-degree route which seems somewhat at odd with their usual billing practices.