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Neito posted:
The dogcow dates back to Susan Kare's first pack of Mac icons / fonts! Anyway the https://www.folklore.org/ stories are all wonderful reading, and definitely capture exactly that kind of crazy energy from an era that will never come again. Data Graham has a new favorite as of 02:04 on Mar 3, 2021 |
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Mar 3, 2021 01:59
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Data Graham posted:Anyway the https://www.folklore.org/ stories are all wonderful reading, and definitely capture exactly that kind of crazy energy from an era that will never come again. The story of how Burrell Smith mastered Defender is one of my favorites.
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Mar 3, 2021 04:42
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Lesson learned: it's faster to decompress .zip files on the server side, and transfer them uncompressed. It took two hours to unzip a 300 MB iso image, significantly slower than just transferring it uncompressed. Weirdly Fetch 4 doesn't work as well as version 3, some issues with directory listing again with v4 that v3 doesn't have. Playing with the transfer cache, default is 8k and reached around 100-120 kb/s, setting it to 128k (maximum) slowed it down to 50 kb/s. 32k seems to be the optimal point for this setup, almost 200 kb/s! I think it's caused by the time spent writing to disk vs. the network card cache or something, large caches take too long to flush to disk and the network card buffer fills up during the disk flush, slowing the total throughput.
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Mar 3, 2021 10:15
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Neito posted:They never would've survived the 90s if Steve hadn't come back, but god drat was Apple between Jobs' tenures a more fun company. Also just to come back to this — was the non-Jobs time really fun at Apple? All the folklore stuff was from before he left; and all the stories I've heard from the early-mid 90s (I had a couple friends who worked there during that time) were hollow-eyed horror stories of declining market share, false starts on pie-in-the-sky projects, ill-conceived corporate alliances, horrible software quality, and a general sense of grin-and-bear-it. Like annual company retreats where in between capture-the-flag tournaments they were always just waiting for someone to go up to the mike and drop the next shoe about Copland or Pink or whatever being inevitably cancelled.
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Mar 3, 2021 14:50
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Should transfer the files over modem using ZTerm  Maybe with the Kermit? Protocol iirc?
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Mar 3, 2021 16:14
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Data Graham posted:Also just to come back to this — was the non-Jobs time really fun at Apple? All the folklore stuff was from before he left; and all the stories I've heard from the early-mid 90s (I had a couple friends who worked there during that time) were hollow-eyed horror stories of declining market share, false starts on pie-in-the-sky projects, ill-conceived corporate alliances, horrible software quality, and a general sense of grin-and-bear-it. Like annual company retreats where in between capture-the-flag tournaments they were always just waiting for someone to go up to the mike and drop the next shoe about Copland or Pink or whatever being inevitably cancelled. I'll revise: They never would've survived the 90s if Steve hadn't come back, but god drat was Apple between Jobs' tenures a more externally fun company.
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Mar 3, 2021 19:29
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e: never mind, ignore
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Mar 3, 2021 19:58
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In the early 2000s I worked for a university department where the employee computers were 95% Macs, student and lab computers closer to 50%, and outside people/entities 95% Windows. I had to try and support and interface all of them, so had both a Mac and Windows machine running at all times. I got to see the whole debut of Mac OS X play out in real time (and try to peel people off of Mac OS 9 kicking and screaming), and beat my head against various walls of cross-platform incompatibilities in new and unexpected places all the drat time. Powerpoint was always a pain in the rear end, because Microsoft apparently thought having cross-platform versions of the same program actually be able to work with one another's output was a silly idea. The one Mac piece of hardware I find myself nostalgic for were the iSight webcams. I find it odd that I'm not aware of anything comparable on the market, but then again I don't spend much time looking at higher end webcams.
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Mar 3, 2021 20:12
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Neito posted:I'll revise: 
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Mar 4, 2021 02:37
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Dr. Quarex posted:Plus speaking as someone who was a huge Apple fanboy in the 1980s (despite never owning one), the UnJobs Interregnum was the last period I remember still thinking it might be cool to own an Apple computer, considering how rad the IIGS was and how After Dark made the color Macintosh seem like the coolest possible thing to have sitting in your bedroom. Then that VISIONARY came back and made things actually popular and elegant instead of whimsically absurd I grew up in a mac family, starting with a Plus until 1996 when we switched got our first PC. I guess they've gone back to Apples for some reason in the last couple of years
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Mar 4, 2021 02:48
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Towards the end of my newspaper tenure, my boss got a wild hair up her rear end to send me to free InDesign training offered by the Texas Press Association. This was a spectacularly bad idea - not only could I have taught that class (and done a better job - don't loving tell me straight PDF export is bad and breaks things and I absolutely must save to Postscript and Distill from there or I make printers cry, how the gently caress about not doing business with printers using RIPs from a decade ago - I digress, but that was one of a hundred things that pissed me off that day and the memory still makes my teeth itch) but I was supremely bored and trying not to get into an argument with the teacher. But I had this pirate copy of Win7 on a thumbdrive. And a shiny new Macbook in front of me, bone-stock only with Adobe CS4 installed. And I don't like OSX. Of course I installed Bootcamp, then pirated Windows 7. Then my legit copy of CS5 using a keygen. Then completed the "exercise" he gave us. I think to myself some smart IT guy immediately flattened and reimaged it... but it was the TPA. Probably remained in circulation for a while.
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Mar 4, 2021 07:49
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rndmnmbr posted:Towards the end of my newspaper tenure, my boss got a wild hair up her rear end to send me to free InDesign training offered by the Texas Press Association. This was a spectacularly bad idea - not only could I have taught that class (and done a better job - don't loving tell me straight PDF export is bad and breaks things and I absolutely must save to Postscript and Distill from there or I make printers cry, how the gently caress about not doing business with printers using RIPs from a decade ago - I digress, but that was one of a hundred things that pissed me off that day and the memory still makes my teeth itch) but I was supremely bored and trying not to get into an argument with the teacher. I know what some of these words mean 
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Mar 4, 2021 07:52
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Whats funny to me, I don't even pirate poo poo like I used to. My copy of Win10 is legit, the first time I can say that since 95C. I'm still running the copies of Office 2010, CS5.5, and Font Folio I swiped the licenses for with my boss' blessing when we folded. Not running any other paid software than GR2Analyst for my weather nerd hobby. My hard drive full of pirated stuff died due to head crash last year, and beyond redownloading my MP3 collection, I've barely missed it.
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Mar 4, 2021 08:12
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I don't think I've ever illegally pirated anything. We didn't have anti-piracy laws when I was a kid. It's still legal to copy a CD for your friends and family, which is odd.
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Mar 4, 2021 08:19
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rndmnmbr posted:Whats funny to me, I don't even pirate poo poo like I used to. My copy of Win10 is legit, the first time I can say that since 95C. I'm still running the copies of Office 2010, CS5.5, and Font Folio I swiped the licenses for with my boss' blessing when we folded. Not running any other paid software than GR2Analyst for my weather nerd hobby. My hard drive full of pirated stuff died due to head crash last year, and beyond redownloading my MP3 collection, I've barely missed it. I stopped pirating music software when I could afford it, loving sucked to have 200 vst instruments that were version 1.0.001 and having to figure out which one was crashing the project. Also reinstalling everything was an annual nightmare on XP when it decided that this bluescreen would be the one to make the whole system run like poo poo. Now I just use a few plugin packs (Arturia,Native,soundtoys etc) that download and install everything from their licenser app.
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Mar 4, 2021 08:42
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i used to pirate every new game as it releaseed on kazaa. led to a lot of playing a triple A title for an hour then abandoning it for something else
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Mar 4, 2021 16:28
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I pirated about a handful of things over the years, and I mostly just used CD cracks so I didn't have to put the CD in the drive every time I wanted to play something.
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Mar 4, 2021 16:43
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Before kazaa and Napster and whatnot, I used a program called (I think) Hotline, that had a nice GUI for pirating apps and whatnot. I don't think it was a distributed network like the others though. And folks could set up minimum up/down ratios to allow you access to their stuff. I think. I may have dreamt all of this.
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Mar 4, 2021 16:52
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Ah, the old days of trying to find the right mIRC channel to find the right FTP server with the right up/down ratio... The old days were extremely frustrating.
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Mar 4, 2021 16:59
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I really do think the main reason I didn't get into pirating is because I had to share a dialup connection with my brother until about 2002, so it would take forever to download anything. On top of that my brother spent all of his time playing Counterstrike, so he would frequently physically unplug me from the hub because my use of IRC or general web browsing was giving him too much lag.
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Mar 4, 2021 17:04
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rndmnmbr posted:Towards the end of my newspaper tenure, my boss got a wild hair up her rear end to send me to free InDesign training offered by the Texas Press Association. This was a spectacularly bad idea - not only could I have taught that class (and done a better job - don't loving tell me straight PDF export is bad and breaks things and I absolutely must save to Postscript and Distill from there or I make printers cry, how the gently caress about not doing business with printers using RIPs from a decade ago - I digress, but that was one of a hundred things that pissed me off that day and the memory still makes my teeth itch) but I was supremely bored and trying not to get into an argument with the teacher. wow what a badass lol
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Mar 4, 2021 17:10
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Remember having memberships to super secret private trackers? The ones with fake landing pages you had to enter the secret command to login to. I had one for games and music rips but the last time I used them was to get CoD: Black Ops back in 2010 or whenever. After that point I had fallen into the trap of having regular income and just buying things I wanted. The music site was cool because it had moderator curation and exposed me to a lot of stuff I hadn't heard, but streaming services fill that gap well enough for my tastes now. At some point they were both raided and shutdown by the police.
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Mar 4, 2021 17:11
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They're still around if you know where to look.
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Mar 4, 2021 17:16
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Some of the private trackers are still pretty much what you describe, some will only be open to registration based on the phases of the moon + planetary alignment + how the admin's cat feels that day, while others are invite only, etc. No secret pages etc, just restrictive policies on account creation. And then often strict demands about minimum user activity, ratios, etc. Don't think they'll ever really go away.
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Mar 4, 2021 18:09
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Yeah I think I still belong to 4 or 5 diff ones? Most of the time it's just easier to stream stuff though these days. The only one I really use is my book one so I can occasionally snag an advance copy of a book that's in the mail already but i'm impatient. It's entirely possible a couple of them have died or moved and I didn't notice.
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Mar 4, 2021 18:25
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SubNat posted:No secret pages etc, just restrictive policies on account creation. Fake landing pages are still a thing on sites, it's quite fun to see. I've been out of the (named) scene for aeons now, but I'm curious as to how things have changed in the last 15 years. I always appreciated that the wikipedia on topsites was generally really well written and a fantastic introduction to how the scene worked for outsiders. Amusing for a system that thrived on secrecy (but in reality had pretty poo poo security). Statutes of limitations are passed now which helps me sleep at nights better, as I was paranoid someone would be waiting at my mailroom when I was expecting some DV tapes. WB had it out for my guys, and because I'm an idiot I made an intro for the next release mocking them with a bunch of clippings from news sites. When I worked at VCDQuality, I used to put up stuff from my friend maVen who was camming in Canada and putting out the most hyped releases. I'd get a jump on the pre-time so you'd have a bunch of scenesters calling the releases fake, while we both just laughed at them knowing they'd eat their words in a few hours. Fun and silly times. The law caught up to him, and he passed away after getting out of prison which sucked. He was a good dude. Legit streaming is constantly getting worse, and as usual piracy providers a better experience than going legit because of how anti-consumer it is. Want to watch Mandalorian s01e01 on launch day? Good luck on Disney+, but those running a few simple tools had it ready to go in their setups for when they woke up.
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Mar 4, 2021 18:41
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Private trackers were nice back in the days when public torrent sites were getting shut down left and right and they also took a while to get the latest movie or TV show or whatever. Nowadays, everything immediately goes to your favorite torrent site and you can usually just get an RSS feed that you plug into a torrent program that automatically grabs whatever you want. I used to have fun setting that up, but nowadays you can just stream things from whatever streaming site the show or movie is available on, and torrenting isn't as necessary. I also used to steal every game, until I joined the military, started making a lot more money, and also steam sales, so it was easier to just buy the games I wanted and have them available vs having to find a decent torrent and hoping the crack worked with the latest version. The solution to piracy has always just been "make the paid version easier and more convenient than the pirate version". Even though I know how to pirate games, I'd rather just buy them now because they will just be on Steam or EGS or whatever if I want to play them again.
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Mar 4, 2021 18:52
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EL BROMANCE posted:Legit streaming is constantly getting worse, and as usual piracy providers a better experience than going legit because of how anti-consumer it is. Want to watch Mandalorian s01e01 on launch day? Good luck on Disney+, but those running a few simple tools had it ready to go in their setups for when they woke up. I agree that it is starting to get worse with the massive schisms between services and having to buy so many subscriptions that it is starting to be more viable to pirate things again. These people just don't learn. Not to mention that you can buy a season that's currently airing on Amazon and often times you will have to pirate it just to be able to see it and talk to people about it because Amazon often waits two days to put it up. Also, why wouldn't you be able to watch a Disney+ show on launch day? Where are people getting it from if it's not on the service it airs on?
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Mar 4, 2021 18:59
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Cojawfee posted:Also, why wouldn't you be able to watch a Disney+ show on launch day? They massively screwed up and the backend got overloaded so a whole ton of people who paid for the service weren't able to watch the first episode of the show, whereas a scene group managed to get it as it went live.
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Mar 4, 2021 19:11
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Between the Kazaa/WinMX days and torrenting, I was a huge user of eDonkey/eMule and Direct Connect. It was all about finding a good hub with people sharing the best stuff.
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Mar 4, 2021 19:28
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EL BROMANCE posted:They massively screwed up and the backend got overloaded so a whole ton of people who paid for the service weren't able to watch the first episode of the show, whereas a scene group managed to get it as it went live. I feel like that's a pretty extraordinary exception. Streaming works great.
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Mar 4, 2021 19:29
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wa27 posted:I feel like that's a pretty extraordinary exception. Streaming works great. Given how hyped the first episode was, it's a pretty major extraordinary exception. Didn't they also gently caress up the HDR implementation for ages too? Not that piracy could fix that (although I wouldn't be surprised if *someone* did roll their own grading, because its 2021 and that's what people do now!). Doesn't change the fact that overall the streaming landscape is pretty crappy for the end consumer, and piracy once again still provides an equal if not better alternative. If companies want people to part with money, especially right now during a time where 1. a lot of people are out of work and 2. those in work are ever more subject to poo poo wages/high cost of living, then shrugging their shoulders and saying 'well we tried' doesn't cut it. I think of all the services, genuinely one of the best ones was the WWE Network as a combination of a very reasonable monthly charge (especially in comparison to PPV costs at the time) and a huge back catalog suddenly gave the user a pretty drat good product that wasn't worth pirating anymore.
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Mar 4, 2021 19:35
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SoulSeek is still around, and probably the best way to pirate music. I've heard. EL BROMANCE posted:WWE Network as a combination of a very reasonable monthly charge (especially in comparison to PPV costs at the time) and a huge back catalog suddenly gave the user a pretty drat good product that wasn't worth pirating anymore. Not just that, but it was curated to provide an experience WORTH the ten bucks.
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Mar 4, 2021 19:36
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EL BROMANCE posted:Doesn't change the fact that overall the streaming landscape is pretty crappy for the end consumer, and piracy once again still provides an equal if not better alternative. Let's not forget that pirates got a superior version of GOT episodes, I remember the infamous 'black black black, occasionally some details' Battle on Winterfell where HBO's streaming service delivered a notably lower quality stream to it's subscribers than what the pirates got. Which became super obvious in an episode -that- dark. I remember having a HBO subscription, but pirating the episodes myself because the pirated ones were notably higher quality ones ripped from Amazon's services instead. Streaming services are also massively, massively worse the moment you move out of the US. Disney+ only became available in Norway a year after it's release (Which is pretty fast, compared to many services.), so there wasn't really any legal way to engage with say, Mandalorian while that had it's first season, etc. (Which becomes a progressively worse issue as every single publishing house wants to have their own service.) I use the ones that work when there's something I want to see, but sometimes that option just isn't on the table.
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Mar 4, 2021 19:57
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SubNat posted:Streaming services are also massively, massively worse the moment you move out of the US. Disney+ only became available in Norway a year after it's release (Which is pretty fast, compared to many services.), so there wasn't really any legal way to engage with say, Mandalorian while that had it's first season, etc. I love it when they finally launch elsewhere, and they still do the 'one episode a week' release structure, because they know its the only way to keep people subscribed as there's so little else going on.
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Mar 4, 2021 20:01
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I've pretty much reverted back to either physical media or other manners of acquring things.
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Mar 4, 2021 20:01
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Streaming felt like the future, today, when you just had to pay for Netflix and HBO and you were fully covered. Now I just can't be bothered to keep up with what's online and in which service at which time, so I just rent movies from the library. At least I finally got around to watching bucket list stuff like Citizen Kane, I guess?
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Mar 4, 2021 20:10
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Iron Crowned posted:I pirated about a handful of things over the years, and I mostly just used CD cracks so I didn't have to put the CD in the drive every time I wanted to play something. Copy protection got bad enough for a while there that it incentivized piracy. I could make the 60 mile trip to the game store, waste 20 more minutes arguing with the cashier about not wanting to buy a strategy guide or magazine subscription, get home, install the game, get stopped by the copy protection (thanks SecuROM), waste two hours trying to figure out what software or part of my hardware configuration it didn't like, try unplugging different drives, then give up and download a pirated copy of the game I'd just bought... or I could just pirate the game in the first place. Until Steam became decent, piracy was an outright superior service.
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Mar 4, 2021 20:23
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I once went through an IRC 'interview' to get access to what.cd, involving telling them about what kind of music I liked, what kind of stuff I planned to share, and screenshots of my uTorrent ratio. (I was accepted)
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Mar 4, 2021 20:32
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Steam is too goddamn convenient. I just put whatever I want to play in my wishlist and then buy it for a few bucks when it's on sale and I am auto-notified via email and steam app on my phone. It's just not worth the time and aggravation plus devs need food, too. Edit: Oh god, there are so many unplayed or barely played titles in my library. Is there a way to see the total $$$? Edit 2: $1,221.60 over 6 years. Not terrible I guess TotalLossBrain has a new favorite as of 20:45 on Mar 4, 2021 |
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Mar 4, 2021 20:36
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