daltotron
@daltotron@lemmy.world
- Comment on It's Time to Bring Back the Steam Machine 5 months ago:
Bring it back as an HTPC like the peeps are saying, low-ball it on the price like 500 bucks or less, maybe even take a hit on it or just a hit on the profit margins, pre-install all the stuff people might need, and then blam, you’ve guaranteed that most people will be casual users who want a lower-end computer and a smart TV/console replacement, and not higher tier hobbyists who want a more powerful machine. Confining your audience to that specific market share basically guarantees they won’t take advantage of the lower or negative margins on the hardware itself, and will probably buy some amount of steam games. They’re also using a device in your ecosystem now but idk what you do as far as that goes to make a good profit while not being a scumbag
- Comment on subs > dubs 11 months ago:
I think replacing songs in the dub can go pretty hard, like, that’s how we got most of the iconic 90’s american anime theme songs. pokemon, digimon, yugioh, etc. I do like a lot of the naruto OPs too, for the record, and soul eater, and fullmetal alchemist, but it’s really hard to beat how iconic the opening to pokemon is, and how that’s laser engraved to like a fifth of all millennial’s brains.
Actually, I wanna hijack this top post a little bit. Other people have brought up japanese name pronunciation, and replacing the names with more western stuff, and I would like to bring up the decision specifically in yugioh to make joey have a boston accent to mimic the accentedness of the japanese he would otherwise speak with. I dunno, there’s something to the 4kids dubs that has a little bit more texture than your normal modern anime dubs. I like the lack of censorship more, the VAs tend to be better, there’s not like, big confusing rewrites or repacings of certain sections, all that is good, about your more modern stuff. At the same time, I feel like a lot of the sub vs dub argument is gonna come about more when people don’t let the dub be it’s own thing. You already have to translate turns of phrase, culturally dependent expressions, yadda yadda, at what point do you really decide to stop? Maybe a bad example, because it doesn’t really conform to the spirit of the original at all, but people still occasionally talk about the ghost stories dub. I dunno. I guess it doesn’t need to be official, there’s always abridged series to fill the void in my heart when it comes to anime that’s written for a western audience more, but I do kinda wish that more dubs were just like. Willing to take risks. That more dubs were very obviously stand out.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
I mean, if we’re sort of going by DMCA requests, right, there’s upsides, but there’s also downsides. They get abused all the time, and there’s not a clear example in the public consciousness as to what constitutes fair use, so they can even be misused in good faith. Larger corporations can also have bots, or armies of hired outsourced cheap labor (usually in combination with each other) handing out youtube copyright claims left and right. The next step of the youtube claims system, specifically, is that you have to go to court, if you want to contest the claim, and court usually ends up in favor of the larger parties, either because they have the capability to have an out of court settlement, or just because they can hire the best lawyers, and it’s relatively hard for most artists to fund what might be a protracted legal battle. I wonder whether or not the effect is that it’s overall to the benefit, or not. Are these examples you’ve provided, are they representative, or are they examples of survivorship bias?
I dunno, I don’t have access to the numbers on that one, and it’s kind of hard to take artists at their word, because the plural of anecdote isn’t data, and because lots of artists don’t inhabit that legal grey space of copyright infringement, either out of just a lack of desire, or out of a self-preservation instinct. Then plenty of artists are also woefully misinformed people that blame the copyright-infringing artist for their copyright-infringing art. I think I’d probably want to prod a copyright lawyer on their take, as they would tend to see more of the legal backend, the enforcement, but then, there’s a little bit of a conflict of interest there.
I also think that on the basis of just like, moral arguments against copyright, we could make the argument, right, that the obama hope ad was extremely popular because of the circumstances around which it arose, rather than because of the specific photograph used. i.e. it wouldn’t be as popular if not for being a ripoff of a photo that was commissioned from some guy and then pumped out and thoroughly marketed and memeified. Sort of a similar argument to how piracy doesn’t really transfer over to sales, that there’s not an equivalent exchange going on there. The sales of the copy, or, the sales of the modified version, don’t transfer to the original, is the idea. But then, it’s kind of an open, hard to answer question, because it’s pretty contextual and it’s hard to read in hindsight. If the sales do transfer over to the original, if we get rid of the copy, then I think that crediting the original artist is probably the best thing you can do, because that drives more attention to the original, if the original is what people really wanted. That’s sort of like, a limiting mechanism for how popular a thing might get on the merit of something else, as I see it. You could legally enforce that, and I think it would probably be a pretty good move, but you also kind of end up swamping yourself with the same problems that any legal enforcement mechanism will have, of being heavy-handed, grey, primarily only able to be wielded by the powerful, so I think you could also make the case that whatever the public would enforce would be fine.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
well yeah, my point is more that with macbeth, nobody would believe you, you’d obviously be full of shit. that might not be the case with artists struggling to get by, but I don’t really see that as being fixed by the current system, or really, by any legal mechanism, unfortunately. in the current system, struggling artists get sacked by that shit all the time when people steal their art and paste it to merch on redbubble, and can make money basically for free. bigger corps can just steal shit basically full throttle, if not in actuality, than in likeness, and, through monopolization of the mechanisms of distribution, like with music. the struggling artist becomes the exploited artist. streaming services become competitors on the basis of content rather than the features of their platform.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
I think probably the obligation, or rather, advantage, of attributing original creators for public domain works, is: how else will I find more of this work that I like? It would probably also still be frowned upon to just take a work wholesale and post it without crediting the creator, on the basis that it makes the creator harder to find, and makes work that you like harder to find. Whenever somebody ends up trying to pass off something without the author’s name, there’s usually someone close behind asking who did this, tracing the lineages of the media.