The Cracked Mug v 2.0

[knightofcups]

It makes me feel very happy when you talk about your girlfriend. Thank you for doing it and in a place I can read it. She seems like such a cool person, and you sound so happy when you talk about her. It’s beautiful

[erikavonkaiser]

Nothing makes you feel Too Old for Fandom like watching drama from the sidelines!

tl;dr for some Final Fantasy 14 drama --

1) GShade is a popular third party tool people (including myself) use for screenshots; mostly it adds filters and lets you take higher resolution screencaps than the basegame functionality allows

2) It's always had some Hm, Okay to it, mostly in that it contained "DRM" that prohibited it from functioning unless connected to the server or updated, so if you tried to play the game without updating GShade then GShade would straight up not work (even to the point of your screenshot hotkey no longer taking screenshots)

3) anyways this part I'm vague on and refuse to learn more about but apparently the lead dev got into some kind of pissing match with another person who was jailbreaking or altering GShade in some way, and pushed out an update that included malware -- so if the program realized it wasn't being run "correctly" or through the normal launching process, it straight up force restarted your computer
3.5) it has come up several times in discourse about it that the lead dev is a grown-ass adult and the person he was pissy with is a, like, 16-year-old content creator, just to add some spice to the drama

4) when confronted about this the dev initially dug in and said that was not malware and was an appropriate thing to do because fuck this one person in particular, and they're lucky he didn't do a worse thing

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5) the dev was shocked that the above response made everyone go absolutely apeshit

The current status after All That is that the discord was nuked and large fan spaces (including the main FF14 discord and subreddits, to my understanding) no longer endorsed its use, and people started switching to a different and open source application. At some point the dev did seem to realize he had done an Uh-Oh and tried to issue an apology and backpedal, but it was far too late. As of this morning, GShade is bricked and doesn't work at all, because I think the website hosting it has been shut down pending a review (because it turns out knowingly pushing out malware? kinda illegal, my man!), and the aforementioned DRM that prohibits GShade from working when it can't connect to the update server means we've come full circle and it can't be used at all, even if you had it installed "correctly."

Like bro why can't people just be normal when they're mad on the internet oh my God

[erikavonkaiser]

Like bro why can't people just be normal when they're mad on the internet oh my God

I was there, Gandalf, I was there when "go touch grass" stopped meaning "go take a breather and remember the world is big" and started meaning "go learn to regulate your emotions like a human being because your behavior is genuinely alarming and unhinged"

[Fetian]

Wow, what an asshole! Glad there's an alternative for people to jump ship to and glad people are jumping ship, he doesn't deserve his program to be the fandom's go-to default. I hope the kid keeps doing what they're doing, and learns to protect themself better while they're doing it

A random computer restart without warning can in fact be harmful and this guy definitely knows it - if he didn't want to harm the people he's angry at here, he would have made the program pop up a message box saying it detected unsupported third-party software and disabled the program's functionality. That would have still pissed people off, but he'd have supporters in the drama and he'd still have a website

[erikavonkaiser]

@mek as a nice bit of poetic justice, it turns out Nite's main beef with GShade was the DRM (since GShade itself is a direct rip of an open source tool and, you know, a third party screenshot app for a video game that technically doesn't allow third party apps in the first place) and that its often aggressive update pushing meant that you frequently had to restart your game to update it so it could work. So, not only was its restrictive DRM pretentious and uncomfortably gatekeeping but clunky and not user-friendly!

Well, now that the website is nuked and GShade is bricked by its own DRM, Nite's workaround patch is the only thing that makes it work They are urging everyone switch to ReShade, though, which is the open source tool I mentioned and also what I swapped to this morning.

I am curious if the dev will give a follow-up statement but otherwise am checked out of the discourse at this point. Definitely a testament to, like ... you gotta be a little normal about your tantrums, you know? I keep thinking of a certain someone we know who also decimated an entire project for the sake of winning, and like ... what are y'all doing? Did we not watch the same GI Joe cartoons as a kid where Cobra Commander loses because he values winning above people?

Guess not!

[erikavonkaiser]

I decided to make a proper reference sheet for FF14 Silas and was characteristically extra about it, please perceive me:

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I'll probably make one for X'rhun Tia as well, just because I feel like it'll make commissioning art a little easier and potentially more pleasant for the artists. Be cringe, be free!

[erikavonkaiser]

This is 100% a pointless personal peeve (and to be clear, not a callout, since I know at least one person who might see this does do the thing), but it drives me nuts when people specify "folx." It is already gender neutral! Why!

[erikavonkaiser]

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[erikavonkaiser]

Also friendly reminder not to forget vitamins and supplements are a thing, especially in winter -- just got my annual physical bloodwork from the VA and my Vitamin D is at 16 (the "normal" range is 50). Woops.

[knightofcups]

(I do not feel called out : ) I just like more x es. But I have a similar pet peeve re: “gifting” so I totally get it. )