SolOrion

Grakata!

idk, maybe the hospital has insurance for idiocy. But the people that broke it almost certainly can't afford an MRI machine, so they ain't paying.

In my limited experience, they're pretty up front with it even when they're not wearing a fursuit or furry merch.

Well, shit.

Z-Library isn't really research oriented, but you could try it. I have no idea how much scientific content is on it, not why I'm there, but FMHY says it has 'educational' content just like Anna's Archive does, and I've seen textbooks on there before.

That's one path to it, but it's not nearly that simple.

I'm not supporting what you're condemning. I'm just arguing that it's not 100% black and white. I disagree with "all live service games bad." I certainly agree that some are predatory and a problem, and the entire genre as a whole needs much more regulation.

I couldn't really grasp spending that amount of money on a video game, even cumulatively, so no I didn't consider it from that angle.

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money. Ban the entire business model.

Is most of what I was referring to. I don't mind things in games costing money, as long as the game itself doesn't costs money. I also don't mind live service games, at least in concept. They're very rarely good games, but good examples do exist.

A lot of what I think you're talking about is based on player trading, is it not? Maybe I don't know the games you're talking about. I don't think Valve sets the prices for hats, and I don't think DE sets prices for rivens. They're tradeable, so a market forms. To be clear, I think paying $1000 for a hat is absolutely insane, but I also don't see how it's functionally different than paying an absurd amount of money for a trading card you have no intention of using.

Are there games actually asking $1000 for literally anything in-game? Not a player set price, to be clear.

I'm fine with it for f2p games. The monetization is sometimes awful in those, but it's also sometimes perfectly fine. I just want one monetization model. Either have microtransations and ingame purchases(preferably that don't actually effect the gameplay), or have your game cost money up front, and maybe have some DLCs. Pick one. No more $40 games with battlepasses and buyable skins.

TIL, from that article, that Starbreeze is making a coop D&D game.

That's neat. I have incredibly low expectations, but maybe it turns out decent.

I know my family is so used to thinking of batteries as ultra cheap and disposable that there was a lot of resistance to using rechargeables purely because of the increased cost.

An hour long battery on beard trimmers is crazy, I agree. I actually have no clue how long the battery in my beard trimmers would last because I use them for five to ten minutes and then plug them up for a week.

I disagree with the AA batteries being a negative though. If you use rechargeable batteries and make sure to have spares,

yep, fully agree. I don't particularly care for the move to rechargeable internal batteries for literally every device. I can just cycle through a pack of rechargeable AAAs every year or so and be fine.