Call Of Duty Black Ops 7, however im hearing Battlefield 6 is also in the same boat.

A lot of gamers tend to also be teenagers/young adults who just want to play a game with their friends in their social group. I was a kid once too after all so its understandable. However its the “just want to play with my friends” crowd that enables the industries worst practices by being consumers who think of yearly video game release hype cycles as vehicles of social interaction instead of caring about games as an art form thats being slowly degraded by corporate cuckery over time.

Black Ops 7. Its got plenty of shaming going on for other reasons already but this is the first time ive seen this message.

Paid products can be enshittified. Also, its not just the quality of products that are getting enshittified but the concept of ownership over usage and access to digital data.

• Slowly raising sub rates with that boiling frog tek.

• No longer providing means to purchase local copies of data on a CD-ROM when you did before, just to pigeon-hole buyers down a subscription only access to the cloud.

• Not offering a one time lifetime subscription in your sub-only model.

It used to be that you bought something and owned it physically or at least owned a private copy of the data that could be cracked/ stripped of DRM so you could truly freely own and distribute. Now they all want to be digital landlords where you own nothing and pay a little more each month through the good old boiling frog while pinning price increases on inflation. The mid-term result is a 100$/year to rent out digital access to a dictionary when before you could buy a cd copy.

Also, I don’t buy the “academic quality things should be incredibly expensive because its meant for scholars and university libraries” argument. Fuck that grift man. I know server infrastructure. It cost less to update a database or serve thousands of visitors than you might think especially for simple database lookups sent through https.

It also cost practically nothing to distribute a digital file. So, Free digital access to educational and reference materials output by universities realistically should be a right in any sane society. Im sure Oxford University gets enough tax breaks and gov subsidy they could do it without impacting the stock holders precious quarterly figures. That entire 12 volume OED set + SOED takes up 500mb and can be fit on every modern tablet and phone. It sure as hell could be fit on a CD ROM years ago when they made that. The only reason its not is greed and maybe the dopamine rush scholars get from filtering the plebs.

so why all the fuss about the inaccessibility of OED?

Because the OED is the creme of the crop for dictionaries, particularly the SOED has some of the most well put together definitions of any dictionary for casual lookup. Because the 1200$ paywall they put behind the physical editions was always bullshit. Because they no longer have legitimate ways of purchacing a cheaper local digital copy when one was available before is bullshit.

Sure, wiktionary or webster might have an entry for the word but if you do side by side comparisions betweeen dictionary theyre mid compared to OED/SOED. If your reaching for one the logic should be that you want the best/most accurate and descriptive one possible, no?

I genuinely believe that universities have at least a moral obligation (HA!) to provide free public services that better humanity. These are places of education subsidized and given tax breaks by the government for gods sake, yet theyre so corrupt from the rich fucks that run them like a for-profit corporation.

I would make an argument that free access to the highest quality dictionaries thats the gold standard for scholarly reference and similar such materials should be closer to a digital right than anything. In a better world academia pricing structures get fucked, knowledge becomes truly open through digital online and local reference resources without DRM.

Of course, thats a pipe dream. So instead, I simply ask for the option of an updated CD rom to be released as a possible purchacing option in a DRM free format. You know, like they already did years ago.

I don’t own/use a kindle but did a 2 minute search and found this promising fourm post comment from user Enterio https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=360684

"On my Kindle (Paperwhite, 11th gen), the dictionaries are held in the “\documents\dictionaries” subfolder (I kept my firmware to an older version to keep my USB connection). When I bought them online (on Amazon, see Kindle Default Dictionaries category), I received pre-made MOBI files that I only had to place in the aforementioned subfolder, without converting them to other file formats. Afterwards, I set up my default dictionaries for every language on my Kindle in Settings → Language & Dictionaries → Dictionaries. Hope that helped. "

Also, the 1921 version of Merriam-Webster dictionary has entered public domain and is available for local download in stardict format here https://github.com/ahacop/websters-dict-1913-stardict

Double reminder that local offline copies of wiktionary.org dictionaries are available in Stardict, Tabfile and Kindle formats for download here: https://github.com/Vuizur/Wiktionary-Dictionaries

Sure! Heres links.

The full Unabridged 2nd edition (comes in 2 parts): https://archive.org/details/stardict-Oxford_English_Dictionary_2nd_Ed._P1-2.4.2

The Smaller condensed SOED edition: https://archive.org/details/soedrich-star-dict-2022-11-11

While your at it download the torrent link file themselves too in case these archives ever get taken down. I get the impression Oxford is particularly aggressive with takedown request so please consider seeding to keep these alive and easily accessable for others.

Oxford English Dictionary is directly funded by Oxford University. Im pretty sure a world class old money university can afford to subsidize public access and periodic updates to a digital dictionary database without putting it behind a subscription based paywall. At least they could try to offer a lifetime sub option.

Well, that sure is an option, though one that I would rather not take, like ever.

Coincidentally a copy of the Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary 2nd edition stardict is currently available for free on the internet, only requires approximately 200-300mb of storage space, can be installed on my e-reader or pc software of choice for potential automated database retrieval / RAG, ect ect.

In case anyone is wondering you can download a stardict of the shorter oxford english dictionary (and most of the other dictionaries mentioned in this thread!) and have a local copy then use software like stardict or svdc to look up. I actually put up a copy on the internet archive earlier this year. Good timing huh? https://archive.org/details/soedrich-star-dict-2022-11-11

Handling straight rosin is nightmarish. You couldfreeze it so it solidifies and try to get chunks in the cart? I never was able to get reclaim rosin out of my hoohah tubes without a big mess/headache.

I only ever syringed activated rosin cooked into coconut oil for pill cap edibles. Syringing regular rosin would be awful.

I understand the appeal of pens and carts but like maybe just get a vaporizer thats actually meant for concentrates if you want to go that route. Its the easiest thing in the world to heat a DV tip and then lay some concentrate on the inner walls and heat it back up. Or get some vape wool and saturate it with oil and load it in the tip.

It may very well be the oil itself if your buying a generic THC cartridge who knows what they put in as filler. Stay away from the disposable carts and pens IMO.

If you are really interested in switching to vaping for health reason you should try a proper dry herb vape like dynavap which can do both straight herb and concentrate dab vaporization. Can’t get smoother than a high quality concentrate vapor at lower temp pulled through some cold ice.

A few days ago I gotta message from google saying they “can’t verify my age” (meaning they want gov ID I’m sure) so I’m forced to use safe search and other stuff too.

Fuck. That!

Including a dildo as a random image is such a power move, no signs of encroaching corporate enshittification or AI here :)

Theres still browsers like waterfox, librewolf, palemoon, ungoogled chromium. For search engines theres SearX(NG), 4get.ca, YaCy, some more obscure ones like qwant or marginalia.search and a dozen other resellers of google and bing that nobody cares about.

IMO 4k resolution is overkill its way past the optimal between file storage and visual fidelity. Nobody has ever complained about the visual quality of my 720p or 1080p sourced stuff much in the same way most sane people wont notice the difference between FLAC and mp3 on average listening. Bhack in my day we were lucky to get 480p on a square box tv.

Less danger than OPsec nerds hype up but enough of a concern you want at least a reverse proxy. The new FOSS replacement for cloudflare on the block is Anubis https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis, while Im not the biggest fan of seeing chibi anime funkopop girl thing wag its finger at me for a second or two as it test connection, I cannot deny the results seem effective enough that all the cool kids on the FOSS circle all are switching to it over cloudflare.

I just learned how to get my first website and domain and stuff setup locally this summer so theres some network admin stuff im still figuring out. I don’t have any complex scripting or php or whatever so all the bots that try scanning for admin pages are never going to hit anything it just pollutes the logs. People are all nuts about scraping bots in current year but when I was a kid allowing your sites to be indexed and crawled was what let people discover it through engines, I don’t care if botnets scan through my permissively licensed public writing.

Similar story here! A couple years ago learning about Gemini/gopher/smallnet from mentaloutlaw videos. So I joined a public access Unix server (first SDF later tilde.team) and learned how to write my own capsule site for a few years. Learned some basic .CGI bin and awk processing to create a gemtext to epub converter that made small ebooks of daily post in atom feed. It was like training wheels really helped prepare me for the transition to full self hosting capsule and website