https://www.zeldaspeedruns.com/oot/tech/bottle-duplication

Need more bottles.

Break game to acquire more bottles.

I don’t follow the OoT speedrunning community much, but I am fairly sure that it is possible to overwrite … almost all usable items in your inventory with bottles, though some methods to do this basically make the game unstable.

If there isn’t already such a category, I think there should be an Oops! All Bottles! category, lol.

I remember being able to pull off at least one of these methods back in 1999 or 2000, on an N64… at least one of these methods was circulating on GameFAQs.

IIRC, you can actually deflect certain range attacks, like Ganondorf’s energy ball things… by precisely timing an empty bottle swing.

The two major third party kernel level anti cheat have publically stated they have supported some level of their anti-cheat working on linux since 2021.

Easy Anti Cheat:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/09/epic-games-announce-full-easy-anti-cheat-for-linux-including-wine-a-proton/

BattlEye:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/11/supporting-linux-proton-and-the-steam-deck-with-battleye-is-just-an-email-away/

All the devs/management has to do is actually use/enable this feature that is part of what they’re already paying for.

They’re paying to liscense/use the AC in designed for windows games, these ACs have supported linux via Proton and WINE for almost 4 years now, the game devs just don’t enable this compatability.

As you can see from the articles, with EAC and BattlEye… the process truly seems to be as simple a sending an email or checking a few boxes in a dev toolkit, and EAC/BattlEye does all the hard work, the game devs just need to do some testing and submit logs/error reports, and EAC/BattlEye iron out the rest.

…

Many proprietary or less broadly used anti cheat solutions also work on linux.

Valve Anti Cheat

nProtect Game Guard

PunkBuster

TreyArch Anti Cheat

EQU8

FairFight

… all of these AC systems have at least one, usually multiple, very to moderately prominent games which use them, and are fully supported on linux.

…

There is a ton of prevalent misinformation amongst gamers and devs and management as well, that common anti cheat systems are impossible to support on linux.

This is completely false.

What is happening is game developers either don’t care, or don’t bother to put in a modicum of effort to make their games work with third party systems with features they are already paying for, that do exist, that already support linux… or they are to incompetent to figure out how to make their games fully compatible with said AC SDKs they are already paying for / using / developed in house.

How many times have game developers in the last 5 years released a giant, buggy, unfinished mess?

How many times do we have to learn that making games that are far, far too client side authoritative actually need to have a whole lot of stuff be sandboxed, sanitized, and more server authoritative?

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

Scroll through this and you’ll find examples of almost every major different AC system working on linux in some games, and not working in some other games.

But most people act like its just completely impossible, across the board.

It obviously isn’t.

Many game devs or PR people or AC devs will publically state things that roughly equate to ‘it isn’t possible for our AC system and X game to work together on linux.’

This is again, obviously false, for almost every kind of AC system that exists, there exist fairly popular games that have gotten that AC system fully working.

…

Beyond that, people will say things like ‘all linux users are hackers’ or something to that effect.

Again, this is obviously false.

A cursory look at websites that sell hacks for various games will show you they are all targeted at windows users.

These are actually substantially less likely to work on linux, as Proton and WINE and other translation layers are probably not going to be able to emulate the insane hacky exploits that work on a baremetal windows system.

…

Oh, right. Last point: Many of the most popular sites and communities that sell hacks to windows users … well they defeat kernel level anti cheat systems.

So we arrive at a situation where game devs and gamers blame linux users for cheats linux users can’t use, and because of this, they clamor for and build increasingly invasive AC … that doesn’t even work to stop windows cheaters, but it does make legit linux users unable to play.

… The point of a complex system is what it does, not what it claims to do.

Hey now, when you test in production…

… you gotta aim for the stars.

I played through HL Alyx on a baremetal PopOS! system and Valve Index, with no need to compile a kernel from source … in 2022.

I’ve been gaming soley on linux since 2020 or 2021.

Yeah, its definitely ready now, most straggler games are basically massively overproduced and massively MTX exploitative team based shooters using kernel level anti cheat that are designed for children with mom’s credit card.

I mean… probably yes, but in the case of much of the Torah, the mythical characters and stories first appear textually in Sumerian cuneiform.

The Sumerian culture and written language (cuneiform) was located basically in modern Iraq, near the Tigris and Euphrates. The written language and stories can be dated to about 3000 BC, the actual culture itself, even further.

Then you can trace the evolution of the mythic/legendary characters and stories into the Ugartitic texts, located in Ugarit, modern day Syria, dated to about 1200 BC, with the Ugaritic written language itself being an evolution of Sumerian cuneiform.

The Torah itself, in early Hebrew, wasn’t actually written and compiled as such untill roughly 400 BC, despite the tradtitional insistance it is many hundreds of of years older, and is largely based off of the Ugaritic texts.

If you look at the actual archaelogical and linguistic history of peoples, languages, texts and stories, its quite clear that the ultimate origin of many of the characters and stories in the Torah is Sumeria. Those stories then migrated and mutated as they spread from Sumeria to Canaan, where the Hebrews and Israel/Judah later arose.

I’d say a ‘reality check’ is not always negative.

Say you’re very, very self conscious in public, always nervous about how others percieve you.

But then, one day, a friend pulls you aside and ‘reality checks’ you with:

“Look, in 90% of situations you’ll ever be in, if you can follow a few basic dress and behavioral rules, you’ll be fine. Barring situations where the whole idea is you making a good first impression… most people, most of the time, in most situations… really don’t care that much.”

Things like that are arguably ‘positive’ reality checks.

The reason why ‘reality check’ is often connotated negatively is because most of the time, cognitive dissonance develops as a way of excusing or justifying harmful or irresponsible behavior or inaction, all things that mean you are living in a mild to serious delusion which can no longer be maintained, and will require a lot more effort to grapple with.

But it can be the case that reality is in someway better than it is perceived by someone who is overly critical or peasimistic in some way.

In some sense, the initial realization that you’ve been incorrect about something is negative in that you may be embarassed about being wrong in the past, but if it actually means a more realistic outlook going forward, which is actually less troublesome, easier to exist with/in, then I’d say thats overall a ‘positive’ reality check.

Another hypocritical dichotomy is:

Central planning does not and cannot work as efficiently as the free market!

Meanwhile, Amazon and Walmart are literally centrally planned economic production/purchase/distribution systems for nearly every kind of good imaginable, which both benefit massively from government subsidies, but they don’t count because… they’re corporations, and they don’t have perfect monopolies.

… Even though in almost every example given of a ‘centrally planned economy’, the state also did not have a perfect monopoly.

translation party!

Throw Japanese into English into Japanese into English ad nauseum, untill an ‘equilibrium’ statement is reached.

… Which was quite often nowhere near the original statement, in either language… but at least the translation algorithm agreed with itself.

There is no way to know for certain.

Rockstar almost certainly acquired these idiot clowns because they decided they could make more money by officially/unofficially endorsing and regulating RP servers that fleece people for money with paid memberships tiers and in game item/group/role/permission/shop purchases, than they would by suing them all out of existence.

Rockstar very, very easily could have sued them out of existence, and probably put many of them in jail.

There is, imo, a 0% chance that FiveM devs were not personally enriching themselves in some roundabout manner with their product, before they became official employees.

They very likely got an offer from Rockstar that basically looked like ‘Hey, we know you’re making money off of illegally modifying our product, you can either work for us and make that money for us, or we sue you into an early grave’.

My guess to the future with GTA6 is that if a clear winning group emerges from this current drama shitfest, Rockstar will put them in charge of basically developing and licesensing out a framework for GTA 6 online RP servers.

Or, if the shitfest is too stupid and obnoxious, they’ll shit can basically everyone involved, maybe keep a few who can actually code decently around to work on other parts of the game, and any GTA 6 RP system would have to be built basically from scratch.

… And most of the people trying to build it from scratch would most likely be those people who just got shitcanned, and they would most likely be cease and desist / sued into oblivion.

Quite literally, every single GMod RP admin I used to know as a kid is now a full fledged MAGA fascist and/or confirmed pedophile and/or basically started their own cult based on themselves.

A lot of the repurposed stories in the Torah do not have prehistoric origins, as that would mean they have no written predecessor, they have origins that are historic, documented in writings that have been dated by archaelogists and ancient linguistic specialists.

The story of Noachian Flood, and many other elements of stories in Genesis, have been directly connected to much older Sumerian/Akkadian mythology, which predates the Canaanite/Hebrew/Israeli mythology.

Noah’s flood is a rewritten version of the Gilgamesh flood myth, with Utnapishtim as the sole survivor of a massive flood, who builds a giant wooden ark, puts his family and a bunch of animals on it, sends out birds to check if the flood is over, then goes on to restart civilization after the boat comes to rest on top of a mountain.

Not surprising.

If you’ve ever interacted with any of the actual devs or FiveM staff on discord or anything, say you’re looking for actual technical support because their own function calls are incorrectly documented… they’re basically the same as hugely egotistical Gmod RP server devs of yore, happy to powertrip and scam people with reckless abandon, massively overstating their own technical competency and taking any question or criticism about as well as if you’d just personally tied them down to the cuck chair while their gf laughed and moaned.

Yahweh evolved out of existing Canaanite polytheism.

El was the highest god of this pantheon, Ashera was his wife/consort and chief goddess, Ba’al was their child, god of storms and fertility, amongst others gods like Anat and Astarte.

The first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah, mostly switches between referring to ‘God’ as El, and ‘The Lord’, Adonai, Elohim, which is actually plural and means ‘The Gods’, and YHWH.

Adonai was originally a title given to Ba’al.

Yahwism basically started as a cult, in Canaan, that amalgomated Ba’al and El together into a single God, originally referenced Ashera but then wrote her out of the religion, and then just smashed many of the stories about or involving El and Ba’al together, causing the incongruous naming scheme and duplicatative, often directly adjacent, stories in the hebrew Torah, which are largely the same general plot, but have inconsistent details.

This is why Yahweh is jealous and demands destruction of idols to his predecessors in Canaan, and seems to acknowledge that other gods do actually exist, but he is the best and most powerful.

This is why you get Exodus 6:3

https://biblehub.com/exodus/6-3.htm

Where God basically retcons his name. You see I used to go by El, but now my name is Yahweh!

Its integral to establishing the mythic history that Yahweh and his flock are actually not from Canaan, they’re escapees from Egypt, and Yahweh promised them Canaan…

While in reality, the Exodus story is completely impossible as described (would have been something like 2-3 million people leaving Egypt, at a point in history where that was comparable.to the total population of lower Egypt), there is 0 archaeological evidence for anything like that ever occuring… but having a unifying myth is useful for justifying conquering some of your small neighboring Canaanites, even if the stories about thag are also largely mythic and exagerated.

…

Something somewhat analagous seems to have happened something like 600-700 years earlier in Egypt, when Akhenaten decided that actually, Aten was the best and only important god, that the others had died or grown weak.

This attempt at either monotheism or monolatrism didn’t work out so well, it was so unpopular that shortly after Akhenaten’s death, polytheism was reinstated, Akhenaten’s name was removed from official historical records, his monuments were destroyed, and the dynasty that came after him reffered to him as ‘the enemy’ or ‘the criminal’.

ScriptKiddies.

Valve runs a couple of online casinos that target children specifically, not sure we should be arguing who’s worse here.

I agree with the sentiment of this… MTX/lootbox shenanigans are a bad, harmful practice that should be much more heavily restrained…

But that has nothing to do with being a monopoly.

At this point, its a widespread industry problem.

You’d address that with regulation, but not on the basis of Steam being a de facto monopoly, instead based on some kind of consumer protection regulation.

… But Trump and Elon are blowing all of that up, so, probably not gonna happen anytime soon.

Valve skims 10-30% of an insanely large volume of transactions and should be held to a much higher standard.

10 - 30 % really isn’t that unreasonable compared to a lot of existing comptetitors… though I guess we’ll see how their ongoing lawsuit around that ends up.

Either way, this also doesn’t make or not make them a monopoly, unless you or the ongoing lawsuit can prove that a 30% is functionally an outsized monopoly rent, wildly out of step with the rest of the industry.

If this is instead roughly in line with the rest of the industry, you’d again need to address this with some other legislation that spans the whole industry, not specifically targeting Steam as a monopoly.

A lot of people seem to think that a monopoly has a much, much more direct and literal definition than it actually does.

The definition the FTC uses is:

Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.

That is how that term is used here: a “monopolist” is a firm with significant and durable market power.

Courts look at the firm’s market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area.

Some courts have required much higher percentages.

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined

I have a bachelor’s in Econ.

The people that run and advise the FTC have PhDs.

(Well, at least untill Elon and Trump put the fucking Shark Tank guy in charge, or something like that.)

Generally speaking, a monopolist is a single entity that has captured a huge chunk of an otherwise varying and well differentiated market, if your market is closer to the theoretical (ie, not real) idea of perfect competition, or if you’re talking about a consolidated market with only a few major players, the monopolist has at least 50% of the market, though, depending on other factors, that line may be drawn at up to 75% ish.

Different specific situations, regions, laws, etc. establish differing specific criteria… but the idea is not that a monopolist is defined by being literally 100% of the market.

That situation would specifically be referred to as a ‘perfect monopoly’, and like ‘perfect competition’, is basically theoretical only, or a situation where you’re looking at something like a local public utility or some kind of government/state entity.

In actual mainstream academic and legal usage though, a monopoly is a single entity in the market has a very outsized market share when compared to any other market participant, such that its actions alone can very significantly affect all other market participants.

…

Now… when it comes to Steam… a whole lot of the arguement is ‘what is and is not the market, what constitutes its boundaries?’

If you define it as just ‘PC video games’, then sure Steam likely is an effective monopoly.

But if you define it as ‘all digital games’, then no, not even close, the Google Play Store and Apple Store are responsible for far more digital game downloads than Steam, way waaay more games are mobile games than PC games, if you go by yearly or monthly downloads, or market share.

It gets even more complicated with cross platform games.

Ultimately, it would be up to a lawsuit, lawyers, judges, industry experts, to argue all of the specifics of exactly whether or not its legally valid to formally classify Steam as a monopoly that would need to be broken up or penalized or regulated in some way, and a huge part of that legal battle would be based around differing definitions of what exactly Steam is a monopoly if, and whether those precise definitions are valid.

…

‘Other options exist for consumers’ or ‘they don’t have a perfect monopoly’ is not a valid arguement against Steam being a monopoly if Steam facilitates 85% of PC game sales, and the other 15% is split up between 10 or so other digital store fronts.

If that is your rubric for ‘what is the market’, then yeah, Steam is a monopoly.

But, if your rubric is ‘all digital games’, then no, Steam is just a large player in a market with other larger players, other slightly smaller players, and many other very small players.

…

Beyond that, a huge part of legally being determined to be a monopoly is unethical/illegal behavior of the ‘monopolist’ being used to obtain or maintain their monopoly.

In Steam’s case… I think that would be pretty hard to substantiate, its more so just that Steam had the idea first, expanded upon it quite a lot, and no one really bothered to try to compete with them on the same level untill basically the Epic store, fairly recently.

I worked at a large import export firm based out of Seattle a decade ago. All of their internal and external accounting ultimately relied on COBOL as well.

A single guy maintained it all… he also wrote it all, originally. Got back from the Vietnam war, learned COBOL with his GI Bill, went to work for this company, stayed for his whole life.

He kept telling the board that they needed to find a replacement, or three, for him, when he retired.

They did not, at least not before he retired, and I left several months later due to every system I relied on to do my work breaking down after he left.

its ok, their other chips have salt too =P

It also might have tapeworms.