guess who's on fire?

With Steam making digital games mainstream, this was inevitable, but I can understand why this is such a backstab to physical media collectors.

The alarming aspect of going all-digital is the complete lack of ownership, and it's terrifying that companies are doubling down on this.

When you obtain a movie/game digitally, you don't actually "own" it, but rather obtain a license to consume. Those companies dictate how or when you use their media and can remove access without refund.

The license expired? The console ended its support? Your account was terminated? You're fucked.

It's digital rights management (DRM) why an all-digital future is so bleak. Corporations do everything in their power to create this foolproof system in fears of piracy.

It's not foolproof. Pirates always get around DRM, so it's a waste of investment for these companies.

Piracy is huge, not because we're lazy or poor, but because the services don't provide the quality service or ownership we expect.

Streaming is worthless if Widevine forces us to watch media in a piss-poor resolution. Single-player games are useless if internet is required to play.

DRM is also a failure in adapting to our digital lifestyle. Discord watch parties are a wonderful way for us to build human connections at a distance, but we have to jump through hurdles because DRM gives a black screen if movies are screen-shared.

DRM needs to die if companies want to thrive in a disk-less era, and there's proof it can work.

GOG and Bandcamp are great outlets to buy games and music, respectively. They're digital, but without DRM. You own them. You also directly support the artists much more than the pennies from streaming.

With GOG, Bethesda lets you own the install files for the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, complete, and without the DRM overhead.

XL Recordings has Radiohead's and Björk's full music catalogue to buy on Bandcamp. All in the highest quality MP3 and FLAC files, safe on your hard drive.

But every other service is a closed ecosystem, deep in the "you'll own nothing and be happy" mentality. No film studio wants a movie equivalent of GOG, and game companies like Sony are oblivious to the long-term harm that can come from killing physical media. Their consoles will become paperweights.

My big issue with physical media dying out is that companies (other than GOG and Bandcamp) have not given us a viable alternative. We want to own the media we cherish, but DRM makes our hobby a walled garden. It's a failure in digital adaptation on a corporate level.

Ownership and preservation are a necessity in an all-digital future, because why support companies that force us to pay for their totalitarian control over what we consume?

all of my deltarune art from day one. snowgrave tomorrow wish me luck

The blurb said the shot was taken in Granada, Spain, by Agneta Fondén.  No other info, so I have no idea how old, etc.  There's a game (from 1988) that uses a similar pattern on one of its pieces, but this could predate it by at least a thousand years  — or not.  But the pattern intrigued me, so I made a texture map and used Blender's geometry nodes (no generative AI) to set up a hexagon grid with random rotations for the tiles:

That's all done with a single design:

You'd think this would have a name, right?  (For its historical use as an architectural / decor tile — although I've found out more about its use in games, that's not what I'm looking for.)  Like the Penroses do (and no, it's not one of those).  But I've had no luck finding it, or any other info.  Any (human only, please) help?

Turned the Spyro drawing I did into free-to-use profile pics!