honestly aside from explicitly right wing outlets, I don’t see any particular bias against harris. most outlets will almost alway criticize trump on everything while most of the time they praise harris and sometimes they criticise her on her more progression policies (because most of the media tilts fiscal conservative). it’s rather more of a perceptions of the audience thing. trump has done so many outlandish shit that now most of his bullshit gets filtered out as noise.

also i don’t wanna be mean but the question “Why does it feel standards are much higher for Harris than Trump?” sounds like it’s coming from an agitated"vote blue no matter who" democrat who is baffled about why would people not vote for the obviously better candidate.

there are a lot of reasons as you said “this race is STILL either 50/50 or tilt Trump”. maybe it’s because she’s black or female and there are a lot of racist and misogynists out there, maybe it’s because of the electoral college, maybe it’s because of the hold the MAGA cult has over its members, or maybe it’s because harris is refusing to stop arming and helping a genocide and that is turning people off.

the Harris campaign right now can only change one of these factors. even if you plan on voting, lie on the polls and organise and protest against the genocide because if enough people do this to force the hand of the Harris campaign then it wouldn’t be a close race at all.

jagex is a very shitty company and shitty companies don’t want money, they want all the money. they will kill this game eventually. I hate jagex, from jagex accounts which is just a blatant attempt to phase out 3rd party tools and lock people to their ecosystem (which also fucked me over because the new account system blocks my entire country) to their customer service which is horrendous.

now they’re raising prices to appear more profitable probably to trick another prospective buyer and get tossed around again.

most people are focusing on the free labour roblox is extracting from kids but from the article:

Further claims stated, according to Turkish media, that Roblox hosted virtual parties promoting pedophilia and that “robux,” the platform’s virtual currency, was being distributed by bot accounts to encourage children’s involvement in these activities, and excess presence of gambling sites and their predatory tactics.

so it looks like roblox was banned because of bad moderation in regards to gambling and sexual predators, both of which are massive issues of the platform. overall i think this is a good move which hopefully will push roblox to do better.

very inaccurate measure for piracy. for countries with average low uplink speeds most of them use hosting sites rather than torrent. this is basically a map of how good your internet quality of service is times your population.

i mean reddit is bad, but you can get sitewide banned just for using a vpn. i haven’t used reddit in a long time and basically never posted but a few weeks ago my account got banned because i have to use a vpn to access reddit.

this also goes along with the recent policy of blocking all access to people that have not logged in and are using a vpn.

they did a investigation which discovered findings related to 19 people, one of whom was dismissed and the other 9 were deemed insufficient. it doesn’t mean they only investigated 19 people and found 9, it means out of all the allegations only 19 could even be reasonably investigated, and they decided to terminate 9 people.

and by Zionist i meant a supporter of state of Israel (which you seem highly engaged in covering for them) regardless of ideology and politics. this is the most common use of the word by self identified (most of whom are evangelical christians and are zionists for very anti-semetic reasons) and the general public. stop baiting people into the gotcha “anti-semetic” debate bullshit you disingenuous fuck.

I won’t respond to anything you say because new account posting lie after lie doesn’t seem genuine, so go nuts in the replies.

from the article:

Israel stepped up its accusations in March, saying over 450 UNRWA staff were military operatives in Gaza terrorist groups. UNRWA employs 32,000 people across its area of operations, 13,000 of them in Gaza.

so according to the UN israel was off by a factor of 50, which would make UNRWA 9/13000 = 0.07% of a terrorist organization. since you seem like a zionist, if this is somehow gonna convince me to support israel’s bullshit claims about aid workers in gaza, lmao. lol even.

windows users when bill gates has sex with their girlfriend (she’s owned by Microsoft)

yeah your empathy is really showing here.

from your comment it seems like you think they deserved to die, and immediately copy pasted your wall of text when someone accused you of racism. not a good look i must say.

community servers are fine, and it’s a great game. people were just holding out hope that valve would do something but they didn’t.

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well nice job ignoring literally everything else i said but alright. my rule of thumb for comparing my purchasing power vs an american is to multiply the product’s value by 15. so you tell me that you wouldn’t feel annoyed if you had to pay 375$/year (ignoring the increased data cap costs that comes with using a VPN of course) for a service that might get blocked at any moment? never mind the scammers that are absolutely littered everywhere.

and the regions that are not supported by PSN probably don’t have regional pricing in steam as well, so we also have to pay that fuck you fee if we want to buy our games legit, unless of course you are willing to risk a ban (which actually isn’t that unlikely) in order to region hop, or get a CD key that was most likely bought with stolen gift card money of scam victims. and steam recently has been cracking down on both region hopping and the price disparity seen between different regions.

yes it’s not the most earth shattering issue on the planet, but at least we get to complain about it online right?

since you didn’t fuck off let me explain.

i don’t play nor care about helldivers 2 but i can certainly emphasize with people that have had their favorite game linking to a service that is blocked/not supported. you either use a free VPN which good luck with shitty connectivity, high packet loss and ping, or use a paid VPN which basically converts all your games into a subscription that is most certainly not affordable for many 3rd world users, and at the end you are still probably dealing with the issues mentioned before since you are adding extra hops in your route. and that’s if you can get your hands on a working VPN which since most companies have their IP addresses known you get forced into shady VPNs automatically.

plus you are massively risking your data since you can’t trust the person at the other end, especially with free VPNs that could be loaded with viruses and spyware. in addition in most cases using a VPN can and will trigger false bot flags, causing either a temporary block or worse a ban, not to mention lying about your region when creating an account is in most cases is against TOS (although it’s unlikely you get banned for it).

for example i wanted to play titanfall 2 when it came out but couldn’t due to it being linked to EA account system which is definitely blocked here. never bothered with the official Ultima Online because EA. wanna play the free copy of GTA V? can’t download shit off Epic Games. wanna play any games made by Riot? you better get that DNS service ready cause otherwise you can’t get in. wanna update warframe? too bad the CDN service they use blocks your region (this was a long time ago i remember being pissed off about it).

so stop being an asshole online. we deserve to play games like other people without resorting to hacks in order to have a worse experience that was forced upon us. even ignoring all of my rant this decision is still against privacy of most users by handing their data over to yet another big company. i cannot imagine what would compel someone to make an ass out of themselves to call people that are against this cry babies.

as someone who is in a country where services are regularly blocked and you need to use a VPN,

fuck off.

is your country a member state in WTO? are your copyright laws compatible with that of the US? does your country recognise foreign copyright claims from the countries that your pirated media comes from?

your worst risk as someone who just pirates safe media for personal consumption is getting a letter from your isp and that only happens if there are laws against it on the books and your isp feels threatened. if your country simply doesn’t enforce its copyright laws it’s unlikely you’ll be chosen to be punished to set an example (they’ll most certainly target notorious distributors) and your chance of getting sued by a media company amongst thousands of potential defendants in what i assume is a third world country is almost non existent.

iranian diaspora and sick bastards, but i’m repeating myself.

i appreciate the human touch on the shoes lmao

ah yes behave more carefully so that they don’t get caught committing a genocide lmao. since everyone cut funding to UNRWA after this ruling, i don’t think so. are they gonna arrest people that prevented aid trucks from coming in? are they gonna fire people that made genocidal statements? is there any sort of investigation in the military as to prevent war crimes and possible genocidal conduct? i somehow doubt after almost 4 months of doing a genocide they are suddenly going to change course.

getting multiplayer working on a pirated copy really depends on how the game handles multiplayer itself. in general you can divide them into these categories based on how you pirate them:

the easiest ones would be games that allow community or self-hosted servers. getting multiplayer working on them is essentially just cracking the game itself and turning off a few validation checks. if you wanna play with your friend it can be as simple as checking a tick box when creating a new game, although some games have a separate server binary and you probably need a static ip and other complications that arise when you wanna host a server. these games usually have communities that host servers for everyone and some of them can be as active as the original game’s server or even more. this would also probably disable any anti-cheat that the game might have so they may force the players connecting to have a separate anti cheat. some examples that i’ve played would be older valve games and minecraft. most game these days don’t use this model though.

a little harder would be games that only work over LAN. these also don’t need anything special done to them and if you genuinely get people on the same network you can actually play together, however in this day and age gathering people around on the same place can be quite hard, and also if your group is large enough your router may not be able to handle it, not to mention you can’t play with strangers online. that’s why you need an extra layer of software to simulate people being on the same LAN. the ones i have worked with are Hamachi and GameRanger. these tend to be very finicky about the exact version everyone is using so make sure to have the exact version with the exact patch number. these tend to be much older games, mostly strategy games since that was the most popular genre at the time, although early fps games are also LAN based. the games in the previous category also usually have LAN support. some examples i remember would be borderlands 2, age of empires 2 and stronghold crusader.

the biggest category today would be peer-to-peer (p2p) games which use p2p connections as the main way to communicate. in these games one of the clients usually acts out as the host while others connect to it over the internet. some of them might not even have a host and everyone connects to everyone else… and it’s all a giant mess that you really shouldn’t care about. what you should care about is that these games are way much trickier since game clients need to find each other, be aware of each other and send stuff to each other at all times, therefore most of these games usually use third party APIs do all the syncing. this makes it harder to play them online since they also use these APIs to check if the game is genuine or not. wouldn’t it be nice if we could take a free game that uses one of these APIs, send our requests as if we were playing that game so the validations checks wouldn’t happen? since most games on PC release on steam we can use the steam API (steamworks) to play them. these games need to be patched in order to pass off the game’s requests as if it came from another app. these patches are usually called steam-fix or online-fix patches, and most of them use the Space Wars game which is an example game that valve uses in their documentation to explain how their API works, and developers can use it in order to test out their game to see if it’s compatible with steamworks or not (some patches might use a different game like cube racer or TOXIKK but these are rare). that’s why it works since it’s all exposed and it has a legitimate use so valve is unlikely to nuke it. most modern games that can’t afford dedicated servers (usually indies but sometimes big games) use this method instead. i’ve played too many games this way but the most recent example was lethal company.

last but not least is games that use dedicated servers. unfortunately you can’t play most of these since the server is closed source and no one can host their own server except for the game developers. however some games have had their source leaked, or someone has gone through and painstakingly recreated the game and emulated the server of these games. they are called “private servers” and you can usually find people hosting these, or even host one yourself since most of them tend to be open source. most of them don’t work with the ordinary cracked version of the game but rather have their own special clients. be careful with these since you are trusting the host to actually be secure and most of them are not and you might get your data leaked. most of these private servers tend to be for MMOs since recreating a game demands a very dedicated player base over a long period of time. the most famous example are WOW private servers, specifically Warmane servers which have their own ecosystem.

there are also some oddities here and there that don’t neatly fit in these categories. you can’t play most emulated games online, but some emulators have networking functionality and with modified ROMs you can to play multiplayer, some emulators are purpose built to just play one game really well (like slippi for super smash bros melee), some games originally didn’t have online play at all but someone patched it in etc etc.

TL;DR: there are some general ways that you can get multiplayer on a game working, but it depends on the game. if the game can’t have a steamworks patch or it can’t work with LAN, then you need game specific ways of making it work. if there’s a way, someone has posted about it online so don’t be afraid to look for it. i’m sorry about the length of this comment hope it helps.