PS C:\> get-help get-help

Exactly, which is why the type of warning they’re getting matters.

What’s the actual warning? Is is the one about “do you really trust this file you found online?” or is it Windows Defender saying it’s infected?

It could potentially recognize from the metadata that the files were downloaded from the internet, but I’m not sure why it would do it to just a video file.

I tend to get warnings for things I install from the internet, not just video files I’ve downloaded.

The original creators are long gone, the philosophy of the site has changed, and it’s filled to the gills with ads and is just pretty sketchy at this point.

Which is surprising, honestly, because the whole reason that the original team got absolutely fucked was because they had way less advertising on the site to help cover the costs. They were railroaded with “profiting off of facilitating piracy.” Yet the current team clearly is actually doing that and yet its fucking crickets from law enforcement. Reeks of it probably being owned by some government and they keep it up so they can keep track of piracy and send out cease and desist notices.

Why else would they be allowed to continue to exist while flagrantly doing worse stuff than the original team that they literally jailed over less?

You’d have better luck on private trackers and/or just sharing on Soulseek.

So then this falls under “devs didn’t care” because it was useful information for them and they didn’t see how it could be used negatively.

It would mean every Unity game was not-so-secretly shipped with code that phones home to the Unity company upon install.

Either they’ve been egregiously spying on gamers for years (and by extension, game developers using Unity have just been fine with that), or they’re lying through their teeth.

Ah, then maybe hopefully they’re the official subs!

No I managed to find what I assume are English fansubs.

I’m not sure they knew the consequences, I think at the time, like me, they actually had more faith that the majority of Americans would read it as what it was. As a young person, I definitely thought there were more thoughtful people.

It’s easier to critique now, 20 years on, because we’re not experiencing the same things the video game industry was at the time. From the insufferable Jack Thompson to Hillary Clinton wanting to ban GTA over the leaked Hot Coffee code that wasn’t in the main game, but locked away in files inaccessible to most, the industry was under attack and being blamed for all Americas ills. Several games, but mostly GTA and Postal, were holding up a mirror to American society and saying things similar to what I said in my last comment: “America has a bunch of ignorant violent gun-toting people living in it, and they were there before video games were, it’s a violent consumer and celebrity obsessed society, so America maybe you need to sort your problems first before blaming us.” At the time, a fair stance to take, but 20 years on, a decision that lead to a lot of negativity and more mixed feelings on the legacy of the game due to it.

It was easy to think back then that acceptance of gaming in the mainstream wasn’t a given, but games now out-profit movies, and some of the biggest “blockbusters” are games. We were honestly probably worried over nothing.

but that was an intentionally outrageous caricature of the narrative being served by the US government

I actually agree with you here, but I had a serious experience years later that changed my mind on the whole thing. It’s perfectly fine for folks like us who have any kind of media literacy to understand that it’s maybe not meant to be making fun of Muslims, but rather America, but…

GTA 5 has this torture scene, right? It hit me like a brick wall one day when I met people who read that scene way, way, way differently than I did. I had read it as an indictment of torture. The problem is, there’s way too many people who think that scene is cool as fuck and want to do that kind of shit in real life. It’s like the people who look up to Scarface from the movie Scarface. Like these characters aren’t good people or people to look up to, but because America is full of violent uneducated fucking yokels you had a bunch of absolute fucking idiots taking the exact opposite message from it. ( I mean, just look at Trump voters…)

You can’t control how others interpret your art, and if you’re not clear enough, you might end up in a similar position as the people behind Postal 2 and GTA 5, where you have a lot of folks totally misinterpreting what you’re trying to say, and then deciding it means vile, horrible things are not just okay, but cool.

It’s actually something I worry about a lot in life, because I’ve had so many times where I thought I was teaching a person one thing, but it turned out I was accidentally teaching them something horrible. In a country with basically no media literacy and an average 7th grade reading level, we can’t actually take it for granted that absolute fucking morons might misunderstand us.

The problem in particular with Postal 2’s caricature of the views of Muslims in America is that functionally, most Americans who played the game never understood that intent or cared. So when it came down to it, they further entrenched those ideas in the American consciousness, instead of them being read by most people as a critique. Was that their intent? No. Does it matter that the opposite happened? Yes.

Yeah, it’s fine to agree to disagree, but just one caveat

OK there was a bit of dodgy stuff

Man this game came out two years after 9/11 and went whole hog on the “all muslims are terrorists” stereotype. It punched down quite a bit.

It’s more that there’s actually games that rise to the level of great art that are designed to be fucking stupid, like Katamari Damacy, which leans hard into absurdism, and is often quite funny, but more importantly the gameplay is original, brilliant, and fun. The art direction in KD is also off the charts quality, especially the music, all of which was written for the game.

Look, I loved Postal 2 back in the day (I always sort of rolled my eyes at Postal, but 2 seemed less serious and more tongue-in-cheek). I might even replay it someday, but it’s not great art. Especially now it’s ugly, it’s clunky, more importantly it continues to be a buggy mess. Not even a Gary Coleman cameo could save it. They were fun games for what they were and for the time they existed in, and it’s okay to remember them for that, but it’s a little absurd to just act like the world hasn’t moved on and that they were great art to begin with. Art direction was bad, level design was bad, there was a lot of bad stuff about the game, beyond even getting into the edgelord shit.

Bad art is okay. I love B-movies, but we don’t have to pretend they’re anything other than what they are: B-movies.

Glad to know you never grew out of your edgy gamer bro stage. Being able to pee on things is peak gaming, amirite? /s

I’m literally saying this as one of the few people who watched the Postal movie more than once simply because it had David Foley in it and I’m okay with bad movies.

I’m thinking that’s gonna be a bit of projection on your part.

I have the recent Chinese version of Three Body downloaded but I haven’t watched it yet. I heard it’s quite good.

I literally just asked the same question to the friend who sent me this, it seemed familiar but I couldn’t place it. He said he thinks its Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, which definitely looks like it could be the one.

EDIT: Just checked, it’s definitely Contagion.

Running With Scissors is a “legendary” developer?

Postal was a violent mess that didn’t age well.

Postal 2 was a buggy mess that also didn’t age well.

After that, it was just legitimately bad games on top of the humor not aging well. (They literally don’t even acknowledge Postal 3)

Seriously, who the fuck would label them legendary? They’ve been a broken mess for over a decade.

Not acting per se… but the private tracker I am on has every video from MasterClass.

There are several acting focused videos in that set.

I didn’t say it was illegal, I said it was hypocritical.