Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20180827202615/@comment-3547390-20190219200632

Well, I use some shooting earmuffs, so needless to say I have already tried a similar route. It is alright, but definitely doesn't block out audio as much as I would like.

I rarely had physical comics, they just weren't something I could get, so I often used Spiderfan summaries or just looked at comic covers. Not really the same, but the villains always looked interesting to me. Comics aren't the most exciting of mediums, you know good will always triumph over evil and so the stakes often don't matter, and the soap opera nature has led to a bit of mess in the lore. Sort of like Star Wars, you get parts that are important to the EU, then a lot that just is glanced over. The best ones are ones that have the most intriguing villians and a captivating plot. Spider-Man villians for example tend to be interesting, they tend to have greater motivations than "I am evil" or "for the communists". Timely Comics you will get used to a bunch of heroes that will randomly get motivated to do stuff for propaganda in some wars, only to somehow get bludgeoned in the back of the head with a gun.

That issue will just get more prevalent as time goes on. When the servers go down, you can't access the game anymore. But yes, I can't stand launchers, I want the game to load uninterrupted, not have updates. Not have to fight a game just to install a mod because it sees the files as different and thus wants to "fix the corrupted files". This is one major issue with the modern era that just didn't exist before, mods are great for expandability, yet the most modded games are reliant on online connections. This is also one reason why something released today is almost immediately worse than it was in the 90s. It doesn't matter if that game was identical to Quake when loaded up, the problem is the expectation of using Steam or some other launcher, and having an online connection. Plus the removal of shovelware doesn't help.

Look at Beta3. That is technically piracy, it was a leak of a slightly earlier version of the game, and was a problem back in 1996. Plus you can play the entire game, negating the purpose for buying the game. And yet it is a piece of history, one that if you refuse to touch is just avoiding something that could be looked into. There is of course a spectrum and slippery slopes, but at the end of the day, I find myself highly supporting piracy. While I won't take risks myself (beyond getting the content like Beta3), it is piracy that aids historians in the end. Remember, a lot of these commercial add-ons aren't even in publication anymore, nor are the shovelware CDs. You can rely upon buying them from someone when available, but they are quite a finite resource, one that also has a ticking timespan if it isn't archived in some other way.

Piracy always finds a way, specifically for the easy to acquire stuff, but what is bothersome is that the efforts to fight it just usually make things fall through the cracks. The stuff that barely anyone besides someone as crazy as I would even be interested in. The real curse of obscurity is not what exists today, but that it will have less support and even availability tomorrow. I can afford games, it isn't a matter of price. It is the simple matter that things might be inaccessible. For example, Skyrim can only be legally played through Steam. Yet Steam updates you to the latest version. Say you wanted to check out the earliest mods on the Nexus (ones broken by later updates), the ONLY way you could legally do it is through piracy. Let us hope there is even some original 1.00 version existent and that someone, somewhere supports it. Otherwise nobody really has a purpose to even back up Nexus files, since being online sort of kills its sustainability long term.

You can always buy a book, rent a movie... and yet since the advent of the internet, everything is suddenly becoming unstable and temporary, and even CDs are not permanent.

As scary as it sounds, there may come a day where Quake would be unplayable without piracy. Say it had some legal issues that took it offline in the future, since these can come up at any time. It has been long enough that CDs no longer work. Say internet security is policed a lot more and so downloading games becomes a lot harder. Now the Wikia isn't just a resource for those interested in more about the game, but one of the main ways to even get info about the game. If, you know, Fandom isn't taken down in the meantime, since who knows when sites will just go. I bet people didn't think Geocities would close.

Call it obsession, but even if I own games, I tend to test sites and check downloads. As said, the original CDs are only trustworthy for so long, so finding original disk images or backing up your own is always more calming.

You are right though, Russian sites tend to do better. And yes, I am obsessive with installing games, especially since CDs tend to include additional features such as manuals or even some files not otherwise installed. And yes, GOG isn't 100% pure, but is pretty close to the point I can generally support it. They tend not to make unnecessary modifications beyond making it function for modern systems. Hex edits usually don't bug me too much as long as the original engine is used. For example, Thief is a good game to go GOG for, has plenty of support and doesn't include the new engine garbage (at least I don't think so, never looked too much into it admittedly). But if you are really obsessive, for example wanting the ORIGINAL unpatched version of a game, you need to go CD images. And usually people don't go that extreme, they tend to upload the most recent versions of games. So in a way, there is a lot of incentive for hunting down old CDs, especially for something like Unreal where I am not sure if the original unpatched version can be found. Quake, you are a lot more likely to find 1.09 than 0.91 shovelware or 1.01.

Most would obviously not care. When it comes to Quake, are you really missing much by jumping to 1.09? Not really, primarily it was focused on the multiplayer client, so you just get a few minor changes here and there. Like not instantly dying to Spawns. But then there comes along someone obsessive like me who revels in Spawn related deaths just because they want to see what was there in June of 1996 as opposed to October. And of course it differs based on what it is, since as seen some early Doom PWADs don't work right in later versions, and Thief can have some similar situations.

Hey, I am glad I was inspired to start making archives for my Quake stuff as well. It has even helped tremendously with figuring out what I have done even more than the Wikia, since by now I have expanded to quite a wide vista of shovelware files and it can easily get out of hand. I definitely need to continue, but it just has been a mess lately between dealing with depression and family not going out.

Yes, it was surprising to me even, since I didn't expect something so upfront and terrible. Usually people tend to be terrible, but do it in subtle ways. I don't really fit anyone's expectations, that eventually leads to anger with the weird contradiction of people usually liking me for being an individual.

Your words are wise indeed and sums it up pretty well. Everything is a matter of priorities and benefits, making sacrifices to make sacrifices may not be the best answer. If something was bad enough to sway me, I would of course leave, but otherwise it just holds little purpose. At the end of the day, I just can't justify gambling my life and my family so I can potentially get a situation with a bit less noise, while it isn't ideal we also need to know when to tolerate. My mother is in an unstable place as she always ran from her problems, she was never really happy and never really worked for stability. I think I rather have financial stability, since mental can always be a state of mind, one that can be worked with a lot easier. You can try to fight depression easier than fighting starvation due to lacking funds.