Also the book Steal Like an Artist has a lot about how you should stop trying to be totally original and just accept that your work is and will always be a mish-mash of different influences.

As expressed through Mike Mignola, almost.

That’s three non-sequiturs in a trenchcoat. You’re picking topics that sound vaguely related, and then misrepresenting them as well, with the bare fucking minimum effort. And in all likelihood you’re going to scoff at this comment not addressing your argument when what this comment is doing is highlighting how your argument is broken garbage.

Really, try forming a summary of any part of that. ‘Because of rising home prices, it is fundamentally impossible to own a video game.’ No. ‘Because ebook piracy is illegal, the medium of books are not preserved.’ Barnes & Noble is a hologram or something. Also, not letting you juke to preservation, when the topic is ownership. I’ve got a lot of shit preserved that companies would insist I don’t own. They are wrong. ‘Because digital goods have engineered scarcity, you don’t morally own them.’ Holy shit, that’s almost on topic! And yet: wildly misses the point, by not grasping how a normative argument works. As it happens - I am against the obstacles to people preserving the digital goods they bought.

The existence of those obstacles doesn’t mean they don’t own it. It means they’re being robbed.

This is what I’m talking about. You mean “inevitably,” which, no. It’s pretty evitable. Laws work, actually. Other mediums faced this exact same bullshit - everything from books to records to movies - and for a century, the answer was ‘shut up, brand.’ We can and obviously should restore that to software, the same way it still exists for, like, every other possible category of object. Even the spate of rent-seeking across other industries does not somehow make ownership impossible. It’s a trend people hate, it’s been stopped before without la revolucion, and it fucking obviously isn’t “fundamental” if you now acknowledge things were different before.

And of course you follow up this sentence fragment with a completely unrelated demand for a total solution to a systemic obstacle described in broken English. Terse dismissal isn’t “liberal brainrot.” It’s recognizing the bullshit asymmetry principle. You can spout this kind of single sentence assertion and demand, not even bothering to check your goddamn spelling, and then spit on any effort to address why it’s just plain junk.

You lead a rich inner life.

Your comment was such nonsense that it did not parse. I’m not about to peel apart what you intended, and what little it has to do with reality, when the premise is the central fucking opposite of what defines capitalism. Ownership is kinda the whole idea? Like, to an absurd degree. Addressing the equivocation needed to make your absolute declarations justifiable is even now a huge pain in my ass, when just saying ‘what the fuck are you talking about?’ is met with ‘wowww nice counterargument’ and wild grasping about… corporate red scare propaganda? Fuck off, guy.

All of this, because I suggested you obviously can and do own things… like mass-market products. Games, for example. Any game on a cartridge, you plainly own. You have to disappear completely up your own butt to insist otherwise. So when you insisted otherwise, out of fucking nowhere - a brief ‘that doesn’t even almost make sense’ was being polite.

Never wonder why you struggle to make your ideas catch on.

Word salad.

It may surprise you to learn that selling goods and owning things is not the same as abolishing capitalism.

It’s about how culture isn’t property. It belongs to all of us, like language. It cannot be owned. When a movie shifts an entire industry, and the director still thinks he’s free to dictate what’s in it, twenty years later, artists need reminding: you shared this. You gave it to us, or sold it to us. It cannot possibly be yours alone. We outnumber you. As time goes on, some of us have spent more time thinking about it than you ever did.

When a work has influenced people, nobody gets to take that away - least of all the artist. They don’t even get to tell people how to feel about it at-the-time. Trying to erase a work entirely is intolerable censorship. Nothing that any human being put effort into deserves to be lost forever. Not even the stuff that belongs behind a little wall at some somber museum. You are allowed to walk away from it, to disavow it, to never again be associated with it. If you feel that you are no longer the person who made it, vaya con dios. But then who the fuck do you think you are, telling me I can’t continue to love it?

Or we could stop humoring companies that want to take people’s money and pretend that’s not a sale.

That’s a lie told by every new industry since the printing press. Books tried writing “by anonymously exchanging money for this mass-produced object, you’ve secretly entered into a contract that limits your” blah blah blah. Courts threw that shit out, one hundred years ago. Same thing happened for videos and music.

Only software emerged recently enough, and under enough corruption, to keep pretending that opening shrink-wrap was magically the same as ink-on-paper agreement to some negotiated tradeoff.

Moving to digital distribution changed nothing. These assholes would be the first to insist as much. They would agree, you own Factorio on Steam in exactly the same way you own SimCity on SNES. But anyone who points to the cartridge in your hands and insists “you don’t own that” is being a fucking idiot.

This is solving the wrong problem entirely.

You do own games. They’re products. They’re mass-market goods, as surely as when they came on plastic rectangles or glass circles.

Being permitted to continue having things on your hard drive is not a service.

Art belongs to its audience.

Wait hang on there’s a pictures for sad children about this.

“God dammit. Rich again!”

Before Steam, a video game was a piece of paper.

The previews were two screenshots, a paragraph of lies, and your imagination.

Don’t make me tap the sign.

Please do not the wolf.

For those out of the loop: Youtuber Evbo made a two-hour… shonen anime, basically, about jumping between floating blocks in Minecraft.

It asks very little of its audience.

It’s hillbilly Switzerland.

I miss ToyFare.