In the pre-Internet early 90s, CDs were $15-25 (with inflation, about $40 now)…. And for a lot of music, you had no way of hearing it first. Shoplifting was popular.
1999 piracy mostly consisted of paying for a pirated copy that someone decided to make profit off; most likely, they weren’t the person to make the (first!) copy, and they’re not even sure what’s on the thing they were selling you. It was mostly bootlegging.
When I was a kid we still recorded stuff off the radio and copied our zx spectrum games on the family hi-fi. I’d say good times but it’s so much better now I can pirate everything in great quality from teh interwebs.
My memory is a little fuzzy with dates but I’m pretty sure Napster was going full steam by '99 but even before that we used to trade mp3 files on mIRC or ICQ+CuteFTP, I had hundreds of albums I never paid for which I am still amazed I managed to do over a shared 56k connection
in 1999 you had the ability to get into a music shop, load the cd and test listen to it. Or just go through the music charts. Or wish for a specific song on radio.
Also 1999 already had Napster, Morpheus and others.
I think there’s also an element of the hit tracks often being a bit more formulaic. There’s a big component of familiarity in music that makes it appealing, so people might not appreciate the more experimental tracks on an album until they’ve heard them a few times.
Nope, not every place had the money to burn on a cd in a jukebox from every artist. Also standing there for 45 minutes to listen to the entire thing? Who actually does that?
Also standing there for 45 minutes to listen to the entire thing? Who actually does that?
Me. It was me. I was 14. I listened to the whole thing. I think the name of the store was “The Warehouse” and maybe another was called “Good Guys”? But yeah. Both. I’d take the bus to the mall and sit on that raggedy ass carpet that smelled like a movie theater floor and listened to the whole damn album. All of them actually (usually like 6-8 per station?) until the manager told me to leave. A couple times clerks would hook me up with burned demos.
God, I miss test listens. My favorite record store was very easy going in this, they’d happily let me stand there listening to most of the CD. The unspoken rule was that if you spend that much time listening, you’re going to buy it anyway.
One of the few shops where I always felt welcome.
In the 2000s, some electronics stores where I lived had “jukeboxes” with headphones and a barcode scanner, so you could listen to 30-second snippets of the songs on an album before buying it.
I still keep a pencil in my car. I know there’s no cassette to play, but my car feels naked with a pencil rolling around the center console or in the little tray on the dash.
It was less that we were poor and more that my parents had a lot of music and radio dramas on different media. My father still has more than two hundred vinyl disks that he plays semiregularly and I have an old audio tape player/recorder sitting around in my bedroom although I don’t really use that one.
I'll never forget walking into a record store, looking at a cannibal corpse album. The guy working there looked at me and said if i want the album for free. I was a teen with like 9 dollars to my name so i said of course, thank you. When i asked why he said: because it FUCKING SUCKS.
I STILL don’t buy Sony shit because of that. They booby trapped their product and idiots still buy it. There are plenty of competitors who don’t do that.
Which one? There was the 2020 one by winnti group that attacked Linux servers for a decade, and another in 2021/22 called symbiote, but I don’t know how long that one was hidden for.
Read the EULA, if you don’t want an anticheat that requires those permissions then don’t install the game.
Something having kernel access doesn’t make it a rootkit, it makes it high-risk for misuse by a threat actor. Only if the software was exploited by a bad actor to acquire root/hardware permissions would this issue actually become something.
That, or if the anticheat wasn’t uninstallable and/or dodged scans intended to locate it, etc.
Putting the responsibility to understand legalese (and advanced concepts like rootkits) to such an extent on the end user is just straight gaslighting. Nobody has the required expertise to determine what an EULA actually says outside of the lawyer who wrote it, and even then, I wouldn’t guarantee it.
Ugh. As in blaming someone, casting aspersions on them for something that isn’t their fault or responsibility. Words broaden in meaning. If you’re going to quibble about semantics, I got nothing to say to you.
I have no idea if the gamers installing it are “unaware” (I never played such a game), however it’s still a shitty practice. The average Joe has no idea what the hell a rootkit is and it’s predatory to exploit this. Also, no game should install rootkits. For the love of god, it’s a videogame.
most anticheats run in the kernel, even the most popular ones like battleye and vanguard.
also they are often installed automatically while launching games for the first time, without any prompts
slef hosted servers don’t solve cheating on their own either.
proper authoritive server shouldn’t send or accept any information that isn’t strictly necessary, like positions of players that are in a completely different part of the map
The sad truth. I threw out my CD binders at least 10 years ago. I still have some of that uploaded to the cloud, but I’ve swapped provider a few times and probably lost some.
And more often, I Just listen on spotify or youtube music.
I don’t think any CD I ever wanted enough to buy was less than $16. My family was poor so cassette tapes were still a thing for quite a while.
By the time I could start thinking about affording CDs, I’d already seen the movie Hackers (1994) and was convinced everything would be digital really fucking fast.
Oh I would listen the shit album 100 times and memorize the lyrics for each song. It might have been bad album, but it was mine and I was so excited to bring it home.
Mostly THAT was EPs. Some of the best albums are EPs, but they’re short.
Rose for the Dead EP, was my favorite one. 6 songs.
NIN Broken was 8 songs.
A lot of punk albums have plenty of songs, but they’re so short some of them have terrible play times. OpIvy Energy (the first bootleg I ever had) is only about 35 minutes long and the whole thing mostly fit on one side of a (small) cassette tape.
I could probably find more, but that’s just off the top of my head.
That fucking album is proof there was hope, except it bankrupted London Records which killed Grotüs’ career. They are a dope ass band I found in a CD store with throwaway CDs for a dollar in 99. Definitely worth it for them. YouTube Grotüs’ Mass.
There were so many shitty albums I bought for $16 in the early 90s (even worse, that's like $30 now) and had the exact experience in the meme. Things like we loved the first Suicidal Tendencies album, bought the second and were 'wtf is this?' The only way we had to pick out death metal was based on the cover art and record label... put it in the CD player, okay, good guitar sound... just have to wait until the guy sings.... that pretty much decided it.
“Fuck that shit. We’ll fire the singer that put us on the map because she was only supposed to be a back-up, and then we’ll go full techno”.
(as you may guess, I never got over it. Also, I know this full-techno song was still w/ Liv Kristine, but they stayed techno-ey and I picked a song I don’t actually hate)
I tried to listen the song and it’s not really my cup of tea. It felt almost psychedelic.
I for the most cases , don’t enjoy any screaming and neither vocals for that matter. That’s why I mostly will only listen to instrumental pieces of the metal genre like the doom ost. Nothing else matters is an exception but that song is more of ballad.
The part from 1:09 to 1:18 was a pleasant surprise to my ears. The woman seems very talented and I totally understand why you’d feel like a it was a huge waste to fire her.
The start of the instrumental transported my mind into a bandit filled wasteland world. It’d fit soo well into ashe 2063 ( a free doom full conversions game that I highly recommend ) or at least watch a playthrough of. I guarantee you’d play it after watching a few minutes.
If you like that at all, their Aegis album features her much more heavily, if with somewhat less “growl”. She also has had a few bands since that did “okay” in Norway. Leaves’ Eyes does gothic twist on some traditional celtic.
Also, “Beauty and the Beast” death/doom are hard to find, but Cradle of Filth had a few phenomenal songs of that genre. Nymphetamine Fix is my favorite of theirs. It’s so hard to find good death or doom that fit my tastes.
I watched a little LP of ashe 2063. FPS’s don’t work well with me, but it seemed interesting. Me with gaming seems like you with music :) I don’t like “vocals” (action reflex games)
The dude growling voice wasn’t that bad the first time he sang. Later parts weren’t as good tho. The part at 1:22 till 1:45 was my favorite. Really digging the folklore feel.
I actually have really bad reflexes but most games allow to toggle the difficulty and juste enjoy the story with the exploration as the reward, not passing the challenges. I wish it was as easy to toggle the vocals off. So many songs I deeply enjoyed until someone sang and removed any joy listening to it, so i end up playing that first part over and over.
Yeah, IMO it’s definitely a step down from the growl voices I like, ex. Peter Steele or Raymond Rohonyi (but had to look him up, which shows how much more I respect Liv Kristine than him)
As for vocals. I’m so attached to vocals it’s hard for me to relate. Most music I listen to are the type of person you can immediately recognize if they sing a totally random song acapella. Everything from Enya to Celine Dion, Maynard to Trent Reznor to Peter Steele. Even bands I “kind of like” have that in common.
“Oh my god, that sounds like…” <–if I can’t say that if they do a cover or new release and I didn’t know, then I probably don’t like it.
We’re polar opposite. Nevertheless, I don’t hate all vocals, Celine Dion is indeed a phenomenal singer , but not everyone is a good singer nor have a good voice, and even then, the lyrics can be a turn-off. I have hyperphantasia and my mind tend to wonder whenever I listen to any song, vocal more often than not disrupt the process. My favorite genre is chiptune music.
With a new band you never know. It could be a low, murky graaar like Immolation or Bolt Thrower… or a higher pitch like most Entombed (I prefer Clandestine where some bassist from another band sang, but most people don’t, for some reason). Or it could be like Deicide where the singer is mainly good then they cheapen it with this cheesy high pitched thing…. Carcass where the singer is h medium pitched and sounds good, then they also have a low guttural voice thrown in here and there, which was alright. Or maybe all is well and it’s the perfect Morbid Angel vocals.
Fucking Death metal was my counter to shitty alternative albums with one hit…30 years later I’m still a fan of grindcore/death metal/stoner metal…thank god for Relapse Records.
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