The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.
If the technical boundary collapsed, put a human-made boundary in its place. You have the right to have some peace of mind and quiet; make yourself unavailable for at least a good chunk of the day, and make sure your folks know you’re unavailable. And why.
That’s how I remain sane.
I got the demo, expecting something like “Stardew Valley meets Factorio”, and so far, it’s… okay, I guess?
Still early access so it has plenty issues; for example it’s unclear what gatherers do with the crops (if I’m nearby they pop up in my inventory, otherwise I guess they teleport to the storehouse?), and I keep losing track of my cursor because the game focuses on what’s close to the player avatar. But it might be a cool game in the future, dunno.
In both cases you have businesses using the lack of legal representation to avoid following local laws. But that’s it; everything else is quite different.
I don’t think Procon organs have the power to ban the sales of an imported good within their states. But even if they do, note that this would only apply to the state (in this case São Paulo). Plus Nintendo is being considerably more tactful than that braindead idiot called Musk.
A lot of the Switch 2’s UA is also illegal in Brazil. For example, check section 7 (Dispute Resolution) - IIRC law protection is considered an inalienable right in Brazil, you can’t simply sign it off.
However Nintendo has been shielding itself by saying “ackshyually, we aren’t conducting business in Brazil”. That’s why São Paulo’s Procon is calling it out.
Procon-SP is a state customer protection organ. It’s more like “São Paulo’s watchdog” than “Brazil’s watchdog”. However since the state in question is populous and has relatively high purchasing power per capita, typically megacorpos beeline towards it anyway.
I’ll coarsely translate here the news from Procon-SP’s site. Emphasis mine in all cases, as I want to highlight something.
Procon-SP notified Nintendo to request changes in clauses deemed abusive, present in contracts made with Brazilian customers. The main complain involves the unilateral and unjustified cancellation of service subscriptions.
This showed a wider problem: Nintendo lacks formal representation in Brazil. This absence hinders conflict intermediation and the conduct of customer protecting organisations.
To handle this case, Procon-SP had to contact the headquarters of the business in USA. Only then the business named a law office in Brazil, but solely to handle the relevant clause.
The absence of formal representation in the country is an important warning to customers. Without such legal presence, the protection predicted by the Customers’ Defence Code is limited.
“The existence of legal representation within Brazil needs to be one of the criteria [potential customers] take into account to decide their purchases, specially so for digital services or foreign platforms”, says Álvaro Camilo (Procon-SP’s Service and Orientation director). “Without such groundwork, Procon organs cannot act in full power, given different countries have different laws”.
This precaution applies both to abusive clauses and common problems, such as delivery delay or service failure. When the business is not registered in Brazil, often there is no way to sue it.
In the last years, the number of purchases in international sites grew sharply in the country. However many of those platforms conduct businesses with no local judicial link.
Even for smaller purchases, there’s a real risk: the customer gets no goods, no answer, no support. Procon-SP recommends to be extra careful, doubly so for sites handling fashion, electronics, and accessory items.
Before purchasing something, it’s essential to verify if [a business] has CNPJ [i.e. it’s considered a legal entity in Brazil], a real address in Brazil, and support channels; those pieces of info are fundamental so Procon-SP can act in case of problems.
Nintendo informed that’ll analyse the request from the organ, and that it’ll answer it within 20 days. Until then, Procon-SP recommends customers should report irregularities through the site www.procon.sp.gov.br.
See the bolded parts? São Paulo’s Procon is basically telling people “Don’t buy stuff from Nintendo, it’s an irregular business in Brazil.”
I hope so, too. Their current situation isn’t currently the best (a lot of them went away in the late 10s, simply because people were using them less); I’m kind of hoping to see a revival, but that’s at the mercy of the STF, so I can’t completely rule out that the situation will evolve exactly like in the UK. It’s “let’s wait and see”, you know?
I’m also wondering the impact of that on chatrooms, that used to be extremely popular here.
When something similar happened in the UK, it was pretty much exclusively smaller/niche forums, run by volunteers and donations, that went offline.
[Warning, IANAL] I am really not sure if the experience is transposable for two reasons:
So there’s still a huge room for smaller forums to survive, or even thrive. It all depends on how the STF enforces it. For example it might take into account that a team of volunteers has less liability because their ability to remove random junk from the internet is lower than some megacorpo from the middle of nowhere.
Additionally, it might be possible the legislative screeches at the judiciary, and releases some additional law that does practically the same as that article 19, except it doesn’t leave room for the judiciary to claim it’s unconstitutional. Because, like, as I said the judiciary is a bit too powerful, but the other powers still can fight back, specially the legislative.
For context:
There’s an older law called Marco Civil da Internet (roughly “internet civil framework”), from 2014. The Article 19 of that law boils down to “if a third party posts content that violates the law in an internet service, the service provider isn’t legally responsible, unless there’s a specific judicial order telling it to remove it.”
So. The new law gets rid of that article, claiming it’s unconstitutional. In effect, this means service providers (mostly social media) need to proactively remove illegal content, even without judicial order.
I kind of like the direction this is going, but it raises three concerns:
On a lighter side, regardless of #2, I predict a lower impact in the Fediverse than in centralised social media.
The stick in question is off-site; it sees the PC once per month, then it gets back to the drawer in another room. And regardless of its fate, if I had a flood or fire affecting my PC, in the second store of a brick house, odds are that I’d have far more pressing matters than the data.
It’s mostly fluff kept for sentimental value. Worst case scenario (complete data loss) would be annoying, but I can deal with it.
That’s one of the two things the 3-2-1 rule of thumb doesn’t address - depending on the value of the data, you need more backups, or the backup might be overkill. (The other is what you’re talking with smeg about, the reliability of each storage device in question.)
I do have an internal hard disk drive (coincidentally 2TB)*; theoretically I could store a third copy of the backup there, it’s just ~15GiB of data anyway. However:
diff of the most important bits of the data, bit rot is not an issueThat makes the benefit of a potential new backup in the HDD fairly low, in comparison with the bother (i.e. labour and opportunity cost) of keeping yet another backup.
*I don’t recall how much I paid for it, but checking local hardware sites a new one would be 475 reals. Or roughly 75 euros… meh, if buying a new HDD might as well use it to increase my LAN.
No, it’s really not.
It is enough for my use case, considering the likelihood of my SSD and the USB stick going kaboom in the span of a single month is next to zero; if only one of them does it, I can use the other to recover the data to a third medium.
I mean just about anyone of sufficient size is susceptible to this.
Sure - the bigger the business, the more expendable each user/customer is. And Microsoft is really huge.
Just keep multiple backups.
Two are enough for most people (the 3-2-1 rule); sometimes one. The catch is that at least one of those backups must be off-line, and in a different medium than the original. While you can use the cloud to increase the reliability of the whole system, you should never rely exclusively on it.
Reminder “the cloud” is someone else’s computer. If you’re going to use it at least make sure the “someone else” isn’t a clown hat like Microsoft.
(This article also prompted me to update the backup of my personal files. I’m not following the 3-2-1 rule; a USB stick is enough. I do like to keep it updated though.)
So, basically: Save our Ship, vanilla version? Awesome.
I’m actually excited with this DLC.
Wow, the analysis is great - thanks for sharing it! For me Stickerbush Symphony always evoked some sort of loneliness or melancholy…
And yes, the whole series has great music. I agree DKC2 is the best in this regard; not just because the tracks are great on their own, but because they fit really well the mood of each level. Disco Train is on its own a rollercoaster, Mining Melancholy’s “mmhmm mmhmm” evoking winds and machinery, Bayou Boogie making the level sound m… mois… swampy. From other games of the series DKC1 Forest Frenzy and DKC3 Nuts and Bolts are also great. (Now thinking, the DKC3 soundtrack as a whole is a bit more industrial.)
Hard level with all the wasps
So all of them? …sorry, I couldn’t resist. (This reminds me world 4, Krazy Kremland. The hive levels are awesome!)
I remember being completely entranced by it and being unable to put it down (even though it was very difficult for me at the time).
That’s something I find great on so many old games: they were hard, and yet they encouraged you to keep on trying.
found it [DKC2] to difficult and didn’t really like the new protagonist as much
Playing with Dixie is easier, so perhaps both things are related.
Donkey Kong Country was my favourite childhood game series.
The first game was a blast: fun gameplay, full of secrets and things to collect, good music, gorgeous graphics even for 2025 standards, the difficulty was just right. (A bit too hard for me back then, too easy nowadays.)
I remember when DKC3 was released in '98, I’d go to the cartridge rental shop once a week to ask the guy if they had it already. (He was extremely patient with me. That guy was a bro.) Once I finally got to play it, it didn’t disappoint me at all, I loved those puzzles and it was amazing to explore the map freely. Kiddy was a bit odd, but really fun to play with, and I loved how Dixie throwing Kiddy had different mechanics than Kiddy throwing Dixie.
But by far my favourite was DKC2. Everything was perfect - they picked the formula from DKC1 and expanded it: more collectibles! Better music! Better looks! The bonuses now aren’t just “find all bonuses in the level for +1%”, now you got something to find in them! I can literally play the first level of that game with a blindfold, it’s itched in my brain. (Fuck Bramble Blast, though. I had a hard time finding one bonus and the DK coin there. And by then my English was a bit too awful to get what Cranky said.)
Then… well, DK64. It killed the series for me. I didn’t get why it wasn’t fun, but nowadays I see what happened - early 3D games had clunky controls and camera, plus the whole “gotta remake the whole thing five times to get to 100%” was meh.
I played through the demo. It’s fun; you need to strategise a bit and think about the synergy of the power-ups you get, otherwise you will get yourself killed. (That sloth was specially hard.)
It reminds me a bit The Binding of Isaac, both in the overall “mood” and randomness of the power-ups you have to choose from.
I am sane. I SWEAR I AM SANE!
/me grabs the kitchen knifeCAN’T YOU SEE IT? I’M SANER THAN EVERYONE ELSE HERE!!![I couldn’t help but play along with the joke, sorry.]