Mine used to, but they stopped.

I asked why, and they said in the worst case some people would steal them. Maybe they just kept them or “lost” them, or they returned the cases without the game. With something like the Nintendo chips the theft would be obvious, but a couple of disk style ones had labels forged too. A stupid crime, given the last borrower would simply be fined.

On average though, there were a lot of difficulties keeping them in working order. Apparently they were reported non-functional more than DVDs, and despite a contract with a cleaning and restoration company still had a high failure rate requiring frequent replacement. Which is really kinda funny given how 90% of the time the disk is just a DRM token for an online download, shouldn’t be that susceptible to failure from minor damage…

Anyway between these costs and an analysis that physical game media was on the way out the door(probably mostly the costs), the program was discontinued and you can’t borrow games around here anymore.

Well, you see IRC and forums went together because they filled two different needs and we understood that back in the day.

IRC was for chatting, short, quick real time communication that would be lost to the ether as soon as you signed off, unless you had a bouncer or log bot.

Forums were for long information, be that long posts or posts that needed to endure for a long time. Sure you’d get some one liner responses to those posts, but forums were not at all instant like IRC. Though the information did stay much longer, and was much more searchable and organized.

Discord has spoiled us, being quick and chatty while also allowing for longer posts and being searchable. At least within the Discord client. Shoot they even added those “forum” channels to replicate the old forum feel. But real time.

Same thing that’s wrong with Teamspeak and the other old standby, IRC:

A dated look and lack of shinies like inline GIFs scares the youngsters, the lack of history/persistence drops them and everyone else.

Ah, the many logging bots of IRC. Going to a website or getting daily sized text files DCC’d to you so you could search up if your problem had already been solved, or so someone said they think it was solved on one of those days…

Note what they continued to allow. They could still text and call, they did not completely isolate. They just shrunk their bubble.

Instead of being bombarded by global stressors, international conflicts, and the need to participate on a massive stage, they were limited to those friends and family they would give a direct line of contact to.

An echo chamber, if you want to think negatively about it. A village, for a positive label.

The internet is an ongoing experiment, what happens when you take a being who for thousands of generations commonly only directly interacted with his village and neighboring villages, for whom “The World” and all its glories and shames, was just an abstract concept brought home by stories from wanderers…what happens to that species when you put the whole world, up to the minute, within reach at every moment?

What happens when you can subscribe to every conflict and decision made way above your pay grade, and worry how it might hurt you? What happens when you don’t even have to choose to subscribe, it’s injected into your data stream because your anxiety and need to know bring revenue? What happens when you don’t even seek it, but it is delivered right to you?

From the looks of it, the variety of ways you can purposefully or accidentally destroy your local database, and the strict limits on accessing your profile, really gives me the feeling SimpleX is intended to be extremely disposable and deniable.

After playing with it I just don’t see it being used for anything expected to be convenient or ongoing. Regarding the one device per account thing, I think the whole point is you just protect your one app, nobody is sneaking in your laptop or tablet, no remote leaks possible from a sync engine. On iOS you can link to a desktop app, but your phone must remain not just on, but in the app and on the pair screen. One twitch out, PC disconnects.

Feels like something for journalists, whistleblowers, protesters, and all the bad ones. It’s a burner app for your burner phone.

So what’s the opinion here between Signal and SimpleX?

Signal gets all the attention, and seems more approachable but ties to a phone number which can be a big deal.

SimpleX ties to nothing but I could absolutely see people I know fucking it up and wondering where their “account” went.

So, Signal as an common man’s adoptable compromise and SimpleX to nerd out with full “opsec” and disposability? That about right?

As I understand it, their data does in fact enter into the Wayback Machine. They are just also available in the direct WARC archive files(which IMO sounds beneficial to the idea of exporting in bulk to another backup host). At least that’s how their FAQ reads.

And given that they focus on web crawling, and not other arbitrary data formats that IA accepts, 2.8% of over 100 petabytes is still a respectable amount of data.

That said, help is help. If another archival project team wants me to run a worker node so they can distribute load and dodge crawler blocks, let me know, I’ve got space.

The good ol’ Red Scare.