Yes… but the meme doesn’t work if said practice is barely on the scale.

Because yeah, there are some REALLY sketchy registrars. Working with the “reputable” ones and now taking advantage of a nation’s country code for the lulz (see: .ml) keeps you pretty safe.

… if DNS is the worst capitalist practice you know of then you REALLY should spend less time shitposting and more time paying attention to the world.

Yeah…

Spend some time in the “I hate reddit and am glad I am never going back but do you think reddit still thinks about me and hey, can I take a picture of your penis and send it to show reddit that my new boyfriend is massive?” communities. LOTS of the folk around here have those “I was banned for absolutely nothing” mentalities.

And it shows with how fast people are to “clown on” folk with just blatant insults.

Those folk aren’t at all exclusive to hexbear.

Lemmy, in general, is left leaning with the lead dev and “main” instance being unabashedly tankies.

Hexbear is the big instance of people who are so fucked they tend to get banned even from there. The ml crowd is generally still worth talking to. Whereas the hexbear crowd immediately jump to harassment the moment they decide you failed a purity test because you advocated for a social program rather than insisting the entire system needs to be burned down and a managed economy run by putin put in its place.

Needless to say: Anyone who spends enough time “on lemmy” is either on an instance that banned hexbear or muted them themselves.

It depends how it was stored. If it is just raw dogging the garbage pile? The odds get very low but, theoretically, it is just a matter of very carefully the drive before booting it up. Think “data forensics”

If it was stored in a plastic bag or box? Then it is about as safe as a drive in your closet that you haven’t spun up in over a decade.

We live in a world of no regulation (or, to be precise, no enforcement on regulations) but…

Holy shit? Stopping is the one time you actually SHOULD look at your infotainment screen to futz with climate control or check how many minutes until the next exit and so forth.

Actually, Illusory Wall’s “How was the Dark Souls DLC Discovered?” video is probably the best example of what preservation of games actually IS and why “I can’t play that SNES” has little to do with it.

At a high level: Dark Souls 1 was notorious for how incredibly convoluted and stupid the path to the DLC is. It involves killing a boss, reloading the area, talking to an NPC at the back of a cave you might not even see, reloading, killing a DIFFERENT enemy in a completely unrelated spot in the world, reloading, and then going back to that original spot.

And there is over a decae of discussion on how people even found that and lots of nonsense theories. And IW actually searched through a mixture of blog posts, press releases, youtube videos, and even message boards to paint a picture of what actually happened. And… it is very very different.

A friend (who actually IS a curator) watched that and immediately compared it to the idea that guns are why the concept of an armored knight went away. At a very high level… it isn’t wrong. But people assume it has to do with penetration and ignore that we were sending folk into battle in what was basically plate armor all the way up to WW1 (and there are very good arguments that a modern plate carrier isn’t that far off from what a conquistador would wear).

In terms of text articles? Ironically, you want to look at early Polygon and Kotaku. And… absolutely nobody read that and those became the hellscapes they are today. That said, Aftermath occasionally will hang out in the deep end of a hotel pool on a specific game but that is usually in the context of current sociopolitical events or a new release.

Which speaks to games media as a whole being fundamentally broken in favor of the screaming jackasses who market gambling to children (see: xqc).

That said, a few of the longer form youtubers have worked with various preservation efforts in the past. I don’t think Jacob Gellar has (outside of his work on MinnMax which is more just podcasting and interviewing) but I want to say Displaced Gamers reached out to one of the orgs to get a dump of a rare edition of a cartridge once? Although, people like Illusory Wall very much rely heavily on The Internet Archive when they are researching what the deal with the Dark Souls 1 DLC was. Which gets into the other side of “what actually IS games preservation?” that makes people just shut down and start screaming that they want ROMs.

But the big issue? If you are doing a video that can justify flying out to a bunker in Texas or whatever? It is going to be about a game people know about or are interested in. Which means it is likely already available online. MAYBE you get a “deep cut” like CyClones but the vast majority of creators can’t risk a complete dud of a video for that month or even quarter

Its also why the popular history youtubers tend to have a day job as a dealer (Matt Easton) or are running not so subtle ads for auction houses (Forgotten Weapons). And there are a LOT of mixed feelings about them (especially Ian) because of how much they profit off of museum collections.

Oh yeah. You totally aren’t just an obnoxious jerk with a side hustle.

Still, kudos for actually thinking “TL/DR” is a good response. It saves people who thought you might actually be operating in good faith a lot of time.

Time to piss some people off!

What is worse, is that The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) is refusing efforts allow remote access to these old games for research and learning purposes, just like a historian would do research of events by reading and viewing any historic materials, the restrictions to access of different media because of convoluted copyright laws are a real world problem!

You may actually want to research what museum curators and the like actually do (or just communicate with them. I have never found one who didn’t want to chat about their job).

Copyright/Trademark/IP Protection is very much a thing. It is the main reason so many museums have “no pictures” (barring the increasingly rare cases where it is genuine light concerns). And that applies a lot more when it comes to “modern” history, of which video games definitely count. But even for ancient manuscripts, the answer tends to be “if you fill out all this paperwork and can demonstrate a genuine need to our board, you can come by and read that manuscript in a clean room. Or… you can spend 20 bucks on a copy in our gift shop. Hell, if you stop bothering me I’ll spot you ten bucks toward that”

And that is more or less what we see with the video game preservation efforts… that operate more like musems than hoarders with a youtube channel. They have a few actual historians who do outreach. And, in rare cases, people CAN organize visits. But “I want to play Metroid” isn’t really a compelling argument to a board that is risking damage every time that NES is booted up.

That said, I WOULD like to see a bigger emphasis on said curators documenting things themselves. But I am the weirdo who would love to see a deep dive on Star Crusader’s DLC. Whereas most people are just going to say “Ugh, they are so boring” if it isn’t pewdiepie screaming at every jagged polygon.

But yeah. If you actually genuinely care about preservation efforts, rather than just a site to download roms, I STRONGLY encourage getting in touch with your local museums and working with them (and lobbyists) to protect those museums. Because I didn’t even get into the active war on The Internet Archive in the US (and similar efforts in other countries).

Been a minute (this was a nice reminder that I hadn’t even booted up my PS5 in almost a year…), but I want to say it depends on if you have your console set as your primary console or not. Primary doesn’t need to go online to authenticate. Secondary does.

Most people just have a single console so it is auto-primary. But people who bought a ps5 pro or who do super convoluted account sharing shenanigans always have trouble when auth servers are down.

Also, I think the PS+ IGC requires network to make sure you still have PS+?