Amazon Prime, but thinking about cancelling.
Tired of receiving damaged books and discs in the mail, so might order exclusively with B&N or Best Buy and pick them up in-store. The shows are alright, but I could miss them pretty easily. Lots of other stuff in my "wish list" is so much riffraff.
Will probably pick up NYT digi on the cheap. $1/wk isn't that shabby, and some of the articles can overrun a lunch.
uziq wrote:
streaming is like the ass cancer of gaming. i still think the move to streaming platforms changed gaming fundamentally from self-organised fun, amateur leagues/ladders, ‘clans’, forum player communities like this one, etc. towards everyone defining themselves as fucking chat-room tippers and fanboys. it’s pathetic. as if watching television wasn’t a waste of fucking time, now you have to watch some maladjusted manchild play a fucking computer game. wow.
dumbest shit ever especially now when you consider that game designers and studios are pandering to the influence these morons have. i do not want games designed to be ‘spectator friendly’. give me a fucking solid game! and these cretins are going to ruin vintage gaming experiences like the relaunch of classic WoW by tipping server populations with their asperger’s-zerg followings. great.
For me, it depends. My best gaming days were spent on the NES as a kid. Some titles were single player, and my friends and I took turns on it. You just learned how to spectate. Watching a streamer (who hasn't developed a kid's TV show persona) is almost like a quick fix of that.
Some games lend themselves to streaming without trying. With Mario Maker, you can get your schadenfreude quota filled by watching someone suffer through your obnoxiously trollish creation. Sometimes you might bump into a broadcast from someone you used to game with, and reconnect that way. Sometimes you get to watch an temporary prerelease key in action, or watch a bit of actual gaming footage from an early access releass. Someone playing AoE2 on Voobly or trying out Brutal Doom for the first time can trigger a bit of nostalgia.
Sometimes it's just something to run in the background at times where I can't get invested in a match, but I'd rather listen to Ross Scott spend an hour breaking down some obscure title from 1997 if there's a new video out.
I've never bought into the follower culture though. The idea that people almost come to blows over youtubers and twitch streamers still seems like such an alien concept to me. I don't even remember kids doing that "back in the day" when it came to action stars (not that fights weren't started for asinine reasons). Also, streams with constant interruptions to acknowledge donors, or content is specifically geared to secure viewers and nothing else: not for me.
It should be worth pointing out here that if you already have an Amazon Prime account, you can use that to power Twitch Prime and free games, keys for in-game items, and one free month "subscription" each month you can toss someone's way.