Edit: Everyone is asking for the code, so here it is. Keep in mind, this code assumes a few things:

  1. You’d need to specify the virtual environment path for Python.
  2. You’d need to specify the directory for which the games are located.
  3. You’d have to put a “game_info” file in each game’s root directory.
  4. You’d need to have steamcmd installed.
  5. The format of the game_info file is like this (I use CS.RIN.RU):
build: 17601020
steamid: 548430
csrinru: https://cs.rin.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=81377

Hope I’m not breaking any rules. This is my first post on Lemmy. I tried to post on garbage-ass Reddit but apparently being a new user means you can’t do fuck-all. So, I’m gonna try to make Lemmy a home.

Anyway, I pirate games. Mostly because I’m broke, and somewhat because I hate spending money on a game and then hating it 15 minutes into it. But anyway…that’s neither here nor there.

The entire purpose of this post is just to share this neat little thing I created. I’m not promoting it – it isn’t released. I just wanna share nerdy shit with other people.

The issue that I was having is that I figured, over time, my pirated game collection will get quite big. It will become increasingly more time-intensive to check back to the piracy forums for updated pirated versions of the game.

So I came up with a solution. Whenever I download a new pirated game, I will create a file called “game_info” in the directory which will include three little bits of data.

  1. The build number of the pirated game
  2. The Steam App ID
  3. The link to the forum topic about that game from the piracy site I go to.

I wrote a script that will scan my games directory for each game_info file. It will then use steamcmd to check SteamDB for the latest patches released and compare that to the current build number in the game_info file. Obviously if they don’t match – there’s an update. And it will inform me. This way I can quickly check if there are any updates available for a game, then I can go to the piracy forum and check to see if anyone has released the updated version yet.

I thought it was cool. Anyway, just thought I’d share some nerdy shit.

Feel free to degrade me.

  • zenforyen@feddit.orgEnglish
    17·
    21 hours ago

    I managed to be 10 years on reddit in niche hobby and nerd communities and it feels like I lived in some parallel reddit all the time, reading about how toxic and broken it is supposed to be.

    Same with YouTube. There are nice channels with less than 100k Views per Video or even just a fraction of it, producing amazing informative videos.

    Gotta find the gems in the dirt.

    I have a nagging feeling the platform is not or only a part of the problem, but collective human nature is. When enough people join a platform to be a representative sample, you get the representative shittiness of the literally median person on the internet.

    • Norah (pup/it/she)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      3·
      4 hours ago

      What I will say is that over the last ~15yrs, globally, we’ve seen a hard shift towards the right wing of politics. But a lot of that has happened on the internet in specific spaces where folks have been radicalised, and if you get into niche enough communities then you just don’t see it really at all.

      • zenforyen@feddit.orgEnglish
        2·
        3 hours ago

        I wonder how much it was manufactured and how much is just the worst of human nature self amplifying. Probably bit of both. It’s just easier to spread hate and fear than make people chill the fuck out and respect each other.

        Any human community that tolarates bad behavior and does not sanction it appropriately will eventually fail and degenerate into a pile of shit, i.e. simply implode. The paradox of tolerance. Good social spaces are like gardens, they need to be maintained and weeds need to be removed. Otherwise it happens what happens.

        • Norah (pup/it/she)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          I think it’s a lot of things honestly. For example, it’s not surprising that education continues to be attacked so much in the US, as it reduces the prevalence of right wing opinions based off all polling. I think it’s a big cause of the shift to the right among Gen Z, and I think the only thing that’s going to fix it critical media literacy, which it might be too late for a bunch of that generation, and even some of Gen Alpha.

    • Mike@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      Definitely an atypical experience. Most subs, especially those that are tangentially political, are incredibly toxic.

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        21·
        6 hours ago

        And I feel like many ex-redditors that turned to lemmy where also very political.

        My only gripe with Reddit is nowadays how the UI is slow af and thr interaction is very limited.

        Example of a Lemmy user turning a non-political comment political:https://feddit.org/comment/6326797

        • zenforyen@feddit.orgEnglish
          2·
          3 hours ago

          Well I mostly never used any kind of social media for political things until very recently. Just read news on the respective newspaper websites. Maybe that did the trick.

          And just wow. Yeah well, some people are just always trying to pick up a useless tribal fight or stir up some drama, or just mess with others i.e. troll…

          That’s why good mods are worth their weight in gold.

          Just check a sub like /r/askhistorians, they might sometimes appear harsh but they managed to keep that place true to its vision and purpose (accepting only high quality responses by people who know what they are talking about). But sure, that is rather the exception.

    • solofroto@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      8·
      20 hours ago

      Yep, George Carlin said it best. Individually, people are amazing, but when they start to group, they’re awful – the begin to sacrifice their individuality for the sake of the group.

    • Bobby TurkalinoEnglish
      3·
      18 hours ago

      The platform is definitely part of the problem. Bending over backwards to serve the desires of the Trump administration and the executive class

      • zenforyen@feddit.orgEnglish
        2·
        11 hours ago

        Compared to say the Meta networks, reddit always felt to me like a platform where I can still control what I see. The feed is only filled by stuff I actively chose to subscribe to.

        Sure it is a part of the problem - it’s the reason I joined Lemmy. And I wonder how long it will take to become the same kind of wasteland of trash. Not sure that the “smaller community and less viral incentives” approach will be enough to keep it more civil than the “offers” by the commercial attention economy.

        Just as a reminder, before the internet was privatized, people were on self hosted forums. Some were good places and some were toxic shit holes. Really depends more on the moderation and community than anything else if you ask me.

        That said, surely I am distrusting any platform owned by some oligarch to have policy in the interest of the user base.