I found that holing up is really bad for my health, both physical and mental.

Yes. And let’s not forget that making a movie is infinitely more complex than writing a book. For a book there’s usually a single author. Sure, they might get feedback from editors and friends, but ultimately it’s just the author. A movie requires a load of talented people and their artistic vision and abilities need to align. Script, director, photography, editor and so many other departments need to come together to create something good or sometimes even great.

But, that’s my whole point. How are you supposed to put the depth of a book into a runtime that people actually want to watch? Even LotR, which has a runtime of 12 hours for the extended cut had to leave things out. It’s not feasible to expect to see everything that was important to you in the book brought directly into the movie. I’d argue that a lot of the movie adaptations that people hate tried too hard to stick to the source material.

See, that’s the great thing about art. Different people like different things. I found the book for RPO terrible, really awful. The movie however was quite entertaining. Spielberg knows his stuff and can polish a turd. For The Martian, I really enjoyed both the book and the movie.

I hate this stupid take. Books and movies are very different mediums, with very different rules for storytelling. The chance that a director captures what you see in your head is so abysmally small, that you will always be disappointed. Just see the stories as abstract things, with books and movies being different interpretations of it. There are cases where I prefer the book over the movie, and cases where it’s the other way around. It’s all fine.

Then technically I am correct? If Valve just shuts down, it’s all gone. You might find a workaround for some of the stuff you happen to have downloaded right now, but in general, everything you “bought” is gone.

If gaben decides tomorrow to shut it all down, everything is gone. They might have a lot of good will based on past behavior, but in the end it’s still a company and you have zero control over what they do. You don’t actually own any of those games.