cool! i never knew

I heat it up and pretend its a hot drink (it is)

Two very different protest songs I heard this year

Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals - The Iron Wall

Hen Ogledd - Scales will fall

As a gamer, I love Valve. Problem is, I’m not their customer. Their customers are publishers and independent devs. Their main product is digital shelf space in the one of, if not the, most visited digital game store.

This is the lens through which any discussion of Valve’s business practices has to be viewed. None of the companies in this meme compete with Valve in this arena, except perhaps Epic Games. They are for the better part Valve’s customers, and they probably don’t like that. They might create their own stores to try to claw back some of their sales, but their core business model is not reliant on those stores.

As another commenter said, if this is a monopoly, it doesn’t seem like one created through anticompetetive behavior. You can watch Gaben on YouTube talk about how he just wanted to make a distribution platform for Half life that wasn’t clunky like Microsoft. Steam was just one of the first, imo.

(This isnt necessarily me condoning their business model though. Still feels like digital feudalism if you ask me.)

Chores for sure. Throw on an audiobook while doing the dishes.

Reading is fun too because you can get a little more absorbed in the world, if you can manage to stay focused.

Watch Baraka.

Go for a walk around the neighborhood.

Wake and bake. If you have a yard, go into it. Look at it. Look at the plants. Differentiate the plants. Take a picture of one. Use your phone to identify it with Google lens or iNaturalist app or something. Find the scientific name (evidently called “binomial nomenclature”, huh). Use bonap.org to find out if it is native to your geographic area. If it is, keep watching it day to day. omg it is blooming. Look at the insects doing stuff on them. realize holy shit that’s their home. they feel peace, like i feel when i hear running water. this is an ecosystem. If it isn’t native, find out if it is invasive. If so remove it as best you can without disturbing your other plants. If it is non-native established or something else, consider keeping it depending on how dominating it is in your yard. Keep watching the natives. Identify others. Read their wikipedia page. Find out they attract monarch butterflies. Prune away the non-natives. Admire your yard. See a monarch and cry with joy. Continue into the fall. Keep taking pictures. Watch the petals turn in and shrivel a little. Witness death. Snow comes. See the stalks remain. They poke out of the quiet blanket. In other places, hard mounds of snow ice envelop. It melts to dirt. Brown yard and sticks are seemingly inert. Somehow it’s all gathering momentum. Imagine next season. Those stalks weren’t there before last summer. They’re gonna explode and even more are gonna pop up. Get excited. Hell yeah. There’s gonna be so many goddamn natives in my yard next season.

I love steam and valves hardware products, but the thing is, I’m not the primary customer in their business model. Steams product is digital shelf space in one of the most popular digital arcades, access to which they charge their real primary customers: independent game devs and publishers.

Whatever their activities are outside that, even the much appreciated proton and contribution to Linux gaming, is in the context of capturing more gamers on their platform, making their real product an irresistible choice for their real customers to release their game on, despite the steep per-purchase cut Valve takes.

That’s not an entirely…erhm…nice business model imo. It’s remarkabley like Amazon, but at least Valve didn’t put a bunch of local bookstores out of business becoming the juggernaut they are.

Honestly i felt the giddiness that DF did in that first video. It was exciting not just because it did look like a huge upgrade to realism – but because this is another pandoras box moment for genAI. Exciting in a holy shit way, not a “I can’t wait” way. Also, I believed it when they said it was just changing the lighting. Looking at the Grace model more, along with peoples comments, there has to be more than lighting going on here. and with Jensens comments, I think that seems clearer.

He really is pushing the slop angle, and, well – me too I agree with you. I’ve soured on the whole idea. I think there’s been too much backlash toward DF though.

I’ll go against the grain here. It’s not as much, to me, about whether homeschooling is good or bad. I think it has the potential to be really good and really bad for the kid, depending on the parents.

But people who say, “kids won’t get socialization” if they are homeschooled seem to think that tossing all our socially-unformed people into one location, with little socially-formed supervision, is automatically going to teach the former group how to socialize with others in a healthy manner. It’s not. It just creates trauma for kids all around. Child on child abuse.

Not only that, but you strip kids of agency by putting them in a building where they can’t leave, controlling their movements by a bell, assessing and grading their performance by “objective” measurements, subjecting them to authoritarian teachers – it’s all so degrading and the opposite of what id consider a healthy learning environment.

If schools had more adults integrated into student activities – all the activities – sitting at lunch, class, band, whatever, – removing the barrier of superiority, removing lettered grading system, paying more teachers more, maybe id consider it. But as the school system is in the US (or, at the very least, my locality) now, id never want to send my kid

Edit: obviously not all schools are like this. But they are in my city. Id have to move to a more affluent town to be able to trust the school system.

It had that terrible Netflix sheen that pulls me right out of a movie

I’m just so tired of seeing 1984 and Brazil and Idiocracy and every other political warning and satire played out in the real world every goddamn day of my life

Ahhh…Well, in that case, I think you should quietly ask her out. I personally don’t think its wrong of you to do that. I’d keep it on the down low, of course. Who knows, maybe one of you gives the other the ick and it turns out to be nothing more than two platonic coworkers hanging out outside of work (I know, unlikely). If it does develop further romantically, at least you’re now out of the love triangle and into a secret romance…which im kinda inclined to think that is better than a perpetually unresolved love triangle. But yeah, its tough. Wishing you good luck!

How realistic is it for you to be able to talk to Jane about it all? Maybe you could get a clearer picture about her (perhaps, lack of) feelings toward John.

Feels kinda silly for him to stay at a job he hates just for someone he hasn’t been on a date with yet…sounds like could be an infatuation situation but im not sure…

definitely juicy though! sorry you’re in the middle of it

edt: phrasing. also, course its not as simple for John as “just leave the job and find another.” surely there are other factors to him staying on board

I hate silicon tips usually but these are my preference too. I have ccx brand ones though.

Emperors new groove is the only one up there in snark for me

What version of proton are you using? Whenever I have weird issues with a game, usually the thing that fixes it is switch proton version. GE proton 10-28 has been working well for me so far across all my games.

check out this book

https://interesi.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/technopoly.pdf

Tech is a tool, you don’t need to connect with it in any transcendental way. According to this guy ^ Neil Postman, you may feel this way because we live in a TECHNOPOLY

I’m an admin and using an SSH key is the most common way we log into servers.

Also the most common way I log in to self-hosted servers.

So I’ve been seeing some discussion online about how Apollo has solved some user’s problems with virtual display

Do you mind me asking what you’re running? I’m on Ubuntu 25.10 w/ Plasma 6.4 running wayland, and I’ve had issues forever setting up a virtual display. I’ve just accepted that I have to go with whatever modes the edid my monitor/dummy hdmi plug offers, which means I havent been able to stream 1260x800 or 2560x1600 to my steamdeck (so it is black-barred)

I guess Plasma 6.6 is going to add the ability to add custom modes via kscreen-doctor, but thats at least a few months out I think. I’d much rather use a native virtual display if apollo is magically able to do that.

If you just discovered Steam Link and you’re not married to it, you could use Sunshine as your gamestreaming host and Moonlight as the client. you can set it up so that you can launch Steam Big Picture on your host and play any games that are listed under your steam, even if they are non-steam games.

I’m more partial to a more human Superman

You just found the words for me, thanks! I’ve had trouble explaining to people why I didn’t love the most recent movie. I guess I prefer God-Superman rather than human Superman. I’m glad you liked this rendition though – here’s hoping Supergirl is good too!