At this point when I’ve heard it said so many times for anything that isn’t just cheering on or silence that I usually expect those saying it to be racist and certainly Islamophobic and very likely genocide apologist

Back in 2009 I was a lot more naive and optimistic. I really believed Steam needed competition to improve and needed major competition. I was pretty excited to see Amazon doing a store and Microsoft doing Games for Windows Live (until I learned they were charging to play online multiplayer and had a 3 time install limit until you had to call support to get that reset). I was excited for EA Origin. I kept Impulse installed. The only store that got better was Steam. In the case of Origin and Uplay, they got worse. GFWL died and the Windows 8/10 Store was worse. EA never changed. GOG at least released GOG Galaxy. Amazon never improved. Desura died. Bethesda Game Launcher and Rockstar Club were trash since day one. Battle.net/Blizzard was stable but just Blizzard games and I think a CoD showed up one year. EGS came out without a shopping cart and no user reviews. Steam kept getting better

That just sounds dumb. Amazon has been selling digital PC games since 2009 and it’s just about the most bare bones digital PC games store out there. Luna from my testing has great quality but a puny library. For local download and install gaming, it’s barely any more convenient than like itch.io. It’s takes the top spot as the most comically poor run digital games platform across consoles, mobile, pc because they been at it for 17 years while being one of the worlds largest companies all that time that also happens to specialize in both physical goods and digital goods retail. It’s incredible how bad they are at this and how few people actually know that Amazon has been selling digital PC games for 17 years

Anti-steering stuff again. Besides that I’ll always be a bit annoyed with Mozilla both with their design decisions for FirefoxOS and then how much they bungled it. RokuOS is still highly relevant while FirefoxOS descendents are real niche. Firefox is usually the default on Linux distros. Mozilla should have at least been pushing Linux distros that shipped Firefox on laptops/desktops since FirefoxOS was announced

Deja vu

I don’t care how much they try to make TV show seasons into events, they’ll never really be events like in the past. Same with movies. Like if movies aren’t hitting event status anymore, TV sure isn’t and that’s the key to this. FOMO for popular traditional media (Im including stuff like Netflix here as a successor to TV) looks way down to me compared to the pre-mainstream internet culture era.

The last huzzahs for event FOMO media to me seemed like Breaking Bad season 5, Game of Thrones, and Endgame. After that it’s been a rapid progression to everyone watching/listening/reading whatever they want at whatever pace they want. I don’t need to be rolling media subscriptions every month. Some months I’ll be busy doing outdoor sports or gardening. Then some months I’ll sub and bing stuff. Then off to something else. Thing for me is the amount of months I want to binge TV/movies has been in decline for years now

Social media also for me broke my ability to have any sort of idealism towards performers. Actors are stupid assholes. They’re athletes with better vocabulary and image maintenance. I used to watch a lot of boxing and MMA, no surprise that these guys are incredibly stupid and often terrible people. Athletes and wealthy/rich artist/performers are leftist by word and image, conservative to hyper conservative where it actually really matters. Not even just the super rich ones, the ones with power like film societies that run big film festivals and art galleries. Leftist persona, operationally conservative, in a voting booth conservative

Spring planting was about to begin. Then costs jumped. Fertilizer more expensive. Fuel more expensive. One reason: Hormuz was shut.

…

The real pressure builds somewhere else. Fertilizer.

Strip it down, and the system depends on three things: nitrogen, phosphate, potash. The Gulf plays a central role, especially in the first two. Around 50% of globally traded ureapasses through that region, moving mostly by sea. One company alone, Qatar Fertilizer, produces roughly 5.6 to 6 million tons a year, about 14% of global supply. That flow depends on open routes.

…

A core ingredient in fertilizer, heavily dependent on natural gas. The Gulf produces around 30% of global ammonia, and that production relies on gas flows now under pressure. About 20% of global LNG exportspass through this region. Qatar alone accounts for roughly 19% of the market.

…

Phosphate follows the same logic. Its production depends on sulfur, and about 45% of global sulfur exports move through Hormuz. Disrupt that flow, and prices react quickly. Farmers are left with difficult choices. Use less fertilizer and accept lower yields, or stop planting if the economics no longer hold.

…

Pull the camera back a little further, and the picture widens. It doesn’t stop with food and energy. Qatar produces about 63 million cubic meters of helium a year, nearly a third of global supply. Helium is used in semiconductors. In MRI machines. Disrupt that, and the effects don’t stay in tech. They move into healthcare. The same applies to petrochemicals used in pharmaceuticals. Any shock in oil and gas runs straight into that sector as well.

…

I need spinning disk drives to get back down in price so I can get a couple to fill out my Jellyfin server

Ya I’d definitely say the US is more violent but in Europe casual and institutional racism is more accepted in my opinion. Especially in regards to non-white non-black people though I have heard comical stories from black friends in Germany of entering bars and like a TV show damn near every stops and stares.

Europe is the current home of, say racist/stereotype based joke then when the other person is upset, act incredulous and be, “it’s just a joke loosen up. You people can’t take a joke.” There’s at least cultural push back for some decades to be aware of racism towards black people especially in terms of microagressions and institutional prejudice but that hasn’t had the attention for the various MENA, Asian and native Hispanic people. Spain though is a place for preference for American Hispanic white immigrants over African and middle eastern immigrants because of racism/colorism and islamaphobia. East/southeast Asian people prepare yourselves for slant eye jokes especially from the drunks and country folks.

It not may not be violent currently but it was in the past and racism and prejudice is a far bigger discussion in the former colonies of Europe in the Americas and Oceania than in Europe. And that plays a role in things like opportunities in media representation, upward mobility and where one is likely to cap out at in a company and in politics, expectations of pricing for services rendered. A whole lot of things that extend beyond violence. It will become more a discussion in various European countries as non-white and non-christian communities grow in them

And the violence of the US is no excuse for European racism both current and historic nor should it be used as attention cover for incidents in Europe especially when it does get violent. Europeans need to observe their own issues of racism and xenophobia rather than paying so much attention to the US. Same for Canadians, Australians, New Zealander, etc. It feels like the whole past 25 years I’ve been watching countries in Europe sliding closer and closer towards racist and xenophobic mainstream governance all the while the people left of center focus on American news rather than their own. It’s not just racism and xenophobia. It’s happening with mass surveillance and censorship. The current trend of, in opposition to Trump sabre rattling, Euro-washing marketing to sell products or push legislation

Racism and xenophobia isn’t new to Europe whether in the west or east. Especially not in soccer matches. I don’t know a year where racist chants weren’t a problem for non-white players in Europe. Don’t hear about it as much as before. If you’re not white, you will experience racism in Europe especially outside of the major cities with large historic immigrant populations and you’ll less likely have bystanders come to your defense compared to like in the US, Canada, Australia

Before Trump 1, I thought the neo-Nazi groups in Europe were better organized and closer to mainstream. Trump just gave the movements in the US a major boost. All the focus on the US is distracting leftist Europeans from their own internal decay. Even if national rally loses the next election in France, they’re seemingly getting closer each go around

And imperialism, marketing says Europe had some humanist epiphany in its period of decolonization, but that immediately ignores stuff like Algeria, Vietnam, Suez crisis. Stuff like French coups across the Sahel. Assassinations of leaders in Africa by former European colonial master countries. Assassination attempt on Iranian prime minister. Afghanistan in general since the end of the Durani empire. Sterilization of intuit people of Greenland. European nations haven’t been unwilling benefactors of American imperialism. It was a failure to maintain their own imperial power that had them volunteer to playing the gang leaders posse members

Large anti-immigration marches have been happening across numerous European countries for years now. They seem to be growing. In western Europe I recall Spain and Italy are standouts in terms of growing xenophobia with non-white immigrants and tourists

I believe a major reason is reputation tied to a person’s account. OfferUp has also superceded Craigslist in my area and I think the user history and reputation system plays a role there. Same with other stuff like eBay, Mercari, StockX. Craigslist is too anonymous

People constantly dooming steam are punching themselves in the face instead of pushing for anything better. If they wanted a more competitive market do two things. Buy games on other storefronts. They exist. There have been digital storefronts since before Steam. Second is direct your complaining to competitors to improve their services. Like go complain on every EGS press release for Linux support and a gamepad friendly interface. Something equivalent to Steam input and remote play that isn’t using third party software like Sunshine/Moonlight. Something like steam curators and other social features. User reviews. The complainers of Steam are pretty much campaigning for Steam to be worse so others can compete without having to improve as much

If available in your area, you should try out the 5g services. I use one and I play counter strike well and I get 200-300mbps down normally. When I got it, the first month was a trial period where you set it up and if it sucked, it was no charge. Plus sign up offee was good so look out for anything offered

I’ll wait for a complete version for like 75% off. It’s been almost 3 years of bad word of mouth. After the PS5 release, it shouldn’t be too long until that game falls to obscurity and stays relevant with deep discounts

Screw Dolby. I’ll only ever encode in AV1 and in the future AV2. HEVC won’t ever be ubiquitous like h.264 and VVC has already had support dropped by Intel processors after only one generation of hardware support. 6 years after the standard was finalized and VVC is still practically non-existent in consumer hardware

That looks good. Will be fun to play what people make with it someday

Main reason I want the steam machine to be a hit is just getting regular Linux boxes under people’s TVs and that getting developer interest. KDE Plasma Big Screen too. Good TV interfaces for media software. Respond well to remotes and gamepads. Popular service apps like Netflix and Crunchyroll. It’s jarring when I use other people’s TVs and the default page screen is just a wall of advertisements. At least Android based TVs I can install projectivity launcher to get a clean interface

Once I got into JRPGs and rouguelites, there’s been an unexhaustible amount of games to play. Every Steam next fest I see an ocean of soulslikes. There’s a developing ocean of turn based CRPG games to match up with the ocean of Diablo-like action RPG games. I’m hoping to someday see the old KOTOR third person RTWP gameplay make some mainstream jump and get a wave of those

XDA will write articles these days like:

• How this wallpaper has proven how I’ve been using computers wrong for 30 years
• These gloves improved my typing speed 300%
• I painted my NAS red and you won’t believe the improvements

This includes not in the Google play store so like f-droid or like how people would get software from a places website or GitHub or sourceforge or wherever and installing it like you can on Windows or a Mac or Linux