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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • “Men” as a “political community” is entirely a fabrication. Reality does not conform to the social constructs you are trying to impose upon it. This may come as a shock to you, but most men do not actually know each other.

    In the last US presidential election, 45% of women voted for Trump even after all of the misogynist shit he’s done, and 45% of men literally voted for a woman to be president (not including non-voters of course). A slight statistical trend, but certainly not enough to be able to predict who an individual woukd vote for based on gender alone.

    Gender is a spectrum (or more correctly, a collection of a lot of traits, most of which are their own individual spectrums). That is not something I can selectively believe is true whenever I want to support my trans/nonbinary/gender fluid friends ans just conveniently ignore whenever it makes me feel good.

    Racists absolutely love to cite statistics about violent crime in predominantly black communities. Do we say “good black people need to do a better job of holding the bad ones accountable?” Absolutely not, because that’s prejudiced ans ridiculous.

    If one trans woman sexually assaults a cis woman in a public restroom and JK Rowling starts howling about it… What do we do? Do we demonize all trans women, or even all trans people entirely? Do we start doing genital checks in toilets? Do we start to become afraid of trans people as a “political community”? What if it were more than one case? How many cases does it take for it to become a problem? The answer is: the question itself is fundamentally transphobic and invalid.

    I think most progressives get it: its unreasonable to generalize individuals by their identies and pre-judge based on things they cannot control. However, there always seem to be some people who have a problem with that and want to hate others as a sort of “revenge”. Right now it’s in fashion to hate on men. In the past it’s been white people, which I find particularly funny because “whiteness” itself is an incredibly recent concept and many “white” people in the US today would not have even been considered “white” 100 years ago. I’ve heard the occasional hate against straight and cis people.

    Age is another one I see. People love to hate on Boomers, but most of the evil people destroying the world aren’t Boomers. Trump, Biden, Obama, both Clintons, Bernie, McConnell, Peloso, Graham… All Silent Generation. JD Vance is a millennial. Elon Musk is Gen X (though it’s even less relevant outside the US). Plenty of boomers are cool as fuck and have spent their lives fighting oppression to make the world a better place, while plenty of people from every “generation” have been shitty. The simple fact is that such generalizations are meaningless.



  • Spider-man is a vigilante who constantly fucks up and makes the system worse. He is also, and I cannot stress this enough, a work of fiction. Relying on the individual wills of physically and politically powerful men, even well-intentioned ones, is how we get to authoritarianism and fascism. The answer is not in individuals, but in systems.

    In reality, the closst thing we have to Spiderman IRL is the NYPD, and we’ve already seen how ACAB.

    The men with the most physical and political power are the ones abusing that power. The problem is the concentration of power, not men.

    What happens when the “bad” men have more physical and political power than the “good” ones do in a system that allows those individuals to exercise that power unilaterally?





  • When I first looked at the Steam Deck, I thought for sure the track pads would be terrible. I expected them to be uncomfortable and clunky and horrible to use for any extended period of time, only useful for getting through some launchers on or doing some quick configuration. I expected to use an external mouse or the touch screen for any serious mousing.

    I eventually bought it and was completely wrong. The first game I played fully on the Deck was a tower defense game called Dinosaurs Go Home! (I had gotten it in a Humble Bundle). It was pretty much entirely played using the right track pad, and it was fantastic. Sometimes for FPS’s I’ll even use the right stick as a coarse control and the right track pad as a fine control. When I play emulators, the track pads are radial menus to control save states and emulation speed.

    All this to say- I know this looks ridiculous, but I have learned to not make such assumptions. This could totally be useful for a lot of applications. Heck, sometimes at work it gets really annoying to keep moving my right hand between my mouse and the keyboard, and this would eliminate that.


  • I also use them in my Schecter Hellraiser with no problem.

    However, that is because I use NiMH batteries. They are regular old chemical cells- all of the circuitry and switching is done in the charger, which is a separate device. If you use USB-rechargeable ones it it quite possible something might cause noise. However, you might be able to add a smoothing capacitor to eliminate that if you really wanted.

    Either one should be fine for pedals too, because every well-made pedal SHOULD have smoothing capacitors on the power supply to get rid of issues like that. Of course, that increases the cost by maybe $0.50 so some manufacturers cut that part.


  • The thing is, old incomplete games like that usually sold terribly. They are now either forgotten or worse: remembered for being terrible. Stuff like Superman64.

    There used to be more pressure on developers to make good games first. Testing and QA departments have shrunk, or st the very least failed to scale with the increased scope of modern games. They instead rely on consumers to report the bugs.

    So at the same time they keep raising prices, they are also pushing more of the work onto the consumers.




  • I love physical media, but are optical discs really a good match with the steam deck? What exactly is the use case here?

    As someone who grew up in the ERS of the Sony Discman, I can testify how annoying it is to try to get an optical disx to read while holding it in your hands. The PSP largely solved this with UMD’s- addign an expensive and bulky plastic shell to the discs to stabilize them. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Sony decided to remove that entirely from.the Vita. I can’t remember any other handheld that has used discs. Everything else uses cartridges or is digital-only.

    Disc drives are common on laptops, and portable DVD players used to be common. These larger form factors are expected to rest on your lap or a table, so are more stable.

    Another consideration is power. It takes a lot of energy to spin those discs around. That’s one of the reasons why SSD’s have almost completely replaced HDD’s in mobile devices.

    Another issue is- are you planning on carrying a CD wallet full of discs around with you?

    What is the use case for a disc drive on the Deck? For the games I have in disc, its easier to just rip them and keep them digitally. Same with movies and music.

    I think a disc drive could be a cool part of a Steam Deck docking station, but I have a hard time seeing myself ever using discs in any other situation.

    Edit: Nevermind I got the Deck and Machine mixed up lol








  • Yeah I agree with this 100%

    I grew up with consoles. The PS1, N64, GBC, GameCube, PS2, GBA. As an adult I played the PS3 a lot and I ownd a Wii for parties, and went through a DS and 3DS for Pokémon. I was a late owner of a PS4, Switch, and eventually a PS5. I dabbled in PC gaming, both on a desktop with M+KB , with a controller, eventually streaming to my living room for couch gaming.

    The Steam Deck blows it all out of the water. It can do everything, anywhere, usually more ergonomically than the original. The only real drawback is the resolution, but that’s a perfectly fine trade-off most of the time.