Maybe its just me, but nowadays every public apace is incredibly noisey.
Every bar and restaurant is blaring music. Vehicular traffic, air conditions, all sorts of other machines are pumping noise in too.
I just went out with some people this weekend and found myself wishing we had, noise-canceling headsets to be able to talk to each other. Kinda makes me want to not go out any more.
Kape (and thus all of the VPNs they have purchased) is owned by Ted Saggi, an Israeli billionaire.
And yes, they are legally headquartered in London, but how meaningful is that? There’s hundreds of US companies that are headquartered into a handful of buildings in Delaware for legal and tax reasons. Their “development center” is based in Tel Aviv.
Have you really never had the misfortune of encountering one cracked in the carton?
In my experience there is usually a small pile of cartons with cracked eggs set off to the side of the shelf in the refrigerator in the store.
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.
How were they broken?
Maybe my memory is different, but I recall Infinite being extremely well-received at the time. Much better than Fallout 4 was. Like, it was talked about as being one of the greatest games of all-time.
Rather, I think its a rare case where public opinion sours over time. Part of that is because the game itself really doesn’t hold up to being replayed. The best part of the game is the story, and mostly because of the sense of mystery that pulls the player forward and leads up the the big twist reveal at the end. In a lot of media like that, its really fun to go back and are all of the little pieces of foreshadowing that you overlook or misinterpret the first time. Or heck, maybe some people pick up on it and predict the ending, and that can also be incredibly satisfying. But Infinite doesn’t have any of that. When I replayed Infinite a couple years ago, I got to the ending thinking “yeah there was absolutely no way I woukd have been able to figure that out on my own the first time”, which was really unsatisfying.
Not only that, by parts of the story are actively bad when you stop to think about it. There was the whole arc where they go to a different dimension where Daisy is leading a revolt against Comstock and she just kind of decides for no reason that Booker is an enemy who has to die. It really felt like they just ran out of ideas to make the enemies you had been fighting up until then visually interesting so they tried to cram in a different faction somehow. The scene where Elizabeth sneaks up on Daisy and kills her with a pair of scissors to the neck felt incredibly out of character and unearned. There were moments during the revolt sequence when Booker acts sickened by the violence against Comstock’s soldiers, though he never reacted like that to those soldiers oppressing civilians earlier in the game.
Some of it is cultural context too. Fascism has been on the rise globally since the game has come out, so I think a lot of the audience (myself included) is less interested in condemning the oppressed for violence against their oppressors than they may have been at the time of release. When you put it next to BioShock 1, it seems like Ken Levine is just using political extremism in general as a narrative device for conflict rather than actually trying to make any particular statement about politics. That kind of centrism has not aged well.
Without that, the rest of the game falls apart. The peaceful segments are good additions for the sake of pacing, but the NPC’s don’t really interact with you much and are more just scenery. They aren’t people that you ever care about, so changing the world state to the violent one where you’re shooting enemies never feels all that meaningful.
The action sequences are okay, but not good enough to stand the game up on its own like some of its contemporaries did. Games like Uncharted and Assassin’s Creed have their own issues of course, but it was really fun to just run around as Ezio or Drake in most of the games in a way that it never was for Booker. The enemies in Infinite feel repetetive, almost every “arena room” area feels the same. The guns aren’t that interesting and the gimmick of the vigors wears off quickly. Elizabeth isn’t all that interesting in combat, just an occasional extra source of health or ammo. The time rifts are basically the same. The sky hook was cool, but wasn’t used often and there wasn’t usually much of a benefit to being airborne vs grounded anyways.
So the only thing left to really enjoy is the spectacle. It still looks good. The art style is a great balance between realism and stylized that looked great at the time and has aged well. The sound is all good- voice acting, sound effects, music, all of it. The setting and environments are creative and interesting.
So I’d say it is worth playing once for most people, but doesn’t live up to its Metacritic score. In tier terms, it seemed upon release like an S-tier game but has aged into more of a B-tier.
Uber is too expensive these days
That was always the goal. Uber and Lyft prices were heavily subsidized early on. Their investors poured billions into them in order to not just establish market share, but tk drive existing taxi services out of business. Taxi services that had things like: fleets of company-owned vehicles instead of personal vehicles, commercials grade maintenance schedules, stricter licensing requirements for drivers, unionized employees instead of independent contractors, etc
Uber and Lyft just plain ignored a lot of existing regulations by saying “those don’t apply because this is an app” to legislators who were too old to know how to turn on a smart phone. They got the public on-board by temporarily offering artificially low prices and high payouts to drivers. Now they have established themselves and removed the competition, so the payouts are going down and the prices are going up.
There are still some US cities that do not allow Uber or Lyft to operate, and there are other countries in the world that do the same.
No, though I eentftom not dreaming at all (or not remembering them) to dreaming occasionally.
I smoked weed and went progressively harder for the last few years.I really enjoyed it a lot: my joints felt better, sleep was easier, I found more joy in movies, TV shows, music, food, and sex. Exercise was easier and I lost weight.
Starting last fall I noticed my memory was getting bad, and at times my mind woukd just shut down. So at first I cut back, then stopped it entirely. Been completely off for 3 months nkw, which should be more than enough time for all the THC to be out of my system and my canmabanoid receptors to be reset. I never used it until my 30’s so there should.be pretty much no risk of long-term issues.
Since then, I’m proud to report that those same problems just got even worse AND I’ve lost all of the benefits! Yay!
My router (GLI.net Flint 3) makes it really easy to set up Wireguard servers on it, and from there all I needed to do was get a domain name to use. Set up Wireguard on my phone, and I can access my local network remotely without needing to pay for a VPN subscription. I still use Mullvad, but that’s for privacy not remote access.
I’ll be a lot more open to comparing Valve with Amazon when I hear reports of Valve employees pissing in bottles
Steam also provides value by acting as an intermediary.
There were 21,503 games released on Steam last year. How the hell is a consumer supposed tk make informed purchasing decisions with all that? Steam is a discovery platform which connects a game with the individuals most likely to buy that game.
It is also a central launcher to organize and manage libraries, including non-steam games. It’s easy to move games between drives, and to use the various library tools to pick out what I want to play.
Then there’s Proton, a completely free comlatability layer for Linux that has allowed me to mostly stop using Windows.
There’s the Steam Workshop, which is far and away my preferred method to mod games. It’s so much easier to click a button to add a mod tk Cities Skylines or Civ 6 than it is to fuck around with Nexus Mods and a mod manager for Skyrim.
Steam is a centralized location for support from developers. It also is convenient tk keep track of updates.
Steam Remote Play is probably the single most umpactful thing to my gaming in the past decade. I just need my 1 gaming desktop and I find myself playing on my Shield in my living room, my phone in bed, my tablet on my exercise bike, my Steam Deck on the porch, or even over at my friend’s house on an old laptop. All for free, when I’ve never even be able to get Moonlight or Sunshine to work at all in my desktop.
Steam has social features like friends lists, chat, and even voice, which is relevant with how shitty Discord has been as a company lately. Support for family sharing and multiplayer is phenomenal.
It is not like Steam is just pocketing a bunch of money and not doing anything. They beat out not just their legitimate competitors, but even piracy, because they provide better value for the consumer. They do a lot of tasks that publishers otherwise would have to handle themselves, saving them costs.
And I’m sure there are more features that I’m forgetting kr that I don’t bother with, but other people find valuable.
I do think they should be heavily regulated, but there hasn’t really been much to regulate with them. They had a minor lawsuit in Australia early on relating to the verbiage displayed about refund policy. I don’t like loot boxes, but my solution is… I don’t buy them, and usually I don’t even buy games with them.
Steam was launched in 2003.
By that point the ships had already sailed. You didn’t own software, and micro transactions already existed. Steam did not “bypass” copyright laws- the facilitated a storefront that sold based on already established and litigated law.
This goes back tk the 1960’s with the origin of computers, when they were gigantic. Manufacturers like IBM would lease the hardware to institutions that used it, and the software was just included for free. This practice ended because of antitrust lawsuits in 1969, which led to IBM charging for software seperstely.
It’s funny you mentioned Apple, because one of the foundational cases of software copyright law was 1983’s Apple vs Franklin case that ruled against a company making Apple II clones, who argued that machines readable code was similar to machinery designs and thus not subject to copyright law. 20 years before Steam existed.
But I guess you can just ahead and make things up on the internet to jump aboard a hate train.
I’ve literally never seen any of these so-called “simps”
Like, the internet is a big place and I’m sure some of them exist, but you could make that argument about any view at all. I see way more hatred for these alleged simps than the simps themselves.
Steam, and Valve, operate in a capitalist system. They’ve been successful. They are similar to a handful of other companies, like Costco, that seem to understand that in order for capitalism to be sustainable, corporations need tk govern themselves and show restraint. They need to focus not on merely achieving profit for ownership this quarter, but on establishing long-term and stable business relationships with all of their stakeholders. Customers, emplpyees, suppliers, governments, lenders, the planet itself.
The biggest failure of capitalism is that the system does not incentivize for any of this. Which is why such corporations are so rare.
I don’t think motherboard manufacturers are askign that question. I think they’re asking “why aren’t the RAM manufacturers making enough RAM? Why aren’t the GPU manufacturers making enough GPUs?”
Consumer case manufacturers and power supply manufacturers too. These few oligopolies on key components are screwing over more than just their own consumers.
Both versions (original + Special Edition) were among the first games I installed on the Deck when I got it, and habe stayed installed for years since. I still go back and play one or the other a bit every couple months.
The only issue I can remember is just dealing with the stupid launcher screen before you get into the actual title screen. I think I might have had to change the launch options for one of them to be able to access the graphics settings?
Interestingly, the original version is still listed as Playable even though tbr Special Edition is Unsupported.
He was always this way. Born to upper-middle-class parents, growing up in the suburbs, cosplaying aa an urban poor black person to grift white people put of their money. Punching down on Mexicans and Asians, anyone he could to be profitable. Now it’s trans people, but the grift has always been the same.
I don’t mean to be out here defending credit scores as a concept, but mine never dropped. Not when I paid off individual student loan accounts, not when the US Federal loans came due after the pandemic pause and I paid them off in one lump sum either. Not when I paid off mybcsr loan either.
Technically the 3 companies that do these each have their own proprietary blend, but it is generally accepted that there are 5 C’s to credit. Character, capacity, capital, collateral, and conditions (“Character” woukd be better described as “history” but that ruins the memnonic).
Which one of these would be negatively impacted by paying off a student loan? None of them! In fact, it improves your Character to pay off a loan successfully, and it improves your capacity to reduce your monthly minimum payments. For stuff like a car loan, paying that off improves your Collateral.
Every single time I have met anyone claiming that paying off a debt hurt their credit score, their story falls apart when I start asking questions. Oh it was actually not them, but a friend of a friend of a friend. Or maybe they also got in a fender Bender and added $3k to their credit card balance that month. Or paying off the debt and the decline in credit score were seperated by months.
What CAN happen is that some accounts only report credit history upon closure. My wife used to work for an “alternative energy supplier” where this was the case. Due to state protections they could not turn off electricity during the winter. People would rack up electric bills for 4 months without paying, then get their electric shut off and suddenly see a huge drop on their credit score out of nowhere. I have heard similar stories of landlords not reporting late rent payments for years until the tenant moves out. This was all years ago though so I’m nkt even sure if that’s true anymore.
I would love to take my money elsewhere, but… Where? Everywhere else is just as bad or worse. Half the VPN’s are owner by one Israeli billionaire. I’m running out of options here.