See that also tracks with why we hate Californians…

Cap Hill used to be affordable, and considerably more weird.

Yes, its weird, it used to be more weird.

Like uh, I remember one time about 15 years ago now (rent in Cap Hill was roughly 1/3 of what it is now), I saw an actual freak on a leash, like just full BDSM gear dude walking another BDSM dude down the street.

They were going to QFC, to get groceries, just normal stuff, most people were like ‘huh. sure. neat.’ and just went on as normal.

Then the California hipster trust fund babies moved in, followed by the techbros, raised the rent, the Seattle natives moved out, now Cap Hill is basically a tourist area, masquerading as ‘the most coolest Seattleist part of the city’.

Like, I’m in the midwest now in large part because of the real estate bubble caused by rich transplant gentrifiers.

But yeah, anyway, I did interperet the uh, full blast accent drop as a sign he was uh… comfortable talking to me, so i was genuienly happy, but also very confused, hahah!

Part of it is just a genuine gamble.

You can try to model demand for a kind of thing that has never specifically existed before.

You will probably fuck that up at first.

Early signs point to -> they significantly underestimated demand.

By how much exactly… shrug?

Also, there’s basically no way you can find no difference between the trackpads on the Steam Controller, and the trackpad on the PS controllers, unless you’ve never used a Steam Deck or the Steam Input system.

Does a PS 4/5 allow you to fully remap all the controls of a game to literally whatever you want?

Add in macros, turbos, input chords, make a joycon be a mouse, make a trackpad be a joycon, or open and navigate a custom ingame menu you made up, or be a new button pad?

Make motion controls activate under whatever conditions you specify, and map that motion to whatever input you want?

True, though this would be even more difficult to reliably measure/estimate.

Whats the term, uh, wash trading, basically, for scalpers?

Inflate volume surreptitiously, makes the market look more substantial, more liquid than it actually is.

Also allows for price manipulation.

I admire any kind of person that knows how to get what they want.

… notice how that dude isn’t in many (any?) of the other panels we’ve seen of her?

Damn fine hustle.

Valve doesn’t have the scale.

They’re nowhere near as big of a company as Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony.

FFS they have like under 500 total employees, roughly 350.

For many legal purposes in the US, they are literally a small business.

They retooled the place that was making Steam Decks… into being the place that makes Steam Controllers.

Because that would be more affordable than renting out and kitting out an entirely new production facility somewhere near Shenzen or whatever.

They’re not big enough to get first dibs, preferential contract bulk pricing, from component manufacturers.

In the ocean they’re swimming in?

They’re bass or salmon, compared to dolphins, sharks, orcas, whales.

I made a joke about this being an ‘artisinal, small batch’ controller in another thread, but it basically isn’t a joke, if you understand the scales involved.

Hah, I actually yesterday ran the same math as you just did, for total # of controllers, and yeah, we got the same result.

~42,000 if you don’t take excess packaging weight into account, yeah, probably between 35k and 40k if you do.

Now, you’re the only person (or outlet, for that matter) I’ve seen even try to do the actual math on scalp counts so uh… yeah, seems reasonable to me.

Yeah, I was telling people, like… half a year ago, that Steam sells direct to consumer, not via a retail store, so, that inherently cuts down on scalping, because they can indeed impose their own hard limits on buys per customer… barring the existence of basically a bunch of scalper fake steam accounts, which… doesn’t appear to be the case, otherwise yeah, you’d expect a larger proportion of scalper listings on secondary marketfronts.

Now I haven’t followed things close enough to see the stuff about ‘2 per txn’ vs ‘2 per Steam Account’, but I mean, what you say there also seems plausible.

tl:dr Good work, passes my smell test!

Unfortunately, all I could tell you is ‘somewhere between San Fran and LA’, lol.

This was also… damn near 20 years ago, at this point.

But I do just remember seeming endless fields of strawberries.

I think the cleverness is on point, I’m more disappointed in the actual hat.

I had to realize that is not Mike Stolklasa.

Fuck.

Yeah I … don’t exactly follow them closely, I just saw a spate of … ahem, mother fucking videos a while back, and was just … shaking my head…

Goddamn it, what a terrible, wasted life.

I genuienly thought they were not allowed to use the internet anymore.

Like literally. After they went to jail.

Safer means safe the same way less lethal means safe.

Double post, but:

I just now realized I fat fingered my own semi-manual autocorrect, and did not originally use ‘They contracted’, which is what I meant.

I have accordingly here made log of my revision commit, which should now be reflected above.

Apologies for any confusion this may have created, derp.

Well that is about as long as I’ve been in the Midwest, so that tracks.

Yeah, been through and around the state a few times.

The Redwoods are… just absolutely stunning, and thats coming from an Olympic / Hoh Rainforest stan.

Pacific Coast Highway is incredible as well.

San Fran’s gotta be the only city in the English speaking world that is more hilly than Seattle, fuck.

I remember driving south on I5 and just… actually seeing endless strawberry fields, not long after I’d discovered the Beatles, lol.

On another trip, I somehow ended up on Rodeo drive… not long after discovering Rage Against the Machine.

… maybe you could say I’ve had a very Lynchian experience of California.

Well, I tried.

Maybe I just don’t/didn’t know people who commonly use ‘ya know’.

…

Ok, so we’re just actually doing the infinite paperclip machine.

… fuck you, Clippy.

Another day living the dream… aaahhhh.

I think I’ll make some tea.

elemenonade

EDIT

Eagerly Emulsifying Melonie’s Elemenonade.

There, try that 5 times fast.

I can’t even do it once, haha!

Tell me more about Alice’s brother Bob’s sisters.

Maybe they can help me find a new way to decompress.