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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • We had enough of them at a time that “the expats” was a relevant group of people you needed to refer to for specific things. Language lessons, HR support, what have you. I definitely heard the anglo guys refer to themselves as that frequently, and that then became the word people used.

    I had a chip on my shoulder about telling people I was a migrant, but I was pretty alone on that. The anglo guys mostly said they were “expats”.



  • It was used colloquially, for sure… by rich corporate migrants that didn’t want to self-ID as migrants. Or at least by the HR people and corpo consultants handling the international relocations and avoding the taboo word.

    Which is what the previous post is saying and it certainly matches my experience as one of the “expats”. I always self-identified as a migrant myself, though.







  • I mean… it’s the best survival horror remake since what? Dead Space? It’s aimed at people who like good games.

    For the record, a 3:1 or 4:1 split between consoles and PC isn’t necessarily unusual for AAA stuff, particularly for a game that is strongly associated to the PlayStation brand that isn’t cheaper on PC. This game runs heavy, if you’re on a laptop or an older PC and have a PS5 that is a common sense purchase.

    Great game, though. Really enjoying it so far. And like the other poster said, not a remaster at all, it’s a full remake. Not that I wouldn’t have bought a good remaster of the original. It’s been hard to get solid versions of those games, historically.



  • I have to say, I have and like my Steam Deck OLED, but there are multiple solutions for desktop mode in other handhelds I prefer to Steam’s weirdo dual touchpads. The platonic ideal is GPD’s physical keyboard and optical trackball thingy, paired with their stick mouse emulation switch, but there are things like the Lenovo Legion Go’s single touchpad that also work.

    Bazzite supports the Legion Go’s detachable dual controllers surprisingly well, too. I was shocked, considering how weird and proprietary they are. You can’t even get Switch Joycon support that good on a desktop PC.


  • People have been using this as an argument for renewables since what? The 70s oil crisis? As new ways to access hydrocarbons got discovered the horrified realization was that there are plenty of reasons to bail on those faster than they run out, unfortunately. The issue isn’t that we’ll run out, it’s the amount of damage we’ll cause until that point.

    And also, it’ll take much longer to run out, but others have mentioned that already.

    This thread is interesting to me mostly as a periodic reminder that culture wars have shorter memories than one would think. People forget hotly contested issues and the public opinion battle lines around them at a horrifying pace. You’d think it has to do with old people dying and new people growing up, but it’s a lot faster than that.


  • “Forced exclusivity is bad” is an angle that has always baffled me a little, because some of its proponents seem to also be going “what exclusives does the Xbox have” like two posts down the road.

    Or maybe it’s because I’m old enough to remember where the “I will never buy anything on Epic because they pay for exclusives” was instead “Square has betrayed its customers by moving to the PlayStation” (or, you know, Konami for having Xbox ports).

    Gaming opinions are weird, and get weirder if you track them over time.


  • It says (pretty explicitly, if you go back and read interviews), that Gabe Newell really doesn’t like Microsoft in general, that the feeling is mutual and that the fact that his multibillion dollar empire is stuck as a Windows application MS may try to muscle out at any point has motivated him to bring PC gaming out of Windows from very early on.

    Granted, MS has been sucking at attempting exactly that for a long time, but that’s the ultimate motivation here. That’s not a particularly disputed fact.



  • I don’t think this tracks. Steam’s model is developing software to automate or crowdsource expensive effort. Now, anyways. It originally was to fix PC piracy, but they achieved that ages ago.

    And hell yeah they have a natural self-reinforcing monopoly. Even ignoring the mass of captive users with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars committed to the platform, Valve has been doing feature work on that storefront for decades. When others try to compete people immediately bring up the expansive value added features. They make their own controller drivers. They make their own compatibility layers. They make their own OS, FFS. In what world bringing a PC storefront to that level would “not take much”? It’s an Apple-style ecosystem model, and much as it terrifies me that it’s an ever growing monopoly, it’s still impresive that they managed to build it within Microsoft’s own.


  • Yeah, if it isn’t it will be. If you extrapolate their current moves to a world where PC gaming is entirely controlled by them, maybe even from the OS level downwards, and there is also a set of console-like standalone platforms on handheld, set-top and VR segments… well, that’s a level of control over a massive media industry that I don’t think anybody has had before. Especially not a private company whose ownership is two cheeseburgers and/or an unfortunate knife sharpening accident away from changing overnight.


  • I’ll be honest, I don’t think that’s the reason. I also think those numbers may be different but they may both be indistinguishable from zero when plotted against natural languages. You’re right about it being hard to define what counts as a “Esperanto speaker”. I can’t decide if that makes the Python comparison better or worse, though.


  • Man, I don’t like the Steam monopoly on principle, but I have to admit I do struggle to pay attention to Epic exclusives. It’s simply the launcher I open the least after GOG and Steam. I’ve though “hey, wasn’t that Ubi Star Wars thing out” like two or three times and forgot about it between remembering that’s an Epic thing and deciding whether I wanted to buy it.

    But hey, since we’re going multiplat again, I could use some newer Ubi games on GOG, too.