Been in my backlog for a while, and this may have convinced me to check it out soon.

Also I gotta say I love the idea of Mid game reviews. Everyone talks about great games to death. Terrible games get s ton of discussion and have the “so bad it’s good” angle. Mid games are often solid values and rewarding experiences that get forgotten about over time.

If you are able to terminate Ethernet yourself or plan on being able to in the future (the hardest part is probably buying the crimping tool), you could just buy a spool of Ethernet and run it now. Either leave the ends loose, or you could terminate them into female jacks in wall plates (just find a good way to label them for your future self).

Depending on your budget, Cat5e would probably be fine, but if you want future proofing you could do Cat6. Technically you can go higher but that’s probably more than you’ll ever need.

Conduit can also work, but you need to make sure you’re able to fish wires through. Could be useful to think about how you’re going to do that, and it kind of depends on the setup. Some way of leaving a string, or perhaps fixing a string into a loop so you can use it as a pulley to pull things through. If it’s a short, straight shot that might not be necessary.

Do they self-identity as Jews?

Their actual name is “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” and they self-identity as Christian.

They don’t call themselves “the Church of Joseph Smith of Latter-Day Saints”.

Jehova’s Witneses and Mormons are both Christian. Each would argue they are the TRUE Christians and all the others are misguided. They worship Christ. Jehova’s Witnesses actually started as a Bible study group.

I have seen similar features on phones. Luckily my LG G4 has replaceable batteries. I can confirm that multiple times I have seen my battery reported as fully healthy, only to open up the phone and find a spicy pillow.

So it may be useful for some things but I would not be too heavily reliant upon this without fully understanding where that % comes from.

I’ll admit I’m using it loosely here because it’s fun

Say the line Bart!

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

How quickly people forget how common it was to see Roach on rooftops in the Witcher 3.

GTAas an entire series has tons of reels of people doing ridiculous and hilarious things.

I’ve never understood the weird hate for Bethesda games in that regard.

I think this could be stemming from another creator’s jokes.

Her name is “CitiesbyDiana”. I believe she started doing Cities Skylines and Truck Simulator content but that transformed over time into talking about urbanism in real life. She makes short-form videos that are hyper-edited “brainrot” and usually have AI voices. Either celebrities like Trump and Biden or OC characters like “Lane Man”- a prodigy of Robert Moses who advocates for paving the entire world with highways.

She’s also moved to to other things. If you’ve seen memes about food or pharmaceutical grade glycine from Dongua Jjnglong, it originated with her ironically simping for the company as a joke.

I’ve noticed she’s started to use AI to manipulate videos from podcasts, including Talk Tuah. I haven’t seen this particular one video, but this seems right in line with the kind of content she creates.

Just to toss my feedback in the ring: I listen to a podcast themed around a local sports team on Spotify, and I often download them to my phone locally because I’m old and still have the habits of being on a limited data plan even though I’ve had unlimited for years.

I noticed the ads (pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll) and was surprised because a lot of them tend to be local ads for various cities across the US. HVAC services in Chicago, lawyers in Houston, etc. None for the city where the podcasters live, most of their audience lives, or the spots team is based.

I don’t always download the episodes to listen, only if I know I’m going to be out , or if I’m mowing the lawn and might occasionally stretch my wifi range. I haven’t tested fully, but it seems as though the ads only get baked into the audio upon download.

I also noticdd a few months ago that downloading a podcast I was partway through resets my progress, which has been incredibly annoying. If the ads are inserted at the time of download, that would make sense because the length of the audio would change.

Amazing. One of the best purchases I’ve ever made.

It’s rare for me to see games in my library that are not supported, although there are a few. But there is a difference between running and running well. Demanding games will get maybe an hour of battery life and the fans will be pretty loud the whole time. Some games (especially strategy games) really work better with a full keyboard and a higher resolution screen. Some games I just would not want to play on a handheld. But most of the time the games that I want to play work well.

One trick I use to get better battery life and performance is streaming. I use Chiaki to stream from my PS4, and Steam Link (as a non-steam app lol) to stream from my desktop. It’s often worth it for the fan noise reduction alone.

It’s even better at emulation. It’s a great machine for PS2 and GameCube games- I have the back buttons and track pads mapped to speed up, pause, slow, and rewind gameplay and to control save states. I have not dialed it in yet, but I think with some tweaking you could probably use the gyro and/or track pads to do some good Wii emulation. 3DS and DS are great too, mostly because of the track pads. Anything older emulates fine, but isn’t as impressive.

I have gotten PS3 and Switch emulation to work, but the fans go on and the battery life goes down, so I don’t really use it for that. Plus storage is a bit tight and PS3 games are huge.

It does feel like Valve was just a little too early. I wish the screen was 1080p.

The 2230 SSD’s that it uses were kind of uncommon when it released. The weird size made them more expensive and they had lower capacities. I managed to get a 512GB one, but I wish I could have gotten like 2TB. It seems like that’s changing now though. Similarly, I wish microSD cards came in larger capacities. Storage just seems to get used up so fast these days.

Neutorypical here (possibly a touch of undiagnosed autism but not a lot)- I don’t get into them.

My wife and I take a very proactive approach to communication. We talk through decisions before either of us gets emotionally attached to an answer. We trust each other to have good decision making processes when that isn’t an option. We have thoroughly established that both of us are putting the interests of the household first. We know both of us are acting in good faith, we both apologize, and we accept each other’s apologies.

In previous, less healthy relationships, I realized what made a “fight” was that her or I wanted it to be. Maybe one of us wanted attention or affirmation or had some inner problems was taking out on the other. Perhaps we just didn’t feel like we were properly heard unless we were angry. Whatever the actual fight about was usually something that could’ve been resolved without emotional energy.

As for how long to recover after… When it happened it always depends on the specific fight. Sometimes hours, sometimes days, eventually the big one was that we broke up permanently. If the issue has been resolved and someone is harboring resentment because the other party disagreed with them, there’s more underlying emotional issues that need to be resolved.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2553040199

But the store piece is the only problem.

For community, there’s tons of different communities for every game and Steam is usually one of the least active anyways.

For mods, as far as I know there’s no exclusivity there. In fact, it’s kind of a pain to mod Bethesda games because they don’t go through Steam. It’s similar to DLC in that it’s just a better experience to have mod support included in the launcher.

For the launcher, that seems like once again a huge blow to consumers to have a separate steam store vs steam launcher. You can already add non-Steam games to the steam launcher or launch games without the steam launcher.

The problems identified in the article, and what they are getting sued for, are solely related to the store. So I don’t see how breaking out these supplemental features would solve that.

So what’s your solution?

Break them up… How?

You can split off business units like their hardware sales or dev studios, but that isn’t going to reduce their storefront market share at all.

Are you suggesting that they just split users up randomly? That would be probably worse for consumers- suddenly the friends and communities people have built up through Steam would be fractured, and users would look to find ways to get around it.

Split up by what publishers they have deals with? Well then those new companies would only be indirect competitors, not to mention that would also be worse for consumers as I’d have to suddenly make a new account with each new platform just to keep accessing my current library.

Like… How do you want to split them up in a way that doesn’t hurt consumers and publishers more than it helps?

So what solution do you propose then?

Ideally I’d like to see media distribution be nationalized. Video streaming, audio streaming, videogames, e-books. There have been multiple cases of companies selling digital goods, then ceasing to provide those with consumers left holding the bag. Multiplayer games whose servers are gone. Movies “purchased” on Amazon that become unavailable when their agreement with the publisher expires. I am concerned about what Valve will look like when they inevitably get new leadership.

But I suffer no delusion that nationalizing that is realistic. Certainly not in the US where I live, where even libraries are under attack from conservatives. I’m doubtful that would happen anywhere else either. So what’s the next-best thing?

Seems to me like the capitalist response would be to try to encourage competition. A lot of companies have tried and failed, so I’m not sure what else can be done on that front.

So… What do you suggest be done about it?

Monopolies are often great for consumers… When they’re nationalized. Obviously that’s not going to happen with Valve any time soon.

What would the benefit be to breaking up Valve? How would you even go about doing that? The obvious choice is to break out different business units- break things like the hardware sales and game development into separate companies. But that still doesn’t address the issue of them having too much market share for software sales.

The next beat thing I can think of would be to have some sort of regulatory body just to place restrictions on the industry. Which, of course, would vary from country to country, and would probably have to include all of their competitors: Epic, GoG, and the various publisher-specific stores, maybe even other storefronts like Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Google, and Apple. It would be hard not to also hit the mobile games industry too (which, to be fair, might be a good thing). But this kind of thing is usually reserved for things like utilities, communications, financial markets, etc. Such an organization for a luxury recreationak market… I have to wonder how much political appetite there really would be for that? Is that really what people want their governments to be focusing on?

Do you have a better solution to propose?