Eh, Americans got that 24 hour news cycle brain. You can just admit to all the war crimes and not have to hide them for 50 years.

In a world where Sony and Embracer are running around saying we need to be paying $70+ for games (while tipping the devs and buying micro transactions like a good like wallet)… You’re mad at the storefront?

Yeah, go into Walmart and demand they take less of a cut so… The publisher can take more from the devs?

Gabe is rich because he spearheaded a good service (which I’ll admit I thought was a scam back when I was forced to make an account way back when I had dial up) but… 30% is standard. For the price of games? Be mad at Embracer. Be mad at EA. You’re free to not like or use Steam but they let the publishers set the price. Their cut is a drop in the bucket. The whole ‘cut’ debate is just EGS propaganda.

Different guy but I’ve got over 2,700 games on Steam thanks to sales… So I’ve probably saved at least one thousand… Maybe not two, unless we count not buying for Star Citizen as a savings!

My Dell XPS 13 (Windows) will kill it’s battery if you look at it funny… Or don’t look at it at all.

One time, I fully shut down the laptop and put it in my carry-on.

When I took it out after my flight, my bag was suspiciously warm and the battery was fully dead. Power management on Linux might be a joke but Dell is certainly the Carlos Mencía of the comedy club. At least I know my enemy now though. I unplug the battery to turn it ‘off’.

Back in the day, when it was light-hearted things like Habbo Hotel raids, Triforcing, and secretly hiding CP in the images you upload so that other people help proliferate CSAM.

If you can’t tell by that last part, I don’t go there anymore. /b/ was never good and all that.

Every now and then, I check it out though. I’m obviously old and certainly not anyone’s personal army so I look at a page or two of porn and gore and shrug, click out, and let time march onward.

I mean, Fossil ended support for my Gen 5 a while back and… It still works. I mean, I mostly use it as an alarm and “ability to feel my phone vibrate when ringing” machine but it still operates…

Until it doesn’t, I guess. The battery life is already shit and I’m jealous of my partner’s Garmin.

Take CapCut off because it’s more like TikTok editing than video editing.

Divinci has a learning curve but any curve is better than learning solely on a ByteDance owned product.

Chinese manufacturing won’t allow quality Chinese cars…

At least they won’t have them in the export line.

It’s entirely possible that literally everything she claimed was false or exaggerated but there’s still enough evidence of Linus acting less than decently on the WAN show with regard to his other actions that cast doubt.

The man who took another company’s prototype and auctioned it off then claimed that they already had an agreement before contacting them somehow had zero evidence of abuse of power? We should assume that his willingness to abuse his power ends at his businesses doorstep because some of his co-workers are decent people?

Should Russia get a black eye and Ukraine be pleased by Chinese assistance, when the Western spigot gets turned off, then China will have an amazing hook on Ukraine. Putin quietly gets told his place, Ukraine has stockpiles of Western gear to sell and China has another part of the Belt and Road.

Of course, the West will try to keep the funds flowing but without “big strong Russian bear” knocking at their door they’ll drop them like a new year’s resolution.

Now, Ukraine gets to play Belle of the ball courting China and the West and in the end The Rich win. Exactly according to plan.

When the invasion kicked off, like day 0, SF assets all over the place were ready to bounce and get in there. I know at least one GROM and UK guy who were training their counterparts in case they got told they could support.

But, as others have said, these are more akin to advisors than “behind the lines” active missions. If you don’t think everyone has someone backing up the tax dollars they’re sending, you’re naive at best.

If you’ve got a market cap of three trillion and the investors expect three trillion plus one next quarter, can you afford to risk it?

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. One in ten isn’t bad odds.

I dunno. Spotify stopped billing me for the family plan I was paying for some years ago and at this point I’ve got five accounts mooching off of them and I’m using powershell to download gigabytes worth of music off of them…

Like, Spotify is evil but at this point I’m a negative number for them every month. I’m gonna keep on going until they decide to shut off the hose.

Oh, but I do go to concerts and buy records.

Shoot man, you gotta think about it the other way. Show them a mobile game, show them the prices, then turn around and show them purchasing power.

For instance, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp. Cute, aimed at kids, horrible leaf ticket practices. Broke down the pricing of one set and for the cost of ACNL and a 2DSXL - you’ve got something like a 0.8% chance of getting the whole set.

So, show that to a kid, do you want a 0.8% chance of having this set or a whole Game and System?

Granted, this was a while back - the price of those two together probably gets you a 2% chance these days.

Not the brightest fork in the tool shed, are they?

The usual, I would but games (and proprietary software for work)

I run a Linux machine literally next to my Windows desktop and yeah it’s 98% for my daily usually but that’s still a week worth of “Not working” for my year.

Fallout 3 was hard enough to get working on Windows many moons ago but even with all the “Use Lutris” or “Use Heroic” cries, it’d be easier to run a whole Windows VM than to get it running natively and in the forty minutes of time I have to game, I’d rather just play the game sometimes.

So, if I have to play in their Sandbox, I’m gonna shit in it first so they don’t try to come play too.

Plus, VR and all that.

Build your own drone. Don’t bother paying the DJI markup when you can get a full frame mirrorless on a bunch of wood with brushless motors attached.

What kinship do the Kurds owe Aleppo when they would hand their lands over to Russia? They can sell it to the Americans or they can sell it to the Regime who bombs them, who’d rather they be bombed out to make room for their Russian Allies. Not much choice for them.

If Assad, because I don’t blame the Syrian people as a whole, recognized Kurdish autonomy they could begin to move towards unifying in the people’s best interest instead of scraping what little they can through bad deals. Instead, the Assad Government is ready to move the Kurds out of their lands to hand them over to Russian companies. The people of Syria don’t really get the oil either way - the people do struggle for US benefit but Assad is not a heroic revolutionary fighting for the people either. A free Rojava would be the first step in removing the US yoke but it would also remove the Syrian one.

Turkyie doesn’t like the Kurds, maybe for a good reason in their eyes. Syria doesn’t like the Kurds and again they probably think that’s a good idea too. Iraq gives them autonomy but that’s who knows what will happen if Sadr continues to expand Iranian influence.

The US has on multiple occasions used the Kurds and left them out to dry, so they’re not some blameless paragon, but they didn’t at Al Sina’a and they continue to keep food shipments moving in despite Russian aggression raising the price of wheat and Syrian shelling the White Helmets.

There’s no angels but at least the US isn’t bombing whole towns for the crime of being “rebel held”. They keep their collateral down to whomever might be standing near their targets…

Or, in the case of their Task Force 9, merely precision bomb their civilian targets.

I think we can both agree that US actions in the region have been abhorrent. Though, the Coalition at least attempts to maintain an air of legitimacy (and aid funding) and the Kurds by and large don’t have many other friends.