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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • I’ve seen estimates put the materials cost somewhere around the $425 - 500 USD range because of the specific, semi-custom hardware that they’re using. It’s also good to note that Valve will be able to get a better deal than any of us will because they can get bulk discounts and aren’t buying each part at a market rate profit from retail vendors.

    Some people seem to be of the mind that it will be somewhere around the $500 - 800 USD range if tariffs and the RAM situation don’t screw with the price, and that it will probably price out the Xbox with Microsoft’s 30% profit demand and be slightly more expensive than the PS5 while having comparable but not quite as much power.




  • I think it varies from school to school based on what they think is important, but I wanna say that I learned about it in high school years ago. Of course, I also grew up in an area with a lot of Irish immigrants and descendants of Irish immigrants who were very supportive of the IRA. To the point of arms deals with the IRA being a thing with organized crime in the area. So I might know of it simply from living in Whitey Bulger country.



  • I’d say the Deck isn’t stealing customers from the Switch because they are filling different market niches. The Switch is a portable console with portable Nintendo games made for it. The Deck is a portable PC that gives you access to your entire Steam library on the go.

    The GabeCube, however, could absolutely pull some customers of the PS5 and Xbox depending on the pricing - especially with Microsoft’s demands that every part of the Xbox division see a 30% profit margin. The Big Three isn’t going to become the Big Four, but I think it will make some ripples. Steam running in Big Screen mode is effectively a console interface, and it plays Call of Duty just like the consoles. And with Sony finally moving away from console exclusive games, it means that Steam has almost full parity with the libraries of both of the consoles going forward while also offering access to all kinds of indie games that the consoles don’t. The GabeCube can play Call of Duty and Ghost of Tsushima, but it can also play Ultrakill and Bloodborne Nightmare Kart, and neither Xbox nor Playstation can say that.

    Edit: And this doesn’t even mention old games. The Steam library has access to all kinds of old games that never get ported to new consoles when a new generation releases, meaning that its library grows in step with the consoles but you can still play your old favorites without having to keep buying them again or keep your old consoles around.



  • What I was trying to say was that they were making two completely different points. When companies talk about “realistic” graphics in games, it’s always about the graphical fidelity, not about art style, direction, or aesthetic, and that steers the entire narrative of the conversation around “photo-realistic” games.

    What memes like this are trying to say is that having a good style and strong art direction trumps pure graphical fidelity every time. Whether your game looks like Crysis or Super Metroid doesn’t matter as much as having clear design direction, and conversely, slapping 4k textures on everything won’t matter if your game has no design direction.


  • What they’re talking about is what I call “The Wind Waker Effect.” When the GameCube was first announced, they showed off a trailer that included a realistic looking Link fighting Ganondorf to show off the power of the system. When the Wind Waker was announced and shown to the public, fans were furious. They didn’t want some cartoony Zelda game, they wanted that photo-realistic Zelda game that they had been teased with years before! When Wind Waker came out, it was universally criticized for its graphics. Today, it’s considered one of the best looking Zelda games of all time and was the main inspiration for the art direction of almost every Zelda game after it - including Breath of the Wild.

    If Nintendo had made that “photo-realistic” Zelda game, it would look nowhere near as good nor be as fondly remembered today, because “photo-realistic” in terms of video game graphics is an obsession with graphical fidelity, not artistic quality. That’s why photo-realistic games from the same era are remembered as the “real = brown” era of games. It’s a technical or hardware question of “how many polygons can we fit in this character’s facial pores”, not taking something fake and making it seem real through art direction.




  • The last time the US enacted global tariffs, it created the Great Depression, which hit the entire globe and was one of the major contributing factors to the Nazis rise to power. What happens here might only be hurting Americans and killing American minorities at the moment, but the psychotic demagogue in charge here will have real international repercussions soon enough. Honestly though, I think the tariffs have done what international sanctions couldn’t do, which is help convince some of Trump’s cult that he’s the one hurting them. Sanctions would just let him blame the outside world.

    You should keep in mind, it will take time for everybody else to truly divest themselves of the orange shit-gibbon and all the corporations based here, and that means time in which the fan spraying shit can turn towards Europe.


  • The 30s would be in the upswing after the Great Depression, which hit the entire world hard, and right in the middle of WWII. Post WWII was incredibly hard on almost every European country, as well. The founder of IKEA was inspired during the reconstruction period by Swedish socialists and a simple idea: that everybody deserves to be able to afford furniture. Before IKEA, the Swedish were largely using hand-me-downs of generational pieces or improvising wooden shipping boxes into tables and chairs. True furniture was generally custom pieces made for the wealthy by artisans. IKEA is still banned to this day from buying materials (like lumber) from a number of Swedish companies because they were black marked for providing affordable furniture to the masses by outsourcing the assembly labor to the customer with their innovative flat pack design. Much of Europe in the Cold War was massive concrete prefab buildings because the need to build large-scale housing quickly was so dire. Many cities were practically levelled by the air raids.

    On another note, I think a lot of the conversation on the topic of birth rates ignores or under-values the impact of sex ed, safe sex, and the rise of accessible home entertainment. Teenage pregnancies dropping has had a major impact on the birth rate, as has the reduction in accidental pregnancy. Combined, they probably make up a lion’s share of the difference between the present and a century ago. There’s a reason that so many people are born in the summer/fall, and it’s because 9 months before - in the winter - people are cooped up inside more and have less options for things to do for fun, which leads to more “Netflix and chill” and more accidental pregnancies as a result.


  • The fastest action that we could take that would have the largest effect is to cut out all the waste that companies get away with. Stuff like using water in California on cash crops unsuitable for the climate and on grass lawns and golf courses, or telling people in Texas to shower less and drink less water because they’re using it all in new AI data centers. Stopping practices like that will reduce strain on the system from multiple points by reducing energy and resource consumption both. Couple that with the ever increasing green energy use (solar/wind was cheaper than coal for the first time like 10 years back), better efficiency, and more effective materials and we’ll eventually make fossil fuels too expensive to use (legislation would also help big time there). There are sustainable farming practices that have been used for centuries in areas of little farmable land that have been replaced with harmful nitrogen fertilizers shipped and sold from countries like the US. Fast fashion and consumerism, loose regulations around hazardous waste disposal, the list goes on and on.

    There’s massive amounts of waste in how our society works, and there’s tons we can do towards fixing the world without giving up and murdering half the world so the billionaires can keep destroying the rest of it.


  • I have also been part of more than one conversation on Lemmy where people have used the term breeder

    Ew, that’s 110% some dehumanizing language there. Gross.

    The big hostility I see isn’t from 18 year olds who don’t want kids, it’s from 30 year olds being told that they’re wrong and they will want kids. I’m with you in the “it doesn’t affect me so I don’t care whether someone wants kids or not” department, but some of the conversations that I’ve seen have given off the same vibes as when a former coworker told a young lesbian that we worked with that she “just hadn’t had the right dick inside her.” That shit ain’t okay and I totally get the hostile response people have.


  • Indefinitely. Overpopulation is a lie that corporations have fed you so you blame the average person for the repercussions of corporate greed. It’s the same propaganda campaign they used with littering so you don’t blame the companies dumping chemical waste in rivers, and the propaganda about jaywalking that shifted the blame from car companies for lethal pedestrian accidents that eventually saw roads being designed for cars first instead of people. Recycling programs started before we had a realistic way to recycle in order to get people used to the concept for when practical ways to recycle were actually developed, but recycling companies never bothered with that. They just shipped most stuff overseas to landfills in China.

    The largest freight ships in the world each individually put out more emissions annually than every car on the planet combined. During the COVID lockdowns, vehicle used dropped dramatically across the globe - by something like 80%. And yet, global emissions barely budged during that time. Because the freighters and factories and all the other things that produce substantially more pollution were still running like normal. The US throws away 50% of the food it produces every year, and most of that waste is from companies and stores throwing away perfectly good food.

    Corporations are the biggest factor in climate change and the death of every ecosystem on the planet. But they have reshaped the question and shifted the blame from themselves and the wealthy to the common man.

    I’m not saying that we don’t have to change how we live, but while us using paper straws instead of plastic is a net good thing for the environment, even if every single person were to switch entirely, it would barely be a drop in the bucket compared to the excessive plastic waste generated by companies through single-use packaging. We need to question why companies are allowed to get away with it, not discuss how we’re going to uselessly cull the population so companies can keep doing what they’re doing.



  • I know Lemmy is aggressively anti-child for some reason

    Is it? I’ve never had a conversation on the topic on here so I truly have no idea, but my general experience with the topic is that people who don’t have or want kids (and it’s so expensive that plenty of people who do want to have kids can’t because they can’t afford it) often have their opinion on the subject disregarded, and that that is the root of any hostility towards the parents guilty of the offense.

    Basically, the “I don’t want kids.” “Oh, you will.” “No, I won’t.” “You say that now, but I know better, you will.” kind of conversations that end with the parent wondering why the person they were talking to was so angry.



  • I never said otherwise. I said that the economy does better under Dems than Republicans. That doesn’t mean that it’s the way things should be done, just that under Dems jobs are added to the economy rather than lost and the national debt grows at a slower rate than under Republicans. Between the two, the economy objectively does better under Dems.

    I simply was saying that the “Biden bad because brown people and the economy broke because woke” narrative is a farce no matter how you look at it.