bassomitron

Yes, as far as I'm aware. At least the medicaid portals came back online yesterday evening. President does NOT have the power of the purse. If SCOTUS ultimately rules against this, which would be insane because the constitution literally spells this exact phrasing out, then it'll be among the last proverbial nails in the coffin for checks and balances.

Agreed. Parents and kids' childhoods do play a huge role in how they ultimately turn out. However, there are near infinite variables during their development, many of which are completely outside our control. The best thing we can do is like you said, educate, mentor, and physically and emotionally support them as best we can. Sometimes, kids just grow into douchebag adults.

Anyway, OP, at the party you should totally just act like Mac, Charlie, and Dennis when they steal Frank's credit card and think they're rich.

I was tired last night, toddler hasn't let me sleep much.

I think I poorly conveyed that I do prefer Steam, and do think Epic's launcher is lacking. My point is, getting into the gaming retail business has a crazy upfront cost, so if GOG closes shop (which isn't so crazy to speculate: https://cdaction-pl.translate.goog/publicystyka/wielkie-zwolnienia-w-gog-u-pracownicy-naswietlaja-wewnetrzne-problemy-firmy-tylko-u-nas?_x_tr_sl=pl&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp&_x_tr_hist=true the original article was in Polish, thus the google translate link), that leaves only Epic competing with Steam. If epic eventually concludes they can't pull enough marketshare to continue justifying the crazy money they've spent trying to attract users from Steam with all their sales, that'll leave zero competition to Steam. I for one don't condone monopolies.

Alternatively, studios could just start releasing physical media again, but we all know that'll never happen...

Steam's voice chat/partying functionality is garbage. Discord is widely used for a reason. Remote Play is hit or miss, but I've largely resorted to using Moonlight instead on my Steam Deck because it's more reliable and stable. The guides on Steam vary wildly from game to game, just depends on the community support for it. It is nice when there's good stuff available, as it is somewhat convenient (though I wished it saved my spot on the page, I constantly have to scroll to where I left off on guides whenever I do use them). Lutris and NonSteamLauncher makes running Epic on Linux a non-issue.

I get it, Epic is a lackluster launcher. No one's arguing otherwise. But it's hardly a huge barrier to playing games.

Not really. Games would've gone digital either way, it was the obvious path to go. Steam might've sped up that process by a few years, but pretending that without steam, digitalization of the games industry would've never happened is naive at best and dishonest at worst.

And yet consoles still have physical game copies available all these years later. Why is PC so much different?

And I'm not saying to be happy that Epic is competition, I'm saying that if GOG dies, you'll only really have Steam and Epic. That sucks ass, but it's still better than only having ONE option. And like I said, once Gabe is gone, I 100% believe Valve will go full on enshitification mode. I wouldn't have to worry as much if I could still buy physical fucking copies of modern PC games.

As for Epic competing by creating better platform, I completely agree. Their launcher has made improvements, but it is still very bare bones and not great. I try to remember that tons of common sense software features we take for granted get patented. Hell, that's why so many streaming services felt so much shittier than Netflix for so long. It's not as straightforward as just emulating what Steam does but slightly better. That's still no excuse though, and they still fall very short of offering the mostly comfortable user experience we've grown accustomed to. Steam didn't start off where they're at now, they've had 20 years with an entire company dedicated to developing it.

My main point is, we all love Steam and Valve because they've been a mostly ethical corporation so far as well as mostly improving the experience of PC gaming, especially with Linux (minus expediting and enabling 100% digitization so they could attain better profit margins on Half-Life 2 sales). But nothing lasts forever, and pure monopolies are bad. Fuck Epic for buying exclusive rights for third party games, but in this specific context, it is their game, so it is what it is.

As far as I know, Jack Dorsey left Bluesky almost a year ago: https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-bluesky-twiiter-nostr-interview-2024-5

His interview on the topic: https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana

I have to somewhat agree with him that Bluesky is still very much susceptible to turning into Twitter all over again. Right now, it definitely feels like Twitter in its infancy but with all the modern QoL features we expect to have nowadays. Which is nice, of course. Twitter didn't used to be such a toxic shithole of bots and disinformation, it used to be a powerful communication tool for activism and journalists covering rapidly evolving events live.

However, the endgame of such platforms is inevitable. Higher user saturation means higher operating costs, which then usually means the company has a higher reliance on advertising, which then leads to more algorithms and data mining for targeted ads, which then leads to easier mass political manipulation campaigns.

I'm not sure if it's actually possible to attract mass audience without an algorithm driven model. Mastodon tried and it's had some moderate success, but because it's completely devoid of algorithms, users have a harder time discovering people/accounts/mindless entertainment. That's the only reason I can think of as to why Bluesky took off so much faster.

Games not developed or published by Epic only become exclusive when the publishers and/or devs take their money. Why is no one mad at them? And of course Valve doesn't have to do much of anything, they have had like a 10+ year headstart on cornering the PC marketplace. GOG has been completely awesome and more ethical than Valve and yet they're barely scraping by. Gamers/consumers just love to fanboy the hell out of corporations these days. When Gabe is gone and Valve inevitably goes public and enshitifies, you'll be glad there's still some competition left. But it'll suck because 90% of PC gamers have probably damn near 100% of their library locked into one platform. Remember, Steam is a huge reason why PC games went fully digital almost two decades ago.

Exclusivity has been a thing since the advent of videogames, this isn't anything new. Epic is just a shitty company, so they're an easy target to criticize. They funded the development and published the game, it's their right to do with it as they please. They're losing money by not bringing it to Steam, so their loss, really. But it's not even close to the equivalent of console exclusives, as the barrier here is spending 5 minutes to just download their shitty launcher. It sucks, but this really isn't that big of a deal, in my opinion.

Ironic that the site has "peace" in it.

Did you get a job there before moving? I've been contemplating emigrating from the US, but it's such a steep upfront cost