The shows antagonists were a wealthy business man turned politician who wielded the corrupt police force to feed his own power and oppress the common folk. And while his nickname was Boss Hogg, the villain’s canon name was Jefferson Davis Hogg. Pretty literally calling the cops confederate pigs.

Definitely a lot of problematic elements to the show, but there’s some good there too. And I’m sure it influenced a ton of car action sequences for decades.

Republican governments never seen to have nice things.

I don’t have much to say other than I like these a lot

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?

I thought this meme didn’t smell right so I looked for more information.

She has not even been accused of attempted murder. She was in jail without trial for 15 months, accused of assault. Italy seems to be think that she was being held (and in poor conditions) not to actually carry out justice, but as a piece of political propaganda. The Italian foreign minister even called the Hungarian ambassador to Rome, and has accused Hungary of violating EU laws. Italy has also pointed out that, per those pesky EU laws, Hungary should have allowed her to remain on house arrest in Italy while awaiting trial anyways.

She’s actually accused of several counts of assault, but Hungary has not publicly released any evidence. The “assault” was related to the disruption of a Nazi demonstration, which the right-wing Hungarian government seems to like.

She was not released because of her election- Hungary finally caved and allowed her to enter house arrest like they should have 15 months ago.

Really terrible meme all around. Not even close to reality.

A few years ago my friend’s father passed away. My friend’s mother continued to live in the house for another year or so. She never worked and had to eventually sell the house and downsize.

My friend had referred to her mother as a hoarder before. I’ve seen the reality TV shows about hoarders. But you don’t really understand just how bad the problem is until you spend several days helping your friend clean out their childhood home for sale, filling up several dumpster bags worth of… Stuff. Apparently the mother has always had some mental health problems and a shopping addiction, but spending over a year alone in that house drove her off the deep end.

We could have opened an entire new Harbor Freight store. There were clothes in sizes I didn’t know existed. My wife casually found a pistol just shoved in a random box. It was madness.

Just looking through my HLTB at things I’ve done recently:

The Ace Attorney series Sucker for Love Coffee Talk Haven (good for co-op)

If you want a bit more gameplay, but still chill:

Paradise Killer Braid Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

More gameplay focused:

Control Portal Wargroove Cat Quest Knack (I know it’s a meme, but the games are actually pretty fun)

Gomes then sued, alleging absentee ballot mishandling and supplying video footage showcasing Geter-Pataky, a member of the Democratic Town Committee, repeatedly dropping absentee ballots into drop boxes or handing them to others, who then did the same.

If I’m interpreting this correctly, it sounds like a couple of election officials just put absentee ballots in with regular ballots instead of… I assume they should have been set aside for vetting? The article doesn’t say what should have happened. The article doesn’t really go into the impact- seems like they just really, REALLY wanted to print a headline about Democrats meddling in the elections process.

When I think of “stuffing” I think of people creating wholly illegitimate ballots, which does not seem to be what happened here.

Also worth noting that this was for the Democratic primary for a mayoral position in 2019, and some of that info probably should have been in the headline.

I actually think it’s worse for Meta to take a loss on hardware. That tells me that they are expecting to make that money back and then some elsewhere. It’s possible that they are just hoping to make that money back through software sales (similar to Sony), but I just have a hard time trusting the company. The “Meta” name is such a turnoff that I don’t want a piece of their hardware in my house, let alone on my network, so I haven’t even looked at their offerings.

Also, I disagree with the notion that “for a budget rig somethings got to give”. The answers for a “budget” rig are… Nintendo Labo. The AR games with the 3DS. The various ways of strapping a smart phone to one’s face. Things that the VR community scoffs at, but the average consumer is much more likely to purchase.

I think the “budget” option is to just… Not use VR. For me, the adapter isn’t a huge deal. They just cut the price by $100 earlier this year. The Horizon bundle, plus an adapter, comes out to $560. The Valve Index can vary based on the setup, but I figure that’ll be at least $1k. The HTC Vive products seems way more focused on business than gaming, and all of their headsets are >$1k anyways.

So for me I have 3 options: wait for Valve or HTC to make more value-oriented products, get the PSVR2, or just not do VR. And I’m perfectly at peace with just abstaining from VR- I certainly don’t regret that I didn’t buy a 3DTV for example. But this PC adapter has suddenly made the PSVR2 an option where it previously was not one.

In this entire article, not even a single attempt to quantity the number of complaints.

This sounds to me like an extremely small minority. It appears as though Fallout 4 has sold over 25 million copies, and there’s… Maybe a couple dozen people on the Internet complaining?

There’s just no pleasing some people I suppose

For me personally, I dislike Meta strongly enough that the Quest was never an option.

I already had a PS5 and have a couple of digital VR games Sony have away a while back, plus there’s a few more I have been interested in. But until now the library was so restrictive that I could not justify the price tag for a PSVR2.

The only other option I considered was the Valve Index. I like Valve a lot and I’m sure it’s great, but at this point it’s 5 years old and would be 2x the price of the PSVR2. Not being comparable with the PS5 for those couple of free games plus exclusives in interested in like Horizon is a minor setback as well, although it’s not a huge deal and Horizon might come to Steam anyways. Also I would have to upgrade my PC a couple years earlier than I would otherwise- my RX580 is mostly fine now, but I don’t think it could handle VR.

Couch gaming.

I’m a technical person and I’ve tried a lot of different methods to do couch gaming with a PC. From having some sort of lap tray to various wireless mice and keyboard solutions. I’ve currently landed on having my gaming desktop just stream with Steam Link to my living room. As long as I’m selective about which games I want to play, I can usually get a good experience. But I still have at least 60% of my steam library that isn’t a good experience doing that.

Having a dedicated piece of hardware with a custom OS that is designed around a controller is a huge difference maker. Plus you add in how ridiculously expensive it is to get either a USB external optical drive or internal SATA drive to watch DVDs and Blu-Rays. Heck, even just watching Netflix or YouTube in the living room is easier on PS5 than a media PC for the average user.

There’s a reason Valve tried to make the Steam Machine.

Except that there is plenty of evidence that alcohol is physically addictive and causes withdrawal symptoms. So, by my logic, alcohol addiction is a thing.

Because it’s not just my logic. I’m leaning on the history of years and years of medical professionals and scientists doing research. And their conclusions are that alcohol addiction is a thing porn addiction is not.