That’s an exaggeration. If voting was meaningless, they wouldn’t bother with things like gerrymandering or other ways of restricting the vote.

I mean, while it wasn’t a good outcome for the people at large, Trump was very much not wanted by established power when he was first elected. And yet…

It’s creeping into parts of the EU. I can’t remember exactly what the loophole is, something to do with not explicitly advertising the product but rather having like a sponsored message from the makers of WonderDrug™ to ask your doctor about treatment for X condition, but I’ve seen them pop up here and there. I have my doubts the EU is going to stamp it out, but I hope I’m wrong.

GOG has managed to put out DRM free games though on a digital distribution platform. I can have my entire library backed up and it isn’t possible for them to nuke it in any way, as far as I know. It really isn’t a problem inherent to digital downloads, only the way some are trying to do it.

Valve gets away with it because you can get games for dirt cheap there.

I suspect if we were looking at the same image as above except buying Dead Space for $6 like you can on Steam, we’d be seeing a lot less pushback. Part of the excuse they had was physical media having a way bigger distribution cost compared to digital. They’re kind of trying to have their cake and eat it too, here.

And yeah, GOG is DRM free so that’s a pretty big difference.

I’m still a couch and controller gamer primarily, I just use a PC to do it lol. Honestly, with Steam, it’s really easy to just change Steam Big Picture mode as the default shell for Windows, so even if you don’t want to install SteamOS, you can still have the console experience of just turning the machine on and booting right into your games menu.

Least enjoyment for me was Star Wars Squadrons. I wasn’t interested in the slightest but my friend convinced me to buy it full price on release.

Ouch. I got it at, like, 2 bucks or something like that and at that price, it was… okay when I wanted to fly around in the cockpit of a Star Wars ship. But even at a couple of bucks I feel like it only barely cracked into “decent use of the money” territory… I’d be mad at full price lol. I think I may have a grand total of 5 or 6 hours in it.

Least: The two I bounced hard off of I think was the '24 version of Microsoft flight sim? Loved Century of Flight in the past, but felt like the navigating the UI was oddly arcane and just couldn’t be arsed to learn its eccentricities. Also GTA V. Do not get it, man. I really enjoyed San Andreas and the old Saints Row games, but GTA V was just boring for me.

BG3 was another that I didn’t get a ton out of… Act 1 was great, but it fell off a lot after that imo. Every session felt like a slog (I actually like 5e, but it tends to get more slog-y by itself at higher levels imo). I just watched the rest on YouTube and didn’t feel like I missed much in terms of experience. I get where people got into it though, the voice acting really was a treat and I did enjoy Act 1. But I felt like I went way over my usual dollar to fun ratio.

Most: Minecraft is up there, like many, especially for my kiddo. We both really like playing Golf With Your Friends together along with PinballFX. I’m pretty much done for good with it at this point but I put countless hours into New Vegas that I don’t regret one bit. Similar story for Oblivion and Skyrim. Even at the price, RDR2 was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in gaming. American and Euro Truck Simulators, CKII, Civ VI, Subnautica. I really liked Cyberpunk and put a lot of hours in there, but I came in well after the release kerfuffle and had no expectations. My wife plays the shit out of Disney’s Dreamlight Valley.

Wow, that’s really good! You’ve definitely got your money’s worth, I’d guess.

FYI, you can get total spent by going to Help > Steam Support > My Account > Data Related to Your Steam Account > External Funds Used.

Can you not check directly if your account is private? I went through Help > Support > My Account> Data Related to Account > External Funds Used for totals. Does that rely on a public profile?

It all depends how old the account is. $1000 in a few years is definitely bananas… over 15, that’s a damn cheap hobby honestly.

Less than I thought! About 1,900, can’t tell if that’s USD or EUR I’ve used both. Saved over 3,000, supposedly. For over 17 years, 112 bucks a year for a hobby shared nearly the entire time between 2 - later 3 people - that’s pretty good I’d say. Not a lot of hobbies come in that cheap.

I’ve been predicting for while we’re going to see two parallel Internets develop, the “new” net running on the old infrastructure that’s basically run by the big guys and a new infrastructure modeled after the old internet that’s decentralized. We’ve been seeing a bunch of different pieces from Fediverse to LoRa communication, Meshtastic, Matrix, increased hobbyist interest in old ways of connecting computers (even saw a guide on how to set up your own dial up ISP for fun), etc. I’m not sure exactly how all those pieces are going to come together, but a locked down internet is only going to increase demand for what was lost in its creation. And its already been trending this way for awhile.

Perhaps, but one could argue it happens so often that the hammer lends itself to hammering this particular nail, and so often devolves into that. The Balkans are this experiment played out, attempting to carve out ethno states, and we’ve seen how that’s gone. Once you start saying things like “this country should only be (or primarily be) for X people”, you almost necessarily have to engage in some degree of genocide (in the wider sense of removing a people and culture that doesn’t fit the paradigm), or apartheid, otherwise the statement ends up a bit vacuous, no?

Israel is, in my view, a very clear example of this; once you’ve decided “this is a Jewish state”, anyone not Jewish by definition become second class citizens.

If we’re just talking general assimilation, that’s more nuanced… I don’t oppose calls for more assimilation, but I think governments have done a very poor job in using more stick than carrot. They tend to not put any effort in helping people integrate, which is, from experience, very difficult. One could argue it isn’t their responsibility, but I think such framings for state action is silly… either the state has an interest in a thing being done or it doesn’t, and in this case I think they very much do. Most immigrants that form insular communities do so not out of any inherent pull to, but because they’re already being somewhat ostracized. In the US, Chinatowns arose as a direct result of ostracization and discrimination.

I do think there is a danger of assimilation programs overzealously wiping out culture… the Sami have faced multiple attempts in the past at trying to stamp out their culture, the US and Australia religiously forced the elimination of many native cultures in the name of assimilation. It is also a fine line to walk. But there is undoubtedly a state interest (and immigrant interest!) in assimilating into society.

I’d argue the binding culture that should be assimilated shouldn’t be things as fuzzy as ethnicity… the culture that binds should be the values of that nation. Which doesn’t really have anything to do with ethnicity.

I guess I’m just skeptical this false impression will work on locals… I’d presume they aren’t hearing from this group from lemmy mainly and likely already have feelings established, no? It just seems to me this wouldn’t be a good forum on which to spread misinformation… strikes me as a lot more likely that a forum known for being pretty left leaning is just latching onto a story that is related to their interest.

Because (at least on lemmy) they spam articles about this, and treat it like some “gotcha” moment that would make the company no longer able to fulfill their purpose.

Because more militant left leaning views are pretty common here. Seems to be the Occam’s Razor answer.

Yes of course, it is to me just clear that it is not about Mullvad. The post are about ÖP.

To what end? Surely locals would have a better idea of exactly where their politics stand… what’s the point in giving a false impression to people from random countries on the Internet?

I still wouldn’t support it and would probably pull my money from someone who is actively promoting it. Often this kind of sentiment is a soft pedaled version of more ugly policies, and I just don’t agree with it in the first place. I think nationalism is generally an ignorant position and the lesson of the 20th century should be that trying to maintain homogeneous states nearly always leads to genocide in the worst cases and apartheid states in the best of times. So this doesn’t assuage me much.

That said, extra context is always welcome.

This is way worse than what Yen did. This guy donated a lot of money to a party that explicitly pushes demigration policies, and if there was any doubt that this was a motivating factor for the donation, he later said he felt those policies were necessary. That’s understandable to not want to give your money to someone who you know is going to go bankroll demigration politics with some of your money.

Yen praised the Republicans at large over an anti trust pick.

I think the other criticisms of Proton’s policy changes are valid, and everyone has different standards for what is enough to divest from a company I guess, but I’ve heard people calling Yen a fascist sympathizer for that statement, and that’s just divorced from reality imo.

Dress codes for restaurants (jackets and ties required), dress codes for gas stations (no shirts, no shoes, no service)

Now this is goofy… comparing a private business telling you what you’re allowed to wear in their business versus a state mandating what you can or can’t wear? Come on, man…

dress codes for schools (uniforms)

We have all sorts of extra restricted rights for children. They don’t have a lot of rights most adults do in public schools. Free speech is greatly restricted… should the state then extend these restrictions to the wider public because it happens in public schools for children?

Calling this idea goofy when making a false equivalence that should be dispelled with a 101 level understanding of government is the soul of throwing stones from a glass house, dude.

There are arguments for your position, but not this one, this is just silly.

I mean, this is true, but if you ignore enough rules you’re essentially playing a different game.

But some systems are easier than others to wing or remove pieces. 5e already, for better and for worse, hand waives a lot stuff as up to the judgment of the GM, rather than having explicit rules on how to handle something. I think this is a bad thing for long term groups because it puts a lot more work on the GM (this might, ironically, make it good for new players but less good for new GMs), and for people who know their way around ttrpgs it’s a little annoying that so much of the experience, even more than usual, relies on each given GM with less reliable and predictable outcomes.

But what rules 5e does have are usually pretty simplified… looking at 3.5, something like grappling has very explicit rules on how to resolve things in what feels like a pretty satisfying way, but it is very verbose… 5e just says “eh, contested Strength check and call it a day”. It’s just a very, very simple system at its heart. And again, a lot of stuff is just straight up written as “leave it up to your GM”. This is frustrating for more veteran players that might want to try optimizing or pushing the bounds of a system and need a structure to push against, but for a newbie just having fun and who isn’t too hung up on outcomes, this is a feature not a bug imo.

My fear with more open systems is like you said above, it can give especially new GMs and players a bit of paralysis in not really knowing where to go… I think 5e strikes a good balance of giving newbies a structure to work with while telling them not to sweat details too much. I could see with the right group though that isn’t too timid or afraid to explore how this might be a benefit more than a hindrance…

All that said, I haven’t tried Fate itself, so I’m speaking generally here. I’m sure I’ll get around to checking it out at some point, though I’m mostly moving genres these days into stuff like the new Shadowrun and Cyberpunk RED so might be awhile… appreciate the rec though, we have a sub group that runs new systems all the time so I’m sure we’ll get around to it lol.