Yeah, no I definitely agree they’re good to gamers. I also love how they have a flat structure, and I think Gabe seems like a smart guy. He’s given some interesting talks about economics. They’ve made a great platform for gamers, but it doesn’t quite change that their business model is based on taking a cut of the profit of work done by others. In most other scenarios, it’s easy for us to recognize when companies do this – amazon, Walmart, etc, but in Valves case they have such a great reputation among gamers and a fanbase of their own, I think the escape a good amount of warranted scrutiny (game dev side, not gamer side)

Valve’s fee is more than earned however.

Maybe. I’m not a game dev, so Im not sure I can say for sure. But it still remains that there isn’t much of a choice for game devs and Valve holds most of the cards. That level of centralization of power isn’t good, earned or otherwise. It’s evident that at least some devs aren’t happy how much of a cut Valve is taking.

Meanwhile if a developer were to do that themselves then they pay each time a user wants to download that game.

I’m not sure this is exactly right. They’d have to buy and maintain their own servers, or rent them from a cloud provider, but it wouldnt necessarily be a charge for every download. But maybe I’m being pedantic – you’re right that it costs some amount of money to store data and keep computers up.

I think probably from a game dev perspective, the issue here is Valve takes far more of a cut than whatever value they add to the experience itself. If you’re a team that just spent years of work on a game, the one-third cut Valve takes is just not proportional considering the amount of dev work, and is therefore considered extractive. Does that make sense?

I’m trying not to cast too much moral judgement here because we live in a capitalist system and corporations are going to seek profit in whatever way possible, and we are all indoctrinated into it, but from a perspective critical to that system, Valve are not good.

From a gamer perspective theyre a fucking godsend lmaooo

The fact that they don’t pull this shit is the reason they have the distribution market cornered.

We have to remember that gamers are not Valve’s primary customers. Game devs are. The market you’re referring to is the market of distributors available to game devs – NOT the market of storefronts available to gamers. In the PC space, the market of distributors is cornered by Valve and it allows them to take a big chunk of each sale from the game devs.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Steam and I think Valve has done some great things for gaming on PC and for gamers in general. That doesn’t change the fact that they are another cost a game dev must pay in order for them to create their goods, in an economic sense. Valve’s got the shelf space and devs don’t have much choice but to rent it out.

Gamers have good reason to love Valve for Steam alone – not even accounting for their amazing games. They really do have the best gamer-oriented platform, and seemingly they care about gamers. I think they’ve done a lot to advance gaming on linux as well which is much appreciated.

But, at least the way I see it, they still extract rents from game devs to an almost feudal degree.

“Sure – come sell your grain game – but you’ll have to give me a third of your profit because I own the town square platform/servers.”

Side note: It’s pretty funny that for a while Valve had Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis on staff to analyze spontaneously emerging markets for digital items on Steam – and he went on to write about the phenomenon above in his recent book Technofeudalism.

Edit: formatting

bahahahahah I was so confused. wait til you get to their line about kobe

that is fundamentally untrue but i suppose you cant have a revolution without breaking some axiomatic eggs

awesome. that album is so sick. the lyrics have a shock factor that i really like. sometimes theyre straight up hilarious.

me too lol. the shirt with the lego guy ? that’s the one i got

subversive punk is still around. It’s still politically leftist. Jeff Rosenstock and his fans are pretty anarchist in ethos. Go to one of his shows, you’ll find a whole lot of messaging about solidarity, mutual aid, building better world, fuck the police, etc. His lyrics aren’t always about politics but they have an anti authoritarian edge.

There’s Infinity Knives x Brian Ennals who are mixing punk and hip hop in a very in your face political way and theyre GREAT.

Viagra boys are a pop punk who satirize the alt-right, especially in their album Cave World.

Mount Eerie is a noisy folk band that dabbles in some punk aesthetic – their most recent albums contains themes of decolonization and anti-war.

Honningbarna just came out with an amazing record called Soft Spot that has some leftist political themes, but not as overt as the others. Amazing sound though. Maybe more Hardcore than punk.

There is no centralized counter culture because the media landscape is so different now. There’s no radio to all listen to together. Communities are pretty isolated online. There are advantages and disadvantages. At the very least, decentralization of the counter culture prevents it from ever being squashed completely. On the other hand, decentralization makes it harder for people to see, and cause them to lose hope and feel alone. But as another said, you’re here, aren’t you?

Yeah that’s why I’m skeptical of this guy actually being a Nazi lol

But then again the dude literally had a Nazi tattoo so that’s why this whole situation is so weird.

I guess I can personally see it being ignorance because I didn’t learn about 88 until the last couple years.

He got it in Croatia btw. To me, it’s plausible he didn’t know. He seems to have gotten progressively more disillusioned by his time in the military. Comments from 2018 like

If people “expect to fight fascism without a good semi-automatic rifle, they ought to do some reading of history,” he wrote in one since-deleted post. In another, he said that “an armed working class is a requirement for economic justice.”

don’t scream secret nazi to me. People comparing him to Fetterman is kinda silly to me considering Platner has called what’s going on in Gaza a genocide while Fetterman is a still supporter of Israel.

There’s a source out there, I guess, that claims they talked to Platner and he explicitly referred to his tattoo as “my totenkopf” but its an anonymous source who spoke to zionist publication Jewish Insider, so idk. Seems hit job-y to me.

Then again what the fuck do I know. The water is pretty muddy and its a terrible look regardless.

You should check out the last chapter of Bullshit Jobs. The author makes a good case for UBI as a liberating force for people whose lives are tied to demeaning work. His idea is that UBI would free people from being dependent on an economic master in order to have access to basic human needs like shelter, food, water, healthcare, etc. but also less concrete needs such as sociability, leisure, and play. It would have to go hand in hand with some regulation on prices.

He’s an anarchist so he ostensibly has your same aversion (completely warranted) to the perpetuation of money and capitalism.

relevant always sunny scene

https://youtu.be/GiJXALBX3KM

Thank you so much! you pointed me in exactly the right direction and now I have a couple edited photos I think I’m happy with it. The trick was watching Boris Hajdukovic’s Diffuse and Sharpen video – seeing him go do his initial edits with Color Balance RGB module gave me some confidence and the idea to just not worry about sharpness – get the colors right – then fine tune the sharpening on the church.

So I did that, then I masked the church and did some manual Diffuse and sharpening there (rather than using the presets - I think one of my issues was i would experiment with a preset and it would reset my mask and screw me all up!) and – well looking back now, maybe its a little oversharpened compared to the OOC jpg, but its not too bad to me!

I did remove some of the atmospheric haze too as you suggested and I think that helped quite a bit.

If you do find time to take a pass at these please let me know! I’ve added my “final” edits to the album in case anyone is interested. “Final” because I think I need to take a break from this image lol.

Will be watching more of Boris’ videos! Thank you again

Thanks! Yeah, me too Re: the endless rabbit hole of editing. For one thing, I very much hate the editing process! I too want things to look natural, but I’ve been watching the “Darktable Landscapes” Youtube channel and I’m amazed at what he’s able to do with some of his rawfiles, especially his use of masks.

Usually I just stick with the OOC jpegs because I find them good enough, but in this particular shot I’m using a long lens and teleconverter, and since the subject is so far away there’s a bit of haze and not a ton ton of detail. So i figureed it’d be a good candidate to practice editing and see if I can make a better image than the OOC jpeg… but I’ve been feeling like I just can’t! When I zoom in to bricks of the church in the OOC images, they seem a lot cleaner and sharper than my edited raw files, and I’m having trouble sharpening in darktable without making the image look twice baked.

I haven’t tried rawtherapee yet but I’ve heard its a bit less cumbersome than Darktable – I think I’ll try that and see how it does. Thanks again!

docker ps

I use navidrome to stream music from my desktop. Symphonium is my android client. It costs like 2 bucks but it’s real good. Lots of different UI options.

I haven’t done it myself since Im the only one using it…but I think in order to have somewhere your family can login and download music … That is a separate application from navidrome. Lidarr, Jackett, and somehow connect to qbittorent…I haven’t done it yet but I think that’s probably the route id go

Fuck Charlie Kirk, but you’d think a leftist would think twice about the psychological harm done to 3000 people in attendance watching their idol get shot in the neck. Talk about a radicalizing event. Its like an instant 3000 more alt right militants. Pretty boneheaded move from a “radical leftist.”

Edit: Looks like they have him in custody. sounds like he was a right wing 4channer. lol

edit2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groypers

Edit3: high chance this political donation is not him, but someone else with the same name from the same town in UT…

https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?contributor_name=tyler+robinson&contributor_city=St+george&contributor_state=UT

TLDR:

you can use adb