And basically did the Action RPG equivilent of dying to the first Goomba in Super Mario Bros.’ World 1-1 at a live convention where your speedrunning skills are the main attraction

I’m pretty sure the current standard is playing Halo and fumbling so badly you have to turn the difficulty down from Legendary to Normal, and missing your target time by over an hour (see: the Cody Miller Halo GDQ speedrun).

Razors and blades - every console game has a, IIRC, ~$5 platform holder fee, which goes to Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo. So if you buy a Playstation at-cost and then buy 5 games, then Sony makes ~$25 in profit.

Bullet Heaven is an old bullet-hell game playable here. Naming the genre that is stupid.

Bullet Heaven is the name of an existing game, don’t clobber it with a genre name.

They disrupted the status quo back in 2003 (2001?), then in 2009 they were doing Linux ports, then in ~2015 they were doing HTPC stuff (and also funding Linux graphic driver dev the entire time, Linux gaming in its current state would not exist without Valve), there was their Steam Machine experiment somewhere in there (it flopped but that doesn’t make it cost any less), then they were doing Steam Deck stuff. They’re still paying Linux graphic devs BTW.

Yeah, Steam is a monopoly, but 1) they’ve been a monopoly since forever and there hasn’t been a Comcast-ish disaster, and 2) more competition doesn’t seem to actually benefit us here but could potentially make things a lot worse.

In principle, Steam is a Sword Of Damocles just like any other Monopoly. In practice, the alternatives are EA and Epic, no thank you (I know itch.io is a good competitor, but they don’t have any pull on AAA publishers so I don’t expect them to take the market if Steam implodes).

Also, Valve is innovating in ways that nobody else seems willing to - not just their Linux ports (represent!), but also their attempts on HTPC gaming (which was unnecessarily a huge pain in the ass on PC, for no good reason) and their steam controller. And their portable PC gaming with the Steam deck (which to be fair GPD probably did first).

All in all, I’m happy to pay the Steam tax for what they’re doing. I have no illusions that Epic Games Store would provide serious competition in terms of the goodies I want, because they already aren’t, and they’re still in their sweetheart phase.

Putin will kill those dissidents, handing over the list is murder. Anyone who hands over a list of dissidents to an authoritarian dictator deserves to be Luigi’d.

The PineNote. Depending on your definition of “proper”, since it ships with GNOME and AFAICT only supports Wayland, and Wayland doesn’t have many compositors that work well on a device with no keyboard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p954EFd0VMI

They keep saying “51st state”, which implies Canada will only be a single state under the electoral college, and thus will be shafted just like California.

They fought in the Ukrainian Foreign Legion. Which is distinct from mercenaries AIUI because Ukraine is 100% in charge of the chain of command and takes full responsibility for their actions.

Ukraine has had a “no mercenaries” policy IIRC, if NK troops are seen as mercenaries then maybe it’ll legitimize Ukraine shopping for manpower.

Neither are ATACMs. They aren’t air force though.

What if they switched to shooting sand? Raining sand isn’t too deadly, it’s not dense enough right? And if it’s not lethal enough to the drones, then they can just up the caliber to shoot more sand.

Okay then, how does Hungry Jacks fit into that chain of logic?

How much obsolete tech does the WW2 infantry have, is the question - e.g. if it’s US troops then they’ll have Garands, which are only obsolescent, and they only need to stall until the modern air force can come help.

…actually, no. The modern air force could split up, put 10%ish of its forces into ROFLstomping the WW2 air force and the other 90% into supporting the WW2 infantry. So the WW2 infantry will always have air support from the moment the war starts. If the air force can obliterate a few platoons of modern infantry, then the WW2 infantry can scavenge some of their equipment and level the playing field a bit.

What exactly does “take a city” mean? If you’re not too squeamish then you’ll find you don’t need infantry, just a few MIRVs.

Aren’t those planes brought up to the air by actual planes? If modern planes have air dominance, then those plywood planes had better have a functioning plywood engine because there won’t be anything else to get them skybound.

Drones are army, they’re just a fancy grenade/pair of binoculars, when you think about it. Or maybe a missile.

If the modern air force can take out some modern ground troops, the ww2 ground troops could loot their corpses to be somewhat modern-ish ground troops. The modern air force could use radio to explain how to use the equipment, if they have access to wikipedia.