If Valve fails, we’ll have so many great alternatives, though!

• Epic Games Store, with it’s… uh… better fee structure that benefits the publishers.
• EA’s Origin, with direct access to the exact same Origin website but instead presented through an Electron app.
• Ubisoft Connect, with the latest access to Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed games and related reskins sold under different IP.
• Battle.net, with the feature to run partially-downloaded games and stream missing assets in on demand.
• GOG, with real installers for its games that you can hoard to a hard drive sitting in your closet. (No sarcism. This one isn’t terrible)
• The Microsoft Store, with its incredible ability to revoke your license for the Notepad.exe program that comes installed with Windows.

Who needs a forum, mod portal, user reviews, or Linux support anyways?

I didn’t even need to click on the link to know it pointed to civil forfeiture. The fact that they’re not required to destroy whatever they steal creates one hell of a perverse incentive to keep doing it.

Their what now? That’s ICE’s money. After the pulled the immigrant out of his bed, that money was just laying there. Nobody owns it, so it’s finders keepers. /s

Hey now, it’s not just a scheme to deport legal immigrants—That second arrest also inflates their numbers to look successful.

I can’t wait for the Criminal Repercussions In Manipulating Electees act.

Spud also has a blue Twitter checkmark. If it walks holding signs like a Nazi and quacks on a Nazi-owned platform it pays to use…

Why days worth of farming? To help give the player a sense of “pride and accomplishment” of course.

It wouldn’t even work on paper. All it would take to twist this into something dystopian is requiring cryptogtaphic attestation for the age range, and knowing lawmakers, they would justify it as a countermeasure for kids lying about their age. Expand the feature as a web API so websites can use the “easier” and “more secure” system-level age verification process and—oh look, now we can’t use important websites without a commercial operating system.

It would be like Secure Boot but worse. At least with that you can turn it off or enroll your own keys.

The blogger in question doxxed the owner/maintainer of Archive.today who in return doxxed the blogger.

Did you actually read the two articles posted by the blogger? The archive.today owner wasn’t doxxed. No personally identifying information was provided; it only aggregates already-known info including a couple of fake aliases. The most it concludes is that the guy is Russian or operating out of Russia.

https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-attack-against-my-blog/

https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/

Oh, no, no. You misunderstand. They want small government as in physical size, not organizational size. The smaller it is, the more places they can fit it in your daily life. /s

I am a different person. For the record, I don’t condone making the uncensored videos public either.

Investigators need to see them

The ones at the DOJ, which is led by a corrupt loyalist?
The ones at the FBI, which is led by a different corrupt loyalist?

The public doesn’t need to see them, but investigators won’t do shit if/when they see them.

Using a reskinned Google Chrome protects you from malicious Chrome extensions how, exactly?

He also created JavaScript, IIRC.

Big no thanks /j

Because they don’t care about evidence or facts unless it fits into their narrative.

You can point to posts advocating for violence or censorship coming from their ilk and they’ll just attribute it back to the other side because “we wouldn’t need to if they didn’t do it to us first.” It’s just the abuser justification, “look at what you made me do”.

Or they will just outright deny reality, dismissing opposing evidence as conspiracies, exaggerated, or misunderstood. Did Elon really do a Nazi salute? “No, no. He was just sending his heart out to Americans!”

And when there’s overwhelming evidence that they can’t do mental gymnastics around? They shut down the conversation. They stop talking about it. They ignore it. They bury it. Out of sight, out of mind.

When someone is indoctrinated into that way of thinking and makes their politics a part of their personality, you are not going to beat them at their own game. Their sense of identity is tied to their beliefs and their ego will not let them accept anything that goes against those beliefs. They need to be deprogrammed.

"Art isn’t about artistic expression. Billions of people make paintings and most of them go unseen. Museums, on the other hand… They don’t make paintings, they make experiences. For a nominal entry fee, consumers have access to an evolving and ever-changing catalog of content.

This is the future we envision here at Remedy. High quality games that build upon themselves, creating an experience that grows with the player. For that reason, we’re announcing that the Alan Wake series will no longer be individual games, but instead a live-service experience with episodic content."

• also that guy probably

Literally create all the service problems by normalizing launcher DRM

I hate DRM as much as the next person, but if Steam didn’t exist and digital downloads still became a thing, there would still be launcher DRM. Thanks to corporate greed, DRM is an inevitability in the industry.

Games distributed on DVD were packed with DRM fuckery, needing to be inside the computer to launch and using kernel-level drivers to enforce it. Before DVDs, you had games on floppy disks. Those came with physical codewheels that the player had to use to decode a password before it would start the game.

even their precious HL’s engine was IIRC a rewrite or fork of the one for Quake

IIRC, even the HL2 engine was just an improvement on the HL1 engine with a commercial physics engine bolted on top.

Much like Google used to, Valve doesn’t really do anything new. They take existing ideas and remove the rough edges to provide a more polished experience than what is already available.

To their credit, that’s exactly why they succeeded with most of their ventures. Gabe Newell understands consumers well enough to know that most people don’t care about anything other than user experience. Or, as he put it, “piracy is a service problem”.

Also they’ve been separated out of CDPR recently

Someone corrected me on this recently so I’m paying it forward.

CD Projekt owned GOG, not CDPR. CDPR is a separate company under CD Projekt and isn’t related to GOG other than both previously having the same owner.

Funny how it’s only a problem when using the Snap distribution.

Windows’ UX is shit.

Windows 11 still has its settings splattered across multiple applications. The Settings application has all the shiny new gimmicks they added, yet still lacks any way to change some basic settings. If you need to reset a local user’s password, you’re stuck going back into the now-gutted Control Panel to do it. And if you want to change something that Microsoft feels the average user shouldn’t be allowed to know exists, you’re using the group policy editor to do it.

Or, how about the way that there’s at least two applications installed by default that do the same or very similar things? Windows Media Player or Videos? Paint or Paint 3D? Cmd.exe or Windows Terminal?

How about the design language inconsistency? The Run dialog was left looking like a Windows 7 dialog and didn’t get a dark mode until the mid 2020s. The Event Viewer and Windows Firewall UIs are still something right out of Windows XP, but with Vista-smeared paint applied on top.

Or, if that’s not bad UX, then how about the ads in the start menu? Or how OneDrive tries to trick you into uploading your desktop to the cloud? Or, maybe all the telemetry services running in the background and slowing shit down?

If you’re using a distro with a worse UX than that, then that’s on you. There’s plenty of options that provide a more cohesive UX than Windows