Ok, howabout non millionaires?

Residual salesman brain.

Trump: I am awesome, I bought this thing, it is awesome, you will be awesome if you buy it too.

It bears no relationship to … making any kind of sense, because it is literally a hustle, a psychological manipulation tactic.

He is just saying salesman words, meant to encourage buy in.

Has no relation to reality, the truth, making sense, etc.

… But, it works on rubes, dullard marks, cult members, weak willed / low self esteem people with decent reliability.

These are just more Trump University or Trump Steaks to him.

Tom Clancy’s ‘Debt of Honor’ features nearly the entirety of the US government being wiped out:

Supreme Court, House Representatives, Senators, President and most of his cabinet… are all present at a State of the Union Address.

And then a 747 is flown by terrorists into the Capitol building.

In the book, the main character Jack Ryan, the Vice President, is basically running late, and is the only senior officer of government to survive.

Book came out in 94, before 9/11.

I suggest you check out Decky FrameGen.

The technicals are … very complex, but the upshot is: It basically injects FrameScaling/FrameGen modes into games that don’t officially support them on AMD hardware.

So… I’ve done this with CP2077, and if I understand this right, basically it injects FSR3, but under the DLSS settings under the game’s options menu… and it works better than the game’s current officially supported FSR 2 for the Deck.

Elden Ring may also be able to benefit from it.

Yep, I already said the Switch 2 makes sense if all you care about is playing Switch 2 games.

I am not trying to aruge that the Deck is just hands down, inherently superior in all cases, for everyone.

I hope there’s a way for you to put parental controls on your 12 yo’s Fortnite account’s ability to buy microtransactions, and that you have enough time to teach them how to identify and disregard all the dark patterns in the game that encourage irresponsible spending habits, as well as resist all the social peer pressure that comes with an MTX heavy game.

The offical dock is $80, but you can get the Baseus Dock for between $30 and $40.

Point by point:

1: I mean, I guess? I do not even have a mouse myself right now… but if I needed just a cheapo one for basic use… you can get something functional for $20 or under, a basic mouse you’d get for a work laptop type thing.

2: People have all kinds of ‘unusual’ Deck set ups.

The mouse dongle you just mentioned wouldn’t… really make that much sense, as … you can just hold it… and use the touch pads… or the touch sensitive screen itself…

But its actually not uncommon for people to dock their deck, sync it to a controller or M+K, and then stream it to a smart tv, or a dumb one via a dongle or direct connection to the dock. No, you’re not gonna get true 4k on any non retro game, but a good number of people do something like this.

3: … As compared to…? Your minimum 3x more expensive PC you can upgrade with even more money? Another console/handheld you… can’t upgrade?

Unless the Switch 2 can play Cyberpunk 2077 at better than 45 fps, with graphics basically medium/high, I don’t see how the Deck is ‘showing its age’ compared to other similarly priced handhelds.

Decky FrameGen is pretty neat. I think I managed to tweak mine up to an avg of almost 55 on the benchmark, and thats without mucking around in CET to squeeze out even more.

4: I absolutely understand buying a Switch 2 is your best option if you want a very straightforward, doubleplus legal, and expensive way to play Switch 2 games.

Like, if you’re super dedicated to current era Nintendo games, sure, fine, yep, get a Switch 2.

But if you just like games in general…

5: Pretty much yeah, I agree. Its possible to get it working with a Deck, but its gonna be a lot more hassle, and you’ll need peripherals, yep.

wait wait wait.

Fucking… what?

… Are they trying to preempt the expected ‘GTA 6 MSRPs for $120, base edition and breaks all video game pricing’ thing?

I’m seeing $80 for Mario Kart World.

puts on eyepatch and peg leg

Ok so…

SHEIN and TEMU are done, as in, just over, for Americans, and possibly just in general.

Their business models basically no longer work.

Almost 50% on Vietnam and Cambodia?

Ok, thats at least an instant 50% price hike on… most clothes Americans buy?

Fucking…computer hardware?

Jesus Christ, throw another 30% on already bonkers GPU prices.

Cars? Beyond fucked.

Components very often get shipped to one country, partially assembled, cross the border, get assembled more, do that again a few times before final assembly… oh right, and they all are massively computerized now.

Yeeep. Great Depression 2.0 here we come, certainly for America, and probably to a lesser extent for the rest of the world as the US can no longer consume imports… and we will almost certainly have a massive financial collapse, which will almost certainly to at least some extent fuck over finances everywhere else.

Every less developed country that just has its currency pegged to the USD is now fucked and will be in chaos as they figure out how to respond to this.

So… its $50 more than an LCD, 256 GB Steam Deck (the Switch 2 is also LCD).

A Deck has two touchpads that work as mice.

And you can buy a real mouse with those $50 bucks you saved.

Oh right and it has a bigger screen, can run almost every modern to ancient PC game, and basically every retro game if you can handle an EmuDeck or RetroDeck guided installer, oh and it also just is a computer that does everything a mid tier linux laptop can do.

It can even run Switch games, and probably will be able to run Switch 2 games in… what, 2 years? 3 years?

I’m really not trying to rain on the parade here, but uh… yeah I do not understand the cost benefit analysis on a Switch 2 vs a Deck unless:

You really, really want to play Switch 2 games soon

OR

The Switch 2 somehow has vastly superior performance to a Steam Deck

… I kinda doubt that last one being the case, but the specs aren’t out yet (afaik) so I guess it is possible.

EDIT: Ok, so uh… tariffs just happened.

Switch 2 may now be $600.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/104409/nintendo-switch-2-price-may-jump-from-449-to-600-following-trumps-tariffs/index.html

Preorders have been delayed.

Steam Decks are manufactured in Taiwan… so they’ll likely jump in price too… but that could possibly be delayed for at least a bit…

I think Valve has warehouses in the US full of them, and they are also a private company with absurdly deep pockets, and thus don’t have the ‘maximize shareholder profit in current/next quarter’ mandate… so they may be able to keep their costs to consumers from raising, by just internally subsidizing them…

But I really have no idea.

I’m in a similar boat as you.

Got my routine 6-7 year CDR packet in the mail… took me 2 weeks of off and on trying to access the site last month to input and submit all the information digitally … as sending it through snail mail would probably be too slow (10 ish days), I don’t have a car and am mobility challeneged.

Now I’m trying to call my local office to make sure they actually got everything but uh wow big surprise, that ain’t going well either.

… At least I did get my payment direct deposited.

I say we deport him to Mars.

He has literally said he plans on dying on Mars.

Let’s oblige him.

EDIT:

I somehow forget to link to this banger.

EDIT 2: Alt, Live Take at KEXP

Tch tch tch, those damn self combusting, self immolating Teslas.

Someone should probably just ban them all, astoundingly unsafe, especially the cybertrucks.

Sorry to hear you’re in a similar situation with family, but at the same time, happy to hear your story, to commiserate, to have an impromptu therapy session haha.

Do… do you think…

That a person working… at Walmart…

… has the financial resources…

… to sue Walmart?

I had a hunch, looks like I was basically right.

I… come from a family that’s… well let me just put it this way:

The last time I talked to my dad, I think 3 years ago now at this point, he was fully, fully down the QAnon rabbit hole, told me about how Tom Hanks’ son rapes and kills children, after extracting their adrenochrome… and he then proceeded to show me how he partially mills, taps, and assembles AR 15s and 18s in his garage, having sourced parts that don’t have serial numbers… thats what you call a ghost gun.

He is exactly the kind of person that does these 180 flip flops and … either doesn’t remember he did, or has an elaborate nonsensical excuse/explanation.

I am unfortunately way, way too familiar with basically nearly every right wing conspiracy theory that’s existed in the last 40 years.

… I actually have Jewish cousins, and … yeah, basically since as long as I can remember, he’s made bigoted ‘jokes’ either behind their backs or occasionally even actually at family functions.

My dad is my archetype for MAGA people: an abusive alcoholic narcissist asshole with no friends, who is never wrong, proficient in gaslighting, life didn’t go the way he wanted it to, and it’s all the fault of whoever right wing AM radio/ Fox News/ insane facebook posts and shit tier ‘journalist’ grifters told him to be mad at in the last week.

… thats all probably a bit more info than necessary, but I’m still pretty traumatized from a life time of that, and venting helps lol.

I don’t think that’s what is meant by that comment.

Back about a decade ago now, the USS Liberty ‘incident’ was a bugaboo of Alex Jones and many other right wing conspiracy theorist types…

…who were correct in that yes, that is a thing that happened, it was basically covered up for decades, and almost no one knew about back in the 00’s and 10’s, and that the Israeli government and AIPAC have a huge amount of influence over US politicians and political discourse generally…

… but were very incorrect in then just slap dashing it into their growing conspiracy centric view of the entire world, which very, very often actually was just anti-semitic generally, utterly oversimplifying and overnarrativizing their understanding of ‘how things actually work’ into insane nonsense.

Fast forward 10 years, and basically all the people that were really concerned about the USS Liberty attack, you know, anti-Israeli government/military… well now they are basically all ardent Trump supporters, they all love violent Israeli genocidal expansionist Zionism, but also somehow simultaneously think Trump is … anti-war or something?

I am of course guessing and cannot read Birch’s mind… but yeah, if you come from a right wing upbringing and then later realized how bs that worldview is, like myself, and possibly like Birch…

It is indeed quite notable how much of a total 180 shift that is, amongst the right wing conspiracy theory types, and I think that is what they are referring to.

I don’t think they are saying that those (mostly liberals, progressives and leftists) who’ve been vocally opposed to the Israeli genocide of Gaza (and everything else its now grown into) in the past few years suddenly changed their opinions about that in the last few months.

Not a VPN, but you may also want to look into I2P.

https://i2pd.website/

https://proprivacy.com/privacy-service/guides/i2p-guide

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FNp0TRDG0BQ

Basically, a p2p protocol for the entire internet.

Its considerably more complicated to set up than most modern VPNs, where nowaday’s its usually as simple as install an app with a GUI, verify some settings and you’re good to go, and i2p is also quite slow…

… but its totally free, and you can torrent over it, and as far as I know, if you’ve set it up properly, it is basically undetectable by ISPs, due to how it uses ‘garlic’ routing: basically, a whole bunch of users net requests are encrypted, anonymized, and then smashed into a big packet… so an ISP would have to untangle all of that for every packet, and afaik, none of them have figured out how.

I2P would obviously be horrible for watching streaming content though, snail speed.

Link to the song, for those who don’t know the reference.

Its actually perfect. No notes. No possible improvements.

This deserves some kind of award.