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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 7th, 2023

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  • In practicality, and this life-and-death is a matter of practicality rather than preference, betrayal beats zealous genocide support.

    Even as someone from outside, I can say the U.S.’ best bet is Biden again. His international politics are no different than most U.S. presidents that came to office in the last century, but at least U.S. citizens are getting a nice end of the mostly shit-ended sticks for a change. And that goes for all the current immigrant peoples in the U.S., too, although for many the reason for leaving their homes can be traced back to deep-rooted U.S. foreign policy.

    What do they have with Trump? Persecution during immigration while their home countries will be kept bombed to hell or stripped and exploited by the ongoing U.S. policy.


  • I’m not porposing or defending any approach here, where do you draw the line between the decision to address the underlying issues and catering to creating isolated environments to shelter the marginalized groups, tho?

    I get that taking a breather in a safe environment to help with self-esteem and love is critical so as not to sink below that threshold of constantly feeling overwhelmed that is different for everyone, and I’m in no way seeing a one-day thing as anything else, but as public coordination events, how do you draw the line between the two I mentioned above? First example of going beyond giving breathing room to making a segregation comes to mind as the “pink buses” in which only women are allowed to be feel safe from men that some right-wing politicians bring up from time to time as a similar topic on addressing the cause vs treating the symptom or even causing different problems under such intention.






  • They meddled with the Islamic countries beyond what befalls them, and they helped the worst of the extremists come out in the instability they helped create.

    Besides, being some of the worst offenders on climate pollution per capita by far and making someone else’s homes burn to global warming first was bound to create these refugees whether those ecuador countries were stable and tried to counter the local symptoms or not. I’m not saying advancing the comfort of human living is a sin or anything zealous like that. All I’m saying is that glossing over personal and corporate consumption while neglecting apt measures in favor of decoy policies and trying to reflect the blame somewhere else was bound to have the problem become bigger and more apparent.

    They reap what they have sown over the last few decades. Trying to put up a gunship and gunboat barrier over Greece while bribing the corrupt Turkish president to keep over millions of Syrian refugees, let aside others flooding illegally in groups of hundreds from Afganistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, etc. will work so far to keep the facade on.

    Rising fascism in Europe is not a defense against the religious extremists. It is due to desire for continuity of personal comfort and freedom in the face of reckoning day, by ensuring those who they fucked over can’t come near and try to share in their abundance of resources.


  • I have more than a soft spot for Valve. Their price recommendations over the years Turkish Lira reached the moon was stellar for the consumers here, and it wasn’t just us. There are whole regions of countries that Steam has provided affordable game prices, which would otherwise simply have to resort to piracy completely.

    On another side, Steam’s many features like lenient refund policies, extensive yet on-point and open profile/library/workshop/community infrastructure add more than 50% of the content and quality on some games, and a complete easy of use for consumers.

    Whatever one can say about their specific policies on some topics, I’m going to argue no other for-profit company has ever put this much feature on display without immediate gain from all of them. This is almost on par with many FOSS projects with such development behind them.

    However, on this price-matching practice, I believe it is totally not a pro-consumer one. It is not exclusivity, which could completely bankrupt and erase all other competitors long ago if Steam went that way, but it is still somewhat meddling with blocking cheaper options for consumers.

    All that said, and with another commenter mentioning that 30% price cut is standard in the industry and a developer selling a game expensive on Steam and having the possibility to sell it cheaper on another wouldn’t make sense with the same cuts in place, I don’t think this policy completely lacks any merit. Having unreachable presence on Steam and using it as an advertisement platform thanks to its reach while selling the game cheaper elsewhere with the same cuts, or even no-cuts in their own stores, would open a hideous scam many of the well-known companies in the industry would jump on without blinking an eye.


  • When the competition is trying to bring in scummy, sugar-mommy approach to gaming by luring unsuspecting players with sweets, a company that has consistently proved to be rationally pro-consumer is bound to earn the right to be defended, as long as they keep their pro-consumer approach intact. Which Valve still does, while others are quite shit.

    Except GOG, but I’m gonna presume GOG had higher currency conversation rates or advised rates, which made the games there 3-4 times more expensive than Steam in many 3rd world countries. Still cheaper than most other storefronts, but it was more expensive than Steam till the latest currency change.