What if he got ill, or has an upcoming holiday and has to make up his quota? I am not sure I want to take that chance.

I would easily say no to his face… but he has a guna nd is willing to use it.

PAIGE NO!

This analogy is so bad, it is not even close to what is happening.

I will try and adapt to cars for you(I dont know why), but this is just really really bad.

Say you have designed a car, you can produce them on a very small scale, but you have come to valve(they make cars now) to mass produce. They do so, for a 30% cut(that reduces the more they sell) for everything they sell from their direct sales at the price you have set. There is no material costs or labour costs, just that cut of the price you have set.

Now valve have a sales page and are selling, and you decide that actually I would like more people to see the car, and so you consider selling it at other dealers. Valve says, sure, you can even have the cars for free from us(no 30% cut) and you can have basically an unlimited supply of free fully built cars to sell else where. We only ask that you sell the car at the same price you have set with us if you are selling a car we made.

You want to go sell it new cheaper? You are more than welcome too, but you cant sell the car we produced.

Such a bad analogy, but that is closer to what is actually happening.

Just think about how this works.

Steam currently allows you to generate keys and sell them for free, only stipulating that they must be sold for the same price as on steam.

Let’s say they are told that stipulation can’t be enforced.

Valve, will probably go with 1 of 2 options.

1 - you can no longer generate keys. So all the great key sites(GMG, Fanatical and so on) no longer exist, because no steam keys.

2 - Valve charge an upfront fee for keys generated. Now smaller pmdevs and publishers can no longer supply keys to sites, because they can’t afford the upfront costs.

What incentive does valve have to continue offering this free service? If it can be exploited for the detriment of steam, they will stop providing it.

Phone tech is really boring. Almost everything looks the same, they are all x% faster than last year’s model which still does everything perfectly fine. In terms of hardware, the phone has kinda reached the optimal place.

I’m not the target audience for bleeding edge phones though. I take photos, listen to music(using Bluetooth and wired headphones), browse the web and message people. I don’t really play games or use it for work.

By far the most interesting thing to me is foldable phones. I really like the idea of a flip phone, but I don’t think it would be too happy sitting in my sweaty pocket while I cycle.

I don’t know if I would call it spicy, been a long time since I had just celery though. But I am really sensitive to the taste of it.

Even if you chop it up small and cook it into something, for me it ruins a meal and gives it this horrible aftertaste. Probably best described as puke, that kinda acidic taste

I really like Orion browser. Allows you to use Firefox extensions(and chrome), so you can use ublock origin and enjoy ad free browsing again.

SQL has always been Skull in my head. I think it is because I hated it when in college and associated it with dying inside.

Similar set up for me. But 21:9 is my desktop, so discord, web browser, anything that is lower quality. Then my 16:9 is my gaming and high quality content screen.

This is because my 21:9 monitor is a bit older now, and a 144hz VA panel, and I hate it for games. My new 16:9 is an OLED and 240hz and it is absolutely gorgeous. I also mostly play fighting games, so anything more than 16:9 is just black, well in the case of the VA panel grey and a bunch of light bleed.

Ohhh can I partake in this.

Fluoride contamination, consequences and removal techniques in water - https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2022/va/d1va00039j

See look at the scary headline, and the first sentence - “Fluoride contamination has created a drinking water crisis globally.”

Only downside to this paper… it kinda mentions how great it is for humans to consume low levels of flouride.

Yes, where it can be moved and stored or potentially used in other applications.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsengineeringau.3c00049

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/innovators-trying-bring-down-sky-high-cost-direct-air-capture-2023-10-24/

Wasnt a difficult search.

And yes, more money(realistically probably a lot more) is needed to refine and improve the technology. No it isnt going to end climate change, but it is a small part of what is needed.

Paige NO!

I feel the Linux - Linux fanboy is very wrong these days. It does not have a monitor at 22 degrees

So for fighting games, character passes are a good thing(overall).

If you bought SF4 at launch and continued to play the game throughout it’s life, you ended up buying the same game multiple times. This was essentially a few characters and a balance patch(had new mechanics as well). This the fragmented the player base a lot, so if you were playing the base game you couldn’t play with someone on the latest version.

Street Fighter 5 however, switched to character passes and even being able to unlock characters with in-game currency(difficult if you came to the game later but possible). This means everyone got the balance patches and major system updates, so the player base stayed as a single entity.

For a niche genre, this is significantly better than multiple purchases of the same game, and allows for a game to get more updates over a longer time.

However I do wish they kept in more unlockable content like costumes, colours and stages.

Specific to Street Fighter 6 though, they have a battlepass(which is not good, but isn’t terrible either) which the free version gave/gives out a bunch of character rental tokens, so you can play with DLC characters you haven’t purchased.

I think it is a bit more difficult than that. I have really enjoywd watching downhill bike racing in the past, and both the men’s and women’s races are incredible.

If you don’t know, It is a single rider time trial down incredibly technical courses on a mountain bike.

Unfortunately I don’t think it would be good to mix men and women, because the men are faster. This year’s world champs race had the men finishing 30s faster, the fastest woman would have been 66th. Results

I would love to see more mixed competitions in the elite level of sports where it makes sense.

The Cat Empire - Two Shoes

Still playing Street Fighter 6 pretty much everyday. Looking at who to try and get Master rank with next.

Learning Tekken 8, but complete scrub at 3D fighters so taking it slow and trying out a bunch of people.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink is my current non fighting game time sink as well. Absolutely loving the game, the quality of the combat and character variety is fantastic. Although definitely would have enjoyed more variety in the end game.

I am going to respectfully disagree, I think if you have a desire to learn and participate everyone can have fun online in fighting games. Don’t get baited by thinking that you need to learn all these combos and moves and be 100% perfect at doing it all the time. Cause you dont.

The difference between someone just starting and a pro is vast, and will seem daunting and like you need to know a bunch of stuff. But honestly competitve starts out similar to you and a bunch of pals just having fun together.

You are playing the other person, getting reliable damage from a combo is more important to begin with than doing optimal damage. For street fighter(it is what I have the most experience with), you need to know how to anti air to stop people from jumping(this is usually a crouching Heavy Punch, but can be different for some characters). Then throw in a simple combo, can be an easy target combo(or using the modern inputs in SF6) or something as simple as HP > Fireball/Tatsu. And then making sure you know basics like blocking and throws, drive impact and drive parry for street fighter 6.

That seems like a lot, but it is less than the mechanics of most single player games that get thrown out in tutorials, and the rest of the knowledge will come with time and practice. Say you come across someone who just cleanly wipes the floor with you, you can look at the replay and see if there is a gap, or learn the timings, or if it is unsafe if you just kept blocking. But that won’t be something you have to worry about for a while. You will spend a lot of time figuring out how to handle people randomly throwing out DP or Drive Impact or who just won’t stop jumping.