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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I find my sense of humor has become broader with age. Its also tinged with (surprisingly) less cynicism but more darkness.

    I think laughter is one of the weirdest mechanisms for coping. I laugh when kids get killed in movies, my partner laughs when something causes physical pain.

    When it comes to comedy itself, I have less tolerance for the Joe Rogan crew of comedians (Segura, Kreischer, that lot) as well as Chapelle it just feels like exhausting space filler. There’s no humor left in it, its just out of touch, rich dudes rambling between punchlines.

    That said, I find Bill Hicks as brilliant now as I did as an angsty teen. True comedy (shout out to Carlin, Pryor, and Bruce too) transcends age. Its found in human suffering, which we only accumulate more of with age. Not in tired jokes about gender equality, rich problems, and a discontempt for your audience.














  • I built my entire cloud storage strategy around Google drive because it had very simple integration with my previous seed box provider. Like, I could run Plex from the cloud through them directly off of my Google drive and then mirror that to local storage.

    Super slick and easily usable setup. In a push to completely de-google my life the past 2 years I had to figure out an effective migration strategy off of that stack.

    It was a total pain in the ass. Not to mention moving the rest of the people on my family plan off of Google as well. The majority of them are fairly tech savvy and even with that in mind we struggled.

    I am now 100% self-hosted and learned a shit ton about docker along the way but, I couldn’t imagine trying to do the same thing with a group of entry level users.




  • I also wanted to add on a recent experience I had that highlights this even more so.

    I was going through old archive drives and found a digital copy of “The Club” that I had purchased from Direct2Drive. I don’t know if anybody remembers them or not but, they were one of the early digital storefronts that focused on PC digital downloads.

    Anyways, I had the installer and my provided key in the directory so I installed the game and attempted to launch it only to be met with an activation screen. When I attempted to activate those servers had long since been decommissioned so I was dead in the water. Feeling that sting that one gets when they can no longer play something they legally purchased I started searching around for information on workarounds before I grabbed a crack. I found a thread from the company that had purchased the rights to all direct2drive purchases that had a workaround for doing the authentication through an alternate method.

    I tried all the steps listed including performing a recovery process for an account that I had long since lost the login information for only to be met with a failed authentication once again. By this point I had invested close to an hour maybe an hour and a half of my time trying to get some shitty old game to work and decided it wasn’t worth it.

    I hopped over to Steam and saw that I was able to purchase the game directly from them for $5 and download it immediately without any need for additional authentication steps or trying to track down who had purchased the rights to give me access rights to the thing that I had purchased 15 years ago.

    Sure, my one experience may be anecdotal but I think it highlights some of the greater issues people might not take into consideration when talking about what valve’s cut is and what that represents to us as the users of the services they provide.


  • If you look at the overall cost of running a platform though, especially one that does several things, you can see where that 30% becomes viable.

    A few things to highlight are, long-term storage and availability of purchases. There is not a single game I have bought on Steam in close to 20 years that I can’t still download and play to this day. Many of those are games that are no longer available for sale on the storefront yet valve as a content provider keeps them available to me and likely will in perpetuity.

    There’s an argument to be made that storage is cheap but they are also storing other people’s things that are no longer generating revenue for them. Also, they are providing the bandwidth for us as users to download those games whenever and as many times as we like without concern for how many copies of title sold or who the initial publisher or developer was.

    When you look at something like a console provider such as Nintendo or Microsoft who will completely shut down legacy stores, it makes the value of valve taking a unilateral 30% all the more attractive. Anything I buy on Steam I will be able to download and play in perpetuity. That 30% goes to making sure this isn’t just for big-name or the current hot shit. This is for everything ever put on their platform.

    Sure, in a vacuum 30% seems like a lot but when you consider the overall maintenance costs and the fact that they have seemed to be pretty pro-consumer all along, The intrinsic value in what they’re offering becomes a lot easier to see.