Fire Emblem I think should be way more popular. I’ve tried to introduce people to Xenoblade games and most people I’ve had try it do not like the combat. I can manage it to enjoy the story. But others, the gameplays not enticing to most of my friends

I wonder what sort of metrics they’ve gotten on how people have received the art style/this first world they showed off a few years ago and now again today. For me it’s definitely the least appealing KH artstyle. The handheld and mobile games 20 years ago looked more appealing to me both as I imagine myself as a child and me now as a well seasoned adult

Always remember how much the party, MSNBC, CNN, Washington Post, etc all hated Bernie Sanders. Freaked out about him more than Donald Trump back in 2015/2016. Then the cold shoulder to to AOC, a Bernie Sanders campaign organizer, and the squad, most of them endorsed Bernie in 2020. Then the lack of support for Mamdami even after he won the primary from the federal level democratic elected public servants in the northeast/NY. Vote blue no matter who Schumer, Booker, Torres, etc were pretty absent in the NYC mayor race after Mamdami won the primary

Besides that, remember that the US involvement in the Vietnam war was escalated and then into a full scale invasion with Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was a moderate that threw a bone to the left with the great society initiative but at his core he was not a part of the progressive wing of the party. His evil in Vietnam far overshadowing Great Society would be the end of New Deal Democrats and contribute heavily to the decline of the US because of the cost the the Vietnam war would do the US let alone the millions of innocent killed in southeast asia.

The progressive wing of the democratic party was only really powerful with FDR and it mostly died with FDR and Huey Long and the new deal probably wouldn’t have been as progressive as it was without pressure from the left of FDR from Huey Long. After that it was nonsense ever since Harry Truman was pushed as FDRs running mate in the 1944 democratic national convention. Truman was the choice for the business interest side of the democratic party rather than FDR’s previous VP. They didn’t want FDR’s previous VP to president if FDR died in office. So we got shitty Truman and in general every president since has been a bad person at least behind the scenes when it comes to foreign policy. A lot of slaughtering of non-Europeans whites.

Lack of success post Lyndon Johnson had the party trying to find success and they stumbled into with Bill Clinton who crashed the primary and beat Al Gore for the nominee in 1992. The important background for both Bill Clinton and Hilary Clinton is that in the 60s, they were Barry Goldwater supporters. Hilary herself was a high school young republican and worked the republican presidential campaign for a Rockefeller. Barry Goldwater is a foundation for both the modern republican and democratic party. For republicans, he was the foundation Ronald Reagan’s economic policy path. And the democratic party, their economic path and also their approach to social politics.

Goldwater was like, appeal to racists but don’t be too racist to appeal to the rest of the country and win national elections. Nixon did it better and then Reagan perfected it. So then the democrats with the Clintons come in as economic conservatives but socially liberal and pulled some of the thunder from republicans. They were Goldwater economist for people that weren’t hyper racist, hyper religious, hyper anti-LGBTQ. And Obama is a part of that lineage. Effectively they’re all pro-color and sexuality diversity but they’re conservatives when it comes to economics and foreign policy.

And it shows with how measured they were in when they adopted pro-X views. Like listen to Bernie Sanders on gay people in the 90s or 80s, he may even have writing from the 70s, and compare them to the Clintons and Obama up to like 2012. Bernie was the worst contrast for the old guard of the democratic party in 2016 and 2020. Bernie has been consistent since the 60s whereas the Clintons would identify as republicans as high schoolers or up to their early 20s.

That era of 80s/90s era democrats that came to power are now just losing their grip on power. And I bring up Bernie because so many of those old 80s/90s era democrats that dominated the party to this day are about Bernie’s age and their political allies/protoges/descendants like Obama, Wasserman Schultz, Booker, Jefferies, etc aren’t lining up to be big public supporters of the new progressive wing of the party that started with AOC and the squad back in 2018. Because the party is in the middle of an inner identity struggle and they’re on the Goldwater/Clinton economics and foreign policy/intervention wing of the party. They’re the pro-mass surveillance wing of the party too. Those old ones, compare what they were doing in the 60s and 70s compared to Bernie. In the civil rights era where they all love to draw credibility from, they were hyperfocused on their careers/moving up their state political machines. Bernie was an activist and it would show once he finally got into politics and became a mayor. edit - I looked it up, Bernie supported the towns first pride parade in 1983 while the rest of the party heavyweights wouldn’t really become pro-gay marriage until just about after the 2012 election - lol for the social progressive high-grounding the 2016 Clinton campaign was portraying

Mamdami is on the progerssive wing and in California Beccera will be in that old Clinton/Obama/Biden wing. And Biden’s 4 years were actually the best of the three but that’s after so much complacency and foreign invasion/politiking to neglect the domestic people. Biden was decades of assholery but not nearly as assholery as say like Newt Gingrich to 4 years of being OK. Like how they were all late to the pro-gay marriage party, they’re all already late to supporting the new progressive wing of the party (should have started in 2016 or at least 2018). Pushing Biden in 2020 was their pushback against economic progressivism. 2024 was unrelenting pushback against supporting Palenstine and ending Isreali apartheid to see themselves fail again like 2016

American’s live in Barry Goldwater’s America

On the higher end of action cameras, it’s GoPro, DJI, and Insta360 that are very good. They are better than the budget brands. Problem being the budget brands are still pretty good. It follows phones. Before small camera sensors sucked. By like 2015 it reached a point of good enough for the vast majority of people. Good enough 1080p for YouTube. Then 4k came along and the same thing happened where camera sensors at the budget level became good enough for the vast majority of people. So it doesn’t matter if you find people in video communities all trying to get people to buy the $300+ GoPro or DJI action cam or else they’ll regret it, plenty of people will try the ~$100 ones and find them very good for their use case

DJI at least has an evolving drone business. GoPro exists as an experience enhanced brand where the experience enhanced is being undercut by other competitors and on the premium end, DJI sells more stuff and people have a habit of buying stuff from brands they already have. So if you have any thoughts of shooting video with a drone, for an action cam you’ll probably buy DJI. Just want to strap a camera to your helmet or whatever, any of the plethora of ~$100 action cameras will do. GoPro’s lane has shrunken. It has premium competitors while not being competitive for the entry level

I know how your buddy felt. When I got a 970, I was worried that you’d need at least a 980ti to play Star Citizen well at 1080p. Luckily I’ve never spent a dime on the game so don’t have any strong feelings about how development has been going. Just see a news headline every couple months

Back when it was only Roku boxes, I don’t recall any ads at all on the home screen. Then when I got a TV with Roku built in, I recall it also being zero ads. That was like 10 years for the Roku TV where it still had no ads on the homescreen of the RokuOS. Then they added that big right banner ad. It was that for a number of years and then they added a row at the top advertising some streaming apps. Then they started this beta program for the new layout and they jacked up the size of the content advertisement space and pushing your stuff further down where your cursor focus defaults at when starting the TV/Roku. The expanding presense of advertisement icons have been pretty rapid.

Roku used to be have no advertisements. Then they started trying to be a digital storefront for movies/tv and that was just a button on the side list menu. Then they started adding advertisements more and more

Altman can try to hype up how everyones going to subscribe to them someday all the while their subscriber base is being eaten up by competitors.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-projects-chatgpt-plus-subscriptions-to-drop-by-80-from-44-million-in-2025-to-9-million-in-2026-made-up-using-cheaper-subscriptions-somehow/

Local stuff. I still believe the small parameter, ~1B free local, ones will suffice for the vast majority of how people use LLMs and there’s still going to be a few years of improvements there until investments dry up. Eventually I bet more and more phone companies will include one of these small ones out the box. Pretty much like a nice search engine that works offline like if you’re out on a major hike. Cloud stuff, there’ll be stuff like Proton’s Lumo where they’re taking free open weight stuff and piecing them together for users.

OpenAI’s thing is they’ll make up for falling subscribers with advertising. So pretty much we’re advancing fast in the search engine race of the 90s/early aughts. We’ll at least have Gemini. ChatGPT maybe ends up crashes in value someday and bought up by Microsoft or some other company. Deepseek, Qwen, Kimi. Claude like ChatGPT maybe survices or crashes and gets adsorbed by another company. Proton continue to exist as the company making AI products out of free stuff. Eventually the pace of improvements moves at a crawl and it’s pointless to be paying for the best paywalled stuff. Just use the free stuff like how everyone mostly uses free search engines

It’ll be packaged up in plasma 6.7, I think mid June. Then it’ll be easy for distros to make it available. I want to try it but I don’t want to change distro or build it myself. When 6.7 rolls out, I got my computer plugged into my TV with CachyOS handheld edition. Right when Plasma 6.7 is available in the Arch repos, I’m installing it

My understanding is that they pushed it to some people as a beta and eventually they would roll out the update to everyone even if they opted out of the beta. I opted out to go back to the not as bad homescreen and blocked it from the Internet in my router settings

Centimeter by centimeter getting people towards signal and matrix chats

I’ve defaulted to ddg for like 2 years now. Solid. Good enough. Really what happened is that SEO optomization websites even before the AI craze made Google search so awful that ddg became just as good if not better for me than google

If they get out some solid linux drivers, I’d buy one. Same thing for me when it comes to anything risc-v. I’m buying out of interest in a new alternative

Have you ever enjoyed any game that’s mostly played one on one like rock paper scissors, tennis, poker, chess, go, cup stacking, most sports you see in the olympics. In one on one PvP games, you usually make friends too

Assuming you meant drm free books

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/drm-free

Not every book on kobo is drm free from what I remember so keep an eye on that

It’s like how the US can block mergers between companies that aren’t based in the US. Companies want to operate in these markets. If a major regulator says no, they have two options. Remove themselves from the market the regulator that denies them regulates or spin off into multiple companies if that’s actually possible operationally for the multiple companies to exist. Somalia regulators can block an acquisition in their country but that wouldn’t change much for the company as Somalia has a small market and little international influencer. If China or the US or the EU say no, a company that wants to operate internationally will lose a huge market and will now have a way more difficult time doing business from other companies that operate multinationally

Your media sources aren’t really indictive of monoculture. More the opposite and that’s the problem for marketers. It’s hard as shit to reach people because everyone can form their own niche media community. If people still treated IGN and like award shows as their mainstream trustworthy source, we’d still be in the pre-youtube monoculture

2020 plain clothes federal agents kidnapping people to makeshift prisons and the none of that really being addressed should have been an ey opening for people to view their greatest threat being the government they live under. Same with the Snowden leaks and rather than that becoming illegal, much of of progressively becoming legal going forward. Maybe some even made retroactively legal

It was mostly sourced from her 2020 campaign that were fodder for commercials. Then there were stuff like her going off on Tulsi Gabbard about not being a democratic party team player that made her look too centrist and establishment for people further left. Another common fodder for commercials are stuff like how the democratic party only cares about black guys with stuff like that 10 point plan for black men becoming wealthy. That stuff would be open to everyone because it’s just marketing really, but the lack of marketing to non-black people is fodder for marketing the democratic party as not caring for any other minority group along with white people. I don’t remember that commercial people hated that was shaming men to vote Harris in some way. That was good fodder for conservatives to paint the democratic party as anti-men

I keep thinking maybe things will good by 2030 and remember that’s 4 years away. Game devs please target the Steam Deck and Switch 2 as the baseline. Mid range and high end is just too premium for most people. Even entry level enthusiast gaming hardware is too expensive because of memory and storage. Steam Deck and Switch 2 are good low power draw integrated graphics level. That’s not terrible for pricing

Yup. For all the making fun of chinesium (socially acceptable racism often when people talk about chinese products. Very clear when one scoffs at a taiwanese product as being trash because chinese but then walks it back when they learn it’s of taiwanese origin), in my life I’ve seen chinese phones, audio products, and cars go from scoffed at to being well regarded in enthusiast communities.

I saw it in other hobbies of mine. Not long ago people only talked about Japanese and German chef knives - Chinese knives must be trash. Then eventually people started to try out Chinese knives that weren’t just grocery store bargain stuff. Now progressively people are trying knives from Vietnam. Turns out people have been making knives in these countries for thousands of years. Not as bad but maybe worse is when a person I knew told me they were at first surprised to learn movies were made around the world rather than just being in hollywood, english language. Went from American and European made video game peripherals dominating to more and more chinese competitors like 8bitdo, aula, whatever.

In my lifetime, earlier if it said made in South Korea of made in Taiwan, the assumption was poor quality. Hyundai was scoffed at until like the mid 2010s in my experience. I’m told Japanese products were scoffed at as poor quality until like the end of the 70s and then you had major strikes and violence against Asian American people in the rust belt as anti-Japanese sentiment primarily in regards to competition for autoworkers and steel. Now Japanese made is fully regarded as high quality and the desire to compete in quality+value+parts+serviceability doesn’t seem to be of much interest to US or European automakers (that parts availability and serviceability is major)

I imagine it the same as decades back with Korean and Taiwanese made goods, you get you pay for. If you start on the premise that a $200 Chinese product should be as good or better than like a $500 American product, that’s a nonsense expectation to have. People will go from a $1200 iPhone and use a $200 Ulephone and determine that $800 phone from a company with a Chinese sounding name, name of their CEO, are trash unless it turns out that that Chinese sounding name company is headquartered in Taiwan or Singapore