Mind you, doing things you could do in real life might actually be a major part of the appeal.

Sure, in real life I could grow quality potatoes or power wash a house or drive a truck to a city that’s 400 kilometers away. And I’d get a little bit of dopamine from a job well done – after hours, days, or even months of work. Plus what’s needed to acquire the tools/land/licence necessary to do it in the first place.

Or I play Euro Wash Farm Valley Simulator 2026 and finish the job within half an hour of gameplay that’s just challenging enough for me to feel that I actually did something. While possibly interacting with a cast of charming and/or interesting people along the way.

There’s a reason why job simulators are such a popular genre. They take the interesting bits from a job, drop the tedious parts, and greatly accelerate the whole affair. They’re like working in real life but better.

Except Desert Bus, of course. That one very deliberately isn’t.

Neither do the lower ones. The wheels of an office chair typically don’t move when the seat spins around.

Probably that they’ll do fuck all when China invades Taiwan.

It’s a German laundry detergent brand.

Besides, even though people love to riff on it, Kinect Star Wars was actually great if you ignored everything but the Galactic Dance-Off mode. A very competent rhythm game where half of the songs are Star Wars filk? Sign me up!

How about a trade? I mean, Trump really wants Greenland. That’s about 2.2 million square kilometers.

Texas is about 0.7 million square kilometers. California is 0.4. New Mexico 0.3. Arizona is 0.3. That makes 1.7 million square kilometers.

So how about they swap? The USA get Greenland, Denmark gets all of the states adjoining Mexico. That swap is super favorable to the Americans (2.2 > 1.7, after all) and the USA even get a nice buffer state between themselves and those Mexican drug cartels they’re so afraid of. There’s literally no downside. Trump would be the greatest landswapper in all of history, if not more. I’m sure Denmark would even give him a Nobel Prize in Economy or two.

I’m pretty sure that whether it can is irrelevant. Unter Trump it won’t because China playing strongman appeals to him more than petty things like allies and an independent semiconductor market. Also, he can very clearly be bought and Xi can just send him a couple yachts with tacky decor or something.

He has pretty much torched all of the USA’s soft power and standing as a trade partner.

GWB had already done some damage to both, which Obama tried to repair (more so on the trade front). Then Trump I happened and made it very clear that the USA were no longer a reliable partner and probably not even politically stable in the medium term. Biden tried to salvage something but then Trump II happened and conclusively buried what little goodwill the States had left.

I don’t think the pax americana is going to survive the decade and neither is the petrodollar. It remains to be seen whether the States will become a local hegemonial power, a failed empire with lasting ambitions á la Russia, or will even fade from relevancy entirely. I don’t expect them to remain a superpower.

Also note that the EU has just signed a free-trade agreement with Mercosur, meaning that the EU and pretty much all of South America are pivoting trade away from the USA towards each other. Conveniently, that should also make both of them less reliant on China.

If you want to download once and then never have to deal with updates unless you want to, there’s always GOG.

(Also, yes, Steam is a lot more comfortable with a faster connection. I generally spend more time waiting for Vulkan shaders to be precompiled than for downloads to finish.)

We just signed an FTA with Mercosur. That’s a major trade bloc. I think we’re doing good on that front and it demonstrates that we have the capacity to just pivot trade home away from the States.

Still, I do agree that counter-tariffs don’t feel too great as a response, even with the new FTaa in place. It might really be time to bring out the anti-coercion instrument.

Mind you, that’s for the same reason all American phone numbers in shows have a 555 prefix – showing a real address could lead to liability if e.g. someone tries to launch an attack on that address they saw on TV.

Unlike phone numbering schemes, the IPv4 address space has no well-known area reserved for fictitious addresses. Sure, you could use something like 192.0.2.0/24, 198.51.100.0/24, or 203.0.113.0/24 (test networks for use in documentation), but those aren’t well-known outside of certain circles.

So they just go with completely invalid addresses because that’s easy.

The main difference is that the additional software you need to install doesn’t always come from the manufacturer on Linux. Other than that it’s actually pretty similar.

Heck, there are even devices that work better under Linux, such as the Logitech F710 gamepad. That one has been subtly incompatible with the USB stack of every Windows after 7 while it works with Linux just fine.

Usually between 1 and 2 GB/month, up to 10 in months where I travel, which happens about two or three times a year.

I have a plan which increases my data cap each year, giving me 30 GB currently. It’s 20 €/month, which is about average for a 5G plan of that size. I like not having to worry about my data usage.

The Descendants series. The setting is basically as I described, except of course that the ghetto is heavily romanticized and the squalor mostly amounts to people having a vaguely punk aesthetic (as opposed to the preppy good guy kingdom). They’re Disney movies for kids, after all, but they do acknowledge that their own setting is fucked up.

The premise of the story is that someone realizes that the villains had kids in there and that punishing the kids for their parents’ misdeeds might possibly be kind of cruel so a few of them are selected to attend school in the good guy kingdom as an experiment. This results in a lot of choreographed song and dance routines, a romance plot, and some semi-self aware criticism of the “villains get punished harshly, heroes live happily ever after” trope.

The first one was pretty decent, the sequels were okay even if they effectively sidelined three of the four protagonists. They also made an animated series, which was a complete dumpster fire.

Everyone will get a QR code tattooed on the forehead. Among other things these codes will be needed to use a credit card. Evangelicals will hail this move as a clear sign of Trump’s godliness.

The link is “Disney movie that recycles old characters in ways that have very little to do with their original story or characterization”.

They explore an alternate story. Sometimes they do that and explore fun scenarios like “what if Cruella DeVil was a somewhat decent person” or “what if all the heroes lived together and operated a magical ghetto and also brought their enemies back from the dead specifically so they could force them to live in squalor in the ghetto forever”. Fun little alternate stories.

The one in the middle is a floater. The ones on the top right and bottom left are psychedelic fractals that are very much not floating around in people’s eyeballs.

Some of the criticisms definitely make sense. Parts of the premise are barely utilized. Some characters barely change at all. The finale makes a complete joke of one of the major threats in the setting. Janeway somehow manages to challenge Sisko for being the most liberal about Starfleet principles while simultaneously being a hardass when others do it. Neelix has screen time. (No offense to Ethan Phillips who did a wonderful job portraying him; the character just happens to be intensely annoying.)

I’m not going to list “the first episodes/seasons suck in comparison” as a downside; that’s a fairly common Trek ailment. People need time to nail those shows down.

On the plus side, it does make for a good space cozy and it takes the Trek ethos way more seriously than some newer shows. Some of the ideas it comes up with are genuinely cool. It has some of the better holodeck episodes. The Doctor is a better vehicle for exploring the rights of artificial sentiences than Data (The Measure of a Man notwithstanding). Seven of Nine was added as a mobile pair of tits and somehow ended up massively upgrading the show in terms of character development.

I’d say that out of the TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT quartet it’s definitely the second weakest but it’s not a bad show overall.