Our News Team @ 11 with host Snot Flickerman


Yes, I can hear you, Clem Fandango!

  • 17 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2023

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  • He’s focusing so hard on his themes being timeless that he’s no longer challenging the audience. Which is why they’re only winning visual art Oscars.

    I mean he’s been using visual shortcuts to human emotional states instead of, you know, character development since fucking Titanic, if not before.

    The obvious example to contrast the Avatar films with is District 9, which came of the same year as the first Avatar film. The “prawns” of District 9 are absolutely ugly to behold, but they are “humanized” through character development instead of shortcuts like giving them giant, dewy, innocent looking eyes and making them look like innocent animals like cats or dogs. Cameron make the Na’vi aesthetically pleasing to humans because it’s easier to make them the “good guys” this way than it is if they looked like District 9’s “prawns.”

    I mean, no shade, Cameron is good at using the techniques he has chosen as a way to short circuit his audience into feeling the things he wants them to feel… but that doesn’t make them not cheap, easy, and overall weak compared to serious character development since it’s a complete reliance on visual shortcuts to emotional depth without the actual emotional depth.









  • so I think we could say that this trend of being a disgusting bigot is one which is being ‘allowed’ more recently than it once was in social media.

    I always try to bring this up because honestly, if we go pretty far back in internet terms, we can see that this has actually been brewing for over a decade.

    In 2013, EA won the Consumerist poll for “Worst Company in America.” While mostly people pointed to arguably rational reasons for these votes (DRM, microtransactions, badly made and released games), the COO of EA had some other thoughts as to why they got hammered so hard as the worst company:

    In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America. That last one is particularly telling. If that’s what makes us the worst company, bring it on. Because we’re not caving on that.

    When this happened in 2013, most of us thought this was absolute bunkum and just EA doing damage control. Now, I’m genuinely not so sure anymore. I think perhaps some suit at EA had noticed something happening, some change in the waters that had not yet become “mainstream” but was bubbling beneath the surface, slowly growing. People made fun of this response from EA, because we thought at the time “this is the modern era, those are just backwards fools stuck in the past that are complaining about LGBT inclusion, if they even exist at all, I bet EA is making it up to cover for how shitty they are.” But… were they?? At the time it was roundly dismissed because popular culture widely accepted LGBTQ inclusion, but now we’re on a backswing and people feel emboldened to be disgusting bigots and be loud and proud about being a exclusive asshat who hates people different than themselves. Has it just been brewing under the surface for over a decade?



  • I think both of your arguments in this thread have merit. You are correct that it is a misused tool, and you are correct that the better solution is a more compassionate society. The other person is also correct that we can and do at least make attempts to make such tools less available as paths to self harm. Since you used the analogy of people jumping off bridges, I have lived near bridges where this was common so barriers and nets were put up to make it difficult for anyone but the most determined to use it as a path to suicide. We are indeed failing people in a society that puts profit over human life first, but even in a more idealized society mental health issues and attempts at suicide would still happen and to not fail those people we would still need to do things like erect barriers and safeguards to prevent self-harm. In my eyes both of you are correct and it is not an either or issue as much as it is a “por que no los dos?” issue. Why not build a better society and still build in safeguards?






  • The new translation layer they’ve been working on for their new VR headset, the Steam Frame. Steam Frame runs on an ARM64 processor so Fex is a translation layer for x86/x64 games to play directly on the Steam Frame hardware (meaning if you install an x86/x64 game to the Steam Frame SD card, it will use the Fex translation layer to run the game natively and locally). Honestly, in my personal opinion, it feels like a bigger and more impactful project than even Proton because it’s the first step to opening up PC gaming to other chip architectures other than the traditional x86/x64 Intel/AMD chips. What if you could buy an ARM64-powered Linux PC and still run your entire Steam library on it? That’s the potential future here.

    Don’t feel bad about not searching for it, I like to have conversations with real people, and I don’t mind doing my best to answer questions. Cheers!


  • Not even speculation, just shitposting.

    Valve has done a ton of work on expanding their level of access in the gaming sphere, from Proton to the new Fex, but they are a PC gaming company, period. Yes, they’ve had forays into selling movies and a light foothold on Android, but the movie sales were short lived and the Android support is limited. For all intents and purposes, their near exclusive focus is PC gaming.

    SteamDeck doesn’t run Android, it runs full Linux.

    Other Linux phone variants are in such infancy I doubt Valve would want to take on such a project in it’s current state. Maybe 10 years down the line, if their hardware gambits pay off.

    Even then, mobile devices is a whole different ball game of working with cellular service vendors to get support for you device. Currently Valve doesn’t have to work with any vendors other than traditional PC and game peripheral parts providers, they don’t have to cut deals with xFinity or other ISPs to get their products to connect to them. They are not having to make deals with AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. Getting into the phone sphere is such a huge undertaking, and while it’s a fun thought, it’s such a far-off and unlikely move for Valve.