Look at major wars and start going backwards in history… and then do the math of how long before that major war a previous major war was.

WW2… 80-ish years ago from today Civil War… 1860s - about 80 or so years before that American Revolution - 1770s - about 80 to 90 years before that

There seems to be a rough pattern indicating that once the generation scarred by a major war is gone… so seems to go the world order that was in place beforehand.

I just kept an eye on Micro Center’s refurbished cards for a few weeks and was able to snag a 3090Ti late last year with a 3-yr warranty for the same price I paid for a 980Ti in 2015.

America is stupid and selfish.

The U.S. has been propagandized by the rich via corporate media consolidation (AKA Manufactured Consent) since at least the 1980s when the Fairness Doctrine was repealed by Reagan… earlier if you consider folks like JFK - who (as a member of a dynastically wealthy family) did things like drop the marginal tax rate from ~90% for the insanely richest people in the country to ~60% to start the tumble of budget shortfalls ultimately leading to the ease in which dishonest grifters are more easily able to convince the desperate and unheard to put their faith in demagogues offering them scapegoats in place of the actual culprits for their socioeconomic plight.

That is to say, that :

1. IF America is stupid, it is the fault of the ultra-rich once again - as they did in the 1860s with railroad barons, and 80 years later in the 1920s with the industrial age robber barons, and again as they’ve done now with tech-bro barons - need to be reminded that peace is only achievable on a level playing field, wherein they pay their goddamn fair share of taxes to provide a stable, safe, clean, healthy society where our bountiful resources are not made artificially scarce for all but the very top of the wealthiest classes.

2. IF America is selfish, it appears so only because those at the bottom are shown - by example of those at the top - that if they are selfish, they can “get ahead…” or at least “get by.”

Afaik they aren’t tied to supporting Zionism. They had some problems a decade ago with safety standards and union busting.

Didn’t know that… :( - Open to hear other alternatives, but when NewEgg became much worse notably a few years back, and NCIX went under, B&H has been an online staple for my computer parts, camera, and general electronics needs… save for cables from Infinite Cables.

I do go to Micro Center in person due to being lucky enough to have one within a sensible distance, but that’s still quite a drive for me, and I know not everyone else has one nearby.

Would love to see a really comprehensive list of sites that aren’t garbage AI slop scam alleyways that would help cover the goods and services that Amazon acts as a one-stop convenience for. I don’t want to support Amazon, but I also don’t want to get scammed by handing out my credit card info to any old shopping site.

Feel free to add more suggestions in your own replies.

I’ll start :

Electronics : B&H Photo - owned by religious folks so hours of operation are a little odd sometimes, but overall good customer service, fair prices, reliable shipping

Grocieries : Central Market - HEB’s high-tier store chain for high-quality groceries, instead of Whole Foods

Kitchen supplies : Webstaurant - Wholesale store for things like home kitchen goods and supplies, as well as things like flatware and dishes

I was just gonna say - he looks like the Nazi in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade about halfway through his visual effect death…

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Reminds me of an old favorite CollegeHumor video comedy skit series - “A Message From Your Favorite CEO” featuring the Tumblr CEO…

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Follows the “have a pic of you and a hot ex” rule when hitting up the dating scene. Anything you can do to make someone think “oh they must have something cool about them if the smoke show was hooking up with them.” FOMO

Flying on the balloon was used to mask some loading times, but that was waaaaay longer than transitions from space into the world in Astro Bot.

It DID outdo Nintendo’s equivalent - the previous mainline Mario entry - Super Mario Odyssey - in every way except maybe 4 :

1. Quantity - Mario had more moons than Astro had Bots to rescue… so more collectibles.
2. replayability - with the Luigi balloon challenges, they extended the game’s longevity with this feature and it is better than Astro Bot’s simpler “speed run challenges” because of Mario’s unique game mechanic of allowing players to create and compete by crafting one-of-a-kind challenges for each other.
3. Nostalgia - Mario’s New Donk City party was absolute peak love letter to the origins of Super Mario and the sequence with the song sung by Mayor Pauline honestly brought me to tears…

…But everything else - the scale of and pure ingenuity of the boss mechanics, the visuals - from both a stylistic and technical standpoint, the Dual-Sense’s controller gimmicks, the complete lack of load times… it brought into stark contrast how far Nintendo has fallen behind - not so much from a game design perspective necessarily - but certainly at least from a hardware power standpoint.

Looks like it’s a behind the scenes image from the recent film starring Margaret Qualey and Demi Moore - The Substance.

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Wanted to better illustrate my point about asset modernization, here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

This is a 7.45MB animated GIF embedded among several others on the page for Helldivers 2 store page on Steam :

Here’s that same animation converted into an animated WEBP around 800KB… (I did an AVIF at 215KB with default settings from some random online conversion tool, but apparently Lemmy won’t allow those to be embedded / shown directly) :

It is literally ~10% the size, looks nearly identical (could make 1:1 with less compression for just a few KB more), loads faster, and will play back in everything except e-machines from the late 1990s.

Additionally, modern formats support things like wider color gamut - which means you can create HDR assets.

It’s not flat out “bad,” but it IS visually inconsistent when it comes to their overall design system element library… but their visual hierarchy, their arrangement of said elements, and layout - is overall pretty well done.

My personal biggest gripe is less about element appearance, but more on how inconsistent their tab layout ends up being from page to page.

When browsing, I always struggle to find a couple of elements - usually something from the specific set of tabs I want to navigate to like the “community” home, my wishlist items, or the shopping cart.

…But really my very biggest gripe is on my Steam Deck. I have the mod for allowing customized animated grid images… and when I go to the Collections section, the loading of those images grinds browsing to a nearly unusable halt.

I would LOVE it if they did overhaul their element library to unify things, and did away with older more bloated raster formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF and H.264+MP3 in MP4s… and instead switch to something like highly optimized HEIC / AVIF / WEBP and SVG, custom fonts with embedded symbols, and VP9+opus WEBMs to modernize and shrink their asset libraries. They could even have fall-back compatibility when they detect an ancient device that can’t decode them for some reason.

Not that anyone cares, but I am a Sr. UX designer who used to work in games but switched to general software like 12 yrs ago… so if anyone from Valve browses Lemmy… PM me. 😅

If we’re just mentioning internet connectivity, the PS2 did end up getting the ethernet + HDD expansion adapter .

I remember playing MGS Online that way with friends back in the day.