Steam came before it's time, while we were still on dialup. Once high-bandwidth internet became common then it made sense, as did many other cloud-computing and cloud-storage ideas.
Sadly, it still has problems, especially when end users can't get along with the customer-facing staff and lose access to their licenses. There's also the problem that has revealed itself with other game clients, when games shut down, when distro-clients go out of business (I still hold a grudge with Stardock / Gamestop) and when governments seize cloud storage without consideration for the end-users (as happened with MegaUpload). When Newell dies or retires, then we only can wait to see what becomes of Steam and our libraries and what company is going to attempt to buy (and exploit) all that responsibility.
It's going to be trading Robert Baratheon for Joffrey.
I'm reminded of when I was blogging about brown shooters, FPSes during the era realistic graphics looked brown and dingy with subdued coloration.
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES do an image search of brown shooter with safesearch off. Worse than goatse hello.jpg.
I was hoping this linked to an XKCD article that discusses the question. Answering the question optional.
What I heard (on here, and I hope it's a vicious rumor) is that TPM 2.0 comes with backdoors accessible to Microsoft via the OS so that a significant chunk of the computer belongs to Big MS and not to the end user, and it will squeal and cause problems if the end user tries to take it back.
The whole point of TPM 1.0 hypothetically was to allow a larger secondary encryption key of a device to be accessible only by a small user-provided key (say a four-digit PIN), and requiring use of the key-query software to run to get the secondary key. A limited number of chances with longer delays with each wrong answer heightens security.
But this pissed off government law enforcement across the world, who want backdoors for when they want to crack the phone of a very important criminal.
It would be nice if Apple, Google and Microsoft had more respect for their end users than they do national and corporate institutions, but we know this isn't really the case, so it's at least plausible that TPMs 1.0 or 2.0 come pre-backdoored. It doesn't hurt that this is exactly what FBI and NSA want even though (Pre-9/11 and Pre-PATRIOT) NSA is supposed to be assuring that no-one, not even police can crack our secure communication protocols.
Despite efforts to look into it, I've yet to get an answer I can fully trust whether or not they are backdoored. But since Microsoft is notorious for exactly this kind of bullshit since the 1980s, I assume it's true that TPMs are backdoored until I find convincing information otherwise.
In 1980s psychological parlance, the most common places to find partners were:
In the 1990s and aughts, we were already seeing that things had shifted. Fewer people were engaged in their church group. There was more awareness of sexual harassment at work (and power dynamics that could interfere with regular human interaction). People also had fewer friends and less contact with their extended family. This resulted in more people clubbing (and functioning by one-night stands) and otherwise looking for better places to find eligible partners.
I was in the psychiatric sector both as a patient and a peer counselor, and they recommended activity groups. Frisbee golf, knitting, puzzle-building, backgammon, gardening, etc. I sucked at those, but I was dating during the golden age of Craigslist personal ads. We still have sexual harassment in the workplace in 2024, often from upper-management on the clerical pool, which means for anyone not in upper management, they're being micromanaged and kept from propositioning fellow employees. But curiously in the 1970s and 1980s employees often dated and married.
From my Christmas 2020 sentiments: This year, Ignorance and Want are not mere wastrel wretches clinging to the ankles of a Christmas spirit,^†^ rather they are massive kaiju, towering over us all, with a fell, desiccating breath and a petrifying gaze brought fully to bare. And as I write they thunder across the countryside razing human civilization like Godzilla leveling Tokyo.
† passage here. Note it's not a secure site.
Curiously A Christmas Carol was what started the modern retail-centric rites of Christmas celebrations: prezzies, house parties and feasts.
Also at the time Dickens wrote it, industrial bosses were grudging about making it a work holiday, like Scrooge, often mandating reporting for work and penalizing those who didn't.
These days we might add a spin on it, that the ghosts are of bosses past who failed to mind the welfare of their workers, only to be brutally turned into the ghosts they are today, and finding the afterlife not to their liking.
With accounts that are less data-miney, you can replace all your account details (name, email addy, region, etc.) with gibberish and wait for it all to update, and then replace your password so not even you can get into it.
If it's more data-miney and you are willing to put in a few months / years of maintenance, you can trickle in the gibberish and false data until it's thoroughly poisoned.
When we rely on our lover to process our inner turmoil then yeah, it's the same, just not a professional therapist. That's the implication.
Hence a better model of having multiple holistic close friends that can distribute the work. Or a professional therapist and a separate FWB.
Your psychotherapist is absolutely not supposed to have sex with his / her patients, and doing so (and getting caught) is grounds for losing your license to practice.
That said, about 30% of psychotherapists are banging at least one of their patients in the United States...or claims to be...or something. If we're lucky that is a bogus stat, but frankly it's plausible.
That said, ideally you'd get therapy and sex from different sources.
Tweaking once was chemsex when it wasn't experimenting with the fine-tuning of your amateur radio array.
Now its erratic behavior like someone on stimulants trying to fine tune their radio array to pick up alien chatter.
An early meme that did not pass muster when I showed it to family, but it makes me giggle.
I may just be an esoteric nerd.
Art by Erik Carnell one of the LGBT+ artists who was featured in Target during Pride and then removed thanks to white Christian nationalist pressure.
So here we are, and yeah, we need you all.
A semicolon after "youth" will help keep it clear.
Note: Most of the info here was ripped from the most recent You're Wrong About podcast ( On Buzzsprout ), Halloween History with Chelsey Weber-Smith Go! Listen! Enjoy! Tell 'em Large Marge sent ya!
Yesterday, I learned that the current American Halloween tradition of giving candy to costumed kids represents an uneasy truce between civilization and the trickster spirit.
There are a lot of traditions regarding Samhain, many of which include bonfires and naked dancing (because they all included bonfires and naked dancing. Who are we kidding?) But in the Irish farmlands, Samhain was mischief night, at least for adolescent and young adult boys (we assume they were boys.)
The idea was to haze the local grownups, particularly the crabby ones who yelled at clouds or didn't like young'uns much. There were plenty of old standby pranks: carving faces into produce or shepherding livestock to the rooftops to dressing up like ghosts and monsters and ambushing them at night to send them running.
It was a mostly accepted tradition. Teenagers got to go bananas for one day a year, and were (more or less) on ~~good~~ better behavior for the rest of the time. Skittish folk did the Purge thing of holing up in safety.
And then the Irish and their wily teenagers came to the United States.
Our Halloween pumpkin-smashers were called guisers from those in disguise. Note that there were other guising traditions that exchanged DNA with our dark cabal of malicious tricksters. (One fond one was of drunkards who'd sing at your house until you gave them food, beer or money to leave), but for our antagonists, it was the black bloc of the time, a means to ensure that you weren't identified at the scene of a fresh crime.
Do an image search of "vintage halloween costumes" and you won't see people trying to look like Mario or Misty or Mickey or Megatron, but just people in spooky clothes and spookier masks clearly up to no good. You didn't buy your costume, rather you made it with whatever was on hand, and hence there were a lot of sheet ghosts.
In the early 20th century pranking in the States achieved an apogee (a nadir?). The great depression drove everyone to despair, and wanton destruction that once was meager and required a morning of repair might be the fire that broke the farm. Also some pranks went wrong, leading to a resonance cascade failure, starting a wildfire or other unnatural disaster.
And then WWII happened and we were not only trying to salvage what we can, but had real (alleged) monsters that might even be infiltrating the homefront as we speak. Pranksters then were losing the war for the Allies and serving the Axis, even if inadvertently.
Something had to be done, and even President Truman got involved regarding The Halloween Problem.
A couple of early attempts to trade Halloween for a nicer holiday failed drastically, and the pranking continued.
Eventually an armistice came when the neighborhood spooky pageant emerged. Creative neighbors would turn a part of their house into a spooky diorama and light the path with candles and jack-o-lanterns and other Halloween kitsch. Rather than hopping onto a war-wagon (that's a mischief team stuffed into a motor vehicle) they'd go visit the local spooktaculars. (This would in turn fuel the haunted house craze, assisted by Disney's Haunted Mansion opening in 1953)
Feeding the roaming guests kept the rotten eggs away. While there was candy, there were also cookies, apples, (toothbrushes, Chick tracts) and other treats. Sometimes there were activities, though I never could figure out bobbing for apples.
The transition from free-form snacks to packaged candy came due to The Candyman who was much less exciting than the movie version. Ronald Clark O'Bryan made custom Pixy Stix laced with potassium cyanide, one of which he fed to his son, Timothy on Halloween, 1974. He was far removed from a master criminal, and inconsistencies in his story kept the police interested until it all fell apart. He was also deep in debt and took out a beefy life-insurance policy on his son. The police didn't have to investigate too deeply.
O'Bryan was executed in 1984, but by then the damage he had done to Halloween had been done, and moral panics would persist about tampered Halloween treats. By then it was common for everyone to just give packaged candy.
Related was also the 1982 Tylenol poisonings. They had nothing to do with Halloween, but secured into the public conscience that people could tamper with products in order to cause mayhem to the general public. And at least by my recollection, this not only ended all Halloween offerings of home-made cookies by kitchen-minded families but also made sure safety seals were added to every food and hygiene product in the US.
By the aughts, everyone was familiar with the "fun-sized" candy which was totally not that fun.
(It's noted by some that Tylenol doesn't really need all that much assistance to poison you. As painkillers go, it's hard on the system, easy to overdose, and Tylenol poisoning incurs a yearly body count in the US. There's been an ongoing effort to convince the FDA to rethink its approval of Tylenol, for convincing cause. But big pharma really wants to keep selling you stuff. Anyway I digress.)
These days, we hear a lot of calls from the religious right for the end of celebrations of Halloween, a holiday too macabre for families who purport to have family values. Many churches tell their parishioners to skip the holiday for Jesus, while more clever churches simply hold a party there as an alternative to trick-or-treating. Some churches forbid witches, or even only allow approved costumes from the approved costume list. There's a lot of, as Dan McClellan would put it, costly identity signaling between members of right-wing religious ministries to show they're on team-purity.
But this is not a holiday we celebrate to honor benign gods and favored spirits. This is not an Apollonian holiday we keep up for the morale of the people, rather it's a Dionysian holiday, one we celebrate in respect for spirits who would wrong us if we don't acknowledge their presence and the unsteady peace they offer in exchange for our tribute.
Hallowe'en as it is celebrated in the US is a rite we engage in every year to keep away malevolent trickster monsters, who will return (and will start fires) if we don't placate them with yearly treats.
We recently had this conversation and I realized I have new headcannon.
I was thinking Low Key Gigachad Enclave
Courtesy of Ray Bradbury, of course.
(We assume Jim took the deal.)
If that were a 60 mph bumper, I'd totally put one in front and back. Screw ugly, let's be safe.