Yeah, you kinda defeated your own argument there, but you do seem to recognize that.

You can instant resume on a Steam Deck, basically.

You can alt tab on a PC, at least with a stable game that is well made and not memory leaking.

Yeah, better RAM / SSDs does mean lower loading times, higher streaming speeds/bus bandwidths, but literally, at what cost?

You could just actually take the time to optimize things, find non insanely computationally expensive ways to do things that are more clever, instead of just saying throw more/faster ram at it.

RAM and SSD costs per gig are going up now.

Moore’s Law is not only dead, it has inverted.

Constantly cheaper memory going forward turned out to not the best assumption to make.

PC games are software.

Unfortunately many PC games are also like this, astoundingly poorly optimized, just assume everyone has a $750 GPU.

Proton can only do so much.

… and Metal basically can’t do that that much.

Look at Metal Gear Solid 5 or TitanFall 2, and tell me realtime video game graphics have dramatically increased in visual fidelity in the last decade.

They haven’t really.

They shifted to a poorly optimized, more expensive paradigm for literally everyone involved; publisher, developer, player.

Everything relating to realtime raytracing and temporal antialiasing is essentially a scam, in the vast majority of actual implementations of it.

I mean, I have certainly wandered through many an abandonded, functionally cursed place when I was homeless for about 2 years.

And I could have just brought a portable radio and randomly dialed through FM/AM stations, pausing for a few second on something stable, then going back to static.

… but I didn’t need a radio to see the echoes of what had happened at the places I’d been.

‘Environmental Storytelling’ isn’t just a thing in video games.

I just now saw this and… that is a much erudite explanation than I gave… I will have to check out this Corey Robin.

I think these ideas, and what I said, are mutually true.

What do you think?

Basically, yes, conservatives either literally are losers or fear loss, to horrifically paraphrase Robin… and also, their replacement identity, their group identity that has supplanted their personal identity, which includes being directed to war against certain ideas and concepts, well, they can’t not perform those ideas, otherwise, its another existentual criss.

First, they lost or failed at something core to their personal identity, then they subsume themself into the aggrieved group identity… and if they renege against or fail at the performance of the group identity… well now they have another existential crisis, suffer another kind of identity loss.

Conservatism, as a trauma response.

I just also want to note the immense cognitive dissonance between the actual, fear-based conservative mindset of ‘zero-sum’… and their purported belief in the ‘free market’, much of which totally fails to be any kind of logically coherent without the idea that… an unregulated market generally (or even always) leads to a ‘positive-sum’ situation.

They lie about how they actually think, and tell you the thing that very often actually is zero-sum in reality… is broadly mutually beneficial… and that you’re wrong/evil if you disagree.

Its… all projection.

Quite a logical short circuit.

I’d argue that a lot of ‘Alchemy’ had actually been very spiritual/religious/philosophical from the start.

It was… more of a way of trying to understand the world, in a very broad, total, and inventive way, with connection to and focus on the material, but much also focused on and devoted to the divine.

The whole idea was to try and define the rules that bridged the gap, if that makes any sense.

Its not that ‘Alchemy’ diverged or emerged as the spiritual side of proto-Chemistry expiriments…

… its more that the materialistic parts of Alchemy that ‘worked’ grew out of it , into Chemistry, the ‘spiritual’ parts of it that ‘worked’, grew into Religious or Philosophical ideas, some quite popular and influential, others very, very niche.

Alchemy also isn’t always related to or involving Astrology.

Sometimes those mixed.

But not always.

… and the Freemasons, other weird covert orders like that… I mean, their ideas, rituals, customs, symbolism… largely are evolutions of spritual/religious/philosophical concepts that were present in Alchemical writings.

As an example, its why most of the Founding Fathers were Deists.

They either literally were Freemasons, or, believed in the Freemasonic concept of a Deity… you actually still to this day can’t be a Freemason and an Atheist/Agnostic at the same time, you must believe in a God.

The Freemasonic ‘Great Work’ is… to transform society into a more righteous, more divinely aligned society…according to their own conception of what that means.

The Masonic Founding Fathers literally believed that the creation of the USA … was them doing that.

Its all over the symbolism that still exists in many of our monuments, on our currency…the all seeing eye of providence, the unfinished pyramid, “E Pluribus Unum”, forging a new society by mixing together a variety of peoples, as if making a superior metal alloy.

Alchemy etymologically derives from al-kīmīā, الكیمیاء.

Which itself etymylogically has … a couple of likely/potential meanings, possibly simultaneously.

Either:

The Black Land, referring to the fertile terrain near the Nile River.

Khemet being the Egyptian word for Egypt, the land.

Or,

Transmutation, meaning a process by which one can create or transform into or reunite with the basically Platonic Ideal form…

Or,

Metallurgy, basically.

So if you were to try and translate the term ‘Alchemy’ into modern English, you’d basically end up with ‘The Study of Ancient Knowledge of Transformation’ … something like that.

Where you could be transforming either your soul, or literal metal, or both.

It does not help that there is the famous ‘Noble Lie’ from Plato’s hugely influential Republic, where the idea is posited that the Gods made some people’s essence out of gold, some of silver, some brass and iron… that that false idea could serve as a grand lie by which social order could be maintained.

So you’ve kind of got metals and souls intertwined, conceptually, going back to something like 375 BCE.

I guess what I am trying to say its that it is nearly impossible to try to describe ‘Alchemy’ without being anachronistic.

They did not think of things in the same way that we do today.

PS:

You wanna know arguably the most famous alchemist of all time?

Isaac Newton.

Spent by far most of his life… studying Alchemical texts.

Calculus?

An undergrad capstone project.

Managing the monetary system of England?

Retirement plan.

Physics? Optics?

Post-Grad work.

Now alchemy… he spent like 20 to 30 years just buried in alchemical books.

That’s kind of amazing, honestly.

She is basically right.

Yeah, a lot of ‘Alchemy’ did involve essentially proto-Chemistry, but a whole hell of a lot of it was also …basically, a way to hide being a heretic of one kind or another.

What we now call Philosophy and Religion… were not really distinct concepts back then, they were interwoven.

And it is absolutely true that a good deal of ‘Alchemists’ had… very esoteric ideas about spirituality, and they did offer the kind of mundane, materialistic outer meaning, vs the exclusive, spiritual, inner, hidden meaning, in their texts…where the metals and such do sort of transmute (hah) into having analagous conceptual meanings.

You also have to remember that just literacy itself was not as commonplace as it is today, and you might literally be the only person within 500 miles who has an actual copy or translation of a specific text.

You could not have had the Rennaisssance without the preservation and translation of many texts done by many ‘Alchemists’.

If anyone is interested, I strongly recommend the youtuber Esoterica.

Fear of non-conformity.

They value being in some kind of ‘tribe’ to a literally irrational extent.

Hence, black and white, ingroup vs outgroup thinking.

Then combine that with half of them hate themselves (mostly because of the peer pressure that comes from their tribe) and are literally in a suicidal apocalyptic death cult.

So when the death cult says ‘destroy’, they don’t want to lose their group identity, because without that, they are nothing, so, they destroy.

Amidalin.

Amygdalia.

A McDonalds.

POV:

You just aggravated someone with an ‘undersized’ amygdala.

Real Time Raytracing.

That user growth translates to more revenue for game developers. Since the 2018 announcement of the 75% and 80% revenue share tiers, more and more games from developers big and small have reached new higher revenue share. The revenue share paid out across all non-Valve games on Steam in 2025 was 76%, and that does not include any revenue developers may earn selling free Steam keys outside of Steam. Back in 2024, we shipped a new notification feature for developers to make it more clear when their game has crossed a new revenue share tier, and developers can see a game’s progress towards those higher tiers in their sales reporting.

Not directly related to the new hardware, but that does put a bit of a dent in the ‘Valve takes a 30% cut’ line.

Evidently, netted out, its 24%.

The hypothetical call center would be selling Steam Accounts, with… $100 in their Steam Wallets, or w/e.

Which is … well, against Steam policy, though enforcement is spotty.

Or I guess… physical Steam Gift cards?

But that leads into the other part of this:

The call center would have to be making basically fake individual Steam Accounts for each purchased Steam Machine.

And then probably routing them to different addresses. Different home addresses.

Valve sells its hardware directly through Steam.

They ship it to you.

No stores.

Sure, secondary markets always exist, but it is at least kind of hard to like, buy 100 Steam Machines or 100 Steam Decks on one legit Steam Account, they can easily just say uh no, you get a max of 5 or 2 or whatever.

So yeah a call center could pull off buying a bunch of them, in the sense of them being a scam call center that specializes in fraud and identity theft, yeah, they’d be able to figure it out, but it would probably be decently illegal.

Most people don’t own flagship GPUs

Spec sheet culture has warped our expectations

---

We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that everyone and their dog owns bleeding-edge hardware when they really don’t. Only a tiny percentage of users run cards like an RTX 4070 Ti Super or above. The overwhelming majority are on midrange builds with similar VRAM and system memory to what the Steam machine is going to ship with.

Repeating this, because it needs to be repeated.

It is extremely not normal to own a high powered GPU.

Very, extremely, not normal.

Further, you can make a lot of good arguments that nobody fucking bothers optimizing anything anymore, that gameplay, story, writing, art design trump pure graphical realism power.

Real time ray tracing is still a ludicrous, unsustainable, elitist, exclusionary paradigm, from every way you look at it.

Beyond that, … I’m looking at a potential Steam Machine buy… because there will probably be a way to plug an oculink adapter into one of its M.2 ports, figure out where to cut a hole in the case and snake it out, and then you can just attach an eGPU of some kind, with its own PSU, to it, if you want to crank up the gfx even harder.

Then, your next upgrade path is along that paradigm: A superior mobo+cpu combo.

Somebody on github I saw already mocked out how you could get close-ish to M.2 long term storage transfer speeds out of the Machine’s fancier USB port, or you could just run it all off of an SD card if that doesn’t sound like its worth the trouble.

Oh, also, a default Steam Machine?

Way less power draw than a comparable PC, more like a beefed up laptop.

If you’re worried about either sustainability, or just the power bill going up… worth considering.

Half Life 2:

C1: This is how it always starts. First a building, then the whole block.

C2: They have no reason to come to our place.

C1: Don’t worry, they’ll find one.

my piceses, my piceses!

goblin monches on raw wriggling fish

I… am not entirely certain whether or not the tech actually existed, when the Dark Night came out, to build the hyper spy system…

But it definitely exists now, to at least some extent.

Fortunately, the Antichrist Peter Thiel is probably more or less in charge of it, so, all good!

If you mean to use a different definition of aura, as in just a glow of light, then sure, technically all living matter has an imperceptible aura.

Could these UPEs play some kind of way into extremely short distance cellular interactions? Yes!

But thats… not what people mean, 95% of the time, when they’re talking about a person’s aura.

This is the whole problem of using woo woo terms.

You can’t conflate two different meanings of words and then act like that is not what you are doing.

You also should specify what you mean, in cases where a word has different meanings in different domains.

• Myself, from the comment you replied to.

He wasn’t.

You can’t see the biophotons.

Humans have no way of detecting, experiencing them, without complex instruments.

They do not factor in to any decision making activity in our brain, because we have no senses capable of receiving them as input.

Read your own source.

The way that people colloquially use ‘aura’ is as if they have some kind of magical ability to see things other people can’t, that indicate things about that aura-haver’s emotional or mental or spiritual state.

They can’t, biophotons do none of that, they’re just a nearly undetectable form of light that’s emmitted by essentially anything that has an active metabolism, ie, is not dead.

They’re just using a made-up concept to describe internal herusitics in their mind, ie, their intuition.

Sure, they’ve used their mind in the way that your last two sources sort of hint at, but its a delusion, its failing to understand their own mind giving rise to a psuedo religious concept.

The only reality, the only power in ‘auras’ as a concept is sociological, indirect, as a reference with no referent.

Auras being a thing be people can see and use… that’s on the same level of ‘real’ as ‘Christ died for our sins’.

If you mean to use a different definition of aura, as in just a glow of light, then sure, technically all living matter has an imperceptible aura.

Could these UPEs play some kind of way into extremely short distance cellular interactions? Yes!

But thats… not what people mean, 95% of the time, when they’re talking about a person’s aura.

This is the whole problem of using woo woo terms.

You can’t conflate two different meanings of words and then act like that is not what you are doing.

You also should specify what you mean, in cases where a word has different meanings in different domains.

You can map out the inside of a building and figure out where objects are, and when and where movement occurs, with WiFi.

You cannot do this with magic woo woo nonsense that equivocates and conflates terms across different domain specific meanings, and then attempts to build a world view out of confused, meaningless/contradictory gibberish.