As urban men's testosterone levels continue to plummet, there are interesting sociological phenomena which have emerged.

• Primate Behavior: Signal submission.
• Emotionally Crippled: Can only inauthentically mime emotions. Elect leaders who are same way.
• Conditioned: Totally checked out from surroundings, Universe 25-style. They will not even intervene when someone is being raped.

Irrational people don't realize they are being irrational. They will use any manner of ex post facto "reasoning" necessary to make themselves appear reasonable, to themselves. When a critical mass of people are irrational, society takes on bizarre characteristics, yet almost everyone pretends that the state of affairs is ordinary.

The reason people are becoming increasingly irrational is because they are regressing into base-brained mammals, operating on the same instinctive level as chimpanzees. It's Haidt's "elephant-rider" analogy, accelerated. The only remaining upper-brained capability is being used to justify why they are acting like monkeys-- to make themselves appear rational.

This talk is well-worth listening to: anyone who regularly interacts with young people today will be able to relate. Regular readers will recall frequent references on this blog to a lack of authenticity in the world today, which is a point the speaker emphasizes in his diatribe.

Seven years ago I wrote this: "it's the world, not me", I concluded. This mirrors the conclusion at which the speaker arrives: "When your environment collapses, you collapse." The talk also recalls Stefan Molyneux's "do what you're going to do, but know why you're doing it": motives matter.

There were lots of interesting comments to the video, here are a couple-- bold emphasis is mine:



I too have written about this extensively. When I was young, old people had a quiet sort of wisdom about them, lots of personality, and many stories to share. When I talk to a sixty five year old today, it's the same as talking to a twenty year old. It calls to mind that old joke: They don't have sixty five years' of experience-- they have one year of experience, sixty five times over.

And:



Hearken back to the pair of aforelinked pictures. Almost everyone I know in the world today is pulling even further towards the latter picture, and away from the former. They are pulling in the exact opposite direction from where the world needs to go: towards centralized authority, towards coddled atomization. It's difficult to relate to people who have these instincts.

Wifey and I were playing New World together last night, when I suddenly had a Steam client popup appear, saying that my key had been revoked due to a refund. Minutes later and while I was doing initial investigations, wifey got the same message. As it turns out and in the words of a customer service rep, "Most of the customers are across the globe are getting this error." Just when I thought I'd seen everything in this hobby...

Someone on Gab posted a comment regarding Calhoun's "Universe 25" experiments, which I then subsequently looked up. The full article is well-worth the read because this exact experiment, down to the minutest details, is playing out in American society right now, but with humans:

• Abundant, near-infinite food. Absence of predators.


• Males lose their purpose in society, become super passive and pessimistic. They "check out" (gen x).


• Females lose maternal instinct and interest in mating; they become super aggressive, territorial (modern career women, feminists). Many of them start murdering their young (abortion).


• A handful of alphas take over the society and beat everyone else up for no real purpose, since their material needs are already met (bankers, CEOs, politicians).


• The young which do survive in this twisted society never learn how to socialize properly. They just sit around eating and preening themselves (soy boys).


• Eventually the society collapses and population falls to zero.

The Wikipedia version of this experiment is hilarious: I don't want to directly link them traffic, but it white washes all modern sociological parallels, and condenses the whole thing down to "a study about overpopulation." Hah!

Instead, let's turn to Calhoun's own conclusions, bold emphasis is mine:



Not to make this about me, but I fit into the model via this observation from Calhoun's notes: "The excess that find no social niches emigrate." Remember: I just relocated my family full-time to the bug out house just this year. As an adult I have never felt like I have a social niche, a sentiment I've repeated to my wife and also my mother many times over the years.

I disagree with Calhoun on one minor point: he gives his hard conclusions a cop-out escape hatch with his "...and having expectancies to do so..." words-- which even he surely knew was nonsense as he said them. Social roles aren't arbitrary constructs: they are hard-wired via millions of years of evolution. He was just trying to pour some sugar on the experiment's outcome to make it go down a little easier (see? there is hope!).

For anyone looking to become Catholic, I have a couple of documents to share. First, there is a really nice Catechism study guide. Second, I created an accompanying worksheet-format document, where you can conveniently fill in your answers to the questions for posterity.

• Study Guide
• Worksheet

Of course, you'll also want to order a copy of the Catechism along with a Catholic Bible. Regarding the latter, I prefer the classical non-PC translation, fonts, and ancient pictures from the illustrated "New Revised Standard Edition"-- whereas wifey is loving her plain English, color-coded "Great Adventure Catholic Bible". Ideally, it's best to own multiple Bibles, so you can cross reference translations to get a clearer picture.

It feels like we're living in a real-world playout of "Atlas Shrugged". The article blames the jobs numbers on employee fears of the WuFlu-- and that may well be true, in the isolation of this specific report. But I'm also regularly seeing basic IT services going down for prolonged periods, airlines cancelling thousands of flights due to protesting pilots, huge shortages of electronics, major shipping delays due to an incredible lack of truck drivers, significant increases in food prices, rolling blackouts in places like England, and so forth.

In my workplace, I keep getting whiffs of the names of people who have left, and it reads like a "who's who" of some of the brightest, most ambitious people I've worked with. Recall that in the aforementioned Ayn Rand novel, by the end of the story New York City-- due to a combination of the smartest people "checking out" of the system, and bureaucrats and their grifter business pals taking control-- had no working electricity, massive snow drifts everywhere, no running infrastructure, and so forth. I think we're headed there.

I've also noticed over these years that Conservatives specifically have disappeared almost altogether: it used to be that half of journalists were Conservative, half of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs were Conservative, and so on. Today, it's something like seventy to ninety-five percent of people in these fields are not just Lefties, but activist-types. Is there a "Galt's Gulch" somewhere about which I'm unaware?

True, in my current community the script is flipped: other than retired healthcare cartel doctors by the lake or a handful of idiots in the nearest town, it's probably ninety-five percent Conservative here. But population density is low here as well: it's not that many people in total; where have all the rest gone? At least many of the things I've been talking about on this blog, some of them for over a decade, are finally getting acknowledged by the mainstream. Take ganders at this, or this. In the latter case, Tucker didn't even get to interest rates, the manipulation of which are so harmful that they even put QE to shame.

Some time fairly recently, Bloomberg had it from reputable sources that Nintendo was going to release the "Switch Pro" this year, but due to the government-hyper-overreaction-to-the-WuFlu-induced "chip shortages", the Japanese game maker couldn't source the parts. However, their sourcing department had already ordered an entire warehouse's worth of OLED screens!

Scrambling to figure out what to do, the idea came up to retrofit the current Switch hardware with these fancy screens-- and that's what they went with, hence why the Switch OLED is such a goofy product. It turns out that the dock itself uses HDMI 2.0-- so, 4K/60/HDR capable. Undoubtedly, those "Pro" docks were already manufactured, and just got shoved into the Switch OLED boxes-- "here you go!"

Of course, Nintendo has denied these rumors, and people like John Linneman are offering a countering theory regarding the docks, that they are just "future proofed"-- which makes no sense to me, since the inevitable "Switch Pro" will ship with its own dock in the box anyway.

It looks like the next false flag catastrophe is going to be a so-called "cyber pandemic": people have already surrendered their most fundamental freedoms for one "pandemic" ("plandemic", "scamdemic"), so the silly name makes sense, stacking on the precedent building I've been warning about on this blog since early 2020.

If you have a half an hour to spare, listen to this: I did, and took some notes.

• I think this false flag will use back doors in Windows and other operating systems. This session starts off by warning that the apparently impending "cyber pandemic" will be like the 2003 malware disaster, but much larger in scope. I was working tech support at Best Buy that year, and the reason that worm was so bad was because Windows XP was a piece of junk: 100% of the "infected" systems were Windows XP installations, we had a whole room of them. Windows 10 / 11 are a million times more secure-- hence why this will probably be back door-driven


• The first "guest" was some dude named David Koh-- a government bureaucrat from Singapore. He emphasized that now that the WuFlu has made "us" all "dependent on digital services", that they all need to be "viewed as essential." And since they are "essential", there is "collective responsibility" to
  "optimize the full potential of the digital economy" and "increase the cyber hygiene of all internet users". I'd never heard that term before: it's a scary one, and again cleverly chosen.


• He also said that the threat will have a "constantly changing nature", and that as a result there will need to be "close cooperation between all stakeholders". In other words, it will be endlessly convenient moving of goal posts, just like they did with the WuFlu.


• Next up was some typically thin-lipped Australian female bureaucrat-- the sort who is locking people in camps in Sidney-- named Michelle Price, from some group called "AustCyber". She talked about "Quadtech", a "special network between Australia, the United States, India, and Japan". I don't know if she meant computer network or not, since she then went on the blab about "collaboration" and "think tanks".


• She emphasized repeatedly that "public / private partnerships are critical"-- so, Fascism. She said that they would need to "ensure trust" and "ensure availability"-- not sure if "trust" means authentication between systems, or "public trust" in whatever the heck they're doing? She also threw out the term "trusted market". She ended by exclaiming, with an obvious "duper's delight" smile that "we're living a cyber pandemic right now!"


• The next speaker was a Jew in Israel named Gil Shwed, who is the CEO of some company called "Check Point Software Technologies". This guy was just there to get rich selling network equipment, as all he had to say repeatedly was that "we" need to "build infrastructure"-- which of course, his company conveniently makes as he pointed out. He said that with this "cyber pandemic" that "every attack will be a new mutation"-- another WuFlu precedent, moving goal posts. This time, it'll be his company selling the endless "booster shots."


• Finally, there was by a mile the scariest person present: a DC Swamp creature named Clara Tsao. Her job title was "Global Shaper". Speaking of shapes, her face was shaped like a fleshless human skull, sort of like the "scream mask"-- and she had this bright red lipstick on. Her eyes were solid black. As she spoke, in between every single pause her face would elastically snap into this huge, fake ear-to-ear lip-filled bright red grin, like "Joo Dee" from "Avatar: The Last Airbender".


• She was immediately teed up by Samir Saran, the host. Almost the first word he threw out was "infodemic"-- yet another new term! "We're seeing all of this fake news, post-truth (?), misinformation, and synthetic data (?)." What does Joo Dee think about all of this?


• The first thing she says is that it's the "most vulnerable" who are suffering-- those darned old people, clicking on Fox News! She explains that she's a "disinformation researcher" (and I'm the Queen of England), who came "through a White House program". She then postures about her care for small businesses-- I guess like how Davos initiated the world's largest wealth transfer in history to multi-billion dollar corporations during the WuFlu scamdemic?


• "An example of these problems are all of the 'misinformation' regarding mask wearing." So, she's referring to Dr. Fausti in March of 2020, then? Then she threw out that term again: "cyber hygiene." Clearly, they all got the memo on that one.


• She then made the most disingenuous series of statements spoken during the entire half hour, that plastic grin glued onto her face the entire time: in the span of two sentences, I listened in amazement as she pivoted from "none of our infrastructure is secure", to "no one is trusting our election systems even though they are totally secure." Her mid-stream 180 degree pivot was scary enough, but for anyone who watched the Maricopa Audit as I did, her statements were patently absurd too.


• The presentation concluded with what the "new ideal" should be, so that "everyone can work together". Once again, "public / private partnership" will be key-- so, think multi-billion dollar corporations violating the Nuremberg Code with their employees, at the government's behest: governments and corporations caring about our health!


• The most interesting question came from the host: "Do you think citizens trust enterprises enough?" The Australian woman responded by first saying that the "word 'trust' needs to be 'redefined'", and that the "old version", "from the 1960s", just doesn't work anymore. I need to get out my globalist decoder ring to decipher what she meant by that. But second, she said that they can get citizens onboard by "leveraging psychology", since "people already use and trust technology."

So there you have it-- hopefully these notes will be helpful to people; there is a significant chance that the next manufactured crisis will take this direction.

Titles like those from the "Fallout" series, or "The Outer Worlds", have computer terminals in them which reveal all of the evil things the in-world corporations do, via what amount to secret email chains. This reads like straight out of one of those games.

Marxist radical lefties are almost universally the writers for those kinds of video games, so they love making fake evil companies. But in real life, they are one hundred percent behind companies like Pfizer! "Get the 'vax', you bigot!"

The Bible is filled with God delivering messages and miracles through prophets. In a student Bible I've been reading, the supplementary commentary asks, "Who is God speaking through today? Have you seen God performing miracles in today's world?"

Yesterday, there was a crew working on the addition project. My wife kept noticing one of them, a youthful looking fellow who was singing and practically dancing as he worked: he looked like the happiest person she had ever seen. At the end of the day, he needed to come into the house to unplug an extension cord he had run.

As he was departing, something he said caused a voice in my head to tell me, "mention that you've returned to Jesus." This prompted the most incredible exchange I've ever had in my life.


Death and Return

He explained to me that he has had several experiences in his life, where God revealed things to him. He had a first marriage, which he divorced, abandoning his children as he moved out of state. Some years ago, he collapsed on the floor, totally dead: heart was not beating.

His wife, hysterically sobbing and panicking, called an ambulance. Meanwhile, he was literally outside of his body, looking down on his body in the casket, at his funeral. "It wasn't even like a dream-- it was real, as real as you and me standing here right now." He could feel the presence of Jesus standing behind him. Next to him was his eldest son-- one of those he had abandoned: crying.

He suddenly saw every mistake he'd made in his life, played before him like a movie. He turned to Jesus, and said "God, I know I've messed up, I know I've sinned, I know I've left my children. You've come to take me back to you, and I accept that. I don't deserve another chance. But please, please give me one more chance!"

Suddenly, he woke up, was staring at the ceiling. He leapt to his feet, stumbling and gasping for breath. His wife, completely astonished, grabbed him, told him that an ambulance was on the way. They ran tests and scans on him in the hospital, whereafter the doctor, almost fumbling for words, explained what had happened.

"You quite literally tore an artery in your neck. People do not come back from this. Me and the other doctors were in the other room, trying to explain how this is possible: you physically should not be alive right now. This is a miracle."

After this, he abandoned his business, and told his wife: "We're moving back to Minnesota. Start looking for houses. I don't care about my business, or anything else: God will take care of all of that. I need to go back to my kids."


A Second and Third Miracle

He had a friend who had broken two bones in his hand. After multiple surgeries, his friend still could not bend the hand. "Let me try to say a prayer for you over the phone, and ask God to help your hand heal." He said the prayer, and suddenly his friend exclaimed, "Oh my God! Oh my God! I can bend my hand! I can move it again!"

He couldn't even believe it himself at first: a prayer had literally healed his friend, right in that moment.

Some time later, his eldest son-- one with whom he had been re-united, and for whose safety he had been praying daily-- was driving in the dark. As he was passing through a juncture, he realized that car headlights were right on top of him, about to smash into his door: one of them had missed a stop sign! He closed his eyes, preparing himself for death-- but then, no impact. He looked to his right, and saw the brake lights of the other car, the driver very obviously just as confused and disoriented as he was.

He explained to his father: "Dad, with the way that intersection was situated, there was quite literally no way we could have missed each other. The headlights were feet away, shining straight into my window! The other car passed through me, or the other way around-- there is no other possible way."


Revelations

He laid his hand on my shoulder, and said a prayer over me and my household.

I know it sounds strange, but there is no way his words weren't divinely inspired: the things he said in that prayer, the way the words just came to him, and how closely the subsequent things he revealed to me fit exact questions I had without me having spoken a word, not to mention the timing of him arriving-- in a period of incredibly intense stress I've been in the last several days-- is too much to be a coincidence.

• The first thing he reminded me of was St. Peter, walking on water: he was fine! Until he took his eyes off of Jesus, and started looking at the boat and elsewhere-- then he started to sink. "If you keep your eyes on Jesus alone, God will close some doors and open others, for you." I have been under immense stress, worrying that I will lose my career due to the clot shot mandates. Through this man, God told me exactly what I needed to hear.


• Next, he told me to open the Bible, and read Psalms 91. With how the world is today, I have been so worried about my kids falling prey to temptation. After he left I did read Psalms 91, and it gave me the perfect message to use for a talk with my children.


• After that, he told me that I will hear a lot about denomination this, denomination that-- that I will hear different interpretations of scripture, meant to distract me from scripture's core meaning. He told me to remember that all who believe in Jesus are brothers and sisters. This was clearly a direct rebuke of what I'd written at the very end of this blog post-- but of course, the man had no idea I even had a blog, much less anything I'd written!


• He explained to me that we are, in fact, in the end times. He was worried-- "I could be wrong, but this is what I think"-- that the "vaccine" was the mark of the beast, and that there will be a total of seven shots to complete the mark. We're on shot three right now, but they keep talking about future booster shots.

Conclusion

I'm not necessarily saying that this man was a modern-day prophet or anything so dramatic-- but just like what happened a couple of weeks ago in the rain, God sent someone directly to me, to teach me some lesson I needed to learn, right when I needed to learn it.

I shouldn't have done this, but on a whim this morning I called the Target in town-- one of only two video game-carrying stores within a seventy mile radius of my house-- to see if they had any. Well...



I shouldn't have done it: I have an almost seven hundred dollar Steam Deck showing up early next year, and "Switch Pro" will probably also be out by the end of the next year-- which I'll also buy, for sure. On the flip-side, I have my fortieth birthday in nine days, and I sure as heck have the cash for it now that I have no mortgage and minimal bills.

Why not treat myself? Shame it wasn't the white one: but I've always liked the two-toned controllers anyway. Beyond the screen, the battery on my current unit is terrible by now, I have "drift" in one of my joy-cons, and they've actually fixed the "drift" with these latest joy-con renditions.

I did buy it on one stipulation however: that I won't open it until my actual birthday. So I won't be posting any pictures or anything until sometime after that. My copy of "Metroid Dread" also showed up today, so I'll be starting that over the weekend on my current Switch.

I mentioned previously that I've been playing "New World". It has a pretty cool graphics engine-- like all games of this type it's somewhat low-tech compared to the bleeding edge, but is still leaps and bounds over other games in the genre, like "The Elder Scrolls Online".







Here you can even see some cool looking volumetric fog. Yes I know, Unreal had that in 1998-- but it's still a neat effect which isn't commonly used.



The main thing with makes "New World" unique is that control of the map's different regions is constantly being duked out by PvP-flagged players from each of three colored factions. The controlling faction sets the tax rates for that region's town hub, and also does projects to improve the crafting stations.



The game has pretty modern looking water. It obviously just uses screen space reflections, but the resolution is pretty high, and the wave effect is nice.







Unfortunately, being in such a secular society where young people are taught to hate religion, virtually no one picks the faction I did: yellow. They are the religious faction, trying to spread faith in "the spark". The young people don't even get the name: "The Covenant"-- obviously a reference to the covenant God made with his people through Abraham.

Here you can see that yellow is about to get wiped off the map altogether.



It's difficult to capture combat screenshots, but the engine is fully real-time, like a single player game. You get slaughtered if you don't dodge and block. You get two swappable weapons-- I'm using the fire staff as my primary, and a rapier for close-range. Combat is a lot of fun.

Flagging as PvP makes your name and icon above your character turn red in the other players' views. This means that you can get ambushed at absolutely any time, adding a new "head on a swivel" tactical aspect to the gameplay: don't take the main road if you're weak!

I'll write more about "New World" as I continue to progress in it. It's the only MMORPG I've ever had fun with it-- it's all I want to play right now.

This George Clooney quote is instructive:



Everyone wants to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Today's Western world is so decadent, that people are desperately reaching to the point of hilarity for some sort of cause that they can cling to. This is what has led to Cultural Marxism, and Hollywood people equating the importance and heroism of the Normandy Landing with getting the clot shot.

Ironically, one of the key lessons of World War II resulted in the Nuremberg Trials. I guess Mr. Clooney isn't familiar with that one.

It's sort of like this "cloud migration" project I'm steeped in at work. We reached a point with computers back in the early naughts, where they did everything they needed to do: they were supporting "ecommerce" and letting people do their taxes. But in true "landfill economy" style, all of these highly paid IT engineers had to do something with their time to ensure job security-- so now we're making systems almost unsupportably complicated, to create a one percent better ecommerce experience, centralized on the servers of evil multi-billion dollar corporations.

In my daily work, I raise the stock price of a global conglomerate by a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of one percent. Yet they are willing to pay me a six figure income, just to get that miniscule return. "Landfill economy". One of the few observations which Marx got right. Or how about, "the bureaucracy needs to grow to support the growing needs of the bureaucracy."

Same thing with cars: they reached their zenith in the early naughts: they were reliable, didn't pollute anymore, got great gas mileage, and were safe. How then to continue selling new cars? "Landfill economy": start filling them with dorky, distracting "gadgets" and ridiculous "features" which no one asked for. Move the "pollution" goal post to include plant food (carbon dioxide).

Society as a whole operates this way: American was veritably racism-free, as my entire generation was raised to be color blind, to the point where I didn't even notice Obozo was black until it was explicitly pointed out to me. Now? Race and what we don't have in common is all anyone even talks about anymore: regression.

All things follow the same curve: raw, then polished, then perfected-- then tinkered with and destroyed, because rather than move on to something else, people chase the "diminishing return" curve until the changes become counter-productive, whereafter "the thing" actually regresses.

In my personal life, I wrote this blog with like thirty lines of PHP in a weekend, in October of 2007. I haven't touched the code since-- because it works, and it does exactly what I need it to do! It was "perfected"-- I moved on to other things.

Where society needs to go is towards localization: you can still have division of labor benefits, but where IT equipment and other pieces of technology are designed to function locally, and where they can be delivered to local communities, which can then be increasingly self-sufficient-- sort of like how the Enterprise in "Star Trek" delivers high-tech farming equipment to colony planets.

My blog was local to me-- so I reaped the productivity benefits of no longer needing to constantly "enhance" it, directly; whereas today, centralization means that the giant corporations "collectively" see the productivity benefits, while supply-and-demand driven wage labor prices fail to keep pace with central bank-induced (another centralization!) inflation.

The imagery from the first picture in this article is jarring, given the context of the piece itself: it's an aircraft carrier flying the Japanese flag, in the Pacific, and now with the expectation that fixed-wing aircraft will be launching from just such vessels. Takes me back to my "Aces of the Pacific" days.

But that's not what I want to discuss this morning: one thing which has been on my mind is the Pope.

First, an image: picture chief-of-security Worf on the bridge of the Enterprise, expressing more concern for the Romulan vessel about to blast them out of the stars, versus his own ship and crewmates-- for ideological reasons, or because it would get him praise from Romulan extremists on The Twatter.

That's Beijing Biden. That's Cameltoe. That's Chuckie Schumer. That's Nancy Pelosi. That's the CEOs of billion dollar corporations, including my own employer.

These people have no loyalty or moral fabric at all, other than profit and power. They will gladly throw their own people under the bus if it will make them a dime-- outsource, vilify, support domestic terrorists like "BLM" and other racist, anti-white agitators, then import cheap labor and voters via open borders to replace the old, uncooperative-with-their-ideology constituency and employees.

The reason people flock to Donald Trump is because he his platform is based on putting America's interests first: he's like the actual Worf from "Star Trek: The Next Generation"-- the ultimate champion of the ship and its safety.

What does this have to do with the Pope? He should be the ultimate champion of Catholics, the Catholic Faith, the Catholic People, and Catholic Values. Instead, he goes out of his way to throw Catholics and Catholic tradition under the bus, expressing more concern for the people who hate Catholics, than the Catholics themselves!

• He's said repeatedly that Catholics should "apologize to gays". When a Muslim terrorist shot up the Orlando night club, he blamed Christians for not being nice enough to gays. He even once said of gays, "who am I to judge?" Who are you? The Catholic Pope, for Pete's sake!


• He is repeatedly pushing for a one world government, even though that is quite literally a key facet of the "end of times", as described in Revelation.


• He has said that atheists can go to heaven, which is completely and utterly incorrect according to almost four thousand years of scripture and theological analysis.


• He repeatedly appears to support paganism: take a look at idol worship footage like this, or his Nancy Pelosi-like "we need to listen to the cry of the Earth" quotations.


• He repeatedly endorses open borders, in a total distortion of scripture. This is one theological question which I actually know something about, having worked my way through much of the Old Testament: when God told the Israelis to leave food in their fields for "aliens", that was absolutely no endorsement of deliberately sending foreign armies into the Israelite camp, to rape and pillage. When God made his Covenant with the Israelis, he told them to defeat and throw out those who were then in the "land of milk and honey".


• He requires a so-called "green pass" for pilgrims to enter Vatican City. This is another Revelation-endorsement: mark of the devil.


• In response to the Muslim terrorist-perpetrated slaughter of Charlie Hedbo, he had this to say: "...if Mr. Gasparri, my great friend, says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch. This is normal... you cannot provoke, you cannot insult other people's faiths, you cannot make fun of faith."


• I've saved these for last, as they are hearsay from an uncorroborated source, but: a prominent Italian journalist was told by the Pope that the latter does not believe that Christ was God-incarnate, and that there is in fact no hell-- souls just "disappear".

People want more Trump from the Pope, and less Beijing Biden-- and you can see this in Mass attendance numbers and the huge drop in seminarians: both were trends before Francis, but they have rapidly accelerated under him.

My impression of Francis is that he has the same basic psychological and personality makeup of a Twatter SJW. This has led him to compromise his own Christian principles with those of the diametrically incompatible "Cultural Marxist" religion. Then, in the heat of interview questions, he is weak like so many "leaders" today, saying what he thinks people want to hear, versus what it actually true.

This also raises a theological question for me: in "Mises 'Regression Theory of Money'" fashion, the Church traces its roots back to Christ Himself, who was the first Pope, and who then blessed the ecclesia-- his disciples-- thus bestowing them with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit enabled St. Peter to pass the Papal torch to St. Linus, to St. Cletus, and on and on.

In other words, it was an almost Libertarian-like notion of delegated authority, except in this case from God to Christ to Peter, and down the line. This is also why Protestantism misses the mark: just like how government has no natural authority to do ninety-nine percent of what it does, so too did Martin Luther lack the authority to redefine Christianity, throw books out of the Bible which contradicted him, and so forth.

What, then, happened with the appointment of Francis? Indeed, theoretically the current ecclesias are the present-day recipients of the wisdom of the Holy Spirit-- so how then did pretenders and usurpers control the delegation, as is clearly what appears to have happened?

I think the answer is to trust in God: there is a greater plan afoot. But still, the development is troubling for my small mind.

Having always been one of those "first kid on the block" people, I used the "Installation Assistant" to force the Windows 11 upgrade on my gaming PC this morning, and I can't get over how polished it is compared to its abysmal predecessor: this feels like the jump from Windows Me to XP-- it's that large. Everything is so crisp and snappy! That disconnected feeling where Windows and Store updates would "hang" seems like it's been either eliminated, or at least mitigated. I immediately-- as in, fifteen seconds in-- adjusted to the centered "start button" and simplified pinning system.

Of course, that aforementioned comparison breaks down "under the hood" a bit: Me to XP involved a massive kernel shift from legacy "Win9x" to full-fledged NT-- whereas, 10 to 11 involves less "guts" reinvention by comparison, to the point where absolutely everything from my VPN client to my DisplayFusion Pro window position profiles to my Open Hardware Monitor widget "just worked", right out of the box.

They added a "widgets" menu, which flies open on the left-hand side of the screen. I was actually able to add Lazio to the sports one, so I can get to their results and schedule with one click. There is a fake news one which you can't remove or customize-- but if you add three widgets and set them all to large, it gets shoved off the bottom of the screen on a 1080p display, never to be seen again.

Now it's off to fire up New World to check on gaming performance and behavior.

I am not, in fact, dead! I just haven't had much worth writing about lately-- I've already said my piece about video games, economics, politics, the WuFlu, cars, and just about everything else: everything I can say from here will just be repeating myself. I might start writing more about Catholicism, as that is a new topic for me-- but I'm not certain I'm versed enough in theology yet to not sound like a moron.

I've been playing a lot of Amazon's "New World" since it came out a few days ago. I'll do a post dedicated to it, but in general I'm really enjoying it: it's a rare game made for everyone, which actually succeeds at all of the different play styles. For me, I'm almost totally free-wandering around the map, never running out of fun things to do or explore. I'm also going to post my "Metroid Fusion" review soon, right in time for the release of "Dread".

I watched the Maricopa County election audit live presentation, but before I get to the meat of it, let me illustrate the resistance this whole process had from the Left, right up to the YouTube stream descriptions themselves:



My hope from this presentation was that little risk or fraud would be detected: this country has enough problem between the Left opening the border to a full-scale invasion, employing Totalitarian measures against innocent civilians, the full-scale institution of Fascistic corporate-government collusion, trying to destroy the ability for cities to maintain law and order, and the endless pushing of a reverse-KKK worldview. The last thing we need to add is "deliberately broken elections" to the list.

Unfortunately, my worst fears were reinforced: the presentation started out in a promising way, verifying that at least the county did not miscount the ballots, as were supplied to the auditors. The Leftist media was really quick to pick up on these first few slides and run away with them. Unfortunately, the presentation turned into a train wreck immediately after. There is no point in me reproducing their entire presentation, since you can just watch it yourself-- but let me just provide the flavor:

• The various election databases showed massive discrepancies in counts. For example, ~255,000 votes were registered which had no corresponding entries in the "received" file.


• Serial numbers for the ballots were perforated over, making them impossible to read. Many different paper stocks were used somehow.


• The server hosting the election management system had wide open admin user access to everyone who had the password, which was the standard install password for the software, and which was shared across all accounts.


• The election systems were demonstrably connected to the internet at various points. Windows Update and virus definition updates had not been run since 2019.


• The Windows Security logs were purposefully deleted by an admin account. The voting database files were deleted the day before the audit.

Lots of legislation was proposed at the end of the presentation, but as I wrote in the days following the "election", people were deliberately breaking the laws which were already there: passing more laws is not somehow going to magically fix things. Unfortunately there isn't an easy fix for this one, as people acting in this way is an outcome of decades of decadence and moral decay in America's society. Perhaps the introduction of firing squads (partially joking) for anyone who deletes security logs on election servers would provide a strong enough deterrent?

I've been getting to know a lot of the neighbors by the lake very near my house, and a consistent pattern in this rural area versus the urban area where I grew up is just now unbelievably nice the people here are. And I'm not using a watered down version of "nice" either-- I mean, genuinely and authentically nice: pretentiousless.

I was just out for my usual walk down to the lake, and it started to rain. I was in front of a neighbor's house-- we'll just call him "Mark"-- and decided to turn around. I got about three quarters up the road, and heard a car approaching. It was Mark! "Do you need a ride?" "No", I responded, "I'm almost back now. Thanks for offering though, I appreciate it!" "Ok, see you around!" he answered in turn.

Stepping off the road to let his car pass-- I'd naturally assumed he was heading into town, and just happened to see me on the way-- I heard tire noises: a car making a "k-turn". It was then that it hit me: he saw me walking, got dressed, put on his shoes, went out into the rain, hopped in his car, and drove up the road just to give me a ride!

That is the kind of absolute selflessness which I don't know I've ever personally experienced in my whole life. I'm not even family to him: I'm essentially a total stranger! Next time I see him, I am going to thank him profusely. I really think God sent him my way: I was feeling very down about people in general earlier today, so He showed me that there is a lot of good in the world too.

This entire Mark Steyn discourse is worth a read, but the below quote from the "Q and A" portion stuck out to me the most:

My understanding of Fascism is that it views "society" not as a mere shorthand word for the rolled up aggregate of individuals, but as its own organism with its own rights, separate from the human organisms of which it's composed. I thought of that as I read this piece. From the editorial, bold emphasis is mine:



In other words, the flagrant and infuriating double standard-- used purely as a wedge against the Left's political opponents-- was justified as a way to protect "the society organism's" health. In other words, Fascism! From so-called "anti-Fascists". They do this with the border too: "It's too bad your daughter got raped and murdered, but just remember that it's good for society to have millions of illegal immigrants coming in every year."

Interestingly, they also use a Paganistic take on this same formula: that the Earth-- which is just a ball of rock-- is also an organism in and of itself, and if you're opposed to "carbon credits" enriching billionaire Elon Musk, or the shutting down of the Keystone pipeline, or think that denying fossil fuel-powered ambulances to third-world people is not a nice thing to do, that you're "hurting the Earth". Of course, molecules of dirt can't be "healthy or unhealthy"-- they just are. But that's exactly how the Left tries to push their radical environmentalism.

Who can forget Nancy Pelosi's blaming wildfires on "Mother Gaia" being angry with humans?

The danger with this Fascistic line of thinking is that it can be used to rationalize anything; with an individual, it can be objectively proven that eating fifty gallons of ice cream or that having a tumor are bad for an individual's body. But with a "society", which does not have a body, who is to say what's "healthy" or "unhealthy" for it? Ditto for dirt molecules.

Whenever the question of "the greater good", "Mother Earth", or "society" comes into play regarding some proposed measure, the real question is: good for whom specifically within society? Radical environmentalism is good for Obozo's rich, grifting solar panel makers-- not so much for poor people; open borders is good for the billionaires at Amazon and Google who want cheap labor-- not so much for actual American citizens, who eat the inflation created by the welfare expansion; the BLM protestor double standard was good for Chuckie Schumer's power, not so much for flyover American's trust in the government.

And so on.

Imagine that the Ku Klux Klan spent decades co-opting universities, and taught everyone that by nature of their genetics, black homosexual people are evil colonizers.

The students then became elementary teachers so they could brainwash young children with anti-black, anti-gay toddler books; they took over the HR departments, and enacted policies to deliberately hire as many straight white men as possible; they took over media companies, and made sure every film normalized the KKK worldview; they took over the government, and even the military, calling people who complained about the KKK "domestic terrorists".

When you in turn complain about a video game's heroic characters all being Aryan master race blue-eyed "Mary Sue" white males, who run around and slaughter all of the villains and enemies, who all just happen to be black lesbians, I reply to you on Twitter: "What, you don't like having white people in video games? What a snowflake!"

I think most Leftists today who make that kind of argument are feigning ignorance: they are merely trolling with the strawman. But for those among them who legitimately don't get it, well... try exhibiting some empathy using the above mental exercise for practice. And if you still don't get how ridiculous your position is, watch this video.

I have two firearms which I've never even fired due to a lack of ammo-- until a friend sent my wife this URL. Now I've got two hundred and fifty rounds of 5.56 NATO coming for that Springfield Saint Victor I bought some time ago, and plenty of 9mm for the Ruger PPQ Q5 Match as well. Time to go shooting! Our family here have their own backstopped area for hand guns, and even a rifle range.

Onto another topic, regular readers will recall that I wrote extensively about how important it was to not comply with the WuFlu Burqa nonsense, because doing so would give the big "thumbs up" to the power brokers: unless people engaged in disobedience, "vaccine" mandates would be next. Before we put a penny into the addition, I raised the question: maybe we should relocate the family to someplace else, like Florida, Texas, South Dakota, or even Mississippi or Alabama? All I got in response was, "Sniper is such a weirdo! What a whack-job conspiracy theorist! I hate Trump because he said mean things on Twitter, and Kristi Noem is a nutcase!"

Now the "vaccine" mandates are here, and I'm getting "It's too bad we broke ground on the addition, maybe we should relocate to South Dakota? Joe is a despot, and Kristi Noem is the best!" I'm not bringing this up to shame or embarrass anyone, or even to say "I told you so"-- rather, the lesson is simple: people need to stand on principle because it's the right thing to do, not cede ground until it's something which personally causes them discomfort. And believe it or not, I do once in a while have valuable perspective: it might be worth listening to me in the future.

And on to yet another topic, I'm trying to decide whether to even keep my PlayStation 5. Sony billed this as the "Future of PlayStation", and I couldn't even make it twenty seconds in before I started rapidly paging through it to see if there was anything interesting. It was so over-the-top woke and culturally degenerate, and so filled with boring Hollywood walking simulators, that there wasn't a single game on offer I'd even consider buying.

The only actual video game they showed was Gran Turismo 7, and even that appeared to have undergone a significant downgrade when you compare it with that initial trailer-- the trailer which prompted me to pursue the system pre-order in the first place.

As I wrote in my week-one impression, I really like the PlayStation 5 unit, its dashboard (when it's not shoving Left-wing politics at me via its default "Explore" tab), and its controller-- but I'm struggling to see which niche it fills in my console line-up. With Game Pass and superior power, the Series X has the modern gaming thing wrapped up, while the Switch's portable form factor and real game-focused library owns the "old games collection" and indie areas. The only thing Sony's system has is its exclusives, which universally look terrible.

As a parting prank link, and on the "woke and morally degenerate front", check out Alex Battaglia's Instagram account. I always knew there was something a little "off" about him, but I didn't know he was this "out there". I still enjoy the guy's commentary, but let's just say his private life is a bit strange, to put it mildly.

A few weeks ago I decided to return to God: I found a parish in my new area, overcame incredible nerves to confess twenty-plus years' worth of sins to the priest, have been praying and reading the Bible daily, and have been attending Mass every Sunday since.

What a transformation-- I feel like a new man! It's given my life so much meaning and purpose. Even better, I've been taking my daughter with me to Mass, and she likes it so much that she wants to become Catholic!

Every time I say the Lord's Prayer, this line strikes me poignantly: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven." We are God's soldiers, His little worker bees down on Earth, and our goal is to construct and bring about His kingdom here. Could there be a more important mission?

Addition project excavation took place a few days ago, it's fantastic that the project finally underway! The new septic tanks are in place, and the hole for the basement portion is fully dug. My property was filled with trucks and giant tractors all week, took up a lot of my time communicating with everyone, on top of my full-time career which was also very busy this past week.





I spent four and a half hours this afternoon slogging through the mud, carefully seeding and raking all three thousand-plus square feet of dirt you see here. I should hopefully get enough grass growth over the next week or two to prevent erosion, particularly around the mounds. I had about twenty pounds of clay caked onto my boots by the end!

Next step will be the concrete pouring, along with the electrician to hook the pump from the lift tank to the main tank, then fluids out to the drain field. From there, the main floor construction can begin! Tomorrow will be mowing, then hopefully after that I can take a couple of days to relax.

I spent some time this afternoon in Flight Simulator flying directly into the major hurricane, from the North. Here is what it looked like as I approached, click for the full size version:



After flying directly through the wall of cloud pillars, this is what I was greeted with on the inside:



I climbed to as high as the Beechcraft Bonanza would let me go without stalling: 12,200 feet-- but it wasn't anywhere near high enough. To see how close I was to the top, I took the drone camera upwards, and several thousand feet yet higher I was greeted with this astonishing view.



I then initiated a slow descent, getting buffeted and ricocheted everywhere, all the way down to 1000 feet-- and even at that low level, visibility was zero. I had to abort my attempt to land near New Orleans, instead heading back to the Northeast for a bit, whereupon I performed a haphazard-yet-successful landing at some small airfield.



Here is my plane, safe and sound after its incredible journey.

This is a very interesting video, in that I see this stuff just about daily in my workplace-- but for some reason, the critical mass of my co-workers don't seem to understand that they are being manipulated towards the goal of instituting Communism.

Any time you hear terms like "ally", "the people's [insert word]", "social democrat", "people of color", "activate", "have a conversation", "equity", "tell a story", or any other myriad expressions, your tail should immediately go up: almost certainly the person saying those things is not only a straight-up Communist, but a radical activist.

Once you peel back the onion and see that individual X, who says they aren't a radical but rather that they just want to "have a conversation", you see that they are cross-board members with both educational institutions, and literal Marxist groups-- as listed on those very organization's web sites, for those who bother to look. They are lying to you in their denial. There is also a lot of overlap with so-called "organized labor".

Speaking of looking people up, I did some quick investigations into this Trevor Louden-- turns out he was very active in his native New Zealand, combating the Soviet influence there in the 1980s.

The "triple-A" space is in a terrible position, something about which I remarked here-- but pleasantly, an entire parallel games industry has emerged, almost totally separate from the "primary" one, and it's cranking out incredible stuff, to the point where for the first time in twenty years I find myself not really playing older games much.

Just take a look at this: it's a brand new Game Boy Advance release, but will also-- provided enough funding becomes available-- see an enhanced, "Hi-Bit" Switch port. Incredible! The art style is mildly pretentious maybe, but not to enough of a degree to annoy me. We've had home brew games on older systems for a long time now, but what if we start seeing old systems used as new systems, with cross-platform releases with modern hardware become a normal thing? Talk about exciting!

The "OptiDoom" guy wants to make a brand new first-person shooter for 3DO, and he already has my name down as level designer and composer-- so I'm willing to do my part. If my baseline mental health improves, I also want to dive head first into making more "Sniperpon Productions" releases but this time for PCs proper, using "Godot Engine" as opposed to Fuze on Switch.

One other trend I'm starting to see, and this one is just as potentially exciting if it continues: indie game mentality trickling into the "triple-A" space. New engines are so capable that smaller development teams can make games with modern graphics on a smaller-ish budget, provided they keep their core scope contained. For instance, these (ignore the annoying music) are the best graphics I've ever seen in a video game-- maybe even better than the latest "Ratchet and Clank"-- yet look at how experimental the gameplay is!

In particular, pay attention to the: texture resolution, particle effects everywhere, volumetric dynamically-lit fog, incredible temporal reconstruction or upscaling, volumetric fluid dynamics and clouds, per-object motion blur, Bokeh depth of field, plus insanely rich and high contrast lighting. Wifey watched this and couldn't even believe it was a game: "it looks like a modern-day CGI movie." I get major "Wonderful 101" and "Splatoon" vibes; more games like this please!

I get that the precedent-based English Common Law system is one of the foundational tenets which led to the formation of contemporary Western society, but precedent isn't everything, as this piece illustrates well. If I proclaim "well, I murdered someone last month, so what the heck", obviously the act of murder is still immoral. I don't care if corporations already mandate other vaccines, nor do I care if somehow FDA approval has formerly meant that everyone views whatever food and drug as being magically safer after that point, along with innumerable other possible examples: wrong is wrong, and each instance of some act needs to be ethically evaluated in a vacuum.

I've already tried to drive this point home before, but I think it's worth restating-- the argument to be made against the WuFlu injections is that it's morally wrong to force someone to undergo a medical "treatment" against their will: full stop. And yes, excluding them from society is "forcing against their will." Even if the WuFlu didn't have a 99.9% survival rate-- let's presume 90% of people die from it, and let's also presume that the "vaccines" actually inoculate-- forcing vaccination is not an acceptable route. There are dozens of other solutions which could mitigate people becoming ill, which are perfectly ethical.

The more I ponder the new Z, the more doubts I start to have. For starters, people who follow the recent car industry more closely than I say that there is zero chance of getting this car for anywhere near forty thousand: dealers will install options, markups will be made, and in practice even the base model is essentially going to be a fifty thousand dollar car, if not even more.

But the bigger issue, and one which led me to extreme dismay regarding this impending model, is what I found at the bottom of the official product page: "automatic braking", "collision warnings", "blind spot warnings", "land departure warnings"-- this car has every nightmare in the books: it's as bad as my mother-in-law's Subaru Forester!

I'm not the only one who gets completely and utterly overwhelmed by all of this gadgetry, check out this article. While it focuses on pensioners, I suspect you would get the same types of responses from many forty year-olds like myself, not to mention a lot of it is personality-driven (bold emphasis is mine):



All of this leads me to: for that kind of money, why in the world wouldn't I just buy a used C7 Corvette, of which they are tons on used car sites? The new Z isn't even on the same planet in terms of performance, and best of all this Corvette generation started in 2014: it doesn't have any of the "safety" stuff at all! It still has a touch screen, which is somewhat annoying, but that's about it.

The base model has 460 bhp, a seven speed manual, can do 0-60 in 3.6 seconds, pulls 1.03g on the skidpad, and can brake from 60 to 0 in 100 feet. Those are supercar numbers. I can get one for fifty thousand bucks, with less than seven thousand miles on it: essentially a brand new car. It's also exotic looking. The only downside I can think of is that I see a lot of them in my rural area. But I shouldn't let that dissuade me.

Food for thought.

This Ron DeSantis guy is absolutely the best. Of course, I can answer his question regarding why Xiden couldn't care less about American citizens trying to escape Afghanistan, but wants Federal stormtroopers to strap masks onto Kindergartners against those kids' parents' wills.

Present-day Democrats are only concerned with furthering ideological goals. Afghanistan provides them with another opportunity to flood America with Democrat-voting aliens-- so when you see that plane shot, with the hold filled with foreigners, that's what it's about. Beyond that, the Democrats don't care about Afghanistan, they hold their own citizens in contempt anyway, so yes, why would Xiden interrupt his vacation to provide safety for them? Raggedy Ann put foreign nationals in the same category as US citizens when saying whom would get priority at the airport during a press conference, and that tells you everything you need to know.

Regarding Kindergartners, The Ideology requires absolute conformity to its pantheon of beliefs, and that requires not just that children to be subjected to indoctrination by the "teachers", but that the children are taught to submit and obey: here are the right answers, here is the proper way to view the world, now shut up, memorize, and regurgitate. I have a family member who has been in different prisons, so I've seen those places from the inside while visiting-- and when I see shots of kids in schools today, masked, hands by their sides, forced to stand feet apart, I observe that my family member literally has more freedom in prison then these kids do in "school". And that is by design.

So in the contemporary Democrat worldview, the Kindergartners thing literally is a higher priority than Afghanistan, and it's easy to see how if you view it through the lens of their religion.

Here it is, finally and officially. Nissan's social media rep repeatedly responded to YouTube comments asking about price with "starting around forty thousand". I'll go test drive one of these in the spring, and if I like it, I'll buy it. Apparently they're offering two trims, but even though I could technically afford the higher-end one, it's tough to justify so much money for a car: so I'll get the cheaper one, replacing a blue Z with another blue Z.

This new Z is everything I have been dreaming about for a decade: four hundred horse power, a manual transmission, and a modernized design take-- the back end especially, as in my book the 300ZX has always had a top three rear of any car, ever.

If I don't like it, I'll go try out the new Toyobaru "GR 86": it's obviously not in the same power class as the new Z, but I've heard it's just as pleasant to drive as the current generation MX-5. The new WRX reveal got pushed back to September, and while one of those would be more practical given my wintry rural setting with sketchy plowing, I'm not impressed with the long-term build quality of my wife's, and I really want another sports car, having been obsessed with them since about age three.

I've been carefully watching everything my employer's HR department has been saying with regards to the WuFlu, and it doesn't look like they are going to mandate the injections. It's difficult to anticipate though, since from day one they have been making one unscientific and unsubstantiated statement after another:



Apparently some Karens are complaining, and the company is telling them to suck it up. In isolation this is a good thing, but fully recognize that it's because they are worried profits are about to take a huge hit due to Xiden's price inflation-- not because they are suddenly concerned with being rational regarding the WuFlu itself.



"Safe and effective", huh?

On the first point, the VAERS database says otherwise. In fact, people who have had the WuFlu and "recovered"-- you know, from the sniffles-- like me are almost four times more likely to have an "adverse effect": you know, like death. This is why the shots need to be on a person-by-person basis, as they are not blanket "safe" for everyone.

As for "effective", take a look at Israel: "the cases, the cases!" Except, 80% of their country has had two doses of the various injections. Or what about that recent cruise ship outbreak where everyone had the shots? Or how about in Massachusetts, where 74% of the infected had the shots?

And by the by, the people who have had the shots are still spreading pathogen, just like the people who haven't had the injections.



Oh oh, someone has been asking too many questions: "But I thought the CDC said...?" And here it comes: "Yup, better wear a mask even if you've had the shots." But in the paragraph above, they said the injections are "effective"? So why would I need to wear a mask if I've had the shots? Hello?

And about those masks: cloth and surgical masks do not prevent the spread of viruses. So what in the world does that have to do with making the office "safer"?

But here comes the real kicker: the company prohibited use of the office for months-on-end, because it was way too dangerous for anyone to work there. Now, they say that the risk of working there was "medium to low" all along. If that was true, then why was it ever closed? What does "medium" or "low" even mean, incidentally? By what metrics? Did they do studies? What kind of science is applied to come up with those terms?

In any event, now they are saying that the risk of working in the office is "almost zero." Almost zero! Because people are taping a Kleenex to their nose, and have had mysterious injections which don't stop them from transmitting or catching the virus. The office went from "so dangerous it had to be closed" to "almost zero risk", and nothing actually changed-- other than rising input cost inflation!

Then they drop the myth about it being the people who haven't had the shots being the ones spreading pathogen, which as I illustrated above-- and can with a dozen other sources and examples-- is simply not true. In fact, the data suggests to the guy who invented this "vaccine" technology that people who have had the shots are spreading the virus at an increased rate, versus those who haven't.

One last thing: notice how there are zero sources linked to any of the above. It's all unsubstantiated, pulled out of their rear ends, simply because they are afraid of profits dropping-- not because they care about their employee's health in any way, shape, or form.

This goes for all governments, corporations, and so on: you need to be your own champion, stand your own ground, and make the health choices which are right for your body, and your own situation.

Wondering where the heck Afghanistan even was, and what Kabul looked like, I hopped into "Flight Simulator" and flew from New Delhi to the aforementioned Afghan capital. Here is what I saw once I arrived, click for the raw version as captured straight from the Series X:



Off topic, but my son and I have been progressing in "No Man's Sky". Here is what my primary base looked like, as of yesterday, with my fighter and hauler space ships. Once again, click for the original file from the Series X:

I've said before that Hi-Bit is the most important development in the video game industry since the proliferation of polygons in the mid-90s, and the output just keeps coming. Here are just a handful of games which have me really excited, and it's just the tip of the iceberg. If you look at places like Inin or Limited Run, there is so much output that you could have a very fulfilling hobby and never leave Hi-Bit.

• Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon (gameplay)
• TMNT: Shredder's Revenge (gameplay)
• Blazing Strike (gameplay)
• Metal Slug Tactics (gameplay)

The graphical style is obvious, but also pay close attention to the audio, plus the gameplay-centric (virtually exclusive) design: Hi-Bit isn't just an art style-- it's a philosophy, a specific mentality and way to make video games. It's putting what the medium does distinctively on the highest pedestal, and maximizing that potential, without watering things down on counter-productive detours.

All four of these games are going to be on the Switch. Something as outdated as that is already at "hardware of forever" levels, as there is no realistic cap on 2d performance, or barely any theoretical cap at that, as even filling the 720p screen entirely with one pixel sprites wouldn't drop below 60 fps, with well-optimized code.

After Vladimir Putin, Orban is at least the second world leader I've heard say this, the sentiment being that it's so much easier to negotiate with a fellow world leader, when that leader is putting their own country first: "America First, Hungary First". Makes sense to me.

Speaking of putting America last, I haven't wanted a piece of legislation to die this bad since Obozocare-- in fact, this one is worse for me personally: if passed, it will completely, absolutely, and permanently ruin cars and driving, both things very dear to me. This would happen at the Federal level, meaning there would be no escaping it.

I've been trying really hard to improve my sleep. I haven't slept well most of the past decade due to an anxiety disorder and a continuous state of derealization, but over the past ten days I've only gotten zero-to-three hours of sleep per night. Last night I tried a new technique to calm my mind, and slept from 21:00 to 3:00: I'm still tired, but six hours with decent REM is at least approaching acceptable limits.

I'm so impressed with the Series X that I finally decided to just clobber Winbloze from my PC altogether, and have gone back to Manjaro full-time: feels good to be "back home", so-to-speak. While it's true that these RDNA2 APUs aren't quite at the level of Nvidia's Turing, and nowhere near approaching Ampere, they produce stable 60 fps gameplay at reconstructed 4K-- and the ray tracing is actually much better than I thought it'd be. The Series X is "good enough" for me to not need Winbloze anymore.

I saw a few interesting nuggets in this month's Wireframe issue. First, the kids and I got our Evercade a few days ago-- it was the prize we won in the Fuze competition-- and while I recognized the white and red scheme as being obviously Famicom-inspired, the influence for the size and shape of the cartridges confused me, especially the distinctive flat labeled sides. Well, take a look at page 85 and the picture on the left-hand margin, then compare.

Second, working backwards for some reason, page 80 sees the two grand prize Fuze competition winners featured. It's not clear to me how they "imported" assets into Fuze, externally. Third, on page 34, Kim Justice has a thought-provoking editorial about contemporary sports games. I would make sports games not just simpler, but use sprite rotation interpolation for the art style, like what is mentioned in this video about the trees in "Flight Simulator", or like what I wrote about way back in 2012.

It's stuff like this which makes me extremely reticent to get into the Apple "ecosystem". On the one hand I'm thankful they disclosed this before they implemented it-- as Snowden and others have revealed, usually this stuff just happens in the dead of night, without anyone knowing until the people in power are forced to reveal their schemes. And of course, there is an element of who doesn't want to make it more difficult to child predators to hold and distribute these images? Everyone supports this sentiment, in the abstract.

But I can't support the precedent of my own computer scanning my personal files, then reporting me to "the authorities". Today it's child porn, tomorrow it's someone who happened to take a picture of a Lego set of the capitol building; or an Italian who saved a picture of a template WuFlu "Green Pass"; or someone who took a picture of their favorite firearm, to share with a friend.

This also brings up a larger, more personal point: my employer is very visibly outsourcing their entire IT department, so I'm sure I'll get the axe in the next few years, right after I train my Indian or Chinese replacement of course. I simply can't stand web development-- it may be eleven years old now, but the first response to this chain is more relevant even now than it was then-- and my solution to this problem is to re-launch my entire career as "the AR guy": I think it's going to be the next "iPhone moment", and I want to hitch my wagon to it.

But damn do these technology companies make it difficult to support them: it's what happens in a world where ethics and principles have lost out to consequentialism. Remember, we have no source code to what runs an iPhone: just because they say that system A works like this, or that you can shut stuff off, doesn't mean the "off" button even does anything. A big part of me wants to just become a "hermit in the woods": I already have my own well and lots of gardening space.

On a totally unrelated note, I've had Rainbow's first three albums on repeat for the past few weeks-- specifically "Long Live Rock N Roll", which you can hear in full here. Also don't miss this, which is them live in 1977 performing "Kill the King"-- unbelievable!

I need to update this list with all of the new crazy stuff the Democrats want to do, such as let millions of illegal aliens in to vote, or turn every car into the Subaru Forester. Which by the way, I found a leaked, top secret prototype for what the new government cars will look like-- I hope I don't get in hot water for uploading it:



When I replace the Z this fall, it'll be tempting to just trade in wifey's WRX as well and get two new cars, then rust proof the hell out of their underbodies-- get in before the nanny state stuff goes full tilt.

Imagine that your wife takes a baseball bat to the cat every time you say something she doesn't like-- then you overhear her the next day complaining to the neighbor: "my husband is so brutal to the cat, I don't know how he can be so violent and cruel!" That's the exact rhetorical tune the establishment-- State actors, CNN, et al.-- is singing right now regarding the WuFlu injections: "people who won't get the 'vaccine' are authoritarian: just look at how they're making us wear masks again!" It's like children on the playground: "he made me do it!"

Is anyone stupid enough to fall for this line? What I've seen in my personal life-- and yes, it's anecdotal, but it goes give me a modicum of hope-- is that the people around me who went full-retard regarding the WuFlu, went out and got their shots (and got sick from them, incidentally), and are now partying with friends like it's 1999. We'll see as the days and weeks progress from here, but so far I haven't seen even a hint from them that they are heading back towards their prior forty IQ levels: if anything, they seem to be completely tuning things out altogether.

After making people suffer so badly-- suicides, drug overdoses, depression, all at record highs-- from the establishment gunpoint-enforced lockdowns and mask mandates, then telling them that a magic shot will make everything ok, then letting them taste freedom, I don't think the genie can be stuffed back into that bottle: I just don't think the public appetite is there to go through it all over again, even among the most neurotic. Crossing my fingers.

Yesterday, I penned a not-so-flattering take on "No Man's Sky", concluding that it was designed for a very select type of person. I then installed it on my son's PC, and I hadn't seen him having that much fun playing a game since the day he discovered his other favorites, like "Minecraft", "Cities: Skylines", and "Roblox". My son is one of those "select types of people" as it turns out, and I moved the Series X near where his PC is, as we're going to try out multiplayer today.

On another kid note, and unlike pretty much every other kid today, my daughter has been asking me to teach her how to drive since she was about six years old. "As soon as you can reach the pedals, and can see over the steering wheel", I always told her. She's now eleven years old and about the height of a short adult-- five feet tall. So I put her in wifey's WRX, and in about ten minutes had her able to get the car moving from a dead stop in first gear. And once you get first gear down, the rest is easy. Her only struggle was that the throttle felt very sensitive to her foot-- but that will come with time.

If anyone's employers are trying to force them to get a WuFlu-related injection, check out this page for resources. It's phenomenal stuff, but I do have a constructive criticism, which is that I don't really like the emphasis on "non-FDA approved" aspect, for two reasons.

First, it's not like FDA approval of anything including actual food products actually means those things are necessarily safe-- our entire society is essentially eating obesity and heart disease-fueling poison, and it's all FDA approved; hanging up on FDA approval is missing the point. Second, you just know these "vaccines" are going to get rammed through the approval process anyway-- if the argument is focused on a lack of FDA approval, what happens to that argument once the "vaccines" are "approved" two weeks from now?

The better argument is the moral one: it's obviously unethical to force someone to inject themselves with a substance, under threat of severe duress. That is an argument which resonates with everyone-- which is why when I've heard it posed, there is a mad scramble by the "vaccine" proponent to come up with some kind of ex post facto justification or analogy: after all, don't you know that requiring someone wear shoes in a store is the same thing as coercing them into undergoing a potentially lethal medical procedure?

Speaking of ethics, I've been thinking about the concepts of patriotism and loyalty a lot recently. Take this, where it's-- very accurately, if you ask me-- explained that the elites are selling off the remaining scraps of the country to the Chinese. Rather than trying to save the sinking ship, they'd rather scuttle it to make a quick buck off of the spare parts. Or read this piece, which is in the same line of thought.

Austrian economists routinely explain that the homo econimicus model is wrong: people make decisions all of the time in their lives, where they place non-monetary considerations-- often moral-- ahead of brute wealth accumulation. An example would be someone who volunteers for a charity: they are losing time and money, but do it anyway because they rate the moral value higher than the cash: it's the opposite of homo economicus.

CEOs, politicians, and other power mongers have always had strong sociopathic strains-- so I'm not expecting American C-Suite types to be saints. But at the same time, isn't there any part of their soul, which whispers to them as they wholesale sell out jobs on which their very American neighbors depend, to people in in a country thousands of miles away, just to save some pocket change on the bottom line?

I fully understand the financial argument: corporations need to control their expenses, and if they don't keep labor costs in line with their competitors, their stock price will fall and the company will lose investment-- perfectly valid, and I "get it" in the abstract. But details matter: is that argument actually true in many of these cases? We just saw the greatest wealth transfer from small businesses to giant corporations in the history of corporations-- and what do they turn around and do? Lay people off, and replace them with Indians or Chinese workers.

Let's say a Fortune 500 corporation made 3.3 billion USD profit in their last fiscal year. Let's also say that it would cost this corporation an additional 300 million USD per annum to keep the jobs at home, versus abroad. How much would EPS suffer? Would it really torpedo the company to make 3 billion in profit versus 3.3 billion? And why couldn't they gain new investors, by emphasizing that the corporation is focused on creating vibrant, thriving communities here at home, whereas their competitors are vultures?

I'm not expecting these CEOs to take extraordinary action, like throwing their bodies onto a pile of corpses to hold up the flag, as is described in the "Star-Spangled Banner"-- or to run up the beach at Normandy directly into a pillbox's machine gun fire. But surely their is some small part of them, towards which an appeal could be made?

I think a Left-Right populist coalition in America could be really interesting: every Bernie Bro I see has a "buy local" sign in his yard, and the Trump supporters are all about protectionism. It would be a bit like the "Yellow Vests" in France, where their creed was a bizarre mix of Commie stuff, like mandatory labor unions for corporations, with Libertarian ideas emphasizing individual rights and dignity.

Holy cow, if I had neighbors they'd probably be annoyed at my guffawing: this is an absolute listen. You should hear it straight from the horse's mouth, so-to-speak, but just to summarize, in part to cement my own understanding:

People who have gotten the shots are, as the efficacy of the "vaccine" wanes in their bodies, significantly more susceptible to re-infection than people who have not gotten the shots. Further, it's the people who have gotten the shots who appear to be spreading the mutants, not the people who haven't been jabbed. The Pfizer "vaccine" has the lowest durability, as such it's people who have gotten that one, who are the "first up" in terms of risk-- but the same fate probably will await those who got one of the other two shot sets, sooner or later.

Of course, it's the so-called "unvaccinated" who are being blamed for "spreading the 'delta variant'"-- not surprisingly, that supposition is materializing to be the exact opposite of reality, as does everything the establishment pushes in modern times.

But the real thing which got me was this: Dr. Robert Malone, the guy who quite literally invented mRNA "vaccines", and who one would think ought to know more than anyone how they work, is being censored online for spreading "disinformation". The guy who invented them! He's also being called an "anti-vaxxer"-- the dude who has spent his entire life inventing vaccines! There is lots of competition, but this might be the nuttiest thing the Left has yet done.

My mom always told me, "don't do drugs, no matter how much peer pressure there is." Turns out she was right!

I fired up Flight Simulator on the Series X yesterday and was pretty disappointed: the game runs great, but where I'd assumed they'd have completely re-designed the user interface to be controller-centric, instead I found that the UI is essentially untouched, and that they're expecting the player to move a semi-sticky mouse cursor around the screen with the left analog stick. Just getting through my pre-flight checklist, communicating with the tower, and getting the plane in the air took twice the time it does on PC. The Series port does fully support a mouse and keyboard, but if I'm going to drape peripheral cables onto my bed and fumble for some kind of mouse-friendly "comfy couch" surface, why not just run the PC version, which is hooked up to the same television?

On top of the frustrating controls, I'm also constantly taking and editing screenshots in the PC version, plus hacking the ".pln" files to put in custom GPS waypoints-- stuff with is either cumbersome or impossible on a closed console. Interestingly, the menus were totally broken when I first ran the game. After a bit of fiddling, I found that this was because the game imported my PC controller settings, something about which broke the menus. So if you're like me and played the PC version to death first, make sure to create a fresh controller profile from the defaults. Of course, don't overwrite your PC controller profile by accident!

I'm sure console-only players will have a lot of fun with the port, and it's nice that I have Flight Simulator installed on another device in my home in case anyone wants to come over and play co-op. But it sort of reminds me of playing "Warcraft II" on the Sega Saturn: it's possible, but if you have a DOS PC, better to just play it there.

On another game-related note, it's funny how things come full circle: I was a regular reader and occasional poster on NeoGAF, a long long time ago-- a forum which I came to call "NeoGAG", because it had been taken over by radical Leftists, SJWs, and pedophillic admins-- until the site imploded, at which point I jumped to "ResetEra". That forum wound up being the largest SJW nest I'd ever encountered, as they wound up banning over forty percent of the registered accounts for "wrong speak", almost always for politely disagreeing with someone over Woke religious precepts-- blasphemy! In my case, I posted a link to an innocuous YouTube video and was banned as a "white supremacist", even though the video had literally nothing to do with that concept.

Fast forward to 2021, and NeoGAF has not only banned all political discussion on the site, but the conversations half the time aren't that much different than what I read on 4chan or Gab! Bizarre.

Democrats, multiple of whom want to force WuFlu injections and face masks on everyone including on airlines, flee Texas to deliberately circumvent democracy-in-action, because they don't want to vote on a bill which would close common sense loopholes in the existing election laws-- because they require illegal alien votes to stay in power. On their way out, they fly on a plane without wearing masks. Several of them contract the WuFlu, despite already having been "vaccinated".

They travel to Washington D.C. to get effusive adoration from the White House, and in turn infect what looks like a large percentage of the people who work in that building. This forces Raggedy Ann on the defensive, and when pressed won't say how many people-- that's how you know it's a lot. All of this in turn forces the White House to change their tune on the "vaccines": "ok, they don't protect you, but they make the symptoms mild."

While that's technically a true statement, it's also a lie by omission: your symptoms are mild whether you've had the shots or not!

As I've written many times before, the difference between Wikipedia and the Left's "Conservapedia"-- the hilariously named "Rational Wiki"-- has been rapidly diminishing for ages. As such, I really like Larry Sanger and the work he's been doing in calling Wikipedia out. But his solutions seem doomed to failure.

Back when the "selection" occurred, I pointed out that if you have a serial thief in your house, you can go around installing locks on every door within the home-- but the thief is going to circumvent every measure, because... they're a thief! The only solution is to eject them from the household.

Same goes for elections: you can't reform them if half the country is hell-bent determined to cheat in any and every way possible. And same thing with Wikipedia: introduce some kind of search system, and the Left will simply co-opt it-- just look at what a laughingstock Google has been for a long time; ditto for a rating system.

The only solution is to forcibly jettison these people from not just being able to edit Wikipedia articles, but from the country itself! And even that has risks, because they would probably just assemble an army in their new country, then come back to attack you from outside.

To play devil's advocate however, I do notice that Cultural Marxism is wobbling around on its last legs, getting banned in increasing numbers of school districts, plus getting exposed in corporations-- so perhaps the light of truth will cause reform? I'd like to think I played my small part with this blog in exposing the Frankfurt School nonsense, as I was writing about it years before the idea was exposed on the current wider spectrum.

Pro Evo is having its "Gran Turismo Sport" moment: no single player, focus on so-called "e-sports". Looks like I'm going to be installing (thanks, Game Pass) last year's edition as a sort of "Pro Evo of forever"-- an iteration which I'd skipped due to the promise of a true "next-gen" release this year.

I don't disagree with their decision to make a platform-based game: I've been saying forever that sports franchises should go that way. But I quite literally have zero interest in playing multiplayer: I'm an offline "Master League" kind of guy.

My second disappointment is how primitive the graphics look: we all know what's possible with Unreal Engine 4-- what exactly has the development team been doing all of this time? This game should look like "Rift Apart", but on a football pitch. It makes me wonder if all of Konami's talented developers jumped ship when the company started distancing itself from internal game development in general.

Of course, due to backlash they are going to renege on this "multiplayer only" thing and eventually add single player content-- just like what happened with the aforementioned "GT Sport": I just need to be patient.

I'm going to send this guy some cash: I have children of my own, so it's of particular value to me to know which toy or board game companies to avoid. Bravo on him, and the video is so shocking, that it doesn't surprise me why he felt the need to come forward.

The point he makes about kids observing things, because that's what kids do, and it doesn't make them "racist", is spot-on.

One time a little girl pointed at me, and asked her mom very loudly, "Mom, is that a boy or a girl?", because I had and have long hair and a beard. I busted out laughing! The little girl wasn't being "sexist"-- she was just trying to make sense of what she was seeing, in the same way she'd have asked about a tree or the moon or anything else.

When I was about two, my mom said I pointed to a black guy in a wheelchair, and said "Mom, look at the brown boy in the stroller!" Again, I wasn't a "racist two year old"-- it really was a boy (male) with brown skin, in a chair with wheels (a "stroller", which was the only descriptive word I had at that age, for that kind of conveyance).

I also really like the Black Supremacy built into their framework: what they're saying is that a black kid in, let's say, Nigeria will not be a "racist" kid towards white people-- but a white kid in, say, Wayzata Minnesota will be a "racist" towards blacks, just because the kid is "white". That sounds like "Black Master Race" kind of talk-- they're apparently genetically superior!

I love that clip at the end, of a Hasbro C-Suite getting confronted about this: I can guarantee there was a meeting between him and the HR lady the very next day, "what the hell are we going to do about this?" Either he'll choose to be brave too, or he'll be like my own employer's CEO: go along with the religion because Millennials are the biggest group of consumers right now.

I saw this and laughed: there is no way the Steam Deck is comparable in per-pixel power to a Series X, because games on the latter by-and-large don't run at native 4K-- they are upscaled, usually from 1440p.

But then I saw that the observation was made by Durante, who really knows his stuff-- this prompted me to give the notion a second thought, at which point it occurred to me that comparing the Series X at 1440p to the Steam Deck at 800p isn't apples-to-apples: why can't the Steam Deck do some upscaling too?

That thought in mind, I pulled out the proverbial napkin and did some crunching.


Series X at 1440p (55% pixel reduction from 4K)

• 1440p = 3,686,400 pixels
• 12500 gigaflops
• Each gigaflop responsible for 294 pixels
• Each CU responsible for 70,898 pixels

Steam Deck at 16:10 800p

• 800p = 1,024,000 pixels
• 1600 gigaflops
• Each gigaflop responsible for 640 pixels
• Each CU responsible for 128,000 pixels

Steam Deck at 16:10 504p (55% pixel reduction from 16:10 800p)

• 504p = 451,584 pixels
• 1600 gigaflops
• Each gigaflop responsible for 282 pixels
• Each CU responsible for 56,448 pixels

Conclusion

If you take the Steam Deck at native resolution, Durante is way off-- he's not even in the ballpark. But if you apply the same level of resolution scaling, turns out that the numbers are reasonably close, with the Steam Deck even having a slight advantage!

Put another way, Durante's observation isn't as crazy as it initially seems. Of course, there are lots of other variables-- I'm not sure these things scale linearly for one, given other potential architecture bottlenecks. It's still a fun thing to consider though.

Ultimately however, the value I personally see in the Steam Deck is as a RetroArch machine, and as a Steam Remote Play device for the bloodiest of the bleeding edge games, where people's mighty Turing and Ampere cards can do the grunt work, sort of like a Wii U part deux where a fixed box did the processing, and sent the feed over the LAN to the mobile component.

On a side note, I went back to "Monster Hunter Rise" on the Switch-- which was the next title in my review backlog-- and it's a blurry mess which is literally dropping down to the teens in terms of framerate in busy moments, when the system is docked. I'll play a bit in handheld mode today to see if things fare better.

Overall, I'm tempted to shelve the game and just buy the inevitable PC port on Steam when it comes out: provided it works via Proton, the Steam Deck "version" will easily run at 800p, and probably at a locked sixty frames per second too. If I go that route and double-dip-- it is a really fun game, even in spite of the low performance-- I'll post video recordings of both devices running the game, side-by-side.

Re-read this post of mine, then take a look at what's happening: I'm hardly a rocket scientist, but even I called it. So tell me again, what's the point of getting one of the so-called "vaccines"? It plainly looks to me like the "vaccines" just caused the virus to mutate. The people who took this shot must feel like total morons at this point: I tried to warn them repeatedly on this blog.

Now they've done God-knows-what to their bodies, and they're just going to get the virus anyway. Good going!

And if just one round of these shots can cause paralysis, sterility, and fatal heart problems-- not to mention countless side effects which will become apparent over the next five, ten, and fifteen years-- imagine people getting a series every year for "COVID-20", "COVID-21", the "Omega Variant", the "Gamma Variant", and on and on?

On this subject, a friend of mine read this from a doctor recently, and sent it to me:



This kind of rhetoric really burns me up-- I don't know if it's political ideological control freakery, frantic terror at the prospect of getting sick, or the fact that subconsciously they're leery that they've made the right choice and want everyone in their camp, which is short-circuiting their ability to think clearly, but no matter the reason they don't seem to realize that they are toying with people's lives.

Four million people have died... with the WuFlu, or from the WuFlu? Big Difference! We know that in the US, influenza deaths were materially zero this past season, because all of them got blamed on the WuFlu. What were the ages of the people who died? What were their BMIs? What comorbidities did they have? How many of them were perfectly healthy, active, and fit thirty nine year olds, like me? How do we know the post-humous PCR "positive" results were even valid, on the number of cycles being used? How many people die from disease in general every year?

"Four million people had bad eyesight last year." Ok, but mine is fine-- why would I risk LASIK eye surgery if I have 20/20 vision? "But you can't spread bad eyesight." Great, then just have the eighty year olds take the "vaccine", if they want it-- they haven't as much to lose, so-to-speak, as they are approaching or exceeding median lifespan age anyway.

And you've taken the "vaccine" already-- so why do you care if I have? Aren't you "protected"?

"Yes, but we need to protect the people who aren't 'vaccinated'." No you don't: we've already decided that we don't care if we get the virus-- we don't want or need your "protection"! In my case, I've already had the WuFlu and "recovered" (from two weeks of the sniffles and a back rash)! I have the antibodies already.

All of this analysis goes doubly-- triply!-- for children incidentally: I've read too-many-to-count reports of perfectly healthy eight year-olds or teenagers found dead in bed: autopsy? Heart failure due to inflammation, just three days after "the vaccine". Children are at-- just about literally!-- zero risk of even being symptomatic, much less killed, by the virus itself. They also don't spread it, even if they've got it.

And by the way, let's not also forget that there are very effective non-"vaccine" treatments for the virus, such as Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, Remdesivir, and so on-- what's the data on those? For very nearly everyone, unless you're eighty years old and obese, the benefits of the "vaccine" do not outweigh the risks-- and if a younger person does get very sick, maybe one of these other drugs is a good option?

In any event and to wrap this up, this scenario we find ourselves in can't just be about the WuFlu itself, because it has a 99.9% survival rate, and the pushy people have already been "vaccinated"-- it's something else, and I'm not certain what that "else" is. I don't like mysteries. This whole situation just reinforces my views of how adolescent the "adult" population is in the world today-- it's a world run by intellectual toddlers, who never satisfied their basic developmental stages, and are pulled around via their noses by subconscious needs.

Web sites really need to come up with some way to stop "scalpers" and bots, because this reminded me the day I eventually landed a PlayStation 5:



But in the end, victory! The more I thought about this thing from early this morning to the moment I could place the pre-order, the more sense it made for the way I play games.

The Switch whetted my appetite for and got me addicted to the "play on TV or in handheld" formula, but I've been desperate for a blend of that equation which wasn't rooted in 2005 Xbox 360-caliber graphics, in the year 2021: it's totally absurd. Then came the "Switch OLED" announcement, and...

But completely out of the blue, here comes good old Gabe to do what Nintendon't! There are several ways in which I plan to use this thing-- you'll quickly see why it's a good option for me:

• PC Mode: Now that my actual PC is one hundred percent Windows, this will be my dedicated GNU/Linux, Arch ("SteamOS") box for non-gaming usage.


• Super-Charged Wii U Mode: For games which need more grunt, I can stream my Windows PC straight to the unit via Steam "Remote Play".


• Nintendo Switch Mode: Play games in handheld mode, or set it in the dock which will be plugged into my TV.


• Open Source Handheld Mode: I've dabbled in those neat little Open Source handhelds, but this new baby will run RetroArch and every platform under the sun, with shaders and everything else.


• Game Pass Mode?: I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft made a SteamOS "Game Pass" application, then licensed and linked in Valve's DirectX-to-Vulkan "Proton" translation library to make it tick.

People are skeptical of this because of Valve's failures with the Steam boxes and controller-- but unlike back then, every single gaming outlet seems to be really excited this time around, as the value equation is truly there.