Gee I fucking wonder why?

Newpipe / Pipepipe and it’s variants can play in background and have a repeat function (playlist or individual video).

If the US actually succeeds (huge if, they control exactly 0.00% of Venezuela right now), this is will crash the Albertan economy into the earth’s core. And Albertans will, somehow, blame the Liberals.

He’s aiming a little higher, I think.

This. No reason for the rest of us to give up just because they have. We’ll do it without them if we have to.

As far as I can tell, they genuinely do not have anything approaching a real plan here.

Best guess is that, as a would be dictator himself, Trump has so thoroughly bought into his own strongman hype that he actually does believe that’s how governments work. L’etat c’est moi. He seems to truly think that removing Maduro is the same thing as removing the government, and that by some kind of fucking boardgame-ass logic that means they’re now in charge.

America is already the gold standard for failing at regime changes, but this is truly their finest work yet.

Cuba is next. Then Columbia, Mexico and Greenland. Canada is pretty far down the list. Not saying we shouldn’t be taking this threat as being absolutely deadly serious, just trying to be realistic about how things are going to play out.

The good news for us - and only for us - is that they’re probably going to end up in such a deep quagmire in Venezuela that they maybe make it through one or two more of those countries before they stall out completely. Trump has not succeeded in putting the US public on a war footing the way Hitler did in Germany. By and large, MAGA are pretty skeptical of the idea that a war is going to make their groceries cheaper. They want to kick out all the foreigners, not waste money and lives “fixing” their countries for them. There is no lebensraum mandate in the hearts of present day Americans, no matter how much Trump waves around the Munro Doctrine.

Oh, yeah, no question that’s the plan, insofar as there is one.

Oh, perfect. Thank you.

Honestly, I think this is just one where you try it for yourself. The compose file is about 4 lines long, I had the whole thing up and running in about 30 seconds (OK, 45; I forgot a port was already in use and had to redeploy).

So far my one big complaint would be that the self-hosted version replicates the entire website, including all of the “Why choose Bento PDF” and “Try now” and so on. It’d be nice to just have the tools right there when I load it up. Other than that, well, it looks cool, I’ll know more once I actually try out the available options.

I caved and picked up Clair Obscur. It’s a genre that I’m really not a fan of, but it’s just so exceptionally well made that I’m thoroughly enjoying it anyway.

Aongside that, I’ve been playing Rogue Trader at last, after my wife has been bugging me to play it for over a year. It’s very, very good. Probably one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. The degree to which your narrative choices matter is phenomenal. There are scenes in the tutorial that define the entire game. And it nails the setting.

Lastly, I picked up a founders pack for Soulframe. The only bad decision anyone made when working on this game was calling it Soulframe - it is in absolutely no way the “Fantasy Warframe” people are imagining. The designers say their big inspiration was Dragons Dogma. For me, I’d say the gameplay has a lot of the feel of Breath of the Wild. The combat is exceptionally tight. Easily one of the best combat systems I’ve ever played. There’s not a huge amount to do yet, but it’s early access, that’s understandable, and I think they absolutely made the right choice in nailing the feel of the game before worrying about how much of it there is.

For anyone not aware, this happens regularly, and has happened regularly for a long time. Recent events have made it seem more newsworthy, so mainstream press is reporting it like its a big fucking deal, but this kind of airspace testing has been standard Russian practice for a long time. Not saying it’s a good thing, but it doesn’t represent any kind of sudden escalation.

If we’re coming at this from a perspective of fighting climate change, I don’t think plastic straws are really the hill to die on.

The reality of any political battle is that you always have to ask “What is the thing that will create the most net impact?” But net impact includes “Not making my cause toxic to the average person.”

The public, in general, are very amenable to changes like getting rid of disposable plastic bags and plastic packaging, and those can have as much impact or more than getting rid of plastic straws. Those are also changes that don’t create significant negative impacts for people with disabilities.

And that’s before you even get to the industrial scale changes that would have far more impact. If you look at, say, plastic waste in the ocean, about half of it is fishing nets. Changing fishing industry practices would be a lot more of an impactful approach.

Banning plastic straws is like putting out the grease fire on the stove while the whole house is burning down around you. Yes, technically it’s a thing we should do, but it is not even remotely the first thing we should do. And the people advocating for it are often doing so as a way of pretending to do something meaningful while ignoring the far bigger industry level changes we could be making that would have a far bigger impact.

As a political issue, plastic straws have become entirely toxic, and given how small a piece of the puzzle they are, there really is no benefit to dying on this largely worthless hill when our efforts could be better spent elsewhere.

When communism creates victims, it is failing at its intended goal. When capitalism creates victims, it is working as intended.

Weird how, when it’s an oil tanker, they have zero problem boarding it. But when it’s supposedly a boat full of drugs, the only possible course of action is to fire a missile at it, destroying any evidence of whether or not there were actually drugs, and killing any witnesses. Oh what’s that, some witnesses survived? Better go back and double tap. Funny that.

So, they had multiplayer, and it worked very well, but then they went through a whole bunch of major reworks to underlying systems that broke multiplayer, and they basically went “Yeah, that’s gonna stay broken for a while until we get all this shit done, please be patient.”

Project Zomboid is a blast, especially when you really dig into the options for changing game rules. You can basically craft your own custom zombie apocalypse. You can decide how the virus works, whether zombies are slow or fast, whether they have good eyesight, good hearing, how strong they are, where they spawn. You can change loot rarities, how long it’s been since the outbreak started, when the power gets shut off, etc, etc.

Fascinatingly, this number can’t even include Fortnite, since it’s not on Steam, and has got to be the elephant in the room in terms of play time going to older games. But that is something to keep in mind when you see stats like this. It’s not all “New releases failing.” A lot of it is “Games have a much longer lifespan now.”

Numbers wise, my top 3 were Helldivers 2, Warframe, and Vampire Survivors, all of which continued to receive content updates throughout 2025. These aren’t old games sitting on a shelf gathering dust that I went and unearthed. They’re in their prime. Warframe released a huge update specifically to coincide with the Game Awards, with a trailer featuring Werner Herzog. They’ve never been a bigger deal. Helldivers had their single biggest in-game event this year. I’ve also been spending a lot of time with Rogue Trader (just got a big patch) and Dark Tide (got two new classes and a lot of new maps added this year). Ready or Not and Insurgency also got content updates this year.

So, yeah, peeling people away from an existing title is a much slower process now. Games no longer land like a meteor. The real successes creep up.

This is not to say that there hasn’t been an absolute dearth of worthwhile content from the big studios. You’ll notice that every single thing I listed there is, by at least some definition, an indie game. Helldivers 2 has a big publisher in Sony, but Arrowhead were hardly a major or well known developer. Other than that, it’s all outside of the traditional publisher system. And that’s frankly a good and healthy thing. We’re seeing guys like Larian and Sandfall, Arrowhead, DE, Owlcat, Fat Shark, NetEase, Team Cherry, Super Giant, all just absolutely crushing it, and that’s genuinely fantastic news for the medium.

It’s weird how people look at the failures of Ubisoft and EA and act like this is a bad time to be a gamer. This is one of the best times there’s ever been to be a gamer. The medium hasn’t been this healthy since the glory days of the mid-nineties, and I say that as one of the old farts who grew up in those glory days. Sandfall made Clair Obscur with a team of 60, and it’s incredible. Owlcat made Rogue Trader for basically nothing in a shed and it’s one of the best RPGs you’ll ever play. Vampire Survivors had a budget of like three french fries and some pocket lint and it’s one of the most addictive gaming experiences ever. Balatro was like one guy and it absolutely blew up the world. The fact that we’re getting games this fucking good from outside of the big name publishers is genuinely amazing. I remember the mid 2000s when indie gaming was dead in a ditch, PC gaming was just nothing but console ports, and the only stuff we got was the endless drivel the major publishers shovelled out. Yeah, there were good releases sprinkled in there, but for the most part creativity and imagination were absolutely dead. Now we get stuff like Valheim, Stardew Valley, Project Zomboid, Space Marine 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Lethal Company, Among Us, Speed Freeks, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Escape from Tarkov, Shadows of Doubt, Hades 2, Forever Winter… And yeah, some of that stuff is janky or buggy or messy, but it’s inventive and cool and slick and all of it is coming from outside of the big names.

I mean, Clair Obscur and Silksong both came out this year, and they’re fantastic.

But if we’re talking triple A stuff? Uh… Not a clue. I wanna say there was a Battlefield game?

The Total War series isn’t exactly turn based. The large scale strategic stuff is, where you position your armies and run your economy, but all of the battles are real time (with pause / ability to slow down time).