I was getting ready to take one look at these and write them off as looking just a little too sharp, but honestly, with how bleak the visionless hyperrealism of today is, the original design shines straight through. I might use this.

I played Grim Fandango about halfway through last year and I really liked it, although something else grabbed my attention.

Will Wright took one look at this thing in an encyclopedia in 2001 and immediately started planning Spore.

I wrote a similar comment under a similar post here.

I don’t know if it’s considered better to link or to quote an old comment.

Y axis: Empoisoned or Swumble’s Big Jumble X axis: Menus or Parkour

I think we are moving past the outdated genre system and finally finding a way to classify games properly

I’m so glad I nuked my Facebook a few years ago before these companies were paying this much attention to web automation.

Oh, I’m well aware. Every few months I search online for used Classics in working condition in my area because that’s a project I’m interested in, but I haven’t committed to it yet. Maybe I should as they are apparently getting expensive and harder to find everywhere.

I don’t think I’ll ever be a Mac user but I’ve seen how fast these newer MacBooks edit video on battery power without breaking a sweat (and without eating through the battery).

People focus on “software magic” with Apple but the M chips are serious hardware that a lot of us don’t take seriously because the company that killed the iPod made them.

Culture and identity and language and all that is a continuum in the Arab world as it is anywhere else. There are people who would claim that our native language where I’m from shouldn’t be considered “Arabic” but that’s a whole can of worms.

I am not a linguist, just a layperson.

I don’t like dividing us into little categories in most contexts because that’s often used in the context of saying “look we’re much better than <other group>” but very broadly four cultural spheres is correct:

• Levant has stronger Syriac and Turkish influence (which also applies to modern Turkish). Unfortunately that’s used sometimes as evidence that we a different (that’s not bad necessarily) or inherently better (this one is bad) people than the peoples to our south. Lebanon particularly also has a strong reliance on French and to a lesser extent English loanwords. Stereotypically seen as a bit gentle (when being generous) or effeminate (when making fun of it) as far as the spectrum of the language goes.

• The Gulf is where a lot of modern Arab stereotypes come from. It’s more heterogeneous than most people give it credit for but there’s obviously a distinct culture after crossing into the desert. The line is a bit more blurry on the East side than the West but this might just be my own bias coming from Lebanon. Some surprising English loanwords scattered throughout. More aggressive in tone on average.

• Egypt is kind of it’s own thing and it’s simultaneously a cultural juggernaut, especially in the past century when it was exporting a ton of music and movies and literature (we were doing that too to a lesser extent). Egypt has a massive population, most of which is very densely concentrated, and a huge media machine. I feel like Egyptian is the most widely understood dialect because all Arabs are exposed to it. Libya is grouped with Egypt sometimes and sometimes it’s not, depending on what you’re comparing.

• West of Libya is basically alien to me. There’s been more culture coming from there that we are exposed to now, especially music in the past decade. We all like seeing Morocco and Algeria pull off upsets at the World Cup but we see them as kind of their own bubble all the way over there. Their dialects are difficult for us to grasp and even the vocabulary they use is very different. Personally, I’ve defaulted to French or English with the few Moroccans I’ve met while abroad. Yay colonialism. Although we do bond over comparing language differences (“You say what for pants? That’s funny.” Etc )

• Then there’s Standard Arabic (we call it Fus7a), which nobody speaks natively but we all learn in school. Most books and articles are written in Modern Standard Arabic. Divided opinion among the more nationalistic types on whether or not it’s important or should be taught. It’s the formalized form of the language and while I’m terrible at writing or speaking it, I do find it useful when I need to fall back to a word I can’t think of. I think of it as a kind of linguistic gear change. You can also drop the odd unexpected MSA word or form here and there to catch people off guard and punctuate your speech but maybe that’s just me.

If you still think the hardware is pretty good, you haven’t been using their newer hardware.

I think I wrote a comment about this recently, but their newest mouse with a layout I like (G604) was made with terrible soft rubber that is practically designed to disintegrate with use. All their mouse switches are also short life crappy switches that stop working relatively quickly.

Soldering new switches into the G604 is an absolute PITA because it was designed by people who didn’t care for repair. Still doable, just annoying. I just wish the rubber was replaced with the grippy hard textured plastic they used a few years earlier.

At least you only need to use the software at first when you’re setting things up.

Yeah we don’t really mix blood types at all here in Lebanon, and I really doubt they do anywhere else. Universal donor and universal recipient is just theory, in practice it’s easier to receive O- than AB+ because AB is really uncommon (as is the case everywhere).

AFAIK the A/B and Rhesus antigens are not the only markers and there are more blood compatibility components that are taken into account if possible.

I remember seeing people mod the iPhone 4 to replace the glass back with a nice wood back.

Metal and wood can’t be a worse idea than glass. Grippy too. Although without the right treatment it can get gross I guess.

This is the comment that got me back out of lurking mode. Hi. Apologies if any of what I write goes against the Solarpunk ethos, it’s not something I know the details of, just the broad ideas.

So, the Middle East has a weird relationship with solar power. I will split this into two parts for two very different regions:

In the Gulf, solar installations have been gaining momentum as essentially vanity projects to show the world “Hey, look, we’re not all dependent on fossil fuels! Look at this n million dollar investment we made into solar power! We are actively participating to become more sustainable!”. I applaud any initiative to harness some of the sun’s free power, I think it’s not a net negative when they do this. But it is worth mentioning that these places really have no drive to push away from burning fuel for their main source of power. It literally comes out of the ground, of course it made sense to use it before all the money came in, but these solar projects are really just puff pieces. I am glad they are building these arrays but they certainly aren’t part of some solar revolution. If we want to look at sustainability more broadly, it’s not like the urban planning, transport infrastructure, or labor conditions are geared towards sustainability. This is a part of the world where sustainability is seen as a tech thing, hell, a tech feature. “Oh you like the environment? Your single-family home must have a dedicated Tesla charger!”. But the Gulf is its own thing. I do believe that since that part of the world is going to be dealing with the effects of climate change head-on, and they will be figuring out stuff like how to deal with microclimate management and so on. I’m not familiar with that kind of science, I want to be optimistic about something.

They do have to keep cleaning the panels though, it’s really dusty out there.

I cannot really speak for Palestine, but I do know about the relationship my country has with solar. I’m from Lebanon, a place with a climate very different from the Gulf (for now). You may remember from a few years ago we were in the news for a bunch of reasons: Record protests, economic meltdown, the whole port incident, all fun things. In 2021 I remember seeing articles pop out from western news outlets with “uplifting” stories about how many households in Lebanon are setting up rooftop solar. Sadly, those stories are not uplifting. Solar (PV) is not this great liberator that the average household is setting up to become more environmentally friendly or independent from the (very terrible) power grid/power mafia (let’s not get into the mafia thing or this comment would be 10x longer). Solar is something only the top 10 odd percent of households can afford, so it’s kind of given us one more layer of inequality here. Don’t get me wrong: my own household installed solar, at what for us is a significant financial investment, and I can tell you for a fact that for people here it is absolutely life-changing. I haven’t had 24/hour electricity in my lifetime, it’s really only something I saw in hospitals. My life is so much better, I can do things overnight thanks to battery storage, I don’t have to worry about how some appliances react to having their power taken away for anywhere between half a second to a few minutes. Things just work and it is amazing.

But the inequality angle I think is being lost on a lot of us, and I find myself forgetting that not everyone has electricity after midnight. We have never been particularly wealthy - I remember seeing photos of my friends on vacation abroad as a kid and asking my parents why that wasn’t something we would do - but now those same friends roll their eyes when I suggest we play one more round of a game at 11:50 PM. There’s a weird survivor’s guilt with being able to pay your way out of a problem. I’m a true believer in household solar, this isn’t just a “throw money at the problem” thing - my country runs on diesel and I hate it so much. The main power stations are ancient and inefficient, and have been converted decades ago (inefficiently) to burn diesel. The mafia generators that used to fill the gaps in power run on diesel. Heating runs on diesel. I hate the smell of diesel smoke interrupting the fresh mountain air, I hate the sound of generators in the street. I hate the generator mafia shaking us down monthly, and I hate them even more after they started pulling more dirty tricks after we installed solar. But this is so worth it, and it’s been worth every dollar (and dollars aren’t as easy to come by here). It has been a life changer for me and my family. If only we can generate water from the sun :p

I hate to make this a “woe is us, Lebanon has it really hard” comment, especially with the manmade hell that has been unleashed in Gaza, but yeah, the Middle East has different areas with different relationships with solar.

I also think Jordan has a PV manufacturing plant, I guess that’s nice.