I don’t expect that Trump being in office will substantially change US policy on Ukraine. This is not a major election factor. I think that what you’re seeing is politicking, and that the major driver of US policy on Ukraine is the bureaucracy, not political leadership. That doesn’t change from administration to administration.
Yeah, it might.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/chinas-balancing-act-between-us-and-russia
The United States’ efforts to limit China’s shipments of dual-use goods to Russia seem to be having an impact. Russia is finding it harder to obtain the semiconductors and machine tools needed to sustain its war effort. Additionally, Putin’s plan to boost his failing gas revenues by building a second pipeline to China remains stalled.
Yet China is a winner in a situation created by Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine. China has expanded its market presence in Russia and secured affordable Russian hydrocarbons, but only to a degree that maintains its diversified portfolio of energy sources.
Aborted Trade Growth
Chinese-Russian trade has seen explosive growth since the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With bilateral trade surging from $145 billion in 2021 to $240 billion in 2023, China has solidified its position as Russia’s main trading partner.
The primary areas of cooperation include energy, agriculture, technology, infrastructure construction, and transportation, Putin pointed out during his visit to Beijing. What this really means is that China is Russia’s top source for the types of goods that the United States identifies as “high-priority” items. These goods—including semiconductors, telecommunications equipment, and machine tools—can be used in both civilian and military sectors.
In December 2023, monthly exports of these dual-use products from China to Russia reached over $600 million but have since fallen to over $300 million per month. Despite this decrease, China’s support for Russia’s war effort through these supplies has been substantial. Russia’s dependence on China for these products has surged from 32 percent in 2021 to 89 percent in 2023.
But China also has no reason to do that, and some good reason not to. I bet that they won’t.
China may not have a direct interest in the outcome of the war itself.
However, it does gain from Russia being dependent on China.
The reason that Putin has been willing to have that dependence is because China isn’t actively aiming to oppose the invasion. All China has to do to gain here is, well, nothing.
For China, that’s a pretty low-cost way to gain a bunch of influence in Asia. My guess is that China’s goals probably look something like this:
Make sure that this doesn’t turn nuclear (which would potentially affect China).
Don’t have China become involved in the conflict.
Make use of the period of time where Russia is cut off from the West to extend short-run Russian dependence (like, obtaining substitute parts from China) to long-run dependence (tying Russia to Chinese systems and services) insofar as possible.
If China decides to act in concert with the West, then it gains nothing – China probably doesn’t care much what happens in Ukraine – and loses this new influence in Russia, which Beijing probably does very much want.
I was using it on Linux too!
Aside from broken controllers, which I don’t think can reasonably count, the Atari 2600 joystick.
One button, a lot of resistance to push on the stick.
After that, an elderly Logitech gamepad from the 1990s that had a D-pad that rolled diagonal way too easily. IIRC it had a screw-in mini-joystick that could attach to the center of the D-pad. Don’t remember the model. White case, attached directly to a joystick/MIDI port.
After that, I think the NES controller. I have no idea why people like those or actually buy recreations. Yes, nostalgia, but the ergonomics on it were terrible. Hard buttons, sharper corners on the D-pad than is the norm today, and a squared-off controller made the thing downright uncomfortable to use for long periods of time.
I was pretty happy with my most-recent Logitech gamepad – I think an F310 – but I had another from the 1990s that was terrible, had a D-pad that rolled to diagonal movement far too easily.
Unexploded remotely-triggerable ordinance with a camera on it.
Ruling in the case Ukraine v. Russia (re Crimea), the European Court of Human Rights unanimously found June 25 that Russia is guilty of a pattern of human rights violations since 2014 in Crimea, as codified under the European Convention on Human Rights a
Russia withdrew from the ECHR. Presumably whatever specific incidents they’re talking about were before that, but I’m not sure how much Russia is going to care about that.
Russia also terminated ECHR jurisdiction in 2022.
LONDON, June 7 (Reuters) - Russia’s parliament on Tuesday passed a pair of bills ending the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisdiction in the country, a rupture provoked by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
I’m not sure whether that ended authority over cases on issues prior to that time or not, in each of the eyes of Russia and the ECHR. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Russia’s position is that it did, as there wouldn’t be much point to also terminating jurisdiction after leaving if it didn’t.
Probably not authentic as getting a secondary monitor that’s an old-school CRT and an an HDMI/DP/USB-C-to-VGA plug and sticking it right into an authentic CRT, but I’m on a laptop in a restaurant and can’t screenshot that anyway.
You can still get the keyboard, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicomp
In 1996, Lexmark International was prepared to shut down their Lexington keyboard factory where they produced Model M buckling-spring keyboards. IBM, their principal customer and the Model M’s original designer and patent holder, had decided to remove the Model M from its product line in favor of cost-saving rubber-dome keyboards.
Rather than seeing its production come to an end, a group of former Lexmark and IBM employees purchased the license, tooling and design rights for buckling-spring technology, and, in April 1996, reestablished the business as Unicomp.
I have one of their Endura Pros at home, which is an old-school IBM buckling-spring keyboard. That has the IBM Trackpoint nipple mouse. The buckling spring keyswitches will last forever, as far as I can tell, but I wore out the mouse button keyswitches. They might have fixed that over the years, but I would probably just one without the Trackpoint if I got another.
If you have one of those and are typing away (“click ping! click ping! click ping!”), looking at a CRT, that’s probably about as close as you get to the BBS era.
Probably a way to rig up simulated 9600 baud too.
Running it in cool-retro-term with the IBM Dos profile:
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/8923a5ee-e63b-48f9-991e-9116b428f42b.png
Theoretically, if run on a terminal that supports Sixel (most modern virtual terminals) or the kitty graphics protocol, and it got support, it could display graphical thumbnails and inline images too).
Cool-retro-term doesn’t seem to have Sixel support currently, but it looks like someone is banging on it:
https://github.com/lxqt/qtermwidget/issues/552
Last month:
@tsujan @stefonarch I am working on porting the latest konsole sources to pure Qt. If I understand correctly, Konsole has sixel support. If I succeed in the porting work (I’m at least a couple of months from any reasonable result), we can have sixel support.
There’s also an emacs lemmy client, lem.el. That has image support if you’re running emacs in a GUI environment, though I don’t know if there’s a way to convince emacs-in-a-terminal to translate it to sixel or kitty.
I wonder if we’re going to see the return of machine gunner ball turrets with this new era
The reason for those was that the bombers were vulnerable to fighters approaching from below. I don’t think that this’ll be applicable for a number of reasons:
No reason to use a large aircraft like that. All they need is a plane that can get altitude and hold two people.
My guess is that one issue for the B-17 in WW2 was that they needed to fly in formation, couldn’t maneuver much, to achieve the “interlocked fields of fire” that was their defensive doctrine of the time. So becomes harder to deal with a blind spot by maneuvering, so there’s a need for exotic things like the ball turret.
The drones that they’re shooting down are defenseless. If Russia does start sending out drones with some kind of air-to-air capability, my guess is that a ball turret won’t be a good counter.
I’m pretty sure that those ball turrets used .50 cal machine guns. They probably don’t need that. My understanding is that the round caliber in WW2 that a fighter carried depended on what they expected to run into. It was a the reason that the US only used .50 cal machine guns, not 20mm autocannons, in its fighters – the 20mm was only considered necessary to bring down a bomber, where the thing was a big structure, big struts, could potentially absorb a lot of damage. The US wasn’t fighting anyone who was going to be using much by way of heavy bombers against them. I suspect that the lightest of bullets will probably mess those little drones up badly. Honestly, they’d probably do best with a shotgun or automatic shotgun at the very short ranges that I’ve seen footage of them engaging at; that’s more likely to expend kinetic energy inside the drone, hit a lot of stuff in there. Also reduces collateral damage to whatever is off in the distance behind the drone.
There was recent news about at least one, which I assume this is referencing.
Honestly, I wish that NCD posts would include a “context” link, since a lot of times they reference things that have happened within very recent periods of time. I get that some people are totally up on the news, but some people – even if they generally follow military issues – aren’t going to know about the most-recent happenings.
As things stand, mobile OSes have some pretty decent out-of-box ways for apps to be isolated. App A can’t fiddle with data private to app B. That Android video game you just downloaded can’t extract data from your web browser or generally fiddle with it.
Desktop OSes today don’t normally have software install and work like that. Yeah, you can manually set something like that up with containers or VMs, but your typical user isn’t going to do that.
Your age 30 is fine. Age is always an excuse, but mostly not true.
It’s fine for single-player shooters, which are less demanding, but speaking as someone who has packed on some decades, your reaction time definitely becomes a noticeable factor over the years for competitive multiplayer games. I definitely can’t play competitive twitch shooters nearly as well as when I was 18, which is about when your reaction time is at its best.
That being said, there are shooters where twitch time is less-critical or roles or play-styles that focus less on it.
And I don’t see how someone couldn’t learn to play with a dual-stick or trackpad (or trackball, for that matter), which is what I think OP is talking about. I haven’t had any problems picking up new input methods…that just takes time. Took time to learn when I was 18, too.
I mean, twin stick gamepad or to lesser extent touchpad just isn’t going to be as good as a mouse for an FPS. A good mouse player will beat a good touchpad or gamepad player.
And the problem with the Deck is that it has a PC game library, and a lot of those are designed with a mouse in mind. Console FPSes usually adjust the game difficulty so that playing with twin sticks are practical. Enemies give you more time to slowly turn around without inflicting enormous amounts of damage. Auto-aim assist is common. Ranges are shorter. Stuff like that.
If this is a single-player game – which it sounds like you’re playing – you can reduce the difficulty to compensate for the input mechanism.
There’s an input mechanism that some people developed for twin-stick gyro controllers called Flick Stick, which someone else mentioned; Steam Input supports this. The mouse is still going to win, but it’s an improvement over traditional pure-stick input.
There’s also some input mechanism which I think was different from the “Flick Stick” approach – though maybe I’m wrong and misremembering, didn’t have an interest in exploring it – that IIRC someone put together using Steam Input. The way it worked, as I recall, was that one could tap the thumbstick in a direction and it’d immediately do a 90 degree turn. The idea was to provide for a rapid turn while keeping sensitivity low enough to still permit for accurate aiming. But I’m not able to find the thing with Kagi in a few searches, and it’s not impossible that I’m misremembering…this was only a single video that I’m thinking of.
I don’t think that there’s any trick to learning this, just playing games and picking it up over time. I mean, I was atrocious at using a keyboard+mouse when I first started doing it, and ditto with twin-stick FPSes.
You could also attach a keyboard and mouse, though I think that that kind of eliminates the point of the Deck, at least as long as one also has a PC to play on – it might make sense for someone who just uses a Deck and a phone.
is there an easy FPS game where I don’t have to move or shoot too fast
Play games that are designed for consoles or which have a gamepad mode, rather than a keyboard+mouse PC game. They’ll be tuned for controller limitations. Like, can you play Halo comfortably with the Deck? That was designed for a gamepad originally, and it’s available on Steam (though I’d note that it requires a Microsoft account, which you may-or-may-not be willing to do).
https://old.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/8f7oyr/the_core_reasons_thumbsticks_are_inaccurate/
This also talks about some limitations of thumbstick aiming (if you’re using thumbsticks and not trackpads). It might be possible to tweak some of these, like sensitivity or dead zone, but I’d assume that for a given game, the developers have already chosen pretty reasonable defaults.
For those who haven’t played the series, VATS is an alternate aiming mode where one can pause (or in later games in the 3d series, greatly slow) the game, select a certain number of targets depending upon available action points, and then have all those shots taken in rapid succession, with the game aiming.
I’d say that VATS is kind of a “path” than a purely alternate input method in those games; you need to make a VATS-oriented build, though it’s true that it makes it possible to play the game with minimal FPS elements. Like, in Fallout: New Vegas, VATS provides major benefits close-up. While VATS is active, there’s enormous damage reduction applied to your character, IIRC 90%, so for short periods of time, they have enormous damage output and little risk. They can also turn rapidly and target multiple enemies, probably better than a player manually-playing could. At close ranges, VATS is just superior.
But VATS suffers severe accuracy penalties at range. Whether-or-not a target is moving doesn’t affect VATS accuracy, but range does a lot, whereas with manual aiming, whether-or-not a target is moving makes a big difference and range doesn’t matter much. As a result, VATS isn’t great for sniping, which is also an aspect of the game. You can do it (especially, oddly-enough, with pistols, in Fallout 4, where the Concentrated Fire perk lets later shots in a flurry of pistol shots at range be very accurate.
In Fallout 76, VATS provides such dramatic damage benefits that I’d say that it’s impractical to play a non-VATS build – VATS is required to get damage up to a reasonable level later in the game.
Links:
Enderal and Steam Store
Secret World Legends (no dedicated Wikipedia page; apparently this is a remake of the earlier The Secret World)
Yeah, I’ve have a few games that I’ve really enjoyed the bands from.
This is kind of diverging from the topic, but…one of my annoyances in video games is that that there are a number of video games that I play to the point of getting tired of the music, but don’t have the option to buy more music tracks for. There are mods for Stellaris to add more music tracks – people clearly want more music – but even though Paradox is a game publisher that specializes in putting out games with huge amounts of DLC, they don’t sell additional audio for the game, which just seems bizarre to me. I really wish that Fallout: New Vegas had commercial DLC radio packs in the same genre, but nope – though there are people who have made enormous free “radio” mods for the Fallout series, like Old World Radio and Old World Radio 2 for Fallout 4, so there are clearly a considerable number of players who’d like more music to be available.
This doesn’t work for games that you play through once and are done with, but I kind of wish that when a band creates audio for a game that one spends a lot of time playing, that the game developer would at least provide the option to buy more audio from the band for it, as long as it fits. The amount of developer time required to incorporate additional audio tracks seems very limited, and if the band is still producing audio in the same style, it seems like it’d be a sensible fit.
What’s even odder is that it’s become extremely common for game publishers on Steam to go the opposite direction and sell access to the game’s soundtrack to play independently of the game. So they’re basically acting as a music vendor already. That’s also very low developer-effort. But they very rarely have DLC to add more audio from the band back into the game.
Cities: Skylines is the only game that I can think of off the top of my head where the game publisher sold additional DLC music.
I don’t understand why either game publishers or music labels wouldn’t love that kind of relationship. If you’re a music label, have a bunch of IP, I’d think that getting royalties from your audio getting wider play is almost always worthwhile, and if it’s in a game, it’s not competing with non-game use; if anything, it probably promotes it. From a game publisher’s standpoint, the cost to incorporate more music in many games is minimal, so the risk is very low. From a player’s standpoint, it makes the game more-playable; the music doesn’t wear on you.
Project Zomboid is very similar thematically to Cataclysm (zombie apocalypse, loot world for supplies to stay alive), but is far simpler in every respect, is real-time rather than turn-based, plays on handcrafted rather than procedurally-generated maps, has its zombie infections be incurable, and has combat that I really don’t like (though Project Zomboid also has a much gentler learning curve and a loveable raccoon mascot). I’m not sure if one could reasonably put it into the same genre. Maybe.
Maybe SimEarth.
This simulates a tile-based planet map. Animals grow and evolve, and things like atmospheric concentration and other aspects like surface albedo can be altered. More a toy than a game. Had a lot of fun playing with the levers.
1990 release – it’s still playable, though it’d feel pretty ancient and will not be very beautiful.
I haven’t played SimLife or Spore, and there might be some similarities there.
I’m not aware of anything else that’d be comparable.
EDIT: Liquid War. This is open-source and part of the GNU project. One has a map with some areas closed off and some open space that liquid can flow through. There are two or more “blobs” of liquid of different color; each is attempting to destroy the other. Your blob is attracted to your mouse cursor. “Moving into” a pixel of the other color eventually converts it to your own. If two liquids meet in a bottleneck, they tend to stalemate. One wins by getting liquid on multiple sides of the opponent’s liquid, so that one can move one’s own liquid from multiple directions into it. Maybe a bit closer to a tech demo than a full-on game. I wouldn’t call it mind-blowing, but it is free and as far as I know unique, and I had fun with it.
No. Trump was not largely the factor involved in aid being held up – that was the Freedom Caucus, which was aiming to hold it (and a number of other things, including the budget earlier) hostage to get domestic policy gains that they wanted, given that the Republicans had a very narrow margin in the House and their support was required for a deal.
The Freedom Caucus didn’t actually care much about the fundamental issue of Ukraine aid, but they wanted to force spending reductions – they took the position that we could aid Ukraine, but if so it had to come from cutting government spending, reducing regular spending. It couldn’t be additional spending.
Trump’s faction has not been especially friendly with the Freedom Caucus, and supported the guy who just defeated its leader, Bob Good.
https://news.yahoo.com/news/republican-survive-trumps-wrath-bob-221830141.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-endorses-primary-challenger-gop-rep-bob-good-virginia-rcna154285
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4729084-bob-good-donald-trump-virginia-oklahoma-georgia-tom-cole/mlite/
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4727667-bob-good-virginia-donald-trump-kevin-mccarthy-john-mcguire-freedom-caucus/
You can find some people who are friendly with Trump who have opposed Ukraine aid. Vance is one possible running mate pick for Trump, and he has, in the past, pretty consistently advocated for not getting involved in Europe and Russia, and rather focusing on opposing China. On the other hand, Burgum, another possible running mate pick, has been a hawk on Russia. So depending upon how things play out you could wind up with people who do have a voice in advising Trump, will have access to him, and have taken policy positions against support for Ukraine. But I don’t anticipate Trump himself to be much of a factor on Ukraine, and I think that it’ll be recommendations from the Department of State and the like that will be the most influential in a potential second Trump administration.
US foreign policy usually isn’t a major factor in elections, and generally doesn’t swing back and forth around elections.