BanSwitch2Buyers

I dread flying. But as I was preparing to travel to San Francisco for this year’s Game Developers Conference, I had one reason to be excited: It would be my first flight with the Steam Deck. I downloaded several games onto the handheld and gleefully stowed it in my carry-on, right next to my Switch OLED.

That excitement quickly turned to embarrassment thanks to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

As I reached the front of the airport security line, I pulled my laptop out of my bag as I normally would. I asked the TSA agent standing by if I had to remove any game consoles as well. She asked if I meant the Switch, and looking to avoid a needlessly complicated explanation, I said yes. She told me to remove any systems, so I did. First, I pulled my Switch out of its soft slip case. Then, I pulled out the Steam Deck’s comparatively hulking carrier and flopped the beastly device right next to the Switch. That’s when I noticed a strange, almost suspicious look on the TSA agent’s face.

“That’s a Switch?”
“No, no, this is a new thing.”
“… That’s too big.”

That last line, delivered with an incredulous laugh, has stuck with me long since my flight, mostly because she’s right. I couldn’t help but feel a little self-conscious about booting up the device on the plane, the same as I would if I were to take my shoes off during a flight. Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to realize how truly ridiculous gaming hardware is.

Last year I travelled alone on a flight from London to New York. The flight officially takes around eight hours, but from the time you get on the plane to the time you leave it’s probably more like nine or ten. As soon as I sat down in my assigned seat I took out my fully charged PlayStation Vita. I was playing the visual novel Norn9. I recommend it. Once I started to play, the man next to me decided to grab his Steam Deck, Valve’s ostensibly handheld console, before the flight.

He was storing his Steam Deck in his backpack that was sensibly stowed away in the overhead locker. As people were still shuffling down the aisle, there was a little hubbub getting the portable console to his seat, but with a few minutes of struggle it was secured. He sat down and turned it on. I noted that he also had a full battery. After some browsing through his library he settled on Hogwarts Legacy. After this I remained absorbed in my story until I heard a sigh.

I turned to the noise to see that his Steam Deck was dead. The sigh was not only because his Steam Deck was dead, not only because it can’t be charged from the weak plane USB chargers, but because we were still mid-take off and he couldn’t put the handheld away until the seatbelt sign was turned off. He wrestled a little to grab his headphones from the seat pocket in front of him with the Steam Deck teetered awkwardly on his lap. It was impeding him from doing anything else. Eventually the sign turned off, he put the Steam Deck back into the overhead locker and I never saw it again.

lol. The stupid fucking behemoths we get now instead of something actually usable.

And I keep saying yes, but I'm running out of room on my finger for the rings.

Update: I asked him more firmly about it and he revealed that it was a scheme. He says we're now married 14 times, or as he put it, "14 layers deep into marriage" (a quattro-decima marriage) and if I ever left him I'd have to divorce him 14 times for 14 different reasons to leave him and get out of all the marriages. I'm looking up if this is legal but can't find anything saying two people can have 14 separate marriages with each other.

I do love him 14 times more than the average marriage but I'm worried for his self esteem if he thinks he needs to do this to discourage me from leaving him.

Update2: I got kinda' mad at him and he proposed again, likely to distract me, and I couldn't say no. So 15 layers deep now.

At a recent forum on Palestine, I spoke alongside the managing editor of The Breach, Martin Lukacs, about media bias. In my opening remarks, I discussed the uniqueness of Canada’s support for Israel, the longtime head of Postmedia chairing an extremist Zionist organization and the media’s refusal to cover a poll highlighting Jewish Israeli racism.

Afterwards Lukacs (unprompted) denied any ethnic/religious contribution to the anti-Palestinian character of Canada’s media. His central observation was that the Globe and Mail was owned by the WASP (white Anglo-Saxon and Protestant) Thompson family and it was biased against Palestinians so anti-Palestinianism in the media simply reflected the establishment. He repeated the point in a subsequent comment in which he said the military-industrial complex and corporate lobbyists were wealthier and more powerful than pro-Israel forces. Lukacs emphasized that suggesting ethnicity played any role in Canada’s media bias offended him.

It requires only cursory knowledge of Canada’s media to know Lukacs’ claim is mistaken. His position is also morally bankrupt, inverting a basic moral principle.

Canada’s largest newspaper chain was established by Jewish Zionist, Izzy Asper, who imposed an aggressively anti-Palestinian editorial line when he added the Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Vancouver Sun and other daily papers to his media empire in the early 2000s. It’s well documented as it sparked a Montreal Gazette publisher to resign and Reuters to formally complain about their wire copy being rewritten in a biased, anti-Palestinian, manner.

I don't like The Breach. It's better than most but it's still NDP-tailist radlibs for the most part. They also take a really bad line on Russia-Ukraine, etc.

Hey.