tal

When they initially went on sale, apparently scalpers flooded the thing. They put a reservation system in place for the Steam Controller to aim to defeat scalping. This new shortage is with that reservation system in place, limit on two Steam Controllers per account and the Steam account needs to be in good standing. Now, I guess it could be possible that scalpers went out and figured out how to defeat that, like having a number of people collude to purchase two each, so one can't say that there's no scalping...

EDIT: It looks like the going rate on eBay for a sealed-box Steam Controller 2.0 is about $300, so I imagine that that's what market rate is at current levels of supply. Valve's selling them for $99.

I mean, they aren't going to stop making them if there are people buying them. I'm sure that, at some point, there will be enough manufactured to catch up with demand.

2026 has been a pretty exasperating year to try to get ahold of a lot of pieces of hardware, I have to say.

I'm wondering if

assuming Valve still is trying to release the Steam Machine this year, which according to the last news I've seen, they're still saying that they're going to do

this is gonna dick up their Steam Machine sales. I mean, the Steam Controller is a nice-to-have on a regular PC, but for people with a Steam Machine in the living room, they probably are going to want it even more

like, there it's a lot more important to have the touchpads to replace a mouse, remote power-on capability, etc.

NPR article from an hour ago:

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/20/nx-s1-5865006/fighting-lebanon-despite-ceasefire

Iran says Strait of Hormuz shut as U.S.-Iran talks set for Sunday in Switzerland

Iran's military said it has closed the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israel's latest strikes in Lebanon, even as Iranian and U.S. negotiators prepare to meet Sunday in Switzerland for talks.

The U.S. military, meanwhile, denied the claim that the strait was closed, leaving a key piece of the freshly signed Memorandum of Understanding between the two countries up in the air.

On Saturday Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps declared the strait closed, according to state-controlled Iranian media, citing what it called "the explicit breach of the first clause of the post-war memorandum of understanding by the United States" and the latest exchange of fire between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Iran's state broadcaster Press TV reported the IRGC Navy was warning all vessels to "absolutely refrain from any movement in the Strait of Hormuz until further notice."

But U.S. Central Command said shipping through the strait was proceeding normally, insisting on social media that 55 commercial vessels had completed the transit successfully, carrying more than 17 million barrels of oil, and that "safe passage through the international waterway remained intact." The U.S. added that its forces remained "present and vigilant" to ensure all terms of the agreement with Iran were being honored. Even with this disagreement over the vital waterway, both nations appear to be proceeding toward the next phase of diplomatic talks.

Apparently the Iranian military and the US military disagree on whether the Iranian military has closed the strait.

https://music.youtube.com/channel/UCoAHfpcD9nLJ6FZwe3BnTQg

I mean, celebrity news is a thing. Not something I'm into, but there's been demand for a long time.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/retirees-playing-wow/1072667/21

Anyone else retired and gaming?

long thread

There was a hardcore group at a local FL retirement home a couple years back. Youngest was 83. Guild cleared everything with ease.

Yeah, but come on. Sure, you could depict anything with it, but in practice, it's correlated with content.

Chinese ink painting is a medium too, but people talking about it probably are not going to it for cyberpunk stuff.

I don't think I'd call rap not music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music

Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise expressive content.

I think that it meets that bar.

I don't like it myself, either, but there are plenty of genres of music that I don't like.

When I see people riding down the road bumping modern rap music, I just shake my head, especially 30-year-old or 40-year-old white women.

Like, because it originated from black artists? I mean...I've heard people make similar statements before, but jazz also originated with black artists, and I haven't heard people object to white people listening to jazz.

Maybe they did and it was just before my time. I remember a World War II Danish Nazi poster complaining about the jitterbug, which also originated with black artists, but that seemed to take issue with the music rather than who was listening to it.

searches

Hmm. Though it sounds like there was some friction:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitterbug

Swing dancing originated in the African-American communities of New York City in the early 20th century.[5] Many nightclubs had a whites-only or blacks-only policy due to racial segregation, however the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem had a no-discrimination policy which allowed whites and blacks to dance together[6] and it was there that the Lindy Hop dance flourished,[7] started by dancers such as George Snowden and Frank Manning. The term jitterbug was originally a ridicule used by black patrons to describe whites who started to dance the Lindy Hop, because they were dancing faster and jumpier than was intended, like "jittering bugs",[8] although it quickly lost its negative connotation as the more-erratic version caught on.

EDIT: The WW2 poster referencing jitterbug that I was remembering:

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/1774f384-00b9-4f24-8dcf-880f0cb0d58d.jpeg)

I do agree that it's full of cultural references and that lacking it would probably detract from it, but even so, I just don't see how someone having that context makes the jokes funny.

One example I had in mind was when I brought up the fact that I just didn't really find the jokes funny even through some people really did laugh. At the time, the show was showing some robots trying to pack boxes and they kept failing, because when they put them together, they'd eliminate them, in an allusion to Tetris. That is, indeed, a Gen-X reference. The guy I was watching it with was chortling. I remember asking him about it and him saying "it's hilarious!"

I mean...I get the reference there. I've owned a couple versions of Tetris. I played it back when the game was young. But...even having the cultural context, it's just...there's none of the stuff that make something funny for me there. I just look at it and say "yeah, they're alluding to Tetris." Maybe it's that there's not enough buildup or something.

I remember some episode when a bunch of hippies are protesting outside Professor Farnsworth's house. The Professor tells them to get off his property. A hippie says "You can't own property, man!" The Professor says, "You can't, because you're a penniless hippie!" I mean...I'm not offended by it poking fun at communism, but...I see the political conflict there, but it just doesn't make me laugh. Or the Dr. Zoidberg humor, which in significant part is him acting inappropriately...I dunno. It's hard to figure out precisely what makes humor work for people

if we did, we could probably produce it a lot more mechanically

but whatever the writing team did just...consistently didn't tickle it for me.

When did you watch it? When it came out, it was technically impressive for the computer-generated graphics, which included a lot of highly-detailed and expansive "organic" stuff like forests.

Here's some quotes from the Roger Ebert review from the time:

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/avatar-2009

Like “Star Wars” and “LOTR,” “Avatar” employs a new generation of special effects. Cameron said it would, and many doubted him. It does. Pandora is very largely CGI. The Na’vi are embodied through motion capture techniques, convincingly. They look like specific, persuasive individuals, yet sidestep the eerie Uncanny Valley effect. And Cameron and his artists succeed at the difficult challenge of making Neytiri a blue-skinned giantess with golden eyes and a long, supple tail, and yet–I’ll be damned. Sexy.

Cameron promised he’d unveil the next generation of 3-D in “Avatar.” I’m a notorious skeptic about this process, a needless distraction from the perfect realism of movies in 2-D. Cameron’s iteration is the best I’ve seen — and more importantly, one of the most carefully-employed. The film never uses 3-D simply because it has it, and doesn’t promiscuously violate the fourth wall.

I mean, I remember being underwhelmed after I went to watch Avatar with a friend who was deeply impressed, but it did show off a lot of render capability for the time. I'd call it more impressive as a tech demo.

I think that it's reasonable to like or dislike something without them needing to analyze further for that opinion to be valid. I think it's fine for someone to say that they don't like the taste of, say, strawberry ice cream without being obligated to break it down further. I mean, people form opinions without trying to psychologically analyze themselves.

And I don't think that people generally "choose to not like something" either. People don't say to themselves anything like "I think I'll dislike the flavor of strawberry ice cream."

Citizen Kane

@9point6@lemmy.world has a comment below stating that some of these are examples where a piece of media did something new and innovative that was so compelling that many subsequent pieces of media copied it, and thus whatever it was that the piece of media did failed to impress later audiences. For them, it was just the new normal. So the work was very influential...but maybe no longer stands out.

I've often seen Citizen Kane cited as being the poster child for this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_Kane

The film's narrative structure, cinematography and themes have influenced countless filmmakers and films worldwide, asserting its place as a cornerstone in the history of cinema

EDIT:

https://thecinemaholic.com/citizen-kane-innovations-flaws/

‘Citizen Kane’: The Innovations, the Flaws, and the Films that it Influenced

EDIT2: @marzhall@lemmy.world linked to the Seinfeld is Unfunny trope on TVTropes, and it has an entry for Citizen Kane:

Citizen Kane, oftentimes trumpeted as "The Greatest Movie of All Time," tends to inspire "what's the big deal?" responses from modern viewers, especially since Post Modern movies have become the norm and the cinematography has influenced so many other films. And everyone knows what the twist at the end is.