This is me.

Parents are baby boomers but had me really late. I used to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in my Super Mario themed tightey whitey underwear when I was like 4 years old…

I remember in my small town leaving the house on my bike when I was 5 years old at sun up, and being gone playing with friends until the street lights came on, because that was when dinner was ready. I could easily have killed myself or been kidnapped, my parents didn’t see me for 12+ hours at a time.

I’m from Oklahoma and I remember the walls of my schools Gym shaking from the Murrah Federal Building bombing.

I was in Middle School and remember lots of high schoolers having gun racks, with hunting rifles, in their trucks parked in the student parking lot. And it was normal.

I was in A+ classes at a community college while in high school and watched a live stream of the TODAY show as the second plane hit the WTC tower…

I’ve watched the world go to shit, I have a kid that just turned 18 and I’m angry that they won’t get to live in a world that even resembles the one I grew up in.

I’m just fucking angry.

As long as you aren’t expecting it to run games like it has a RTX4090 in it, and are fine with the limitations of both the battery life away from a charger and the fact that some games might have issues related to the fact that the SteamDeck runs Linux, you will probably not regret your purchase.

The new OLED version is slightly updated for better thermals, and from what I’ve read is slightly more capable than the OG Deck.

I have had an OG deck since I got the chance to purchase after putting $5 down to pre order (I want to say a little over 2 years?) and the most demanding game I’ve played on it was Baulders Gate 3, and I had no issues with performance, and the small screen at 1280x800 resolution looks good on the OG but I’ve heard the OLED is even better.

I just bought my sister in law a Refurbished 512 OG Deck for $379 after tax/shipping, which about half what I paid for mine as an early adopter. You might see if you can pick up a refurbished one or get the OLED with a smaller SSD and upgrade it yourself.

“over the past 60 years the West has begun to shift away from the culture of progress, and towards one of caution, worry and risk-aversion, with economic growth slowing over the same period. The frequency of terms related to progress, improvement and the future has dropped by about 25 per cent since the 1960s, while those related to threats, risks and worries have become several times more common.”

I mean, when people are struggling to survive it’s hard to let yourself get excited about technology that will likely only benefit the most wealthy. All of the “easy” discoveries have been made. Anything else getting research funding is to further capitalism.