This is so strange to hear. I loved Frostpunk, but found it to be the very opposite: Far too easy and forgiving, which made the finale in particular, as the music swells up dramatically and the storm reaches its peak, feel kind of anticlimactic, because everyone was well-fed and warm(ish) in my settlement on my first attempt of playing it. Not one person froze or starved to death, no kids were sent into the mines and we most certainly didn't serve a 19th century spin on Soylent Green.

I know this sounds like I'm bragging, but I think the reason why this game felt so trivially easy to me is that I grew up with far more complex, challenging and punishing city builders, like Caesar 3, Pharaoh, The Settlers 2, 3 and 4, Anno 1602 and 1503, etc. I must have played many hundreds of hours of Caesar 3 alone, watching city after city succumb to fires, pestilence, barbarians and unrest until I figured out how to deal with these issues. There are so many more variables and difficult decisions in these games compared to Frostpunk, despite their idyllic presentation. Frostpunk's core city building mechanics suffer from the very idea the narrative and the few scripted decisions aim to avoid: Pretty much every problem the player has to face when building the city has an ideal and obvious solution (if you know your city builders). It's more of a puzzle game than an actual city builder. A very pretty and atmospheric one, which is why I enjoyed the brief campaign, but still.

I hope this encourages you to pick it up again. It may seem difficult at first glance, but once you figure it out, you can cruise your way through it with little effort and spend most of your time looking at the pretty graphics, waiting for the next scripted event.

I've got a Steam Deck and two servers running on Linux.

... until you inevitably need to use the shell. Linux, no matter the flavor, has been very easy to use in the 22 years that I've tried to use it - until you need to dig ever so slightly deeper for something and then it very much isn't. I started out with a Knoppix live-CD back in 2002. Remember that distro?

No issues that you know of.

You might perceive this as annoying, but can't you see that I'm trying to get something more out of you, that I'm trying to encourage you to be at least a tiny bit intellectually curious, to think about this just a little bit? Hell, I would be ecstatic to sense anything resembling uncertainty from you. I might not always be showing it, but I am always second-guessing myself, am never even remotely certain about how I'm seeing the world. I am engaging in these discussions, because I want to both challenge and be challenged, but I've been mostly disappointed. There's nothing I crave more than a good discourse, a proper exchange of words and ideas. Civil, but not to the point that genuinely valuable opinions are being held back.

As a last attempt to get anything resembling a proper opinion based on your own thoughts instead of that of others out of you: Can you name any other occupation similar to this alleged one? Have you ever thought about finding comparable occupations? I've tried finding one that comes close or is even remotely similar, but haven't been able to.

The often cited South African Apartheid really doesn't compare, because there are Palestinian citizens living in Israel with, at least on paper, full rights (and minus one obligation - they don't have to serve in the IDF, but can voluntarily sign up, which a couple thousand are doing every year, more so after October 7th). There's even a Palestinian supreme court justice. If there was actual Apartheid, then this wouldn't be the case. In practice, Israeli Arabs are similarly discriminated against as people of color in countries like the US, but nothing in Israel comes close to what South Africa did to its Black citizens or what Jim Crow laws did in America. Feel free to pick this opinion of mine apart though (but please, with your own words for once - if I wanted to read Wikipedia articles, I would do this myself).

You can at least clearly see the difference between Gaza and the West Bank, right? In the West Bank, there's an agreement with the ruling Fatah for Israel to assist in security matters, although in reality, the relationship is more that of a vassal proto-state that is too weak to both secure its own territory without being overthrown and meaningfully resist Israeli military supremacy after having lost against it multiple times in the past. Israeli soldiers and police officers are routinely carrying out raids against terrorists together with members of Fatah security forces. They are also setting up road blocks, impairing the movement of the Palestinians living there not just at the borders to Israel, but within the territory as well (seemingly randomly and often to a paralyzing degree - I've read reports of pregnant Palestinian women failing to get to hospitals in time, for example), etc. There are settlers in parts of the West Bank trying to expand their territory, often using violence and with help or at least tolerated by the IDF and Israeli police (and they are further emboldened since the start of the war). This is more or less (save for some contradictory peculiarities, like the Fatah's controversial martyr's fund) what a "normal" occupation looks like and has always looked like even going as far back as antiquity, down to getting rulers from the local population to do some of the dirty work for you. None of this applied to Gaza before this war - but I wouldn't be surprised if that's how Gaza might be governed and ruled after the defeat of Hamas, except with a likely even stricter security regime.

Meanwhile, another territory actually occupied by Israel, the Golan Heights, is effectively administered like any other part of Israel's internationally recognized territory, with all Israeli laws applying to it since 1981. Locals there, including non-Jews like the Druze, are citizens of Israel, very much unlike Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. This is the kind of occupation that is labelled as such according to international law, because most nations outside of Israel don't recognize it as actual Israeli territory. Israel annexed it for purely strategic reasons from Syria (making it arguably a cause separate from the Palestinian one), since otherwise, its heartland would be extremely vulnerable to artillery and other attacks from this area. It's one of those cases where one can simultaneously acknowledge the clearly illegal nature of this occupation/annexation, while at the same time admitting that this tiny nation with extremely disadvantageous borders and lots of hostile neighbors can't really afford not to hold onto this small piece of extremely strategically valuable mountainous terrain. It's definitely a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of situation, far from the only one Israel has faced and is facing. Once again though, this is completely different from Gaza.

Maybe I overlooked something totally obvious (wouldn't be the first time), so I invite you to try and find a state acting similar to how Israel did towards Gaza and this being labeled as occupation. Alternatively, you can just ignore this lengthy diatribe and we go our separate ways without continuing this conversation. It's entirely up to you.

Notice how this particular sentence is not sourced and how there is an entire section in the article further down explaining just how controversial it is to call the area occupied.

Can you explain to me, in your own words, how not having any boots on the ground amounts to occupation under international law? If you're trying to make the case that the border controls and wall were occupation, then I would like to preemptively remind you that 1) border controls are not occupation, but the right of any sovereign nation and 2) those were a direct reaction to a series of terrorist attacks, including stabbings, shootings and suicide bombings, as well as numerous rocket attacks. Nobody would deny a nation the right to enact measures that prohibit those from occurring on their soil against their citizens. If anything, October 7th showed that this often criticized wall wasn't even remotely sufficient to counter the threat terrorists from the strip posed against Israel.

Israel forcefully removed all of their settlers from Gaza in 2005. They essentially ethnically cleansed themselves. There were no IDF soldiers on Gazan soil and the administration of the strip was entirely in the hands of Hamas from that point onward. Under no definition of the word occupation was the strip occupied after 2005.

It is odd, isn't it?

Occupied Palestinian Territories

Gaza was not occupied prior to the terrorist attacks of October 7th.

Eh, that's a bit different. The Russian state does carry out assassinations of critics.

I wonder how many of them would complain in the manner this infamous Republican did a few years ago: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/trump-shutdown-voter-florida

In order for Sony to sell the game again and a PS5 (or PS5 Pro) to you - or at least, in a couple of years, the remaster to those who bought the original PC port. There are still about twice as many PS4 than PS5 consoles due to a lack of both exclusives and actual reasons to switch over to the newer system. It doesn't help that more and more people are realizing that one should replace any mention of "the economy" in the media with "rich people's yacht money", given how little average people are benefiting from it anymore, which means disposable income is down. The PS4, despite being almost 11 years old now and still relying on a mechanical HDD (unless you upgrade it), is simply "good enough" in the eyes of many. Microsoft has the same issue, of course, except from a much weaker position in the market. The law of diminishing returns makes newer consoles a hard sell.

At the same time, PC gaming is highly accessible, PC hardware is lasting longer for gaming than ever before (in large part due to the longevity of the previous console generation keeping hardware requirements of most multiplatform games in check) and now that former exclusives are finding their way over at a reliable pace, there are fewer reasons for those that are primarily playing on PC to get a console just for the exclusives. As fantastic as Astrobot looks and as much as I appreciate the return of the classic 3D platformer with physics and shiny new graphics, it won't make me purchase a PS5 any time soon or ever.

Sony is still producing both PS4 and PS4 Pro (whereas Microsoft discontinued both Xbox One consoles four years ago; they are still supporting the previous gen though), games are still being developed for them, despite first party studios having switched over to PS5 by now. Third party developers who were once happy about the low number of hardware variations they had to deal with now have to handle up to nine different systems if they want to release a game on all currently supported games consoles (ten when Switch 2 comes out) - plus PC and Steam Deck, which might just as well be another console as far as developers are concerned. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think I've ever seen cross-gen games that aren't just yearly sports titles being made for this long into a new generation at such a large scale. We certainly haven't had such a wide variety of systems since the early home computer era, even if their architectures and capabilities are much more similar now than they were back then.