There’s multiple parts.

First there was a massive pandemic relief fraud. A bunch of people exploited programs meant to feed kids, because those programs had relaxed checks during the pandemic. The main organization here is “Feeding our Future” who helped various individuals fraud the government.

Basically they claimed to be serving millions of meals to kids, with fabricated invoices/etc.

In exchange for Feeding our Future helping individuals with the fraud, they required kickbacks from the individuals. A lot of this money was used to buy real estate, especially in Kenya and Turkey (which makes it very difficult to recover the money).

Not everyone involved was Somali, be the majority of the people charged were part of the same Somali-american community.

Recently it was found out that some similar fraud was happening with Somali run daycares. They were getting millions in subsides, while having few to no children present at the daycares.

Tim Walz and the Department of Education are being criticized over various parts of how they handled it. The Minnesota Department of Education had warnings about the fraud as early as 2018, but ignored them. Later on they asked the Feeding Our Future to investigate themselves for fraud (which obviously didn’t work).

When the pandemic meal fraud was discovered in 2021, the MDE decided to continue payments to the fraudsters because they claimed they didn’t have enough evidence to win in court. Tim Walz later claimed a judge forced them to continue payments, but the Judge released a statement saying that was a lie. There’s some speculation that Walz was originally trying to avoid it going to court to avoid it being a big scandal.

Finally when Walz did announce the fraud, he framed it as a success that they caught these people, even though it had gone on for years and huge amounts of money had already been stolen.

Alright I might be an idiot. I bought Alice, spent forever trying config edits, registry edits (locale registry for it is at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\EA Games\Alice Madness Returns btw), and no matter what I did the game either would launch in english or not launch at all. And then I tried just setting the game’s language to “French” in the steam properties for the game, and it worked, booted in french.

So yeah, that’s all you need to do probably.

As for Dino Crisis, I don’t own it, so I can’t troubleshoot it directly.

I’m thinking the right price is about $80, and I’d be very happy if the price is lower than that.

I sometimes play with my Deck docked, but a lot of my games aren’t playable without the extra buttons/track pads/gyro of the steam deck.

Ok I did some searching. Try this:

For Alice, go to ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/19680/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/My Documents/My Games/Alice Madness Returns/AliceGame/Config/

Check the different .ini files there, one of the engine ones should have a Language value that needs to be set to FRA.

For Dino Crisis, the language is apparently set by a registry value. The game may include a language_setup.exe or something similar that you can run to change the language. In Lutris you’ll want to use a “run exe from inside prefix” option to run it.

If the game doesn’t have an exe to set language, you can edit the registry directly. Go into wine settings for the game inside lutris, and look for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> Software -> CAPCOM -> DINO CRISIS or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> Software -> Wow6432Node -> CAPCOM -> DINO CRISIS.

Hopefully there’s already a key there called language, try setting the value to 2 for it.

You may need to adjust more environmental variables than just LANG.

These are for English not French, but the variables I had saved for fixing language issues are:

Key: LANG, Value: en_US.UTF-8Key:

LC_ALL, Value: en_US.UTF-8Key:

LANGUAGE, Value: en_US:en

Also I believe Lutris has a spot to set environmental variables without using a launch option. Try going to the game>configure>system options>environmental variables.

Here’s the article where he gives his full bad experience with Linux. He was running Ubuntu when things broke, and had previously had lesser issues trying Nobara.

You might check out some of the different game bundles available right now, they can quickly give you a lot of good games to play for cheap.

One month of humble choice ($15) will get you Nine Sols, Like a Dragon Gaiden, Streets of Rage 4, and a bunch of other games.

Fanatical has a ton of build a bundle available right now for their winter sale. Of those bundles, the Prestige, Best of Platinum, Winter SuperStars, and Play on the Go bundles are all especially recommendes.

Steam Deck is the first thing that comes to mind, I use it everyday.

There are a few EDC items I got as gifts that I use nearly everyday as well:

• Leatherman Surge
• Leather holster for Surge and other gear
• Benchmade 551-1
• Shokz Openmove bone conductive headphones

I feel like this is virtue signaling more than actually addressing a real problem with Clair Obscur.

Right now, they sell a 256GB LCD, 512GB OLED, and a 1TB OLED. The 256GB LCD is going away, leaving only the 512GB OLED and the 1TB OLED.

Previously they had offered 3 sizes of LCD, 64/256/512.

When the LCD models sell out for good, they might start offering a lower price OLED with less storage, but that’s just speculation.

A lot of people have done burn in tests on the OLED, and it’s barely a concern. The tech has really improved.

There are some video on youtube, it’s still kinda blurry but the game is still pretty beautiful imo. Definitely won’t look as good as it does on desktop.

Yes, especially after the recent performance update.

It’s a lot better after the update a few days ago, but back when I played it I actually installed a performance mod to make it run a lot smoother. I thought it was very playable, but I’m also trash at dodging/parrying consistently. I’m assuming it was more of a skill issue than the game’s performance though.

They make specific hall-effect sticks for the OLED models, I know Gulikit make a set, possibly other companies too.

It used to, but all the popular replacements are now solder free.

As far as I know, I think all the designs have been updated to not need soldering.

The inspiration for this discussion is that the capacitive pad on my left thumbstick has started to peel upwards at the bottom, so I plan to replace it soon. Haven’t had any issues with drift or anything else.

A couple things to try:

1. A lot of thumbstick drift is caused from getting debris or sticky residue in around the thumbstick. This is especially common if you let your kids touch your Steam Deck/controllers. Taking some plastic-safe electronic cleaner spray (like CRC QD electric cleaner) and spraying it around the thumbstick while the deck is turned off can fix this pretty easily, and the same cleaner can be used to fix other controllers (especially nintendo switch joycons) as well as sticking controller buttons.

2. The steam deck has adjustable dead zones. If your drift is very minor, you can increase the size of the dead zones to compensate.

3. It’s possible to recalibrate the thumbsticks, see this guide

4. Replacement thumbsticks are available on Amazon, many people like to upgrade to hall effect sticks made by Gullikit or other companies. Ifixit has guides for both the right and left thumbsticks. Important to note with this, there are 2 models of LCD thumbsticks and 1 model of OLED joystick, you need to buy the same type of thumbstick as what your Deck already has (edit: looks like the gullikit LCD stick now works for both LCD types, it has a micro switch on the joysticks to select which type you have). The Ifixit guides explain how to check which LCD type you have. Actually replacing the thumbsticks involves popping the back off the deck (with the microsd removed), disconnecting the battery, unplugging a ribbon cable from the thumbsticks, and then removing a couple screws before pulling the whole thumbstick out. After the new thumbsticks are installed, you will have to follow the callibration guide listed above under #3.