The phrase almost seems routine: Steam has released a new update. Patch that adds options to the platform Valve which might well go unnoticed. However, here we are not facing one of those new versions that is almost not even worth paying attention to. In its place come some additions that promise radically transform the way in which some users relate to the platform. A coup of authority from a company that continues to demonstrate efforts to leave its competitors behind, reaffirming its intention to maintain a leadership position as outstanding as the one it has had over the last 15 years.
A perfect upgrade for multitaskers, the TikTok generation, and low budgets
Although now we will go into an in-depth review of all the additions, the main idea of the update is to offer us the possibility of overlay some tools offered by Steam on top of the game screen. For example, you can create notes about the game to remember your progress and make it permanently visible. Everything is done through Valve’s own client, with no need to ‘tab’ the game at any point or re- windows. This can be very useful, for example, if we are following a side quest from one of those games that doesn’t offer too much detail like Elden Ring either Hollow Knight.
However, this function, which seems like a blessing for classic players who know what it’s like to play a game with the notebook next to them, comes with other even more interesting functions. Do you want to watch a movie or some videos on YouTube while you play? Now you have at your disposal an improved browser offered by the Steam which can also be superimposed on the screen. It is perfectly compatible with all kinds of tools. If you wish, you can even put a movie in the browser and have it in the corner of your screen game to do two things at once while you spend hours playing a more relaxed game that may not require 100% of your attention.
A taste of what you can do with the new Steam features
The truth is that it is an idea with which we can only agree and that benefits, most notably, gamers who only have one screen. Maybe I, with my two monitors, will not get too much out of it. However, players with lower budgets have a chance to make some truly useful stuff. Especially if they belong to that generation accustomed to multitasking that, until now, perhaps had to go to their mobile phone to be able to watch videos while playing. In that sense, it seems that Steam has hit the nail on the head. It also offers options to modify the opacity of windows so that we can configure everything to our liking so that it does not bother.
Additionally, the Steam update has added the following changes:
Updated Steam Client notifications. There are now added options to choose which notifications you will see and where they will appear.
Visual and usability improvements to dialogs, menus, fonts, and colors. Included in this section is the screenshot manager, achievements and more.
Substantial improvements to the overlay in game. New visual section, customization, design and tools (those mentioned in this news) added. You can access it with the Shift + Tab command while playing the game.
Improved functionality with controller.
Mac and Linux can now use hardware acceleration.
Addon Pack is now available to all players and Some of the functions also affect Steam Deck. For example, if we save a note about a game while we are on the PC, we can later review it when we continue our session on the Valve console.
Dubbing or voice actors in video games can mark an entire generation. Whether through starring roles in entire sagas or a single video game, some voices are unforgettable. But what if I told you that most recognizable voice of all in the videogameone that you have heard countless times without looking for it, is famous only for Two words? I speak of nothing less than Richard WellsBritish actor with more than 30 years of career, with a tremendous range of voice and who you know for being the voice of PEGI 18but you have never seen.
The British actor, who can proudly imitate tight British, Dutch, Indian or Australian accents, has been lending his voice to brands, video games, film and television since the 90s. In three decades of career, if you have seen the advertisements for Old Spice either Coca Cola; flown with British Airways; had a cell phone Siemens; or any trailer for an R-rated video game, you know it. The most notable thing is that, among all these, PEGI 18 is its most important role.
Millions of players have heard him, but almost no one knows Richard Wells
I was there last night TikTok, almost as usual in an unhealthy habit of not going to sleep without my dose of short videos, when I came across a tremendous voice. Yes, I was in front of the actor Richard Wells, born in 1948, and who had created an account on the social network not to boast about his success, much less to advertise, just to show several generations of players who is the one behind his most successful work, one where he only said two words.
@richardwells48
#richardthevoice #PEGI18
♬ original sound – Richard Wells
The actor, who goes by the username richardwells48, says that if we’ve ever heard “PEGI 18” in the last 15 years, we were actually hearing it from him. With a comical tone, the 75-year-old Briton comments that of his more than 10,000 jobs and its three decades of careerIronically, it is this age warning that many of us probably skipped when we were little, which has made him not just another voice, but “the voice” of an entire industry.
A video on TikTok with no less than 892,000 “likes” from players around the world and the enormous figure of 4 and a half million views that has made it a viral phenomenon. In fact, with my hand on my heart, I admit if it were not for the chance of the algorithm, I would not have discovered who the voice of PEGI 18 in English is.
But let’s play a game: Would you know who is the voice of PEGI in Spain? As a good classification system at the European level, the ISFE has worked to adapt the warning to the languages of the union, and in Spain that task fell to Dani Lloret. The Catalan voice actor, who began his career on the radio in 1988, has been voicing PEGI in Spain since 2007. From PEGI 3 to 18, those of us who speak Spanish owe a lot to Lloret.
The news from CES 2024 continues and on this occasion it has been one of the main Chinese manufacturers, TCLwhich has advanced its next range of smart tvs for this year.
With a continuous approach in terms of technology with respect to the launches of the previous two years, the brand has proposed to offer more miniLED technology in larger diagonals and with better rear LCD lighting control systems. These are the new features for 2024.
New TCL Smart TV miniLED for 2024
TCL has announced that this season it will basically launch four models of mini LED Smart TV in the medium and medium-high range of consumption: the S551G (60Hz) on diagonals of 43 to 85 incheshe Q651G (60Hz) diagonals 43 to 98 inches (this will come in two versions, one normal and one Pro), the QM751G in 55 to 98 inchesand the flagship for this year and which aims to be one of the most competitive models, the QM851G in 65 to 98 inches, all of them for the American market, but which will have their equivalent in Europe with another nomenclature.
Tcl Qm851g. Image: TCL
He QM851G will represent the brand’s most powerful television in the domestic sector, with miniLED technology and a renewed ‘AIPQ Pro’ processor which will be in charge of managing the 144Hz LCD-VA panel compatible with HDR10+, Dolby Vision IQ, IMAX Enhanced and capable of working with 5000 zones local dimming and up to 5000 nits of brightness.
It will have HDMI 2.1 ports compatible with 4K at 120Hz and VRR, Game Accelerator at 240 Hz, an anti-reflective coating and a 2.1.2 sound channels as well as WiFi 6.
Other features of this model for 2024 is a special function to improve dialogues called ‘Enhanced Dialog’ and ‘TV Center Mode’which will allow the TV to be used together with the manufacturer’s sound bars to improve the sound stage.
TCL Qm751g. Image: TCL
Going down a little in features we have the QM751Gwhich offers up to 1300 dimming zones with peaks of brightness 2,000 nits and will continue to have HDR10+, Dolby Vision IQ, the ‘AIPQ Pro’ processor and the Game Accelerator 240 Hz mode.
For its part, the Q651G-Pro offers conventional FALD local dimming system while the Q651G It will have standard LED lighting without a zone matrix, however, offering 120 Hz panels in the 98 and 85-inch versions.
As for the prices and dates of going on sale, they are still a mystery that the manufacturer will reveal in the coming months.
A 115″ giant for home theater
Image: FlatpanelsHD
The manufacturer has also announced the launch this year of the Smart TV QM891Ga giant of 115 inch LCD-VA with miniLED which offers nothing less than 20,000 zones FALD control and brightness peaks 5,000 nits.
It will be equipped with a high-rise sound system, with 6.2.2 channels Dolby Atmos compatible, including two dedicated speakers pointing at the ceiling and two subwoofers for low frequencies.
It will come with 144Hz refresh rates, 240Hz Game Accelerator mode at 1080p, HDMI 2.1 ports, VRR, anti-reflective coating and WiFi 6. The price? Well, in the presentation they said that it would be available in North America for the summer for an amount less than $20,000.
The bell rings and all the children in the class leave in an orderly manner, heading for a larger room with the blinds drawn and rugs on the floor. They take off their uniform to stay in their underwear and put on tinted glasses and rubber bands designed to fix them on the head. They are arranged around a strange device, a kind of lamp. The same one the teacher approaches, dressed in a white gown and hat, and hits the power button.
We are in Murmansk Oblast, on the boreal coast of the Kola Peninsula, sometime in the 1980s, but “light baths” have been a common practice in the vast northern regions of Russia to promote the production of vitamin D. They continue to be. This is curious because in the European Union or the United States the usual clinical practice in the face of deficiencies of this vitamin is to supplement it. Neither children (infants or not), nor the elderly (to give two examples of groups with problems of this type) are initially recommended to use UV lamps. They are simply prescribed a few drops or a pill.
UV lamp “light baths” were given to Soviet kids in an attempt to supply them with vitamin D during the winter. (1987) from r / OldSchoolCool
What is this about? To the short duration of the summer in the Russian Far North as they say or is there something else? Today we have proposed go beyond the fascinating images of the “light baths” of the Soviet era and delve into the history of how a group of doctors, isolated from the international scientific community and with very particular circumstances, groped for the light in the middle of the darkness.
Deformed skeletons
The first sign is sometimes difficult to notice. The head, especially the posterior area, appears to dented when pressed, the fontanelles enlarge, and the long bones that support the weight of the body bend. Deformities in the tibiae, forearms, pelvis, wrists or knees begin. Growth stagnates, the body takes on odd shapes, and the chest becomes lumpy in the shape of a rosary. Those are the symptoms of a disease that has been accompanying us, at least, since we have medical records: rickets.
Lack of sunlight has many effects on the human body, but this disease (vitamin D deficiency) is one of the most terrible. So much so that, if we search the texts of Greek and Roman historians, it is not difficult to find clear descriptions of this ailment. It is also not difficult to find clues to its social impact either in the skeletal remains of the powerful Medici family or in art. While in 1509, without going any further. Hans Burgkmair the elder painted a baby Jesus with clear signs of suffering, a hundred years later Caravaggio finished a ‘Sleeping Cupid’ who also suffered from it. However, it was not until the year 1645 when rickets entered what we could already call ‘scientific literature’ with the publication of a treatise by David Whistler called “De morbo puerile anglorum” (“On the illness of English children” ).
By that time, rickets (or, as some already called it, the “English disease”) had a huge impact on the social, economic and intellectual life of the country. As we can imagine by And five years after Whistler’s work, a professor at the University of Cambridge, Francis Glisson went to the trouble of accumulating all the physical, clinical and anatomical evidence for the disease rather than getting tangled up in theoretical disquisitions. Yet children continued to die at a perfect confluence of smoke-shrouded cities, poor diets, and agrarian reforms that led to vast layers of society precariousness.
However, the ‘English disease’ should not mislead us. There is nothing – except perhaps the first symptoms of industrialization – that made rickets a British disease. In large areas of imperial Russia, by focusing on the subject that interests us, the problem affected half of the children. As early as the 19th century, while Scottish doctors concluded that rickets was related to environmental factors (such as deprivation of sunlight), Russian doctors related it to problems in housing conditions and practices. social. In Vilnius, where it affected one in three children, reports explained the higher prevalence of the disease in Jews by the greater reluctance of mothers to let their children play outdoors (compared to Gentiles).
How do we cure rickets?
Theories and proposals to combat the disease were emerging in clinical practice (in fact, the use of cod liver oil that we now know to be effective began to become popular as early as the 18th century), but it was not until 1918 that Edward Mellanby decided apply an experimental approach. At that time, rickets was especially strong in Scotland and, sensing a dietary cause, he decided to feed a group of caged dogs in laboratories a diet similar to that common among the Scots. A diet based on porridge (oatmeal porridge) ended up inducing rickets that could later be cured with cod oil and some sun exposure. The discovery of vitamin D, its role in disease, and the importance of the Sun in its production did the rest.
Above all, because this discovery It came at a time when the ‘movement of the sun’ was surprisingly popular across Europe and the United States. Although rickets is the natural result of two things (specific dietary deprivations and specific environmental restrictions), the medical community tended to divide between advocates of one and advocates of the other. And during those first decades of the twentieth century, imbued by strong technological optimism, light therapies experienced a true boom that far surpassed rickets and sought to use light for all kinds of ailments and diseases.
Children receiving ultraviolet light treatment at London’s Institute of Ray Therapy (1934) from r / interestingas___
It was a short boom, yes. And not because light did not play an important role in many ailments (Huldschinsky, in the middle of the World War and with thousands of German children suffering from symptoms, had already shown that rickets could be treated successfully with ultraviolet lamps), but because the expectations that were generated were huge. Too big. In 1927, Dora Colebrook did an extensive study for most health problems in which light was usually prescribed and found no notable effect in the vast majority. That marked, in one way or another, the decline of light in clinical practice.
The bright Soviet approach
A decline that, and this is very interesting, did not reach the Soviet Union. As Charlotte Kühlbrandt and Martin McKee tell us, examining the number of studies published on the subject in the USSR and in the rest of the world, it can be seen that between the late 1920s and early 1960s Soviet doctors published between four and eight times more work on this type of therapeutic approach. In the Soviet Union, light remained extremely popular for decades and as far as we know it still is today in Russia and other ex-Soviet republics.
Why? Why this bifurcation between Soviet and Western medicine? The truth is that as soon as we start to investigate we discover that “light therapies” add up to various factors that favored its “political, economic and social compatibility” with the practices and dynamics of Soviet science from the first half of the 20th century. Let’s start with the first compatibility, politics. During the 30s of the 20th century, the high command of many university and research institutions made a very important effort in order to build a “new Soviet science”. The best known case is that of Lysenko and his rejection of Darwinism and genetics, but there were many more situations in which entire lines of research lived and died only in relation to their adaptation to dialectical materialism.
Electricity played a central role in the ideological imaginary of the USSR. To the point that in 1920 Lenin himself declared that famous phrase that “communism is soviets plus electricity.” The importance of light for health was also presented as a scientific discovery of purely proletarian origin: it would have been the factory workers themselves who would have realized its role in physical, psychological and social health and would have done so. notified to the authorities. Light therapies fit like a glove with the ‘zeitgeist’ of those years.
Russian children gather around a UV light during the sunlight-deprived Siberian winter months from r / ANormalDayInRussia
They also fitted in with the preventive orientation that Soviet officials wanted to impart to their still developing health system. “The fundamental and main characteristic of Soviet public health, which differentiates it from medicine in capitalist countries, is its preventive orientation,” they said in Moscow in 1952. That is, although the relative international isolation of medical researchers prevented them keep up to date with many of the scientific advances, it is also true that, even when these advances were known, for decades the Soviet commanders tried to create an alternative model that “having deep roots in Russian medicine” (people like Sechenov or Pavlov) “will carry out effective preventive operations with the aim of reducing morbidity and eliminating its causes.”
Finally, another key factor was the country’s industrial limitations. And this is something that is little thought about because the image of the USSR as an industrial power makes us forget that this is not true for all industries. While Europe (with Germany in the lead) AND the US had a very powerful pharmaceutical industry that “processed” medical problems to find pharmacological solutions; Russia lacked such capacity and instead had a formidable infrastructure dedicated to heavy industrial and military production. That made the Soviets “process” medical problems differently, with other tools and that solutions were sought where they were strongest: in industrial manufacturingsuch as ultraviolet lamps.
From the Soviet past to today’s Russia
All this, although it may seem strange, explains much of the popularity of ‘light baths’ in contemporary Russia. All health systems have peculiarities attributable to what economists call “path dependence”; In other words, the decisions we make condition the rest of the decisions we will make in the future. The preeminence of this type of therapy for decades has contributed to creating a widely spread social prestige.
And all this despite the fact that the evidence on its validity remains scarce. On the one hand, although data on the real extent of rickets in Russia in recent decades have been scarce, by some indicators we know that especially the extreme north (and the Central Asian republics) had serious problems with vitamin D as late as the decade of the 80s, when rickets was already more than controlled in the western world. On the other hand, the Russian academy has continued to publish works favorable to this type of intervention in numerous diseases, but its quality is very low. There are authors who have come to suggest that light therapies are the Russian equivalent of acupuncture (a technique that only finds positive results when studied in China).
Why is it still being done? In part, because it works for some dermatological conditions (from psoriasis to fungal mycoses), it plays an important role in the production of vitamin D and has some documented effects on moods. Even more so in regions with very little exposure to sunlight. Nevertheless, the main reason why it continues to be done is by tradition. So much so that if we start dating the photographs of children undergoing this type of bath, we can see that their number is declining over time.
