Ben Abraham

@afterclimate.com.au

1039 Followers 379 Following

I research games + sustainability, currently working for the Sustainable Games Alliance to produce a methodological standard for measuring games emissions. https://afterclimate.com.au/ https://sustainablegamesalliance.org/ Was @afterclimate on Twitter

A chart titled "Heat versus gun deaths in Europe and the United States" – including gun homicides and suicides, Europe has almost as many excess heat deaths.
A chart titled "2004-2026 World Newspaper Coverage of Climate Change or Global Warming" shows a decline since peaks in 2022/3
A r/Steam thread where users describe highly inflated prices of Steam games as exisiting to “inflate the value of random steam key bundles you can buy”.
Bart Simpson says "This is the hottest summer of my life" Homer kneels down patronisingly with a hand on Barts shoulder and says "This is the coldest summer of the rest of your life"
Cloudflare System Status Issues solving Challenges Investigating - Cloudflare is aware that some visitors are currently unable to pass challenges. We are investigating the issue. Apr 20, 2026 - 05:01 UTC
This game drops you in a cursed desert where soccer seems to be the only law. The Old West aesthetic, mixed with a supernatural touch, creates a curious atmosphere that, while simple, is striking and even funny. But the real "curse" came right from the start: I opened the game and all six achievements popped up one after another, as if the ghostly sheriff himself were rushing me out of there. I hadn't even touched the ball and it was already "completed." A comical detail, but one that makes it clear the experience is geared more towards quick achievements than a real challenge. The gameplay is minimal, the minutes of content fly by, and the match ends before you can even settle into your chair. That said, as a curiosity or for a quick dose of achievements, it's adequate. In short: a brief stroll through a haunted West where the rewards come on their own. Fun for a few moments, but too fleeting to recommend beyond the achievement collection.
A series of extremely expensive Steam bundles priced at $1261, $1565 and $2044 each.
Meanwhile, the thing these data centres actually run on - GPUs - is collapsing in price. And not gently. In December I mentioned GPU rental prices had dropped 23%. That was quaint. H100 cloud pricing has now fallen 64-75% from late 2024 levels. From $8-10 per hour to $2.99. On marketplace providers like Vast.ai you can rent an H100 for $1.49 an hour. The chip that was supposed to underpin the AI revolution is now cheaper per hour than a cup of coffee in most Starbucks. A100s? $0.75 an hour on some platforms. And it’s about to get worse. Blackwell B200 GPUs are shipping now, which means the entire H-series is sliding toward commodity pricing. Previous-gen flagships typically see about 15% list-price cuts within six months of a new generation launch. The H100 hasn't looked down yet. Remember that I mentioned that below $1.65/h the rental economics stopped working? Well, we’re way below that on the cheaper providers. The very infrastructure these companies are committing trillions to build is becoming uneconomical whilst they’re still building it. It’s like when hotel rates are cratering and somehow you decide the solution is to build more hotels.
Text reads: The work we shipped in 2025 continues a long trend of iterating on existing systems and introducing new ones to make Steam better. Ideas like the Discovery Queue, Developer homepages, or Steam Playtest start as small beta features and continue to improve years later based on customer use cases and developer requests. That iterative approach focused on meeting the needs of developers and players has led to consistent long term growth, and the opportunity on Steam is bigger than ever. Five years ago, Steam was growing steadily and crossed the 25 million concurrent user mark for the first time. In the years since, we’ve grown at a pace of around 3.4 million additional concurrent users per year, reaching 42 million peak concurrent users. All those users are downloading a lot of content. In 2024 we delivered about 80 exabytes to customers, and in 2025 that grew to 100 exabytes. It's hard to make sense of such a huge number, but just for fun: Steam users are averaging 274 petabytes of installs and updates per day- that's 11.42 petabytes per hour, which is about 190,000 GB of data per minute. That user growth translates to more revenue for game developers. Since the 2018 announcement of the 75% and 80% revenue share tiers, more and more games from developers big and small have reached new higher revenue share. The revenue share paid out across all non-Valve games on Steam in 2025 was 76%, and that does not include any revenue developers may earn selling free Steam keys outside of Steam. Back in 2024, we shipped a new notification feature for developers to make it more clear when their game has crossed a new revenue share tier, and developers can see a game’s progress towards those higher tiers in their sales reporting.
Highlighted text from Steam year in review for 2025 that reads: "Our goal is that small improvements like this will build trust with customers and provide a better shopping experience, which in turn helps developers find their audience on Steam and ultimately sell more copies of their games."
A screenshot of the weather app showing g Frankfurt blanketed in “poor” air quality
JC Denton from Deux Ex with the caption "what a shame" evoking the notoriously wooden and insincere voice line
The Simpson screenshots, with a two panel meme. The first has a picture of the heat wave in Australia, and Bart says “this is the hottest summer of my life”. Panel 2: homer says to Bart “This is the coldest summer of the rest of your life”
Screenshot of Operation Tsunami from the Macintosh (1995)
A sign that reads “MABEN”
Cover of "The American Century" appended to read "The American Century of Humiliation"
The 4 panel "I just need to" cycle meme, where the text in every panel is "I just need to reinvent the arcade"
Mark Serrells standing behind a report on a podium
Update/patch notes for BusyCal 2025.4.1
A Strava activity screen with a map of the ride, and the words “Day 3: “We’ll just go for a short ride” with Dad” Distance: 70.2 km Time: 3hrs 39m
A Strava post showing a route from Mansfield to Wangaratta, total distance 86 km (it’s missing some bits) and elevation gain 1144 m
A Strava map of a ride titled “The great Victorian rail trail” with a distance of 123 km and 6 hr, 45m moving time
A quokka on a chair looks across the table at a cocktail
A quokka in front of a tent, with a man in the edge of the frame
A small quokka on a paved path eating
A dog wearing an expression of disappointment
A cartoon with four common meme formats all saying “subsidise demand”
An image showing "Summary of current and future climate risks" for several important national categories, like communities, defence and national security, health and social support, and primary industries and food. Many of the 2050 markers indicate risks increasing to "very high" and even "severe" risk levels.
A table of "future change relative to current" for several climate hazards, like "severe/extreme heatwave days, time spent in drought", sea level rise" etc. With risks at different temperature rise amounts.
The SpongeBob kid meme, where he looks extremely unimpressed
Text that reads: An Ode to the Freedom of Bicycle Riding Cycling demands your attention; there's a built-in risk that’s significantly reduced by staying aware, and I appreciate anything that pulls me back into the moment. What I love most, though, is how cycling transforms your relationship with your surroundings. On a bike, you notice things differently. Your field of vision expands. You're more likely to look up, take a different route, and rediscover familiar places with fresh eyes. If you ever feel like you’re falling out of love with where you live, try experiencing it on a bike. It really does change things. There’s also something nostalgic about it. For many of us, cycling was our first real taste of freedom as kids. That feeling doesn’t fade with age, if anything, it deepens. Even in the chaos of London traffic, cycling is cathartic. My favourite time to ride is early in the morning. I realised this after cycling home from a DJ set in Shepherd’s Bush to Bow at 1am — pure bliss. This, in Tokyo Bike is incredibly lovely with photos and videos and an interview with Ayishat Akanbi.
A taupe coloured bike leans against a concrete pillar covered in graffiti. Lush green grass surrounds the pillar.
A screenshot of Azure pricing, with text highlighted that reads "with InfiniBand networking for workloads that require fast interconnect, like Oil and Gas, Automotive, and Genomics"
6 Stages of engagement with a LLM – the headings read: 1. The Audience Selects Itself 2. The Scene is Set 3. The Prompt Establishes Context 4. The Marks Test Themselves 5. The Subjective Validation Loop 6. "Wow! This chatbot thinks! It has sparks of general intelligence!"
An email from the Australian red cross Lifeblood service advertising that "We're launching a carbon offset option". The email body reads: "Hi Benjamin, You asked, we listened! Now you can choose a gift that lets you do more with your donations ⎯ Lifeblood Gifts now has a carbon offset option! Ooh, how does it work? Like you do now with our gifts, you can choose the carbon offset option with every three donations. This means, instead of receiving physical merch, we’ll put your gift towards offsetting the carbon footprint that occurs as part of processing and transporting three donations. Which carbon offset programs will my gift support? Your contribution will be used to purchase carbon credits from projects that fit within the Climate Active program guidelines. Climate Active is an Australian government-backed program that helps Australian businesses drive voluntary climate action."
Screenshot of p.10 of the Edelman Trust Barometer, showing 11+ point increase in year-on-year change in public "Fear that leaders lie to us"