I think it's a good signal for us users, but for game devs it's still a problem. Indie games get less reviews, and a negative review means less exposure — the number might not mean anything, but plenty people still act like it did.

Plus game devving is artistic expression, and if there's something that pisses plenty creators off, it's when their creations get misunderstood.

Every indie dev at some point gets supermad about Steam reviews. However, 99 times out of 100, skimming the reviews on the game’s front page will tell you everything you need to know.

I think I get both sides of the matter. Some devs seem to be mad simply because the review is not under their control, and the player isn't shy saying what's wrong with the game. But some reviews are like, "2/10 Chinese restaurant, there were no burgers".

I miss times when "Israeli software" meant ICQ.

IMO controlling it "down to Panama" is part of what went wrong, I think. Pushing further into South America would've been costlier, but if people managed to get those flies completely extinct, the problem wouldn't come back.

But that requires multiple governments working together with a "helping them out means less problems for me in the future" mindset, and that simply doesn't roll with USA; USA's external policy was always "I'm shirring my panrs so othurrs smell ir" "I'm shitting my pants so others smell it". And working together with a bunch of dictatorships can be a bit hard, specially when those dictatorships were supported by USA so they can't trust the United-Statian government to die properly.

Well, I told you guys it's NSFL.

In general humans are the least concern. We're smart enough to know something is wrong with our bodies, and fix it before it gets worse; we wear clothes and bandage wounds so there's less exposure of vulnerable areas; etc. It's a bit more concerning because of children, since the flies can attack eyes and mouths, but as long as the parents actually do their job and take care of the kid, no issue. (Bug repellent, pay attention to small wounds, regular visits to the doc, this kind of stuff.)

Dogs and cats are another can of worms (or maggots). Specially urban strays; if anyone here wants some nightmare fuel, websearch images for [NSFL] miíase cachorro or miasis perro [/NSFL], apparently the flies (it isn't just C. hominivorax) responsible for this sort of infestation will lay multiple eggs in the same wound, if they can; so it can get really nasty. Same deal with the fauna.

When you see an animal, there's likely a bunch of the same species you didn't see. Specially if it's a small animal, with a fast lifecycle, and the animal burrows itself into something (like, dunno… the flesh of another animal?). And if the animal can live pretty much anywhere there's another, warm-blooded, animal living. (Livestock? Wild fauna? Pets? Humans? Yes.)

So a dozen cases isn't just "a dozen cases", there's likely millions of those flies in USA already. I'm taking a wild guess here and say a billion dollars won't even scratch the surface of the problem there.

(Not that it changes things for me. Here in South America the fly in question goes from "present" to "present". Just businesses as usual.)

Weird how they mention malagueta but omit a far more popular pepper in Brazil, dedo-de-moça:

It's a Capsicum baccatum variety, related to those ajís amarillos from the infographic. Between 10k and 15k SHU, so it's hot but by no means as scorching hot as malagueta; that makes it a bit more practical to add to dishes. (Plus dunno about others but I always saw malagueta as something way more regional, from Northeast. Specially Bahia; the text does mention it, but those folks down north use it for sauces.)

Incidentally I was able to cross-breed it with ye olde bell pepper (Capsicum annuum), might as well share the pic here:

That's F1, mind you. The bell pepper parent is yellow, so I know for sure she has genes for yellow peppers in it. It was barely spicy, way fleshier than the dedo-de-moça, but smaller than the bell pepper.

Now I'm cultivating the F2. My final goal is to make a heirloom variety out of it, then cross-breed it with either chocolate habanero or another cross-breed, for a full gradient of heats and colours:

• lime — no heat. Mostly as a bell pepper a bit more resistant to pests, and the climate fuckery of my city. Perhaps for paprika. Colour inherited from the bell pepper (yellow) + habanero ("brown" is basically red pigment forming while the chlorophyll is still there, theoretically I can separate the genes encoding it from the ones encoding the red pigment).
• yellow — really mild heat; the sort of pepper you can bite and chew, and you'll notice the heat, but it won't be offensive. Mostly for filling it with ground meat and cheese and whatever.
• red — heat roughly on the same level as the dedo-de-moça, perhaps a bit spicier? Mostly to use it as seasoning; it's fleshier and larger than the dedo-de-moça parent, I like it. Plus DDM has a nasty habit of dying in the winter.
• brown — ideally as hot as the habanero, except with a different shape. And meatier. For Science!

Ideally shape+size should be like in the F1. Perhaps a bit prettier if I can do it.

There's also a fourth type of pepper I'm raising, that I don't see in the graph. I don't even know it's name. It grows into a rather large plant (2m height if I don't prune it), and it seems to be hotter than DDM, so I'm eyeballing ~30k SHU. If possible I'll cross-breed with the habanero and then use this cross-breed in my project; mostly because the bloody tree endures quite some abuse from cold and heat, and produces a lot of fruit. Still, if I don't manage to do so before I get a heirloom out of that bell x DDM hybrid, I'm settling for just a trinary hybrid.

And now we got the Shitennou of weird Linux distros!

Good catch on the minerals. Potatoes also have vitamin C, but I think chuño loses it (vitamin C is rather fragile, odds are it doesn't survive the process). Protein-wise I just checked it; 3% in potatoes, 8~12% in wheat.

I suppose if I ever go back, I might try chicha again. Was really unimpressed the last couple times I tried it, heh.

It's a lot like grain beer, in the sense taste varies wildly, depending on a thousand things. For example, I had a friend from the region sharing his homemade chicha with me once; it was quite sweet and sour, but barely any alcohol. But when I tried my hand at it, the result was way sharper, and way stronger than grain beer.