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Ben Abraham

@afterclimate.com.au
1.1K followers 383 following 1.4K posts

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

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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 02/09/2026
Reading just the executive summary of the new UNEP report on Overshoot is depressing. The almost delusional levels of optimism baked into graphs stressing "if we ACT NOW we can prevent the worst, most irreversible damage to the planet" feels almost deranged. Where does this will to act come from?
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 27/08/2026
@mm-jj-nn.bsky.social Hey since when did you become a predatory journal editor??? looooool
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 24/08/2026
Update
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 19/08/2026
Day 3
An edited diagram of the stages of grief from shock & denial to anger, bargaining depression and finally acceptance
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 06/08/2026
This is a really good piece, and the way of describing the production consequences of decisions in gamedev is great, but also worth noting that it is *obviously* an AI written text. That in itself is not an argument against its validity or content, but it is funny, and notable.
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 03/08/2026
A China Apology Form made out to Xi Jinping with various funny listed reasons for behaviour
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 21/07/2026
Air conditioning rates around the world, per the IEA.
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 16/07/2026
What
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 15/07/2026
Lately I keep finding myself returning to this sentiment from an old Alexander Cockburn piece... and finding it still resonates all these years later. "Alex, is your hate pure?" "Yes, Jim, my hate is pure."
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 13/07/2026
You must imagine us fools
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 04/07/2026
Everyone should watch Bunny it’s one of the best, most bizarrely uplifting films I’ve seen in ages.
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 02/07/2026
The plastic burden *is real* though - from 2000-2018 the number of game console discs sold produced a stack of plastic discs 9km tall. That doesn’t make Sony’s choice “good” but it does highlight the tradeoffs.
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 24/06/2026
Advocate for whatever you want but heat is killing vulnerable Europeans *right now* and poo-pooing the idea of private AC is literally insane.
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.
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 11/05/2026
Is this...good? via @ketanjoshi.co
A chart titled "2004-2026 World Newspaper Coverage of Climate Change or Global Warming" shows a decline since peaks in 2022/3
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 05/05/2026
Ahhh it seems like it’s all just steam price manipulation via discounts and bundles - maybe less money laundering than I thought.
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”.
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 30/04/2026
Advertise your account with a Simpsons image
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"
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 23/04/2026
Just need to subsidise demand some more...
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 20/04/2026
Great...
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
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 10/04/2026
The slightly simpler alternative is that it's just pure achievement hunter spam garbage – one reviewer describes one of the games like this: "as a curiosity or for a quick dose of achievements, it's adequate."
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.
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 10/04/2026
Just some very normal Steam pricing right here. The games are also barely even finished. Trailers that are 14 seconds long. Asset store assets. Bunch of default project looking graphics... the only thing I think might explain it is........ money laundering?
A series of extremely expensive Steam bundles priced at $1261, $1565 and $2044 each.
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 29/03/2026
Too many terrifying indicators in this piece on the AI bubble - but the collapsing price of *rented* compute on current gen flagship AI chips is… errr… yet another worrying indicator open.substack.com/pub/no01/p/t...
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.
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 22/03/2026
There really is a certain clarity in humour!!! Very funny stuff if you can stomach it.
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 18/03/2026
Still, they can't avoid the rev share question, though they leave it to the end, and note that "more and more games from developers big and small have reached [the] new higher revenue share". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 18/03/2026
This year, it's hardware & improvements to the platform through better "Shopping and Discoverability", plus better "tools" to understand users and market data.
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."
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 18/03/2026
My best pull so far
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 16/03/2026
Single–origin copper, coming soon to a smelter near you. Ea-nāṣir is rubbing his hands together in glee.
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 09/03/2026
Pretty unimpressed by German urban air quality tbh. Don’t see this talked about much, but so much for the fabled European emissions standards. P much every time I’ve opened the weather app in Berlin or Frankfurt it’s been this sea of red
A screenshot of the weather app showing g Frankfurt blanketed in “poor” air quality
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 20/02/2026
Yeaaaah Ik ben nu in Nederland. (I’m in the Netherlands)
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 18/02/2026
Made it to Paris. Spotted a TGV in its natural habitat and a wet Sacré-Cœur after a billion stairs. I miss Japan where the trains work 😅
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 16/02/2026
Made it
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 06/02/2026
JC Denton from Deux Ex with the caption "what a shame" evoking the notoriously wooden and insincere voice line
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 31/01/2026
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 27/01/2026
Well anyway good night!
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”
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 15/01/2026
Post a game you remember playing that (probably) nobody else remembers
Screenshot of Operation Tsunami from the Macintosh (1995)
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 26/12/2025
@bonerman-inc.bsky.social found this spot on my ride 2day
A sign that reads “MABEN”
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 17/12/2025
Cover of "The American Century" appended to read "The American Century of Humiliation"
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 14/12/2025
It's cool that every few years in Aus we're just going to be doing this again. Guess no one has any new ideas about how to support a creative industry in this country that isn't "make another co-working space"
The 4 panel "I just need to" cycle meme, where the text in every panel is "I just need to reinvent the arcade"
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 01/12/2025
My takeaway from this chart, which shows CO2 emissions *growth* even in the AI base case by 2030 (let alone the Lift-Off high take-up scenario) is that data centres are making it harder to achieve the reductions we need. Being a smaller increase than others is no comfort when it all has to go down.
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 24/11/2025
"...as households' perceived probability of attaining homeownership falls, they systematically shift their behavior: they consume more relative to their wealth, reduce work effort, and take on riskier investments." This new paper seems very pertinent papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 13/11/2025
Marvelling at this flyer for solar panels from 2013, via FB memories
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 05/11/2025
Saw u in the Graun
Mark Serrells standing behind a report on a podium
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 05/11/2025
Rewiring Australia reckons the cheaper home batteries program has installed the equiv. of "one of the ten biggest gas power stations in the country." Sick to see the power of distributed networks play out like this. Someone could write a book on this in the vein of the early internet stuff.
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 29/10/2025
Omg my favourite calendar app added a travel time option for CYCLING! YES! This is the update I never knew I needed.
Update/patch notes for BusyCal 2025.4.1A menu screen from BusyCal showing Advanced options tab, and under "Locations" an option to select bike as default travel time.
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 26/10/2025
Oh yeah this was yesterday - third and final day of Big Rides.
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
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 24/10/2025
Here’s a cool flyover though! This is neat - but still doesn’t convey the climbs very well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 24/10/2025
Rode too far - again! Too many hills! Too steep! It’s also missing about 18 kms in the middle for battery/charging reasons
A Strava post showing a route from Mansfield to Wangaratta, total distance 86 km (it’s missing some bits) and elevation gain 1144 m
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 23/10/2025
I rode too much today. Too far. Doing it again tomorrow, like some kind of lunatic
A Strava map of a ride titled “The great Victorian rail trail” with a distance of 123 km and 6 hr, 45m moving time
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 15/10/2025
Here’s one with a JOEY in its pouch!!
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 15/10/2025
I warned you
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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · 14/10/2025
Last one for today, cannot promise I won’t post more tomorrow!!!
A quokka on a chair looks across the table at a cocktail
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