I’ll cop to not having read the article and I’ll say I might, but I can think of some pretty good ones. It’s so children and teenagers can tell people when something bad is happening to them. Like being in a child marriage. Or being abused. Or being shot at in school. Or when their community is being preyed upon. Or when they’re in a cult. Or when they’re kidnapped and they have a phone. Or when they need to advocate for themselves against policy that chiefly affects them. Or when they’re afraid something is happening to their friends. Or when they’re suicidal. Or when they’re lost. I could probably come up with a hundred of these. The thing is that children and teens are half-finished people and we afford people certain rights. So we need to decide if we’d rather treat kids as human or as another group of pawns to control. I loathe this debate.

GAMERS ON THE WELL MANNERED PUPPY-GIRL ALPHA CHAD FEDERATED REDDIT ALTERNATIVE WHEN YOU BEG THEM NOT TO BE TOXIC TO THE DEVELOPER (THEY WILL DEFUSE THEIR SHITTINESS/THEY WILL NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY OR TAKE A TIRED DEVELOPER’S PLEAS GRACEFULLY)

GROW UP fuckers. The game sucks, I’ve played it. I’ve also been playing increasinly bad Dragon Age games long enough to know ITS EA, ITS ALWAYS BEEN EA. Everything they touch turns to shit. Veilguard was a live service team-based wave survival game like ME3 multiplayer until eight months before launch and you can reeeaaally tell.

I don’t give a fuck about blue haired devs, pronouns, none of that shit. If you do, grow up. Yes, Bioware is a skeleton crew with hack writers and a captain hired to go down with the ship and get the game out the door… BECAUSE OF EA.

ARE YOU JUST NOW PLAYING VIDEO GAMES FOR THE FIRST TIME? DID YOU NOT KNOW ABOUT THE PUBLISHERS IN GENERAL?

Gamergate’s still fucking going on. Bitching about Anita Sarkeesian in 2025 in response to a dev begging to stop being harassed, PATHETIC.

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I just tried this out and it was being washy about calling it a genocide because it is “politically contentious”. HOWEVER this is not DuckDuckGo themselves, its the AI middleware. You can select whether you’re dealimg with GPT 4 mini, Claude/Anthropic and a couple others. I expect all options lead to the same psycopathic outcome though. AI is a bust.

Evil Felling_High_Horses be like:

I saw a BlackPeopleTwitter post yesterday where one local (so, black) user gave another Asian user a coveted “invite to the cookout” for posting some decently well meaning kinda intersectionalist words, and they ATE THE FORMER USER ALIVE, saying paraphrased obviously “we give this privelage out way too readily to people who evidence the bare minimum decency”. Some people want to gel so bad they jump the gun and so you can’t assume one minority giving you a privelage related to their community stands for all in the community. The paradox of the N-pass.

Neoliberal art cannot answer these questions. Arcane is great and at times even better than great but it is a platform to advertise League of Legends. They can’t properly resolve Piltover/Zaun for the same reason newscasters can’t say out loud “Luigi Mangione is based as shit”. That fundamental truth about our society is like yellow cake uranium broken up into fine powder and lying on the ground to the media and artists working on corporate IP.

For the same reason I was struck in season 1 by how amazingly well done the characters are and how it doesn’t matter because like the protagonists of a Marvel movies, their character arcs bend inexorably toward them becoming video game superheroes. As if caught zipping around a black hole at the speed of light as they dance toward the event horizon, there is no path that leads to peace for any of them because their characters have to be in position to become League of Legends champions who battle it out in toxic gamer Valhalla forever.

Arcane is so much better than Riot Games deserves and its because its a Riot Games property that held it back from saying the things it clearly was thinking about (Jace and Victor, Piltover should be fucking dissolved, Caitlyn should necessarily do jail time). I hope Arcane inspires people to always be critically examining their favorite stories for the untold stories still inside them because that’s what made the show great for me. But it was only as earnest as it could be given the circumstances.

However, it’s important to emphasise that social science has so far failed to provide definitive answers.

Yeah thats traditionally not the job of the social sciences or science in general.

Thank you for educating me, I absolutely did get the sappy propaganda version of that story. I do WISH we could convince people not to use the symbol but I admit that’s something I only wish was possible because it would give us a prescriptive answer to emerging hate symbols.

On a long enough timescale maybe people can recoup the symbol back to its/their original forms; but we live now, and I find it unlikely. And the danger we face now from symbols with plausibly deniable hate built into them is considerable.

Did you notice we were talking about an emergant cartoon frog hate symbol and now we’re having a one hundred year old debate about the last great hate symbol? If we don’t draw lines, what is the protocol of protecting ourselves from fully unironic uses of would be hate symbols? I am not saying CENSOR PICTOGRAMS I DON’T LIKE. I am saying there isn’t a way to stop people from abusing our reticence towards censorship and tolerance of the gray without intense scrutiny and educating people about the symbols. That does kinda mean telling Buddhists that their sign of peace is our sign of death. First the culture shock, then the bitter arguments and singed pride. What should come next then?

Its a complicated thing for sure. I think its worth considering that the Native Americans whose version of the symbol was most directly copied elected to give it up, and that was in 1920. How could we ask Buddhists to give up their symbol of peace? If it isn’t fair to Buddhists, why did the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Tohono O’odham feel like they HAD to?

And that was a decade before the mass killings of the Holocaust. A decade before America intervened.

I fear the answer is there is no right answer. Sometimes groups make incredible leaps of empathy like that, but like hell was it fair to them.

The Swastika interestingly is four right angles, so the symbol occurs all over human society hundreds and even thousands of years before Nazism found it.

People thought any symbol so common throughout history had to be a quasi-good thing. They used it as a general sign of good luck. About the only thing that even comes close to the swastikas ubiquity and thrust of sentiment post-war is the “smiley face” symbol.

The Nazis saw all this and sent scam archeologists around the world to unearth and then piece together a narrative that their Aryan supermen ancestors had been the rightful masters of the earth. From the moment they made that decision, it’s had the stink of human ashes wafting off it ever since. Fire, wind, fortune, ‘North’, Kali’s creative destruction, and dozens more meanings all wiped away. So many cultures and groups robbed of a symbol or perhaps a phoneme even with their own contexts.

Draw the right angles. It is the wheel that crushes now. It means hate. We have a conditioned response as a society to it and each one of us personally has our own gutteral secret feelings about it. But the old meanings are all dead.

One of fascism’s best features is simply bald faced stealing. They stole that symbol from thousands or millions of people who used it every day. Pepe at least carries his own eternal chagrinn with him in protest of being used as a dogwhistle, but thats about it. His expressions are your expressions.

Pepe is damaged goods though. He endures well past his relevance and utility as an internet comic character when very similar concepts (rage faces, Polandball) have had their time and slowly lost ubiquity. But Pepe endures not JUST as a Nazi dogwhistle but as a symbol that even if someone is not right wing they still would like to convey a certain unsociable edginess, like a colorful threat display on a jungle animal. The disposessed middle class, the failure to launch kids, the kissless sensitive souls, all find commonality with the frowning frog. And these are the people they target. People use Pepe as a flare to suggest they’re in pain and only feel safe talking about it to other anonynous people on the same boat. Aka the most vulnerable to radicalization. Clinging to Pepe is advertising that you are looking for something that you don’t even know what it is, but normies can’t or won’t give it to you. Pepe is a green light to radicalization.

And like the various versions of the swastikas before they became THE Swastika, Pepe did nothing to deserve this. Just like everyone else under Nazi occupation.

In case you’re interested, its actually really easy to just grab this big Git repo of hundreds of Linux related wallpapers from different distros. Roughly half are gorgeous landscapes and you can be assured the photographers all gave explicit permission for their work to be distributed as wallpapers. Check it out!

Godot is WOKE and queerdo indie devs are using it to make WOKE games because they are UNCREATIVE HACKS who can’t into game engine thats why WE FORKED GODOT AND CHANGED ONE LETTER

Oh so its now completely impossible to stop a brigade by shuttering a subreddit for a day or two without begging some pea brain Reddit stooge. That won’t lead to anything putrid happening to small and medium subreddits on a regular basis I hope.

If AI bros were serious about existential risk and problems of alignment instead of attempting to form a cult of technobabble to make themselves superior and scrounge for venture capital… They’d pull the plug.

Altman is selling what he alledges he dreads more than anything: AI that would lie to you without a second (or even first) literal thought.

Hang on a second. Orson Scott Card is a homophobic motherfuck. What’d NS do that is so bad?

But for Deus Ex, we’ve got… I don’t know, Cyberpunk 2077, maybe? But the whole open world thing doesn’t really fit in with the usual gameplay loop of Deus Ex. There are a fair amount of great cyberpunk games, but none seem to really scratch that immersive sim itch. I guess Prey is pretty close as well (in addition to its System Shock influences), if you consider some of the body/power upgrades, but it’s not all that similar thematically.

Check out Cruelty Squad by Ville Kallio on Steam. Aesthetically and spiritually it scrys into the future on the same level Deus Ex did and delivers an even more dire prophecy that feels as disturbingly prescient. It takes the open ended levels of DX and adds insane verticality and mind bending traversal. It plays more tactically than Deus Ex but the augment system is really rewarding and enables the player to munchkin their way to their target.

You may notice it looks artistically like a 13th century Christian piece with a Jackson Pollock splotch of New Years Eve stomach soup all over the canvas. I retort that so did DX1 most of the time. The CS playerbase refers to our ability to parse and navigate this style of level design and eclectic color composition as the ‘CEO mindset.’

But seriously I am a big Deus Ex enjoyer and other than Thief nothing has come as close to the full breadth of experience that world evokes in me. It is both terrible and beautiful to behold.

Counterpoint: My sibling had their goddamn desktop ransomewared by this thing when they dared to uninstall it. It isn’t privacy nerd sensabilities, Windows now behaves like malware under certain opaque conditions and at unpredictable intervals. This was four years ago on Win 10. How great do you think non savvy people are about clicking things they don’t understand anyway and essentially springing a trap?

Sorry, it’s just you know how this has to go. “But komrade, surely you know many Unix and GNULinux operating systems are free”? and there’s probably although not guaranteed to be a distro that suits your needs and has analogs for Windows apps. If you’re opinionated about it, that’s fine, but on first blush, it’s confusing. Bring your own hardware and it’s free, right?