Schadrach

I mean the point of all rating systems in the US was fear of government regulation of content and having to fight that particular legal battle. It basically exists because moral busybodies were upset about Night Trap, Mortal Kombat and Doom.

The canonical answer to “can girls become witchers” is no one properly knows. Citi was raised and trained by them but they didn’t do the other stuff (the mutagens, trial of grasses or special diet) because they both didn’t know what it would do to a girl because it had never been done to a girl and because even if it worked exactly like it would for a boy it causes sterility and she’s the last member of the royal line of Cintra.

But the time of The Witcher 3, she’s already older than it’s normally done, so any attempt to do it would additionally have unknown results because presumably they usually start changing them from childhood for a reason, rather than taking in adult trainees.

Though talking about the lore, that had better not be regular witcher alchemy in that potion. She explicitly hasn’t had the special diet, trial of grasses or the mutations so witcher potions should basically be poison she can’t process at all.

Canonically she’s witcher trained but not subjected to any of the mutations, but she’s also of the Elder Blood and a Source. So compared to a traditional witcher you’d expect her to be slower and weaker (because she lacks the mutations) but have greater access to magic (because she’s a Source). You’d also expect her to use most witcher tools and gadgets, but not potions (because they should just be poison to her, not having the altered gut of a witcher).

My money is on fusion before proper socialism.

Utopia is literally “no place” for a reason, and anything less than a utopia will be deemed “not proper socialism” (like literally every place that has ever tried some flavor of communism/socialism) so my money is on fusion as fusion is more likely than utopia.

Hey now, we have some of the best healthcare in the world if you can afford it, and healthcare stats that demonstrate just how few people that actually is.

The implication is that someone is going to come off as a likely mark and for example get invited into a private user group with people “joking” with things like the Happy Merchant or being ridiculously over the top in a way that’s hard to take seriously to ease people in to taking white supremacist ideas seriously.

Ever seen the South Park episode about the Passion of the Christ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passion_of_the_Jew)? The idea is basically that that is constantly happening online anywhere it’s not sufficiently prevented.

The ADL considers Pepe a hate symbol, which I agree with is daft but that’s kind of key to their data and they are considered experts in the field by most. They scanned Steam with some automated tool looking for hate symbol images, came up with like a million hate symbols detected. If something contained more than one detected hate symbol, it got counted as however many hate symbols the tool detected (so for example Pepe saluting a swastika would count as a Pepe and a swastika).

Almost 55% of those were Pepe. The next highest was the swastika at 9%. A literal majority of hate symbols they detected with that tool were Pepes, at more than 5 times the rate of the next most common symbol. It’s literally included to make the problem bigger in the hopes that most readers either won’t look that deep or won’t know what Pepe is.

EDIT: Another fun one is if you go look at their hate symbol index, about an eighth of two digit numbers are either hate symbols or part of a hate symbol.

I am a big GOG enjoyer myself, but when I need to use steam for anything, I have never encountered such content.

You’ve never seen a Pepe meme on Steam? I’m not kidding there either - if you dig into that ADL link and follow it to the research, they have a list of top extremist and hateful symbols on Steam and the swastika is number 2 at 9 percent of detected symbols. #1, representing something like 55% of extremist and hateful symbols their automated detector found on Steam was Pepe.

Perhaps there is such content in private or otherwise not very visible spaces (such as user profiles), where they will not get reported, but that is true for any site with user content. I call BS on this being an issue.

If you dig into their research, it’s mostly private user groups and profiles. Game discussion pages are moderated by their respective devs or whoever the devs appoint but user groups are moderated by their owner/appointees and user profile pages aren’t really moderated at all unless you’re doing something actually illegal in the US.

So unless you go looking at the user profile pages of white supremacists, or go searching for white supremacist user groups you won’t run into much of it.

…and the fancy steam engine version of solar is probably greener to build that photovoltaics, since it’s basically just a boiler and some mirrors.

Steam has also been hosting numerous outright neo-Nazi groups for many years (PDF) and never really stepped up effectively against them. User reports and media attention has limited effect.

As a general rule, steam discussion boards for a game are moderated by whoever the developer assigns that power to, and steam user groups are moderated by the group owner or whoever they delegate that power to and Steam doesn’t particularly care so long as you aren’t doxing, openly coordinating harassment, or doing something explicitly illegal in the US.

That’s also the general tilt they’ve taken with what’s allowed on the store since they opened the floodgates - if it’s not illegal and it’s not going to get them sued, it’s probably allowed if properly tagged. Which is why you can find Sex With Hitler side by side with Super Lesbian Animal RPG.

Worst they do is block it from specific regions if the local government requests it - see that game where you essentially play as Hamas fighting against the IDF that they recently blocked from the UK, the one where the largest part of the game description is arguing that the game isn’t antisemitic hate speech just because the enemy are Jewish. The call to block it came after a new patch that apparently added a scenario based on the Oct 7 attack.

Epic Game store, good: free games, bad: Epic and Tim Sweeney.

Sums up how I feel about them. I have lots of games on my Epic account. I have paid for none of them, and refuse to change that. If it’s an Epic exclusive, it will eventually either release on other platforms, become an epic store free game of the week, or be an epic store freebie on amazon prime. I have enough games in my library I can wait.

You know what, I’d be all behind a subscription mouse so long as it includes periodic hardware upgrades and unlimited warranty replacements no questions asked so long as the subscription is paid.

Admittedly, I’d be trying to figure out the most interesting ways to actively destroy mice to make them rue the day they thought a mouse subscription was a good idea, but that’s beside the point. Why no, I can’t return the damaged mouse, it’s at the bottom of a hole in the woods no human has been down since the civil war. Just like it was none of your business how I found out that the mouse isn’t resistant to hydrofluoric acid.

Short version is that for the most part forum moderation for each game is left up to the devs or whoever they appoint, and users can create user groups and curators without much if any restrictions and they don’t particularly give a shit what content the game you want to sell has. The only real exceptions are if it’s illegal in the US, which applies to very little (for example no CSAM).

I find it interesting that the federal government threatening a private entity with legal repercussions if it doesn’t restrict the speech of it’s users isn’t such an obvious violation of the first amendment that lawyers aren’t climbing over each other to fight this one.

And if you don’t see the problem with it, imagine we agree that the federal government should be allowed to restrict what expression can go on on internet platforms content-wise, then imagine Trump and his cronies deciding where the borders lie. They already want to revive the Comstock Act.

I think nowadays they just use Facebook groups to shame men they don’t like. Are We Dating the Same Guy is the usual name for them.

Are they? It literally points out “Who you voted for is secret” on the ad, right above where it says that people will know if you voted.

…and yet they’ve had power before - several times, including once with it being literally this dipshit - and haven’t burned it all down to gain power yet.

But then this election is different, it’s the most important election of our lifetimes, just like the Democrats have said about every other election since at least 2004. Down to the literal phrase “the most important election of our lifetimes.”

The reality is both major parties benefit from the system, and both market based on fear because they don’t have anything positive to offer voters that isn’t an outright lie that the voters know is an outright lie. The big difference is the the GOP markets on fear of the other and the Dems market on fear of the GOP.

On my instance you just click “Communities” at the top and it gives you a list of communities with three options at the top Subscribed/Local/All just like the main feed. Click all and you can browse or search the list of all communities, though the search is not great.

Because a carrier’s data on you is not your person or belongings. The companies holding this data are selling access to it, so it’s not being searched, it’s being offered.

In other words, the same reason as why they don’t need a search warrant if there’s a breaking and the business across the street volunteers their security camera footage, even if you’re on that footage.

instead of blocking advertising data, we should embrace it IMO.

imagine a world where users shove so much information at these tools that they can’t even tell what’s real or not. camouflage works better when everyone participates.

There’s an ad blocker that does exactly this. Called Ad Nauseam. Chrome blocked it from their store super fast, then blocked it from being installed in Chrome from 3rd party sites, then blocked known versions of it from being manually installed in developer mode. I used to run it set to a low percentage - if I “clicked” every ad they’d know to throw my data out, but if I click say 3% of them…

To be fair, we achieved flight by copying nature. Once we realized the important part was the shape of a wing more than the flapping.