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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Hank Green actually posted a video relevant to this yesterday. He was reading a Fox News article about a machine that can turn C02 into fuel that an internal combustion engine can use.

    He then scrolled to the comments and saw all the posts talking about climate change being a hoax. He says it would be very easy to assume the average Fox News reader is a climate change denier. If you were to ask him how many people in the US deny climate change is real, he’d guess around 50%. However, surveys have consistently shown it is less than 10%. It is a minority of people. His point was that people leaving stupid comments are not the average person, they’re just really vocal, and try not to assume stupid comments are reflective of the average person’s beliefs.




  • I read an article once about a guy who grew up in a poor rural area in the US that changed my opinion a bit. He talked about how progressive and left leaning people want to help the poor and uneducated, but typically only in major city centers.

    Poor people in major cities are seen as victims of society. Socioeconomic forces beyond their control have caused them to fall behind and they need help! Rap music is the voice of the oppressed! Poor people in rural towns are seen as hillbillies who should have paid more attention in science class instead of playing football and taking their cousin to prom. Country music is for hicks! Combine this with the stats that inner city poverty is mostly minorities and rural poverty is mostly white people and you get a sense as to how rural people can see progressive programs as “racist”. It certainly doesn’t help that this idea is beamed into their heads by billionaire funded propaganda like Fox News.

    A tech company lays off 1,000 employees and there’s rage, but a coal mine shuts down putting 1,000 people out of work and there’s cheers. Biden telling rural Americans facing the loss of their livelihood “learn to program” is pretty rich coming from a wealthy successful man who likely doesn’t know how to work a computer, let alone know how to program one. Republican politicians at least pretend to care about run down rural towns. And if they don’t do that, at least they pledge to knock those smug city slickers down a few pegs! Send the Marines into LA!

    Hopefully the US can fix its urban-rural divide. I have no idea how that would happen, but it seems to be a major hindrance to class consciousness.







  • Saw people talking in comments at several places now, expressing animosity towards them to say the least, always presented as something that everyone seems to know about.

    tl;dr It’s YouTuber drama. Consider yourself lucky you’re not so terminally online that you understand it.

    Piratesoftware is a Twitch steamer/YouTuber who speaks his mind quite bluntly and doesn’t back down after doing so. Because of that, he’s often involved in streamer drama and has a lot of people who dislike him. Haters love to reference these past dramas whenever his name is brought up.

    10 months ago, he was involved in drama when he was asked his opinion on the Stop Killing Games EU citizens initiative. His opinion was that he didnt like it and expressed himself in a crass and crude way as he normally does. Supporters of the initiative didn’t like that and it spawned a lot of back and forth arguments before dying down.

    Currently, the citizens initiative is short on having the required signatures to move forward and the deadline is in a few weeks. The lead guy behind the movement put out a video saying the initiative will likely fail, he will be ending his organization efforts when it does, and blamed it on Piratesoftware’s video from 10 months ago. That has restarted the drama.


  • US law allows companies to enforce essentially any terms of service or end user licence agreement they want when selling products or services and rewriting laws to add an exception for video games is never going to happen.

    Stop Killing Games believe existing EU laws don’t allow this and are alleging some TOS and EULA of game companies are in violation. They want the EU parliament to review that and hopefully clarify the laws to ensure game companies aren’t “depriving citizens of property”.

    From the petition:

    We wish to invoke Article 17 §1 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union [EUR-Lex - 12012P/TXT - EN - EUR-Lex (europa.eu)] – “No one may be deprived of his or her possessions, except in the public interest and in the cases and under the conditions provided for by law, subject to fair compensation being paid in good time for their loss.” – This practice deprives European citizens of their property by making it so that they lose access to their product an indeterminate/arbitrary amount of time after the point of sale. We wish to see this remedied, at the core of this Initiative.

    The hope is that companies won’t make two versions of their games. One that complies with EU law and one that doesn’t. No idea where that comes from. GDPR is EU law and many companies created two versions of their service to avoid needing to follow it for everyone. Some companies, including game studios, even dropped their EU customers entirely instead of complying.

    It’s also become YouTuber drama bait at this point and is an easy way smaller channels can get extra views.




  • I just finished playing the remaster of this game! I was also pretty confused by it and can see why it got a lot of criticism.

    Her defense is that players end up feeling similar to the character in a meta kind of way. Players probably didn’t agree with the way the story was going, but pressed on anyways because they want a conclusion to the story, and that conclusion ends up being terribly unsatisfying. You could have stopped playing, just as the character could have stopped pressing on, but you didn’t. Now both you and the character have to deal with the crappy ending.

    It’s definitely a unique way to tell a story, but I’m not sure it’s a story that needed to be told. “All of that stuff you did was pointless”. Yeah, I know! I knew that at the start!

    She also brings up the “Abby Spectrum” which is more of an interesting idea. Trying to avoid spoilers, Abby is presented to the player at the start of the game doing something absolutely evil. She’s essentially the big bad villain. Later on you get her tragic backstory and see her do lots of nice things. The idea is basically, everyone hates her at the start, but how do you feel about her at the end? Are her backstory and good deeds enough to change your opinion of her? Where do you fall on the “Abby Spectrum”?

    Maybe the story would have been better if it focused more on this question instead of purposefully setting out to be unsatisfying as a meta way to explain why endless violence, fighting, and revenge is bad. Though I suppose there are a lot of people who might actually need that to be explained.