I never said afford to protect it, just to comply with the requirements for doing the checks and storing it. Passing SOC2 or PCI-DSS (if you’re doing verification via payment card) doesn’t make you more secure in reality, but if you can’t afford to do those attestations in the first place, you’re out of the game.

This is just another way to ban “harmful” content.

That is true, but it’s not the whole picture. KOSA applies a Duty of Care requirement for all sites, whether they intend to have adult (or “harmful”) content or not.

So your local daycare’s website that has a comment section could be (under the Senate version that has no business size limits) taken to court if someone posts something “harmful”. That’s not something they or other small sites can afford, so those sites will either remove all UGC or shutter, rather than face that legal liability.

The real goal of KOSA (and the reason it’s being backed by Xitter, Snap, and Microsoft) is to kill off smaller platforms entirely, to force everyone into their ecosystems. And they’re willing to go along with the right-wing censorship nuts to do it. This is a move by big-tech in partnership with the Right, because totalitarianism is a political monopoly, and companies love monopolies.

I’m not anti-internet at all, I’m all for the internet; I just think it’s best when it’s by and for individuals.

If I had my way, I’d ban corporations from operating anything online but digital storefronts. :P

I really hope so. The last thing we need is Nintendo deciding that they own every game mechanic they’ve ever used.

This is a tough and complex issue, because tech companies using algorithmic curation and control mechanisms to influence kids and adults is a real, truly dangerous issue. But it’s getting torn at from all sides to force their own agendas.

Allowing large corporations to control and influence our social interactions is a hugely dangerous precedent. Apple and Google and huge telcos may be involved in delivering your text messages, but they don’t curate or moderate them, nor do they send you texts from other people based on how they want you to feel about an issue, or to sell you products. On social media, companies do.

But you’ve got right-wingers clamoring to strip companies from liability protections from user-generated content, which does not address the issue, and is all about allowing the government to dictate what content is acceptable from a political standpoint (because LGBTQ+ content is harmful ^/s and they want companies to censor it).

And you’ve got neolibs and some extremely misguided progressives pushing for sites that allow UGC (which is by definition all social media) to have to check ages of their users by implementing ID checks (which also of course treats any adults without an accepted form of ID as children), which just massively benefits large companies who can afford the security infra to do those checks and store that data, and kills small and medium platforms, all while creating name-and-face tracking of peoples’ online activities, and legally mandating we turn over more personal data to corporations…

…and still doesn’t address the issue of corporations exerting influence algorithmically.

tl;dr the US is a corporatist hellscape where 90% of politicians serve corporations either willfully, or are trivially manipulated to.

PS: KOSA just advanced out of committee.

Except they filed a patent for exactly that recently, so I’m guessing it is for the capture mechanics. It shouldn’t pass muster in that case, but Japanese courts be wild (and very pro-Nintendo).

massive amounts of digital pornography and pictures of cats, the landfills have millions of Styrofoam cups and plastic spoons, and someone will have to pick through that mess and decide what mattered and what didn’t.

I have bad news for you…

My GCW is too slow to play anything, honestly. It struggles with even GBA games. I love the idea of the Ouya as well, but I think that I’ll probably just go with an rPi if I ever go that route again.

I kick-started the Ouya, years and years back. Played a few games on it, but it was just too underpowered.

The GCW Zero was another similar story; just an underpowered handheld console.

I really like the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro. It’s a non-major console that is 1000% worth the money.

S.T.A.S.I.S.

Nightmare House 2

Silent Hill 2

Halo: Combat Evolved (the Flood levels are horror masterpieces)

Lone Survivor

Crow Country

Dino Crisis

It’s no coincidence that some states are trying to get rid of ballot measures entirely, or otherwise make them much harder to make it in front of voters.

I think the first game did a better job of making the player feel like they were starting at 0, and working upwards from there, which is my preferred RPG progression.

In 2 I sort of felt like I was already a badass from the start. Might have just been my perception, but I remember in 1 finding the harpies scary and challenging when you’re escorting the ophidian head on the cart to the capital. In 2, you run into a bunch of harpies right after the first camp, and they were just like nothing.

True, but a card or a comic isn’t dependent on an equally old electronic device to be useful. New in box retro games have value as collector pieces, but used games that have modern re-releases are much less valuable.

They just released Riviera: The Promised Land on Steam for $35, so I don’t think retro games will maintain their value. Studios will just re-release them and charge full price again if the secondary market heats up.

Haha, that’s crazy. My boomer dad may play Halo as a cover-shooter, but he can at least hold the controller properly. :P

You’re not the “bully class”, you’re defending the Bully Class (i.e. the wealth and power holders). The Bully Class uses force all the time, e.g. cops.

Does that mean I need to counter-obstruct obstructism I disagree with? That sounds like rapid escalation.

Activism is, intrinsically, against the status quo. If you are for the status quo, you can counter-protest, but the police are the ones whose “job” it is to employ pro-staus-quo force. If you are for a different change, it very much depends on what the movement you’re opposing is trying to do. It may well be necessary to obstruct it.

to have a outline/playbook to organize obstructionists in this climate is woefully tactless when masses are so easily enraged.

We are living in an age of capital consolidation unlike any time before. Our wealth disparity (and therefore, power disparity) is greater than even in the days of the Robber Barons. I think the masses need to be enraged. If you actually mean, “taking their rage out on the wrong people”, I’d agree, but that’s far more likely to happen due to political actors and news media (e.g. Jan 6th) than it is by local protests.

That said, there are many ways to get your message out. Websites, pamphlets, signs, heck we are Ad ridden everywhere. There is no excuse. Changing laws isn’t glamorous, isn’t fast, and isn’t easy. But the right way has no shortcuts.

The entire Civil Rights Era was riddled with forceful activism, and wouldn’t have been able to make the changes it did otherwise. The threat of, “if you ignore us this will go badly, so work with us” was a critical component of the movement. MLK wouldn’t have been given a seat at the table if Malcolm X hadn’t been in the background (and just look at what happened to them to see how the status quo protects itself).

That said, there are many ways to get your message out. Websites, pamphlets, signs, heck we are Ad ridden everywhere.

And protests too!

And all the ones you listed either require money to do, or require the complicity of the (big money) platform owners. If you have little or no money, and e.g. Facebook takes down your posts, your list leaves no other routes.

Second, (in the USA) your rights end when they infrige on anothers’. To impose my needs selfishly at the expense of yours is not only infringing your rights, but possibly accruing damages.

If someone is illegally detaining you or injuring you, that is certainly an infringement on your rights. But you don’t have a right to go to a specific place, or drive on a specific road. You don’t own any bridges, so their use can’t be stolen from you anyways. Don’t conjure up false rights in the name of your own convenience.

Disruption is an important tool, and often a morally justified one, but who and what you’re disrupting matters. Slave revolts are disruption, certainly. Germans who sabotaged rail infrastructure during WW2 were causing disruption. Taking disruptive, or even violent, action off the table entirely means you are taking the position that all of the actions of a given government and society are moral beyond the point where force is justifiable. And I don’t even get the impression you were talking about the same level as these, you seem like you’re just talking about people blocking traffic for a bit and whatnot. The threshold for that is obviously much lower.

What does is voting and education.

Putting movements in front of people’s eyes is education. Just like we don’t let children choose not to go to school, protest actions are sometimes about not allowing people to look away, by getting in their way. As the article is discussing, sometimes people react well to that education, and sometimes they don’t.

Personally, I preferred the first one. If you’ve played through 1 and are still itching for more, 2 is definitely a fine game.

Ok, this definitely cinches the rumors

It is, but it’s also much more obscure, and definitely much older (2005), than most of the other games on here. I saw just now that there was a remake in 2018, which must have been PlayStation-only to have escaped my notice.