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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • … Its totally fine to include a casino as a setting so long as interactive gambling is not a thing the player can do.

    Did you read the article or the actual government literature it links to and quotes from?

    Nothing is going to change about existing Mario game ratings.

    I’d say it would be outlandish for family friendly Nintendo to suddenly reverse course on general world cultural/legal perspectives and re introduce gambling games when they have not done so in years, the same years many countries have been cracking down on lootboxes/gambling in games for their target demo, kids.

    Finally, I didn’t downvote you. I only downvote people who are being exceptionally idiotic or abrasive or rude. I almost always prefer to engage with ideas or comments I take issue with but are not presented horrifically: the point of a discussion board should be discussion, not an internet points contest.



  • Extremely misleading title.

    It isn’t a weapon that can be used to fight CO2 emissions.

    Its a pre existing carbon natural sink which:

    “If we don’t protect it and manage it correctly, it could actually worsen climate change.”

    Is actually a vulnerable resource that needs to be better managed. That’s the last line of the article.

    No where in the article is there any even theoretical discussion of how seafloor habitats can somehow be made to absorb more CO2, closest the article comes to that is ‘we should look into how to do that.’

    The rest of the article is about dangers to disrupting the natural habitat and thus negating a carbon sink.

    This is not a story about a weapon, an arrow in a quiver aimed at climate change, its a story about a delicate exposed heel, which might actually end up being pierced by a different climate change weapon, offshore wind farms.




  • Now now, they innovated by turning Facebook from the way you could see what your friends were doing on your feed into algorithmically determining exactly which batshit insane ‘news’ stories from cranks and posts from crazy people would be the most effective rage bait to specifically you once they figured out that anger and rage are the most effective way to cause retention and engagement.

    They basically scientifically perfected trolling, and figured out how to monetize it.

    Sure it widely proliferated dangerous anti science nonsense, bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, fostered the Q Anon insanity mind plague and facilitated it going mainstream, but hey, hate sells.



  • Apologies for editing after you replied, I have a tendency of making a quick point and then expanding on it with an edit.

    Hard to copy and paste lots of shit on a shitty phone.

    But basically, its not a retroactive re rating of any game unless the game is patched to add in simulated gambling or loot boxes.

    While sure, Mario Party 3 has simulated gambling minigames, I doubt its getting patched any time soon, and the upcoming Super Mario Party Jamboree does not appear to have any mini games simulating a casino type game.

    EDIT: sorry for another edit lol, but yes, I do think its stupid that a poker minigame with in game currency only, which cannot be purchased or redeemed for real currency, is rated worse than a game with lootboxes.


  • … I’m sorry, what?

    Do … does any Mario Party game even have microtransactions? You know, specific game content unlocked by an additional purchase with real world currency? Much less ones where the outcome of a purchase is substantially randomized?

    EDIT:

    Games that feature “simulated gambling,” such as casino games, will be legally restricted to adults aged 18 and over with a minimum classification of ‘R 18+.’ Projects that were classified before September 22 won’t need to be reclassified unless they lose their current rating due to “revocation or modification.”

    This sounds like it isn’t a retroactive change, its a going forward change. It’s explained further in the actual guidelines:

    Situations where video games may require reclassification Video games that were classified prior to 22 September 2024, but add in-game purchases linked to elements of chance or simulated gambling content may require reclassification if adding this content is likely to affect the classification of the game. For example: – video games classified G or PG that add in-game purchases linked to elements of chance after 22 September 2024 are likely to require reclassification – video games classified G, PG, M or MA 15+ that add simulated gambling content after 22 September 2024 are likely to require reclassification

    So… yeah, Mario Party games would have to be patched or re released or something to add more gambling content.

    It does seem to indicate that, going forward, a Mario Party game that simulates casino like gambling would get an R 18+ rating, but the Mario Party franchise does not seem to me to have had any minigames that even sort of resemble a casino type game, even with neutered or non existent betting/staking mechanics, in about a decade.

    The upcoming Super Mario Jamboree, though public info on the minigames is incomplete, also does not appear to depict any casino like games.


  • Thats … amazing.

    Reminds me of when someone figured out that a huge part of the reason Halo Infinite takes so long to load and go between various menu screens was something like the game redownloading hundreds or thousands of the same exact image, in very high resolutions… basically instead of just pointing multiple instances of the image being used to a single file and directory, for some reason each distinct usage of this same image had its own unique directory…

    Its the kind of oopsie daisy you expect from a first time modder, not some of the most expensive dev teams in the world.

    Also along those lines, kind of: BF2042 has had and still does have a fundamental flaw with the engine level code for fucking mouse movement interpolation.

    They never fixed it. They admitted it exists in their bug logs, but they never managed to fix one of the most fundamental parts of a shooter game, how aiming itself works.



  • Its broken in the sense that it doesn’t work, but it isn’t broken in the sense of oops we accidentally broke something.

    They added BattleEye anti-cheat to online, without bothering to support linux.

    Even though BattleEye can and does support Proton compatibility, and has for years, the developers of the game have to request or opt-in to this functionality.

    But uh, Rockstar didn’t, because they don’t give a shit about linux players.






  • According to a recent FD Signifier video, they have already purged him and a whole ton of other people (cough probably black people cough) from voter rolls in Georgia, he said that hadn’t happened to him in nearly a decade, gotta re register, and of course they don’t tell you if you’ve been purged, that onus lies on you to figure out.

    Its already illegal to hand out water to people in line for polls.

    I would be entirely unsurprised if say I dunno maybe your scenario happens… or maybe they just call in a bunch of bomb threats to polling locations in blue areas, seems to be doing a good job of shutting down Ohio at the moment.


  • Judging from what I’ve seen so far from reports which are early and incomplete, I would eduguess that Mossad basically intercepted a particular brand of these ‘pagers’ known to be used by Hezbollah, put small bombs in them and wired them in such that they could be activated by a broadcast signal, and probably a lot of non Hezbollah people who just happened to buy this model of ‘pager’ in the target areas and timeframe for introduction of these tampered device onto the market also got an exploding hot pocket.



  • A decade ago I was contracting for MSFT as a database admin / data analyst.

    A far older and more experienced contractor told me that he had been part of a team in Saudi Arabia, in 1990, that intercepted computer and electronic equipment bound for Iraq’s air defense command and control systems, flashing the firmware with exploits and backdoors as fast as they could before they were sent to Iraq.

    Supply chain interception has been a thing for a while.

    EDIT: This is a total off topic aside, but hearing about and seeing shit like that at the various tech jobs I’ve worked is why I laugh when people say ‘oh but alexa only activates on keywords’ or ‘no its totally impossible for phones to listen to your convos and then give that data to advertisement systems’.

    Call me paranoid, I don’t care: If you don’t have a hardware disconnect for your microphone and personally have the source code to every bit of software, at every level, then we just have to take the giant tech corpos at their word.