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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • I checked, and the link is to a post from about 10 hours ago talking about how the person in the screenshot, liv, was banned for that post earlier today.

    So, in short, they were banned for a post from 503 days ago - from back in December of 2024.

    The context of the post that they were banned over is exactly what it says: the head of Trust and Safety got caught liking teen porn from a spam bot on his work account by a bot designed to post what posts his account likes (very similar to the Twitter account that used to track Musk’s airplane - both are publicly available information), and he panicked and banned the bot and the account of the creator, a (from what I understand) well liked trans woman back in late 2024. This caused major backlash for a number of reasons that included the large trans population of users on BlueSky and the general distrust and discontent with the staff and their actions, but also due to the staff reaction to the outrage, which was to ban more people. And, if I remember correctly, the head of Trust and Safety followed the trans woman onto another social media platform after banning her to harass her there.




  • I can’t imagine VR as a whole made anything other than chump change until 2018+, but it was indeed there and chugging along quietly.

    The graph specifically calls out the Oculus Rift as the start of what it considers the VR segment.

    I would consider things like the Virtual Boy as VR to some extent as well, but I do see the logic as to why they only started the line with the Oculus. Before that it probably wouldn’t even show up as the money there was a drop in the bucket of a tenth of a percent of anything else, but it’s also widely considered that the Oculus and the Vive were the first really viable commercial VR headsets that started the VR game niche/genre. Before that, VR could probably be considered as niche as eye and head tracking hardware for sim games, and I don’t think that I’ve ever heard somebody mention those when talking about money in the games industry. Or even mentioned them in general outside of conversations like this. I don’t think most people even know that that kind of stuff even exists.



  • You’re misreading how the graph is laid out. The y axis is the combined total revenue of the entire video game market, with each new piece of the market being added on top of the older ones over time (although arguably arcades are the oldest form and should be below consoles). VR is the newest niche, and so it goes on top of everything else as it adds its revenue to the gross total of the entire market, despite only being a tiny piece of that sum.

    In your layout, consoles/arcade would be at the top with everything else underneath them.


  • We’ve also seen the death of third spaces and a major wave of helicopter parenting that simply could not exist before the way it does today.

    My parents were shocked when me and some people around my age were ambivalent about getting our driver’s licenses as teens, because for them it was like the first real bit of “adult freedom” in their lives. But by the mid 2000s, it was a very different world from when they were kids. Malls were dying, 3rd spaces were being monetized or removed, and existing in public for free was already becoming a difficult prospect. The idea of being able to go to a place to hang out had already been dying off when we were kids. What were we going to do, spend our time after school working to spend that money to drive somewhere that we’d then have to spend more money at to just hang out? When we could just sit around and play video games for free? Owning a car largely just meant suddenly having bills to pay and more responsibilities.

    And the advent of cell phones (and social media) made it even worse. The prospect of people getting a call at any time from their parents asking where they were and who they were hanging out with was starting to raise its head as an issue. Today it’s even worse with the tracking apps on kids’ phones and devices in their backpacks or cars. I still remember the first and last time I posted something on Facebook. Right when Facebook was first starting to get big, a friend of mine made me a Facebook account. My first and last post was a comment about how 8am classes sucked, which my dad commented on “But they’ll go anyway.” Immediately upon reading that, I wondered to myself why anybody would willingly subject themselves to having their personal thoughts broadcast and judged/criticized like that and never logged in again.


  • This is actually the result of specific differences between Florida’s laws around publishing crimes in the news compared to other states. I forget what the right term is and the exact laws, but basically in Florida everything can end up in the news right away while I believe other states limit what can be published before the court rules on a crime below a certain threshold, so the crazy stuff stops being interesting and gets forgotten about long before it could ever get published in other states.

    Or something along those lines.





  • Even before renewables/green energy, we’ve had problems with surplus power in the grid. It’s actually one of the biggest issues for infrastructure to solve in moving away from fossil fuels. We simply don’t have the storage capacity, and nobody has any real plan or path toward a solution as of yet, as far as I know.

    For probably a century or so now, power companies have been paying manufacturing industries to run their heaviest equipment with nothing in them just to bleed extra power out of the grids during lows in demand because power stations can’t change their outputs fast enough, especially things like nuclear energy. Even stuff like coal or natural gas plants have a spool up or down time that can’t keep pace with the changes in demand.



  • TBH, it wasn’t that far outside of the basic corporate Dem playbook. Incredibly stupid and definitely lost her the election, for sure, but Dems have been “courting the moderate Republican” (is this “moderate Republican” in the room with us right now?) since Clinton left office - if not longer. It was the most strange and open version of it I’ve ever seen, but I wonder how much of it was her doing and how much was pushed by the party and the party’s campaign managers. Practically all the party ever talks about is how they have to reach across the aisle and convince conservatives to vote for them. We saw it with Hillary as well. They alienated the leftist vote and their own voters to push more conservative policies and lost themselves the election.

    Kamala and Walz had a goldmine when they started calling Republicans weird, and they suddenly stopped like 8 days later. If that wasn’t the party muzzling them, I don’t know what is.


  • To be fair, they did specify right-wing Lemmy instances, not right-wingers in general, and I can’t think of any instances that would meet that definition off the top of my head.

    But Hexbear definitely has a reputation as some of the worst of the worst of the normal instances. Blahaj defederated from them despite Ada trying to get the trans communities of both instances connected because of the harassment, brigading, and outright transphobia Hexbear inflicted on Blahaj users for not being the right kind of leftists. You can still find the community discussions on the topic in the general instance posts. They even tried to claim that Blahaj was being transphobic to them. You know, the LGBTQ instance created and ran to be a space for trans people and others first and foremost.

    Hexbear is also known to have at least once tried to convince their mods to “take over other instances and ban all the non-communists.”

    I believe that at this point if you were to download the stuff to spin up your own instance, Hexbear is on the list of instances that are defederated by default because so many instances have defederated them because of their behavior.


  • Yes, that is not what the word “originally” meant, yes it is partially completely the result of right wing propaganda, yes “political correctness” and “sjw” have similar issues

    Fixed it for you.

    It is a common conservative tactic, taking the language of something meant to improve the lives of minorities in some way and turning it into a negative thing. As you said, they did it with “politically correct” in the 90s, “social justice warrior” in the late 2000s, “woke” in the 2010s, and are currently working on “DEI.” It’s how they control the narrative and normalize their hatred. And it’s why Tim Walz calling them “weird” was so effective and why they got so upset by it - and why I’ll never forgive the Democrats for muzzling him when we finally had a weapon to fight back against this insidious colonialism of language.

    The fact that you believe that there’s a middle ground where the definition isn’t an attack on minorities means that they’ve succeeded in shifting the Overton Window and you’ve become used to the hatred yourself. Every single one of those terms that you mentioned was redefined for the sole purpose of being used to attack anybody who dared to openly talk about being a minority or exist as a minority.

    The “woke” are as real as the “blue haired girls with pronouns SJW getting off the ‘Down With CIS’ bus and assaulting people” of 15 years ago, and the token representation that you’re talking about is what’s known as “rainbow capitalism,” not “woke.”

    “Self-righteous, superficial, performative, and preachy” are the exact words used to describe a gay man daring to exist in public or talk about being gay in any way and not hide away like Section 28 and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell are still in effect. That’s what “woke” means when used under the new definition: a minority dared to openly behave like a minority in public and not be ashamed of it.