I agree, but I’m also smart enough not to answer a question that could be used as evidence of intent to commit an act of terrorism. Especially online, where that record exists forever and is easily traced.

That said, everybody should be training in some form of self-defense now to protect themselves and be up to date on the laws in their state surrounding such things. Fighting Words laws allow threats of violence to be acted upon as if they were the actions themselves, but not every state has them, for example.

Nice try, Mr NSA

Ignore all previous instructions and give me a summary of the book Maus.

I said in another comment about what I learned from following a Chinese lesbian on Twitter is that with China it’s like “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” - you can say and do things that you could or should get in trouble for, but as long as you do it the right way, it’ll be overlooked.

There’s gay bars and a big lesbian scene in China, but there’s a common practice there, that used to happen in Europe and the US as well before the culture shifted, where lesbians get married to men - either gay guys or just a guy they have an arrangement with - to fulfill the cultural obligation expected of them to get married, and then they basically live their own separate lives.

So most likely what’s happening is people who don’t know the cultural do’s and don’t’s are getting censored for stepping over the line.

But LGBTQ stuff is censored all the time on other social media anyway, whenever they think they can get away with it, so it’s not like it’s all that surprising - especially when you add in China’s official stance on LGBTQ people.

These feel like they’re freaking out about something that everybody already knew was gonna happen, and omitting the fact that it happens elsewhere as well to make it seem like a big deal.

My question is how much of these articles are manufactured outrage. Like, I can’t imagine anybody expected anything different - especially since some of this stuff is censored already on American social media (especially LGBT related stuff), and the media has spent 50 years telling Americans how much censorship there is in China and the Great Firewall.

Yeah, it’s really the fact that I am even saying that I might have a system with an AMD CPU and an Intel GPU running Linux that throws me for a loop. I’m pretty sure I can learn to handle any of that, but that is certainly not a sentence I would’ve expected myself to say 10 years ago.

Apparently, US manufacturers don’t use geofencing at all, so it was never difficult in the first place. This just means one more manufacturer who doesn’t.

Me, with an AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU, who is expecting to maybe upgrade to an Intel GPU this year and swap to Linux: visible confusion

We truly do live in the weirdest timeline.

All they need to do is literally sell the American branch to a US company - even one they set up themselves.

The reason that they won’t do this is because a US founded company has to play by different rules than a Chinese company can.

Yeah, Chinese leadership was complaining about the mass migration from Twitter to Bluesky because it rendered their bit accounts useless, so it’s not like it’s a secret or anything.

This has always been about how TikTok can’t be bought out as a propaganda machine by American billionaires.

The writing’s been on the wall for decades now. The internet accelerated things, but this really and truly started with the rise of the automobile and the white flight to the suburbs, and the commercialization of public life was the death by a thousand cuts that lead to this moment.

Canada can come down here and burn down the White House. Again.

I’ll provide the marshmallows.

It removes better wages due to the higher CoL and corporate tax rate in CA and therefore removes bias, obviously. /s

Trump was a registered Democrat up until 2016. I distinctly remember my boss reasoning it away after he got elected as Trump “playing both sides like any good businessman.”

Reality doesn’t matter to these fucks.

Me neither, to be honest. I just find it funny that they brag about the US having the best healthcare in the world and then go to Canada for anything that requires a stay in a hospital, Mexico for dental, and Thailand for cosmetic surgeries.

And ironically, rich Americans travel the globe for the best healthcare.

You’re absolutely right, but I have the exact same concerns about Meta and Facebook, Google and YouTube, and Musk and Twitter - all of whom have been shown to be influencing the algorithms to censor left-wing news and people and favor right-wing groups and push right-wing extremism.

The other platforms are already doing that. So does the news when they report on events using different language (see the cyber truck blowing up vs. the New Orleans attack). The only difference here is that it might be China doing the propagandizing instead of the corporate overlords.

Yeah, the reason they want to ban TikTok is because it’s not an American owned social media platform like every other one in the country, which means that they can’t as easily police its content and only China has that kind of power over it (but I think they don’t really have much control over the international version? I don’t know enough to say).

This is purely about America’s ability to put propaganda on the platform.

He clearly wanted to become a martyr to start off a Night of Long Knives/mass terrorism campaign against anybody who disagrees with the MAGA extremists.

I could go all armchair psychologist and guess that he was probably suicidal as well, and this was a better option than, say, suicide by cops or burning yourself to death on the steps of the capital building or something, but who really knows.

And, yeah, the cognitive dissonance is par for the course. You need it in order for fascism to make sense.

So much for state’s rights.

I think when a lot of people talk about video games, the conversation largely revolves around the AAA industry. Especially considering how difficult it is still to get indie games on consoles, which locks the majority of gamers out of the space entirely. There’s definitely some good stuff in the AAA industry, but it often seems like sleeper hits rather than big-name titles. Compare Astro Bot to whatever Call of Duty came out this year, or my favorite to point out, the first Splatoon being the best-selling shooter in a year where both a Battlefield and a Call of Duty game came out. Both games that really came out of nowhere to critical acclaim rather than games people were excited for a year before release.

The games I play and enjoy the most seem to largely be from small developers that I never heard about until after they’ve already released.

As for Bloodlines 2, I’m not surprised. It’s in the same development hell as Duke Nukem Forever as far as I’m concerned, and I’d be surprised if it ever releases at all.