There was somebody crazy enough to make an entire game in Blender, I don’t doubt that somebody has at least tried to make a soundtrack in Blender.

I refer to this as the Wind Waker effect.

Before Wind Waker was announced, Nintendo did a reel showing off the power of the GameCube that included a “realistic” (for the time) fight scene between Link and Ganondorf. So when they announced a new Zelda game, people were hyped for a gritty realistic Zelda, and when the first trailers appeared, people hated it.

For years after its release, Wind Waker’s art style was dragged on by people, but today, it’s remembered as one of the most iconic Zelda games from that time period and a major influence on the aesthetic of many Zelda games after it.

Today, its art style looks just as good as it did when the game first launched, while most other games from that time period - especially those that went for high fidelity and realistic graphics - look outdated.

A good art style is timeless and will always age better than trying to push the envelope on graphical fidelity or realism.

No, but he does have a history of racism and supporting/promoting white supremacists.

He has a long history of incidents like, “Hey, why are you following those white supremacist accounts on Twitter and promoting their books?” or “Oops, I was wearing an iron cross just as a joke!” and “I paid a dude to yell, ‘I hate Jews!’ as a prank, bro.”

He did more than make fucked up jokes, though. He was pushing white supremacist accounts that he followed on social media at one point to his young and impressionable audience. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and he hasn’t done anything to rectify that situation one way or the other. Given the evidence we have, he could’ve simply started wearing his iron cross behind closed doors instead of on stream.

Having lived long enough to see the edgy teenagers making 4channer jokes grow up to and have those become their actual beliefs, I believe in Philosophical Inertia. You say something often enough, and it becomes what you truly believe. And until you prove otherwise, I am going to assume that your beliefs continue on that same course.

Unless they’re into that.

But this isn’t about kink shaming foot fetishists - it’s about the power dynamic and bruising Trump’s ego. It’s about as NSFW as you can get without getting into major trouble. Showing dommy mommy fElon in latex holding a leash and Trump on his knees wearing a pup mask on TVs in a government office would be hilarious and amazing, but I don’t know if you’d survive long enough to laugh about it.

Depends on whether you have an Android or iPhone for 99% of people. Or, they use an email account that their ISP provider created for them when they signed up.

They want a backdoor so they can use it, but so can everyone else if they know where it is. In some ways, that makes it worse than having no encryption at all because it gives you the illusion of safety when in reality, if people know how to jiggle the handle of your door the right way, they can walk right into your living room at any time.

Some instances have very different rules on them that would affect your experience. Like not allowing downvotes, for example. Blahaj users can’t see downvotes or downvote anything themselves.

Very true. I was just saying that you can also blame enshittification for it going down like it has as well. Burning the candle at both ends and all that.

This brings up an interesting point because my first thought when I read “inundated with sexualized media their whole lives,” my first thought was, “In this Puritan culture?!” On the one hand, ads are all about using sex to sell products, while on the other, advertisers want nothing to do with anything that isn’t ‘kid friendly’ content. You just need to look at how sanitized the internet has become by corporations to see that at work.

But I think there’s something to be said there, and I think it goes deeper than just “the kids these days live in a Godless society of homosexual perverts” or whatever. I think the normalization of sex and availability of information about sex and sexuality has probably influenced it. I’d also say that the current state of the world and the stress of daily life have as much of an influence on this as the amount of sexualized media in their everyday lives. It’s been a noticeable thing with Milennials having less sex and fewer kids from stress, both financial and otherwise, and I see no reason that wouldn’t continue to trickle down to other generations. And even the amount of media out there, regardless of type, has just as much of an effect. If you have books to read and movies to watch, you’re less likely to pop out kids accidentally because you were bored and got frisky.

But how do you keep making the line go up, especially in a “market” with such a guaranteed drop-off point in user retention? You can do what these companies do and fill your apps with bots to keep engagement metrics up and users coming back as they fail to date your fake users. I’d call that enshittification, and it probably makes everything worse in this case.

Is Gen Z becoming the new Millennials?

“Gen Z is ruining the Dating App Market!”

I might be wrong (obligatory I am not a lawyer), but I think the laws either make it so that they can’t be considered as an accomplice to a crime like that, or they’re a corporation, which means that fines are really the only way they can be punished.

Either way, the arbitration clause, I believe, means that you can’t take them to court like that in any situation. An out of court settlement is your only option, except in the case of a class action lawsuit, which let’s them get a bulk deal on how much they have to pay out.

No, I believe the argument they’re making is if someone else posts your private information on BlueSky (think Kiwifarms doxxing gay people and sending that info to Christian hate groups), and BlueSky moderation doesn’t take action against the account posting the info, and then somebody uses that information to find and attack you, then BlueSky is culpable in the attack because they could’ve done something, but didn’t.

A better example, I think, would be the recent issue with known transphobe Jesse Singal and his followers, who came to BlueSky around a month ago and immediately began posting bigotry and false info. When reported to the moderation team, they did nothing about it (he actually got banned by the auto-mod and then manually unbanned during that period, but that’s another story). If he were to do something like my example, posting a trans person’s private information online and telling his followers to harass them, and BlueSky did nothing to remove the posts or his account, then they’d be legally culpable for enabling anything that might happen to you. But under arbitration, you can’t sue them for it.

This kind of stuff has always been an endless war of escalation, the same as any kind of security. There was a period of time where all it took to mess with Gen AI was artists uploading images of large circles or something with random tags to their social media accounts. People ended up with random bits of stop signs and stuff in their generated images for like a week. Now, artists are moving to sites that treat AI scrapers like malware attacks and degrading the quality of the images that they upload.

I’ve seen it described as the social media site for people who hate social media.

The story goes that when Facebook was becoming mainstream, a guy came along and decided he hated Facebook. So he hired a software engineer at his company to help him make a site that wasn’t Facebook in any way. Basically, the criteria for the site were that he could post photos on it and follow people whose photos he wanted to see, and he didn’t have to see anything he didn’t care about.

So Tumblr is a very self-curated social media experience where there’s no brands or celebrities. You just search for stuff by hashtags, follow blogs that interest you, and post and reblog stuff at your whim. Everything is displayed on your dashboard chronologically, and the only stuff you’ll find on there is stuff from people you follow.

The closest thing I’d describe it to is Twitter, but it’s more blogging than microblogging and the more direct interaction between you and the people you follow can feel a lot more personal than other forms of social media. You can send people messages that can be answered in a public post in addition to the usual direct message system. There’s no character limit on posts or anything, and people will write full short stories and stuff. It also has more of a sense of permanence, in my opinion. It isn’t uncommon to see popular posts crop back up that were created in 2012-2014.