#Though I've since changed my name

[uniquecrash5]

The GURPS Cyberpunk and seizure of Steve Jackson Games' computers was a part of an FBI initiative called Operation Sundevil if I recall correctly.

I was a playtester for GURPS Cyberpunk. I half suspect my name is on an FBI list somewhere.

There is another section from the song "Gamers", and I'm curious if it refers to a specific incident.

I'm a live-roleplayin' gamer, I used to play out in the woods. Twilight 2000, Shadowrun, I'd play whenever I could. I'd put on my costume, shoot tin cans, and make firecrackers fly. Then my front door got kicked down again -- This time it was the FBI.

They stole my guns, my video tapes, every book I’d ever read, And a couple of bags of fertilizer out of the garden shed! They told the press I was a terrorist, who planned to blow up half the town. They called me a right-wing militia nut, and a neo-nazi clown.

The details are not the same, but I think this is a reference to a well known incident in 1990, where Steve Jackson Games, best known these days as the maker of the Munchkin card game, were raided by the Secret Service under suspicion that their game product, Cyberpunk, a roleplaying game, was actually a manual for computer crime. Agents literally walked out of the building holding the game company's computers.

Because this story is so well known to gamers, and spread at a time when word of mouth was so potent, there are many details that are altered by the telephone game. Many say it was the FBI instead of the Secret Service, for instance, or it was Cyberpunk 2020 that was raided (which was put out by R. Talsorian Games, not Steve Jackson).

To quote Steve Jackson:

In the course of that visit, it became clear that the investigating agents considered GURPS Cyberpunk to be "a handbook for computer crime." They seemed to make no distinction between a discussion of futuristic credit fraud, using equipment that doesn't exist, and modern real-life credit card abuse. A repeated comment by the agents was "This is real."

"Careless, illegal, and completely unjustified," the raid happened because author Loyd Blankenship ran an irreverent, anti-authority computer USENET BBS dedicated to computers and yes, hacking, and Steve Jackson was struck through guilt by association. It's exactly the kind of overreach that happens when the malevolent Eye of Sauron that is federal law enforcement fixes itself on you. In the course of investigation, the Secret Service justified its own warrant by saying that they would find evidence to justify the warrant, which is circular reasoning.

Due to the raid, Steve Jackson Games had to lay off half the staff and was close to bankruptcy fighting the charges. However, for once, they were able to countersue the Secret Service, because several committed technology lawyers, partially in response, formed the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

This is not the first time this happened. In 1980, a decade earlier, TSR was raided because of the spy game, Top Secret, due to suspicion of aiding international terrorism in Lebanon (!)

[icewindandboringhorror]

A little costume with eyebrow whiskers again.. making their return lol..

[stardestroyer81]

Happy fourth anniversary to... well, me! It was four years ago that I signed up for tumblr under the now all-familiar StarDestroyer81 name, and to celebrate, I come bearing some particularly exciting news I've been waiting a few months to announce...

⭐I HAVE A REDBUBBLE STORE!!! ⭐

Shirts, stickers, pins— you want it? It's yours, my friend; as long as you check out the above link! If you've ever wanted to directly support me— or would just love to have select works of mine on merch of your choice— I highly suggest giving my store a look as I put so much work into prepping it for my blog's fourth anniversary! 💙🏳️‍⚧️✨

[nanshe-of-nina]

Someone on AO3 copied a story you posted on your blog

I just thought you might like it to know

If you’re talking about the parody I wrote about of all the drama and stupidity that went down during the production of Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar, I appreciate your concern, but Zarinaea on AO3 and I are the same person.

[alchemiclee]

you've heard of cat in the hat, now get ready for

[project-sekai-updates]

『プロセカ放送局 #10』 番組冒頭の「ボカロミュージックのセカイ」出演者決定🎉

書き下ろし楽曲を担当したボカロPと一緒に、最新のVOCALOID楽曲の紹介や、書き下ろし楽曲についてお話するコーナーになります🎤

今回はr-906さんが登場📣ぜひご覧ください🌈

[Google Translated Vers.]

"Project Sekai Broadcasting Station #10" The performers for the "World of Vocaloid Music" segment at the beginning of the show have been decided🎉

This will be a corner where we will introduce the latest VOCALOID songs and talk about the newly written songs together with the Vocaloid producers who wrote the songs🎤

This time, r-906 will be appearing📣Please check it out🌈

[nexus-nebulae]

found my ancient mp3 player recently. finally found a charger for it and plugged it in. and remembered i found a yt playlist of the whole httyd movie chopped up into like 20 videos and i downloaded the mp3s of all of them to listen to on the school bus. which is why i can effortlessly quote the whole first movie now

[running-in-the-dark]

after I restarted my phone earlier it changed my lockscreen picture (to a random photo that I saved at some point) and I almost get a heart attack every time I see my lockscreen now 🙃

[antonblastdeluxe]

Now that I've slept on it for two days, I think my thoughts are clear enough to finally formulate my words about the whole situation with a certain pig. Actual final post on this unless. Idk something worse happens but given that pizza discord was lifted up like a nasty rock I sort of doubt it.

I've been seeing a lot of takes lately given the pizza game. I agree with a large chunk of them that boil down to 'don't make playing this game a moral thing'. I don't agree with sentiments that are akin to 'this was years ago', or 'you're all just trying to cancel him because the game got popular'.

I was in that discord. I had most of the channels muted, but I'm pretty sure I left it in 2020ish. I only didn't see the grossness people are outlining firsthand because I only looked at the dev update chat at the time so I can see what he was implementing. One of my dearest friends had a very, VERY bad experience with it. It's not my right to exactly describe what happened to them, but... Yeah. It was awful. I get that all official discords become cesspits when they get thousands of people in there, but there's no excuse for what happened in there.

I can confirm that the discord was always full of redditor-like types and worse, which is why I muted all of the talk channels to begin with and didn't even glance at the fanart I was really there for. You may notice, if you're a long-timer that is, a lot of early Pizza T0wer artists didn't make fanart again when the game came out. The reason is a lot of them were treated like garbage in the discord. Sure, you had your usual types of people who stupidly make comparisons like 'oh your oc looks like (canon character)' thinking that's a good thing to say to a random artist who may or may not be ok with that, but many of them were just... Outright hostile.

Moderation was never good. I can't exactly recall how the mod team was cycled, but most of them didn't-- Or couldn't do their job because of the vast amount of people flowing in pre-release. It is legtiamately no wonder why it's had so many issues upon release. What I'm getting at here is the discord server was an awful idea. Even if it was patreon only a lot of the patreons made this sort of gross echo chamber. The reason why the stuff with pig both surprised me and didn't surprise me was because of the other half of the publishing company, Sertif.

Sertif to me is the most baffling part of all of this. Not because they did anything wrong, no, the exact opposite. They're arguably the most squeaky clean part of the team, being a far cry from whatever slop pig spewed. Which makes the fact that pig said all of that stuff lowkey worse to me? I don't know if they forgave him for that, or they were somehow unaware. Sertif is also the reason why I can't fully hate the game even with the flaws sprinkled throughout.

It's just upsetting. I can't blame people for reacting the way they have, but at the same time people have gotta stop making excuses. I think it's completely valid to say 'hey you're still allowed to enjoy the game and characters, just don't defend the stupid ass pig'. I think a lot of people put it aptly that the game has already gotten traction. It's your choice if you still want to make fan content or not, it probably won't have a heavy effect on the game's sales at this point. It's sort of people trying to boycott pkmn to a much lesser extent-- People are still going to buy it because they're not engaged with online couture or multiple other reasons.

I do indeed have zero respect for people rubbing their hands together like flies like 'finally I have an excuse to dislike popular thing'. Like, really??? That's where your priorities lie? You can dislike the pizza game. You could've still disliked it if the pig was squeaky clean. But this exact same thing happened to two fixations I heavily fell out of, that being 0mori and f//nf. They gained traction, and people dug stuff up on the creators.

I'm not going to claim that people only dug this stuff up because the game got popular. I won't assume bad faith despite many people assuming bad faith out of others becoming a trend nowadays. People have a right to know what the hell creators did before deciding to get into a game. But claiming people are a bad person for liking a piece of media...

...For the love of god, at least confirm if they do or do not condone the creator's actions.

It's very easy to say 'no media is perfect', sure, but I think most people have gone through the song of dance of 'thing I like was made by an awful person!' there are rare white whale situations where you really should drop the franchise (cough) bad wizard franchise (cough), but expecting everyone to just... Drop a piece of media like a sack of bricks?

Please think realistically. It's great that you're informing people, but expecting people to drop media... You don't know their history with it. You don't know how much comfort it brought them or anything else. Demonizing people for liking pieces of media with flawed creators is really just a waste of time.

I won't ever undermine what pig has said and done. I hope he properly apologizes and hell, takes the extra mile, adjusting those questionable enemies and donates to a few charities or something to show he gives a shit. The very little credit he's done is he admitted what he said was shallow. I know the bar is in hell, but it's good that he isn't trying to double down and go 'bluh that was funny though' (I can imagine his cesspit of a discord echochamber has tried to say this. No way in hell I'm going in there to check and I wouldn't encourage anyone to go into that place with a ten foot pole).

I know I don't need to defend myself nor am I a bad person for acknowledging the creator is a shithead and still enjoying the game and the fan content around it. I have a lot of friends who like fn4f who hate Scott. I wouldn't be friends with them if they defended him. People trying to say this and that about this stance is... Bizarre.

I understand how Pizza game can make people uncomfortable now (always have given the long running history of the bad discord), and people have their full right not to engage with me because they are uncomfortable. At the same time, they shouldn't accuse me of being a bad person because I like something made by a bad person.

A lot of music artists, or hell, artists in general are pretty bad people but people will still admire the artist's ability. A lot of people online who hostility attack people over their interests probably have one of their own pieces of media that isn't squeaky clean.

Please save yourself the mental trouble and stop making people feel 'bad' for liking media. In most cases, you can just block them and mute the tag. It's a waste of everyone's time to hunt people down over this sort of stuff.

Stay informed, don't make excuses for content creators. That's all I ask.

[girlitfeelsgood]

right after my dad finished buying my second set of tickets I got through on my mum's computer too so the whole process was less horrible than expected

[theabstruseone]

I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:

Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.

The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.

The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.

The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.

Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.

The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.

Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".

He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.

This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.

Edit to add further developments:

Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.

Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.

The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.

The act of sending a tweet is now known as "Xeet". They even added a guide for how to Xeet.

The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words "tweet" and "Twitter" are still all over the place on the site.

TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it's because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).

This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to "X-Paypal" and eventually just to "X".

This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to "pay online" (as in "I'll paypal you the money")

X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I'm not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he's hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn't be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.

Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.

The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.

One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won't be enough to pay the debt (since it's worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.

Sesame Street's official accounts mocked the rebranding.

[jinxed-dreams]

I've felt like something isn't right for a long time. As in, I've hated my name since I was 5 and wanted to change it into cool names that I knew other kids were called (all genderneutral names) and I always thought the whole "this is a thing for girls and this is for boys" was stupid, even as a small kid. There were also many times I wished I'd been born as a boy because "boys get to do more fun things" and sometimes just because I wanted ti know what it was like to be a boy.

Despite this, I only figured out I'm trans earlier this year. How? - my mother kept making fun of my appearance after I shaved my head (a lifelong goal) saying things like: "when you make the complete change into a man we'll call you *masculine name with the same first letter as my birthname*"

Well, guess what mother!

[arolesbianism]

I have obtained a new oc and in the process I've already signed myself up for needing to make at least 3 new ocs for his story which he now has despite me initially Intending for him to be a side character for a different side character to hang out with. My townhouse has over 200 characters on it.

[fogsnatched]

WOULD ANYONE LIKE A STARTER from yui, yoichi, adam, elodie or felix?? i'm especially brainrotting about post-escape threads right now but threads where they're still stuck in the entity's realm would be really cool as well... so i'm down for whatever you're all feeling! just please specify a muse if you have a preference so I know who you'd prefer to get c:

[akajustmerry]

plenty of Palestinians from Gaza including Bisan Owda have already spoken about this but ICYMI please don't stop sharing and donating to evacuation campaigns just because the IOF have destroyed boarder crossings and stopped aid. even though they are unable to leave right now, Palestinians in Gaza are still needing and using those funds to buy food and necessities that are price gouged due to limited supply, as well as purchasing e-sims for communication, and raw materials required for rebuilding and providing shelter.

please, don't ignore these campaigns just because their primary goal is escaping. sharing and donating to these funds still helps Palestinians and their families survive day to day. the 5 dollars you give might not get someone across a boarder but it could help a mother buy baby food, get a family a tent, provide a battery, buy a day's supply of water, buy material to repair clothes. it still helps. many of the families I've spoken with say the price-hiking on resources in Gaza is why they've had to change the goal of their campaigns. So, keep sharing, even if you can't donate, and donate when you can.

With that in mind, I'd like to spotlight Fatima's campaign, which is currently at 9.1K/10K goal. Occupation forces destroyed Fatima's family's livelihoods and home, and they have been fleeing on foot and displaced 17 times since October 2023. All funds go towards helping the survival of Fatima and Bilal and their young family of five kids. Please, help them by sharing and/or donating. Follow them @save-fatma-gaza3093

[cat-madhouse]

Saw a post going around that said "use this picrew to make you now + you as a kid" and I thought it was fun :)