David Giles

Israel kills Al Jazeera journalists in targeted Gaza City airstrike - Committee to Protect Journalists New York, August 10, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists is appalled to learn of the killing today of Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, camera operators Ibrahim Zaher and M...

An entire news crew working for Al Jazeera was killed by Israel as they sought to bring the world firsthand reporting from #Gaza.

Among them was prominent journalist Anas Al-Sharif, who had been previously smeared and threatened by the IDF.

#NotATarget

Full statement: cpj.org/2025/08/isra...

Five reporters potentially getting arrested rn, myself included

“Visit all your favorite states. Delsware. Manytand. Mississipo. And who can forget sunny West Wigina”

If you want the best spice flavor, gotta recommend gochujang.

So please, do not move forward as normal. This isn't normal.

It's imperative to put pressure on Microsoft to end this. Whether that's by canceling Game Pass, refusing to cover their games with your normal cadence on your platforms, or to pressure them internally as employees.

Now is the time.

@MattWalshBlog let the following bullshit fall out of his mouth hole: “Remember when they spent years telling us to panic over the hole in the ozone layer and then suddenly just stopped talking about it and nobody ever mentioned the ozone layer” and then @DKThomp cast the appropriate side eye with this: “What happened is scientists discovered chlorofluorocarbons were bad for the ozone, countries believed them, the Montreal Protocol was signed, and CFC use fell by 99.7%, leading to the stabilization of the ozone layer, perhaps the greatest example of global cooperation in history.”

relevant

Which then hits the secondary issue of how even in our native tongue words lose and gain meanings over time/in specific regions thus creating a different interpretation.

Just wait for when you start thinking about if translation is ever possible.

To this day PR people ask me if Intuit really asked me to delete this part of the interview and shake their heads in sad disbelief. My friends what we sell here is our ethics policy

This statement is doubly infuriating because every time I see it in my feed, I make a fruitless attempt at removing a hair on my screen.

That's just today. This is not yearly, not monthly, not weekly. This is Israel, today, committing more war crimes than any nation in the history of war crimes.

Newgrounds' approach to verifying age is interesting and transparent.

A: "They're starting to resist more now."
B: "We're gonna end up shooting some of them."
A? (maybe C?): "Just remember you can smell that too with a $30,000 bonus."

my god dude fuck those guys

I occasionally get "Rami you've radicalized, I don't like it" and yeah I hate it too but if you're saying this the problem really is that a literal 600 day genocide in our names with our tax money on our televisions from journalists being murdered as our politicians lie hasn't radicalized you enough

great things are possible when you physically beat the shit out of fascists

if you call and they hang up on you, call back and immediately say you want to escalate to a supervisor because you were just hung up on. you don't even need to say any other details, just that you were hung up on and need to escalate

There's no anomaly here. People, globally, volunteer their time to powerful public goods the moment they're not actively terrified that they'll lose their home, their food, and their freedom. Which means that capitalism requires us all to live in fear, always - because it can't compete with free.

Pillars of Eternity?

Ah! Finally! Thank you! (Drat, I won't be quoted in the history books.)

YouTube video by Just Giles What Lies Beyond The End of Gameplay? Or: A Letter to a Developer

i watched your video between a trip to the local amusement park (roller coasters, etc) and my hour+ long subway ride home so i had lots of time to ruminate

another 'The End of Gameplay' video was uploaded a few days ago, surprising timing, and im re-watching it bc of some thoughts

this is what beit hanoun looked like (from arabi21.com/story/155862...)

“banning pornography” is bad on its own but it is imperative that everyone understand that these people consider the very existence of queer people to be pornographic

they consider the most chaste depiction of a queer relationship, or an openly trans person, to be porn and they want it banned

y'know to some extent i get the "itch should refuse to comply so everyone is fucked together" takes, the "if we cant sell porn we won't sell anything"

what i dont get are the "itch should refuse to comply, and somehow this magically improves the situation and no-one is fucked" takes

Most of the internet used to be like this. This is actually the default, it took companies enclosing the internet and adding weird, soul-killing incentives to make people behave the way they do now. In a way, there is truly nothing special about Wikipedia except that it survived longer.

“It’s a security hole that endangers democracy itself.” NieR creator speaks out against payment processors pressuring Japanese adult content platforms  - AUTOMATON WEST NieR creator Yoko Taro comments on the series of instances of Japanese adult platforms being pressured by credit card payment processors.

It's heartening to see Big Names speak out about this issue, I think it's something artists and creatives from all genres and levels of notoriety can unite on automaton-media.com/en/news/nier...

Holy - and I cannot emphasize this enough - shit.

Also, this guy was a senior project 2025 organizer.

If you care about games, take a moment to read through this and take action. NSFW games might not be for you - they're not for me - but we cannot allow a small group of censorious extremists to decide that people can not make games about sex, about sexuality, and about the role of sex in our world.

i do not believe that the implementation of an unconstitutional executive order is “hard to stop,” there’s simply no institutional will to stop it

Mastercard: Sex Work is Work. End Your Unjust Policy. Mastercard's new policy unfairly targets the adult content industry, making sex workers more vulnerable, especially Black trans women. It must be stopped.

It takes less than a minute to fill out this petition from ACLU and it'll work even if you're outside the US.

This is an international matter. It affects everyone.

action.aclu.org/petition/mas...