Naomi Clark (@metasynthie) 暗悪直美

Some dramatic performances might have looser rules like "if someone sneezes, roll with it" that get fixed in a medium by an artist/author without prescribing exactly what happens, which is a little more like a game!

Paintings have this too, right -- thus we can imagine aesthetic experience being different between various viewers of a painting depending on state of mind, experience, lighting, etc. There's just (usually) no "live process" aspect to painting as there is for following a script, sheet music, rules

In my very limited experience kids love any humorous-sounding dubstep from age 2

5-year-old: Hey Siri, call 911!

Me: Wait, what-

Siri: I cannot contact emergency services from here.

5-year-old: Hey Siri, play call 911!

Me: Are you trying to-

5-year-old: AAAAGH SIRRRRI, PLAY CALL 911!!!!!

Me: (sighs) Hey Siri... play First of the Year (Equinox) by Skrillex

Short term: Pressure campaigns on credit cards and payment gatekeepers

Mid term: Collectively bargained distribution agreements/content guidelines, class actions, pro bono legal support

Long term: Creator-controlled marketplaces and processors

Longer term: Fully decommodified culture + UBI

“Do you feel free?“ she asked. “Or do you feel, perhaps, like you have stolen yourself?”

From interview to story: Putting together a story about sex game censorship I interviewed New York University Game Center director Naomi Clark last week about game censorship on Steam and Itch.io

This week on Save Spot, I published the full interview with @halfrobot.com that I used in the Game File piece published last week about sex game censorship and the power of payment processors — and talked about how I turn interviews into stories.

nicolecarpenterwrites.substack.com/p/from-inter...

Good morning! If the latest censorship chaos has been drifting across your feeds but you're still not clear what's going on, we made a podcast episode for you 👇

Increasingly impressed by the ongoing trend in Japanese games and animation to just photograph actual food they're eating instead of striving for artistic realism

I saw all the furor and thought it was going to be Rahm Emanuel level stuff but no Dem hopeful has matched that level of sheer anti-trans vitriol yet. Buttigieg remains a "but I want everyone to like me" type milquetoast

Pete Buttigieg interviewed about trans sports issues in the wake of Rahm Emanuel being outright transphobic, transcript: What's your approach to that and how would you try to appeal to people who disagree with you about it? I think the approach starts with compassion. compassion for transgender people, compassion for families, especially young people who are going through this, and also empathy for people who are not sure what all of this means for them, like wondering, wait a minute, I got a uh I got a daughter in in in a sports league. Is she going to be competing with boys right now? Right? And just taking everybody seriously. Mhm. And I think when you do that, that does call into question some of the past orthodoxies in my party, for example, around sports, where I think most reasonable people would recognize that there are serious fairness issues if you

just treat this as as as not mattering when a trans athlete wants to compete in women's sports. Meaning the parent who's complained about this has a case in your opinion? Sure. And that's why I think these decisions should be in the hands of sports leagues and school boards and not politicians, least of all politicians in Washington, trying to use this as a political pawn. When President Trump says something like no boys and girls sports, which is a phrase that they use. It sounds like you're not signing on to that. I think that chess is different from weightlifting and weightlifting is different from volleyball and uh you know, middle school is different from the Olympics. So that's exactly why I think that we shouldn't be grandstanding on this as politicians. We should be empowering communities and organizations and schools to make the right decisions.

Buttigieg is the kind of milky centrist who I never want to vote for, but isn't the objectionable thing here the grotesque "I'm going to REBEL against orthodoxy" positioning? The actual substance of "leagues & schools decide, depends on age and sport" what e.g. Harper advocated years ago

a disembodied mouth superimposed atop a phone, yelling the logos of mastercard, visa, and paypal

Inside the mass call campaign to stop video game censorship

aftermath.site/steam-itch-p...

I see, so what you're saying is that if you turn the corrupt creep dial to 90% you get Cuomo and if you turn the demented weirdo dial to 80% or so you get Silwa, makes sense. Could have both factors at once

Much too generous; I know plenty of demented weirdos and the vast, vast majority do not go to Times Square with a pack of goons to beat up random Spanish-speaking people walking by on zero-evidence suspicion of being "migrant shoplifters"

Zenith & Public Progress - NYC 2025 Mayoral General Election Poll - Full Report 2025 New York City Mayor General Election Poll July 2025 Fielded by

Been a long time since I've seen anything as spectacular in electoral politics as this "three corrupt creeps divide the opposition to a popular leftist candidate" popcorn-show
docs.google.com/presentation...

I've ended up working for and with enough thoroughly horrible and morally reprehensible people that trying to use "you got paid by a totally garbage institution / owner" as a takedown tends to sound like more of a naive self-own

Sure! There's plenty of pre-LLM AI in games. I was referring to the Pac-Man example since it's very much on one extreme of proto-pathfinding. And is in the article.

"A.I.-fueled games" are not "accelerating quickly" because nobody has yet answered the most fundamental question raised a few years ago, which is "why would anyone want to do random, unmoored text roleplay with a chatbot inside of a game engine, anyway?"

By "self-aware" what this here "paper of record" means is that a now-defunct Australian "AI voice-over" company hooked ChatGPT up to Epic's "Matrix Awakens" demo so that streamers could ineffectually roleplay "you're stuck in the Matrix" with chatbots, e.g. www.youtube.com/watch?v=aihq...

Most experts acknowledge that if you only ask business analysts about industry trends you will get an answer that is divorced from reality

Hey look, it’s our long-overdue punishment for referring to simple state machines that compile into a kilobyte of code as “artificial intelligence”

The sensitive checkbox is just the easiest and incredibly imperfect way to flip one switch and have everything that could serve as an excuse to turn off payments cordoned off at once, to meet a typically harsh deadline

All signs point to panic policy, as far as I can tell. Nobody involved in all of this seems to know what they are doing or the knock-on effects; giant catastrophe of varied flailing

ah yeah the familiar whiplash of seeing a legacy media org cover something you're an actual expert in and realizing "oh if this is how badly they're fucking up this, how badly are they fucking up every other topic?"

I'm maybe most scared of how horrifyingly plain this all is. A decade or two ago I thought rampant internet fantasies would be like, an evil giant spider robot queen from the future who steps on you and feeds you milk-venom that turns you into a mildly sentient breeding plant, or some shit like that

Averaged out, a journalist has been killed every 3 days since the conflict began.

Why are people looking for, or astonished to find, "even more" mature-content (but possibly not NSFW) games that were delisted from itch? It seemed pretty clear on day 1 that they delisted nearly everything with the "sensitive content" flag turned on, which can be checked by creators or mods.

Visa and Mastercard pressuring Itch.io and Valve does 'nothing to protect' women, and shock games will just be 'side-stepping the ban entirely', say affected indie devs "Cutting these women off from income streams and audiences does nothing to 'protect' them."

really good write-up of this whole situation with payment processors enabling right-wing censorship of adult games www.pcgamer.com/gaming-indus...

As I am not a lawyer, I don't understand why some decisions aren't available via PACER to the public (just minutes? is that way?) or if a more formal decision is coming, or what a "tentative" dismissal is, but if you're a lawyer please feel free to elucidate

Weird thing about the payment processor debacle that I haven't seen much discussion/reporting on: Judge Wesley Hsu ruled to dismiss Visa from a major case in April, saying payment processors don't have liability when routinely processing payments! www.courthousenews.com/judge-tentat...