Chapter 1 | Page 26: Roller Coaster
Sep. 4th, 2025 04:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)






You mean, like, not in the biblical sense?
The post Chapter 1 | Page 26: Roller Coaster appeared first on Treading Ground.
You mean, like, not in the biblical sense?
The post Chapter 1 | Page 26: Roller Coaster appeared first on Treading Ground.
Pintsize and Date would get along pretty well
The last time I tried to write about the censorship of content on Steam and elsewhere, I proved unsuited to the task. Well, that may be a matter for debate. Maybe you would have liked what I wrote. Gabe certainly would have liked it; that's part of why I didn't post it. Let me try this again, in the mode of the Elder Statesman that I am.
I am back home after another great PAX West. Thank you to everyone who came to our various Penny Arcade panels and events over the course of the weekend. I am confident that someday Jerry and I will walk on stage for a panel and find a completely empty room, but that day is not today!
Yay stop trying to be coquettish it's weird
Here's the strip from the make a strip panel at PAX West 2025, to celebrate a new vendor I'm really excited about. In other news, Ronia wants to get Alien tattoos together when she turns 18; she wants me to get the xenomorph and her to get the facehugger, because "that's the baby." I'm weirdly touched by it. We must consider that she may be, in fact, my girl.
Per the dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.
There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.
A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.
The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.
In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.
The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.
Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.
Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.
One of the fascinating parts of now being a Humanities student is encountering things that need reframing to make sense. For example--
"the metric foot"
--which caused me to make one of those boiling kettle type noises.
The context of the full sentence helps a little:
“The metric foot — that is, a foot with a fixed number of syllables — became established in Chaucer's time, largely through the influence of Chaucer himself, and it remained the norm of mainstream English verse for the next five centuries. 1
working out that the meter in this is not the metre I'm used to using sure helped.
(I'm not studying linguistics at all. I just think that this is going to be useful background when I get to trying to understand semiotics, which I think I'm going to need for contrastive media analysis, which is the actual methodology I'm hoping to use)
1. Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar M.A.K. Halliday, 2014.
What we can say for certain is that the eighties were a very interesting time for cross-cultural product. Gabe's verdict on Shinobi: Art Of Vengeance is that it kicks ass, and he says the demo is super hefty. Usually if he likes a demo, he'll just stop playing it - doesn't want to spoil the experience. This time, he couldn't put it down.
The official show store for PAX West 2025 is live, and there are some hardcore bangers in there this time around. Dabe was able to get access to take pictures in real metro spots, and even just the store page for PAX has a ton of amazing photography: