Blizzard Makes Amends

OK, I'm only being 86.8 percent facetious.

They did get slightly more consistent in their totalitarian douchebaggery.

Originally Blizzard opted not to ban the players when they first held up the sign during the October 8th competition, but American University elected to resign from competition anyway to stand in solidarity with Chinese player, blitzchung, who had been banned from competition for saying "Liberate Hong Kong. Revolution of our times!” during a post-game interview.

Kudos to these American University students for pushing this. They gave up a fair amount of money by standing on principles. They also are grounded enough to note in their statement that they are in North America and Blitz Chung is in Hong Kong.

Chambers said the team wants to remind people that Blitzchung risked far more than he and his teammates did to make a point.

"He risked real things,” Chambers said. "We risked getting banned from a tournament structure we don’t intend to compete in anymore. He lost his permanent Grandmasters spot, which is a money printer. He risked getting arrested by security services in Hong Kong. He actually is the hero here."

Note Blizzard's official announcement and public explanation on the matter which, which consists of an anonymous tweet and a quiet banning.

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Lion Rock is This Week's Suribachi

I'm sure it will be removed posthaste, but the Hong Kong activists, acting in the dead of night, managed to get their 'Lady Liberty' Statue to the peak of Lion Rock.

Previously the statue, which had been sculpted back in August, had resided at the Benjamin Franklin Center University Avenue.

The fact that there is a Benjamin Franklin Center in Hong Kong is surprising, a bit awesome, and should be cause for some reflection on this side of the pond. We have a lot to live up to.

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Of Quislelings, Collaborators and Business Decisions

more...

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A Guest Editorial From An Anonymous Blizzard Employee

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Tooting Our Own Horn

Regarding this weeks issue with China, censorship South Park, Anime, Blizzard, the NBA, Vans, Disney, videogame content, and, "global beauty standards", we were discussing this here back in June.

One thing in particular that's not getting a lot about of coverage about this censorship: The Blizzard link is to a 20 minute video has an interesting bit of background on how China's censors have been removing or white washing (literally!) black and other dark skinned characters in video games for some time.

This is a BIG deal and it deserves a lot more attention that the flurry of attention that is likely to be over by the end of the week.

 For instance, this cancerous dynamic is actually the source of many of the "reactionism clauses" that are popping up in the Orwellian TOS's of tech and media companies.

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This is an Interesting, Though Likely Transitory Develpment

The Hong Kong protestors are using a peer-to-peer mesh broadcasting network that doesn't use the internet.

Is this like CB for cellphones? 

I imagine that it could be jammed pretty easily, though actually eavesdropping on it might be a significant challenge, given good encryption.

Anyone here have any experience with these or thoughts on it?

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Hope ?

The extradition treaty is being formally withdrawn by the Hong Kong government.



Note that she refers to the 5 demands as being made by THE PUBLIC rather than something like running dog wreckers and saboteurs.  While Mayor Lam nixes one of the demands (which is for what amounts to an internal affairs audit of the HK police) she yields on the Extradition Treaty and offers to parley on the rest. Which is significantly better than a bloodbath. 

I'm still not optimistic, but there is now room for rational hope.

More on this  here and here.

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Cute Little MMD Videos are Serious Business Apparently

 

If you can't read the text, it says;

Still vague, but its way more than most people get in the way of explanation and has the added benefit to Google of being defamatory.

I assume it's a benefit. I don't quite grok Google's bidness plan but I assume it monetizes the despair and frustration of people unjustly wronged.

The guy just did MMD videos and as far as I could see wasn't selling or soliciting anything. His content was some cute Tohu skits, other shorts, a few racy Kancollie dance videos in a separate, 18+ playlist and  some MMD how-to videos.

Oh well, its gone now.

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This Does Not Bode Well

Can anyone find a current Live-Stream or recent video upload from Hong Kong Island? Because You Tube doesn't have anything younger than a week old. I may be making a mistake in my search terms, but I've tried Hong Kong Live; Hong Kong Protest Live, Hong Kong Web Cam, Hong Kong Central Live (and Web cam) and the obsolete term Victoria City. Nothing turns up anything from after a week ago. I assume that Youtube is downselecting or blocking them but given the techweasel's general opaqueness, It's anyone's guess. I did find a few news reports on YT that were 9 hours old and a conspiracy theorist who claims that this is the first step by the BilderBurgers to cull the planets population but nothing about whats happening now. 

Update: the Victoria Harbor webcam is down as I type this.

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Not Actually Surprising, But Discussions of Hong Kong Are Being Downvoted, Demonetized and Removed From the Internet

Vee also has a remedial review of why Epic Games Store is evil, but we knew that.



UPDATE: None of this stopped a bit of defiance from making an appearance at a video game tournament in Shanghai.

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Some Talk A Good Game About Empowered Women

...but point to Mary Sue Fanfic and weaponizing "the vapors" as examples of such.

Most of those would not be the least bit amused by today's birthday girl, who was a person of extraordinary talent in her sport, She was also a superb showman and entrepreneur who came from less than nothing and on her own merits rose to become one of the most famous women in the world in her day.

She was also a philanthropist, world traveler, businesswoman, actress and at one point tried to raise an all female unit of 50 women sharpshooters  for the Spanish American War before McKinley said "No!"

She also empowered more than 15,000 women in the most profound way possible, by teaching them how to shoot.

On this day in 1860, Phoebe Ann Mosey, better known in later life as Annie Oakley and "Little Sure Shot", was born.

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Meanwhile, In Hong Kong

China has denied a port visit by the U.S. Navy in Hong Kong. This might be taken as an indication that something very bad is in the wind.

The last few days have been less peaceful but the protests, which have been going on for three months now and comprise at time millions of people are still showing no sign of letting up on their own.

It's looking like they will be ended by the CCP, which is reported to be massing troops across the Pearl River.

Tienanmen 2 may well be imminent.

Given the seven and a half million that live in the megalopolis, and what the CCP did in Tiennamen; when the hammer comes down, it has the potential to be a bloodbath on a par with some of the worst atrocities in history. This is not a bunch of students, more than a quarter of the population has taken part in some of these marches, a testament to what the stakes are for the average Hong Konger. The CCP is facing stresses from numerous directions and see the outspokenness of Hong Kong as a danger that is poised to metastasize. For all its millions Hong Kong is but a rounding error among the billion and a half Chinese;  one that the mainlanders have been raised and educated to be decidedly unsympathetic to.

The Hong Kong protestors are waving the American flag and singing The Star Spangle Banner. The desperately want what we have and appreciate it in a way many of our leaders do not and their thirst for freedom is something that many of our gatekeepers and self appointed aristocrats hold in contempt.

There is little that can be done of course, but the comparative lack of coverage or "backpaging"  of this impending catastrophe by mainline news outlets is disgraceful, and feeds into the idea that the tech weasels and media are to a very large extent Chinese fronts now.

I note that the You Tube Filter seems to have gotten particularly egregious about this story recently. Selecting the most recent upload date as a filter provides two particularly anodyne news reports and the then starts going backwards from a month ago.

In any event, companies like Epic that are owned by People's Liberation Army affiliated companies or those like Google that Kow-Tow to their wishes in hopes of favors ought to be scrutinized rather more than they are, for what's happening in china with the social credit system and what is about to befall Hong Kong, is not at all beyond the bounds of possibility for us.

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Of Mailboxes and Mobs

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Some Endings Are Much More Consequential Than Others

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Even the Stupidest Stories Can lead Us To Worrisome Truths

In bowels of the previous post we snarked briefly about that Tifa non-troversey and how it was distracting from potentially worrisome issues with the game. That post hyper-linked to an article that had the character designer explaining that the decision was forced on him by the company ethics department in order to conform to 'Global Standards". Curious as to what "Global Standards" were, our crack team of fact checkers did a cursory search and lo-and behold it's a thing.

Interestingly, this policy was implemented by Sony in in 2018, which was about the same time that a wave of censorious shenanigans descended upon the internet in various places. That timeframe is significant because looking for info on "Global Standards"turned up this rather long but fascinating article at Medium, which deserves your full attention.

Let’s take this timeline for example; In, July of 2017, Stripe announces a partnership with Chinese Companies WeChat (Tencent) and AliPay. What happened less than a quarter of a year later? Well, Patreon (who as stated earlier relies on Stripe for processing), had their guidelines updated with further scrutiny paid to adult content, seemingly out of nowhere. As time went on, Patreon would be on and off with the adult content they allowed, eventually allowing it as long as the outward page being presented was not itself explicit. The NSFW community on the site was left in a cloud of doubt about what the official position was when it came to terms of service; much akin to what is currently happening on platforms like Steam. Are there any other examples of this, however? The archived list we used notes that Circle, which was at one point accepting of this content, apparently changed their mind.

This explains a couple of things like why Patreon and Tumblr suddenly got all wonky regards adult content and still can't seem to define it consistently. Note that Stripe, is believed to have been the payment processor mentioned in the Matt Christensen video and transcript of his interaction with Patreon customer service after the second series of their purges last year, and Stripe and PayPal attempted to shut down SubscribeStar when it presented itself as an alternative.

It gets worse...

  ...there’s been an oddly increasing number of incidents related to so-called "problematic content” being stripped from or outright barred from a number of sites. However, when looking into it deeper, there seems to be a simple, central trait shared by all of these incidents; Chinese Investment, or entrance into the Chinese Market. All of this also corresponds to reports that cross-border investment from China is reaching new levels, as there is proof of China actively attempting to move their money overseas. What’s terrifying about this revelation is, as you’ll see, the issue with censorship does not come simply from Chinese companies buying out firms so they can censor them; it comes, sometimes, from companies simply wanting to expand into the Chinese market themselves, and be compliant in doing so.

This,  of course has far worse implication than the silly notion that "Global" beauty standards are actually being set by insecure members of the CCP's "50 Cent Army".

The article goes on to discuss how this has affected Reddit, Discord, Tumbler, Apple, Google, You-Tube, Steam and the development of the Playstation4, before taking a deep dive into the Chinese influence on various payment processors, how this is tied to Xi Jinping's modern version of The Little Red Book and the dire implications of any TOS that has a "Reactionism" clause.

Also: Epic Games is cancer. (But we knew that)

Of course, this is not entirely the CCP's fault.

On one hand essentially, tech firms are bending over to please the ideals of the Xi Jinping Doctrine, in hopes of courting favor with the party — leading to their eventual approval to begin operations within China.


On the other hand, tech firms are pleasing the ideals of the Xi Jinping Doctrine — without being told to, simply because they already ideologically align.

Again; read the whole thing. Be warned, it's long. Medium estimates 30 minutes, but as I kept cross-checking stuff It took me a bit over 90. It was worth every minute. Joe B. did yeoman's work on this.

The payments processing situation with regard to free speech has been brought up a lot of late, but it bears repeating as it is beginning to look like this is the biggest issue facing freedom of speech.

This dovetails nicely into Dev's latest video...




...and should remind us that the Chinese social credit system is not just a problem for the Chinese people.

Note that the CTV article referenced in the video mentions that Libra will be backed by

  "bank deposits and government securities in currencies from stable and reputable central banks."

I'm pretty sure the U.S. isn't investing in this so I imagine those government securities will include a lot of Yuan.

Dev's video also clarifies a widespread misconception about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, that EFF seems to share.

Anyway, watch the whole video, it's worth the 20 minutes.

Take heart; The situation is grim but not hopeless, and we are far better served to be aware of what's arrayed against us than to be ignorant of what lurks in the dark.

Also, I apologize to anybody, who, having read the first paragraph, read through the entire post thinking they were going to get boobs.

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This Day in History

It's been 30 years .

1989 was an odd year, The U.S.S.R., weakened by its own internal contradictions and with its rot exposed by the Chernobyl disaster of three years prior was undergoing seismic upheavals. There was crazy talk in the west; that the cold War might end without a fight, let alone Armageddon. The faint breeze of hope, long forbidden to those on the other side of the iron curtain was beginning to blow throughout the communist world. Every day, it seemed the news was reporting on how Glasnost was spinning out of control, but in a good way. It's hard to describe the awe, the cautious hope and the elation that 1989 brought us. By the end of the year the Berlin Wall would be rubble, Ceaușescu would be dead and the countries of Eastern Europe would throw off their shackles and begin the long and halting process of rebuilding.

However, in June of that year, the largest of the protests, failed.

In China, one of the largest public spaces in the world was filled with students, packed in like sardines. Emboldened by those heady days when whispers of freedom were spreading like wildfire throughout the communist world, they gathered in Tienanmen Square  to call for reform and civil rights as their ancestors had in 1919 and 1976. For days they marched, they sang, they engaged in hunger strikes. Chinese students around the world joined in. They were overjoyed, and confident. They were going to be free!

And then. It ended. The Chinese Communist Party decided that this could not stand. After a few facsimiles of parlaying, they assessed the situation and came to the conclusion that no negotiation or concessions were necessary.  A billion people is a formidable entity. A billion minds, going in a billion different directions., a billion perspectives, a billion voices, a billion ideas, a billion hopes, a billion dreams, such human capital can create wealth and wonders. However, from the perspective of a leftist, or really any totalitarian, they are cats that must be herded, contradictory views that must be countered, potential disloyalty and a potential threat. The Army was loyal, and with that, even a billion a billion people, if they have been disarmed, are, ultimately little more than a target rich environment.

The CCP decided that thousands in the Square, would no longer be an inspiration, but an example.

The APCs came in that night and were gone by morning, having been routed by thousands with bamboo sticks. 

And so in came the tanks.

...and for a glorious and wondrous moment there was hope.



No one will ever know his name, nor the names of the tank crew who did not follow unlawful orders. But between them these 5 long dead men gave us all a lesson in courage.

It was a brief respite.

Shortly thereafter, less reflective tankers were brought in. The total death toll is unknown but exceeded 10,000. The protestors were shot and bayoneted as they begged for help, then tank treads ground up everyone in the square, living and dead into  a mass of long-pork chitterlings that was hosed into the sewers.  

And so ended the act of defiance.

It has been 30 years.

Obviously things have  changed in that time.
Today we manufacture all our stuff over there to take advantage of slave wages, they have huge influence in our media and the IT technology we've given them makes the CCP's job much easier.
So yeah...progress.

That government is still in place. They are just as ruthless.

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If You're Subscribed to Them, You Might Not Know This Posted

It's a discussion of what's been transpiring in the bizarre race by certain Commonwealth nations to pass every legislative and regulatory initiative that the Christ Church butcher stated that he wanted.

As well as more generalized stupidity.

For your convenience, here's a shorter version of the video.

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It's the Sci-Fi Crossover of our Age

I bet the pitch meeting was a hoot. 

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The Land of the Longbowmen...no More

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This is How Republics Die

Look, I'm a member of the Whitebread Rap Haters Club. I find most of the genre actively repulsive. But you know what? A lot of people probably feel that way about classical music, Finnish heavy metal and/or bagpipes. 

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