Not a question, but in your last post you mentioned people joining game jams to help gain experience. There's a pretty large online two-week game jam in mid july called MyFirstGameJam (that has a tumblr by that name) with a strong leaning towards people who are completely new to game development, though it also welcomes people who're used to it that just want to try something new. It has a lot of people (myself including) who're there to help others learn new engines and development in general
Passing along this information for anybody looking to get started with game dev or networking. [Click here] for the official My First Game Jam twitter, which has links to other relevant sites (discord, itch.io, etc.).
The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work.
[What is the FANTa project?] [Git the FANTa Project]
I have been through many copyright infringement cases - some have been resolved amicably, and there are ones that have taken more work. This case against Old Navy (Gap) is not getting resolved right now because Old Navy is denying copyright infringement.
They are being totally unapologetic, and have said that it would be a “bad business decision” for me to expect to be reasonably compensated for the use of my art. Instead of compensating me, they have chosen to pay a large law firm to fight me, and have even asked the judge to order me to pay THEIR legal fees.
When a company as large and mainstream as Old Navy steals my art and profits from it, and is unapologetic about it, I cannot afford NOT to fight this. My lawyers and I will be fighting this for as long as it takes.
Thank you for all your support. Please feel free to repost this!
BREAKING: The FCC just voted to repeal net neutrality, meaning we’re all screwed. TV news shows were essentially silent about this for the three weeks leading up to the vote.
When I saw this post on my dash, it kept disappearing every time the site finished loading. It had nothing to do with my blacklist extension, all evidence of this post on my dash vanished. I had to go to the blog of the person I’m reblogging it from DIRECTLY.
If you can see this post at all, even if it’s for a split second, try and like it and reblog it! Don’t let this post be hidden!
And you thought Instagram's policy on nipples was ignorant
One week ago, the worst possible legislation curtailing free speech online passed and sex censorship bill FOSTA-SESTA is on its way to be signed into law by Trump.
Hours after the announcement, everything from the mere discussion of sex work to client screening and safe advertising networks began getting systematically erased from the open internet. Thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of women, LGBTQ people, gay men, immigrants, and a significant number of people of color lost their income. Pushed out of safe online spaces and toward street corners. So were any and all victims of sex trafficking that law enforcement might’ve been able to find on the open internet.
The Senate has passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or SESTA, and tacked-on FOSTA (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act), by a vote of 97–2. Lawmakers did not fact-check the bill’s claims, research the religious neocons behind it, nor did they listen to constituents. Significant organizations, including the Department of Justice, ACLU, EFF, and more had assembled to object to the bill both publicly and in letters to elected officials. In the process, law professors and anti-trafficking groups, along with sex work organizations, unearthed the bill’s many alarming legal, constitutional, and human rights disqualifications.
It’s dubbed the “anti-trafficking” bill for the internet, but it’s really an anti-sex sledgehammer. The bill removes protection for websites under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and makes sites and services liable for hosting what it very, very loosely defines as sex trafficking and “prostitution” content. FOSTA-SESTA puts into law that sex work and sex trafficking are the same thing, and makes discussion and advertising part of the crime. Its blurry interpretation of sex and commerce, as well as the bill’s illogical, incorrect conflation of sex trafficking and sex work is straight out of a bad movie.
If only the politicians who voted this Morality in Media (NCOSE) mess into law had fact-checked it with Freedom Network USA, “the largest coalition of experts and advocates providing direct services to to survivors of human trafficking in the U.S.“ Freedom Network unequivocally states that protecting the rights of sex workers, and not conflating them with trafficking victims, is critical to the prevention of trafficking. They also have the data to back up the fact that “more people are trafficked into labor sectors than into commercial sex.”
It’s already an unmitigated disaster for free speech in America. Which was, of course, predicted. The Technology and Marketing Law Blog wrote that there’s no mistaking that FOSTA-SESTA violates the First Amendment; it plainly stated that “this statute implicates constitutionally protected speech.”
It’s unconstitutional, but the damage is already being done. Despite the fact that FOSTA-SESTA isn’t even law yet – it could take anywhere from 90 days to until 2019 to take effect – online companies, always dangerously prudish with their algorithms, or hypocritical with their free speech rhetoric, appear to be in a rush to proverbially herd sex workers (and all us people who talk about sex for a living) out of the airlock into places where no one can hear us scream.
Safety resources disappear overnight
Websites are removing content and communities wholesale, the result of FOSTA-SESTA making safer working conditions more difficult by criminalizing digital conversations about sex work, screening tools and discussions about how to be safe doing it.
By way of its ambiguity, FOSTA-SESTA has begun the largest wave of censorship the open internet may ever see.
Craigslist removed its entire Personals section. All these amazing moments can never happen again.
As some may recall, Craigslist already voluntary closed its Erotic Services section in 2010 under pressure from conservative groups. This is despite a study from Baylor and West Virginia Universities, which found that Craigslist’s erotic services page directly reduced female homicides in the US by 17 percent, “principally because sex workers were able to use the free advertising service to move into safer indoor environments and screen clients more carefully.“ Request for comment to Craigslist and our queries asking why Personals was removed ahead of the bill’s signing were not responded to by time of publication.
Within days, Reddit removed entire communities. Notably, its r/escorts and r/sugardaddy subreddits. We asked Reddit for comment about its pre-emptive removal of those subreddits, and how that lines up with the company’s controversial philosophies regarding freedom of speech, but did not receive a response by press time.
Right now, sites and safety resources are falling like dominoes. In short order, sex work networks NightShift, CityVibe, and furry personals site Pounced shut down entirely. Sites that facilitated safety in sex work including The Erotic Review, VeryfyHim, Hung Angels, YourDominatrix, and Yellow Pages shut down their discussion boards, advertising boards, and community forums. Other sites, like MyFreeCams, have changed their policies to ban any talk about transactions of any kind.
FOSTA-SESTA’s timing puts a dark spin on recent Terms enforcement by Google Drive and changes with Microsoft products.
On the Survivors Against Sesta shutdown list of services, growing every day, Google Drive is listed as “deleting explicit content and/or locking out users.“ Google declined to comment on the record, but Engadget was assured via email from a source with knowledge of the situation that the enforcement wave on Drive has nothing to do with FOSTA-SESTA.
Similarly, Microsoft released a Terms update this week that got the company put on the FOSTA-SESTA censorship list as well. A spokesperson for Microsoft told Engadget in an email that the changes are not related to FOSTA. Further, the spokesperson told us, “The recent changes to the Microsoft Service Agreement’s Code of Conduct provide transparency on how we respond to customer reports of inappropriate public content.”
Human canaries in the free speech coal mine
The hashtag #LetUsSurvive is a current rallying point on Twitter, directing attention to the sex work community’s determination to get out of this insidious wave of conservative anti-sex silencing alive. To that end, sex work websites feature guides to self-censoring, the kind of thing you’d expect belongs more in Weimar-era Berlin than coming out of modern-day San Francisco.
Sex workers are right to be scared. They’re facing all this sudden and casually disastrous censorship as a threat to their safety and livelihoods, and are well aware that few are willing or brave enough to fight for their free speech and human rights. Even sex writers such as myself know this; any of us who’ve tried to make a living off anything relating to sex online has a list of products, services, banks and payment processors, social networks, companies, and business tools that everyone else takes for granted — that we are expressly prohibited from using.
It has been a speech issue for a long time, one most people have turned away from as Instagram censors more nipples, as PayPal freezes and shutters the accounts of sex bloggers and book authors, Tumblr deep-sixes erotic artists, and more.
Hateful gamers? No problem. Death threats toward women? Here’s a form to fill out. MAGA racists terrorizing women and people of color off the platform? Gotta hear both sides. But expose a nipple in artwork, discuss non-reproductive sex ed, or talk about making sex work safer by screening clients? Now that’s a misguided business plan guaranteed to create lasting cultural harm. Let’s definitely keep Peter Thiel on the board. If you thought all that was bad enough, just you wait. FOSTA-SESTA is making us disappear before your very eyes — and it will affect you, too.
Under FOSTA-SESTA, we’d most likely have no Stormy Daniels. That Stormy Daniels is making headlines while the absolute worst is happening to sex workers online is not lost on anyone.
“In a titillating cross-section of lawmaking and scandal,” wrote sex worker Morgan Claire-Sirene, “we have on one side Stormy Daniels suing 45 for unlawful payoffs and calling him to account publicly for his associates’ threats against her, and on the other side, legislation that has already silenced common sex workers, with the overlaying intersections of race and class; good whores and bad whores; victims and perpetrators; and misinformation all around.”
Daniels is a perfect lens with which to view the exact way FOSTA-SESTA harms one of America’s largest at-risk populations. Writer Ben Udashen points out, “The level of sex worker whose lives will be harmed by SESTA are not at the same level of fame and notoriety as Stormy Daniels”
“Daniels won’t be caught up in a sting sending her to jail because she had to work as a streetwalker to help pay her rent and feed her children. Daniels won’t have to carry a weapon to defend herself when she meets with a new client.
“Most importantly, Daniels’s children won’t be woken up to the news that their mother didn’t come home last night because she was murdered by a serial killer, a class of criminal who have always targeted sex workers from Jack the Ripper to the Green River Killer. Poor and working class sex workers, regardless of gender identity, will pay that price.”
And for a short moment in history, the advent of the open internet reduced that horrible cost.
trained video game designers who get paid thousands of dollars for making video game: some things are way too difficult to create with this engine, you have to understand that we are very limited in our possibilities for this game
modders with a pirated version of photoshop who work full jobs outside the video game industry: hey guys I made 100 hairstyles and re-textures of 750 outfits during my lunch time. Also this female character now has proper armor and can be romanced by a female protag. I was kinda busy last night but here are 20 new complexions you can download for free
hi, resident games art student here! i am. bad at articulating stuff but let me explain why there aren’t 100 hairstyles and 750 re-textures made by game devs! there are a LOT of misconception about the game industry, most prominently maybe that there is this Huge Capitalist Entity™ behind them when in fact there is a team of hardworking devs. These people spend SO much time and work on these games, they’re the last ones who want to release a shitty product. I’m sure that at this point everybody has heard about how stressful making games is but let me tell you exactly HOW bad it is. Because this industry truly treats their people like crap. Like they literally made up a new term for overtime, “crunch”, so they wouldn’t need to pay people extra. Let me add a quote from Blood, Sweat and Pixels, a book that follows the development stories of popular games such as Diablo 3, Dragon Age Inquisition, Stardew Valley, etc.
“The developer’s team had to spend the next few months “crunching”, working eighty- to one-hundred hour weeks (…) Some of them slept in the office so they wouldn’t have to waste time commuting”
So yeah.
It’s not really an issue of “do we have the skill?” but more “do we add another hairstyle or do we fix these game breaking bugs?”. When you literally have to decide which bugs you have to fix in time and which ones you can’t there simply isn’t enough time for adding more cosmetics. All games are released unfinished because it is simply not feasible to fix everything. Game development is brutal. Our lecturer told us that people in the industry usually work there for no longer than 8 years simply because it is so demanding and soul sucking. So why is crunch a thing, you may ask.
“I think it remains to be seen whether crunching actually works. Obviously a lot of literature says it doesn’t. (But) I think everybody finds a time in their development careers where you’re going ‘I don’t see what other options we have’” (Aaryn Flynn)
One huge part of that is because the games industry doesn’t have something which almost every other industry has: unions.
This has recently gotten more attention with the whole voice actor thing, but the simple fact is that as of now there are no unions for people working on games, something big publishers want to keep that way. Working in games still has kind of a “rockstar” image, it’s a small industry and there are thousands of eager people who would take any kind of job. As a result there are no real actions that get taken against overworking as everyone is ultimately seen as replaceable.
Not only that but individual studios are largely at the mercy of their publishers. Let’s look at Ensamble as an example. Instead of making the original IP the studio wanted to create they were told by Microsoft to make a game within the Halo franchise. Only to be told that after the release of what was now “Halo Wars” the studio would be shut down.
So while they might not add tons of additional content in form of cosmetics a TON of the work goes into the less glamorous systems like inventory, pathfinding or 3D modelling hundreds of assets only 10% of players are going to look at in detail. And don’t make me go into the topic of 3D modelling because THAT is a whole other rant bc it is difficult AS FUCK and incredibly underappreciated.
And lastly, it is a job. a not very well paid one so you can shove that “thousand of dollars” up your ass.
Last time reblog. Because THE COMMENTARY is important.
I legit love discussing games on here but seeing posts like this getting THOUSANDS OF NOTES despite its fallacies, misconceptions and outright ignorance of how our industry works is beyond frustrating.
Once my friend Henry was accused of wearing wireless headphones by a substitute so she said for him to hand them over so he took them off and handed them to her. Then later on she asked him a question and he didn’t respond so she said it louder and he still didn’t respond. She asked why he was not responding and he said “I can’t understand you ma'am, you took my hearing aids.”
one time we had a sub that was handing back papers and called my name. I asked if someone could grab it for me and she started mocking me for not even standing up. taunting me asking why I was not walking up to the front to get the paper myself.
my classmates went dead silent and after the sub’s laughter ended someone informed her that the wheelchair parked nearby belonged to me
My sister once had her insulin pump ripped off of her because her exam proctor (a sub) thought it was some cheating device.
He soon figured out that it was, in fact, not, when the port on her side (the place the needle goes in) started bleeding through her shirt. Her pump started beeping frantically, because that’s what it does, and it was general chaos until my sister ripped what’s basically her pancreas out of his hands, told her friend “Let the next proctor know I’ll need extra time,” and walked out of the room towards the nurse.
Literally schools are shit with disabilities. In elementary school I was having a high blood sugar reaction(cold sweats to rapid passing in and out of consciousness, vomiting and finally leading to a massive seizure before you die) and I KNEW I had to go to the nurse cuz I was getting worse. Kept telling my teach I needed to go and he kept saying no till finally I felt myself about to throw up and I’m screaming LET ME GO (i was a little kid to me i couldnt do anything in an institution without an adults say so or id basically go to hell) and the bitch said SHUT YOUR DAMN MOUTH AND PAY ATTENTION TO THE LESSON where I proceeded to projectile vomit all over my desk and he jut kept going on with the lesson. Finally I just booked it out of the room but I was too far gone to even REMEMBER where the nurses office was let alone where the hell I was that my class literally just left and helped me to the nurses office. I immediately went to the hospital and officially died for 5 minutes before I was revived. I could have stayed dead all because some fuck twad thought his lesson was more important than a students life
After Columbine, a local school installed metal detectors and made everyone walk through them and put their bags on a table for a teacher to search.
A few days into the school year, a teacher ripped a boy’s insulin pump off him because she thought it was a weapon, despite he and his sister insisting it was an insulin pump and he needed it to live.
I don’t know how many of you are still in school but I have some valuable knowledge that might actually help with this problem! In the United States there’s this thing called a 504 Plan that you can get which basically gives you legal protection from disability/chronic illness discrimination in public schools.
Students can qualify for 504 plans if they have physical or mental impairments that affect or limit any of their abilities to: walk, breathe, eat, or sleep; communicate, see, hear, or speak; read, concentrate, think, or learn; stand, bend, lift, or work
Examples of accommodations in 504 plans include: preferential seating, extended time on tests and assignments, reduced homework or classwork, verbal, visual, or technology aids, modified textbooks or audio-video materials, behavior management support, adjusted class schedules or grading, verbal testing, excused lateness, absence, or missed classwork
I’m a type one diabetic and my school nurse would do stuff like keep all my meds in a locked cabinet, not let me take my insulin or test my blood sugar unless she was watching me, and lie to my mother about me inducing low blood sugars in order to get out of class. She wouldn’t even let me keep glucagon (emergency sugar injection) on my person in case I passed out from low blood sugar.
So one day I casually mentioned all this to my endocrinologist and she was really mad. She was really angry at the school nurse for mistreating me like that and informed me of this thing called a 504 plan. A 504 plan protects students with disabilities and chronic illnesses from discrimination by outlining exactly what a student needs to meet their special needs. For me, this meant I had to be able to keep ahold of my own meds in case of emergency and keep track of my own glucose levels, that I would never be marked late for a class if I was busy treating a low, and I could pause the clock on a standardized test to check my blood sugar and treat it. If you have a disability and you’re still attending public school, PLEASE read up on 504 plans because they saved me so much grief when I was still in school. It might help you too. Here’s some more information about 504 plans:
