Tumblr's CEO, @photomatt, was asked a question in regards to restoring @predstrogen's account. notice how i could not tag predstrogen.
predstrogen had a sideblog, predstosterone (iirc?), in which she made a post saying she wanted to throw a bag of exploding hammers at matt's car. a very cartoonish and facetious expression of frustration
matt responds to this by permabanning her, threatening to call the FBI on her, and when pressed, repeatedly misgenders her (first they/them, then when corrected it/its and "she"/"her", the grossest ones imo!)
matt answers another ask with an "apology" ("sorry i made you feel that way :(")
matt then DIRECT MESSAGES MULTIPLE TRANS WOMEN with the posts in question. why? who knows. to try to be a debatebro? that's my guess
ex-staff reveals matt is the worst version of the millennial CEO. the type to follow "self-help" books written by corpo gurus. but more importantly, forced mass layoffs, several staff want to jump ship
matt meanwhile continues to throw a tantrum the likes of which i have seen compared to elon musk, compared to lowtax, and honestly i hope lowtax is the one that rings more familiar in the end if you get what i mean
those of us who believe in trans unity need to not let this be swept under the rug. several users, including predstrogen, have reduced this to the very popular game of "TME" vs "TMA" again when this is so much bigger than our fake gender wars.
which is to say i'm very upset about that going on. we need to be unified now more than ever, not further divided. we all need to speak for our sisters and brothers effected by this.
One addition: Matt is now claiming that he's "on sabbatical" and will deal with things when he gets back in May, and that none of this is his fault we should be blaming the other staff members for all of this.
So basically we need to make this blow up again in May so he can't claim to have forgotten to address the ban
TL;DR: Steam just made library sharing so much fucking easier and so much fucking better. Instead of login-trading, it's just a simple goddamn invite.
Hello! We are excited to announce Steam Families, available today in the Steam Beta Client. Steam Families is a collection of new and existi
Read this. Really. It's a good read. Because it shows that, full-stop, Valve isn't just doubling down on their stance to make sure that people can and should be able to share their copies of digital goods as easily as they can physical ones, but they're making it better and easier than ever.
But you know how Steam allowed you to, with either friends or family, link accounts with another person to be able to establish an ability to share game libraries with one another? The general gist of Steam Family Sharing was that, with a limit of five people plus you (six in total) on a limit of ten computers total could share account access to willingly mix your libraries. You could play theirs. They could play yours.
This was a huge boon. It was meant to emulate sharing a physical copy of a game. A way to allow children to play games their parents or siblings had bought without having to fork over double the cash to buy it a second game. But it had some major limitations and drawbacks, and was archaic to use.
If a person did not share the same computer, you had to manually log into that computer to give it and the accounts on it access. This wouldn't be a problem if both accounts were used on the same computer, but many households (and astronomically more family and friend groups) had multiple computers, all used by different people.
If that computer, at any point, was hard reset to any point before the sharing occurred, you lost access. And had to do the whole process again. This was also an issue with computer transfers. The whole kit and kaboodle needed to be redone on upgrades. On top of that, the old computer is now just dead weight that you may not realize you have to manually revoke access to.
Putting your account information on another person's computer opens up security issues. They could, intentionally or accidentally, land themselves on your account if the login information was stored. Which could easily lead to purchases or bans you did not want to happen.
If anyone was, at any point, playing any game on their own library, you had no access to their games. Even if it was a totally different game, you had to wait your turn as if waiting for their computer to be freed up to sit at. (Admittedly this is kind of like the "mom said it's my turn on the xbox" meme, but hey, kinda archaic.)
You could not choose whose library you accessed a game from. Not at all. It always prioritized the first library it gained access from, DLC access and multiplayer be damned. If another friend you were accepting games from had more DLC? Too bad.
And yet here we are. Steam Families Beta fixes EVERYTHING about the above issues. By just going through Settings > Interface > client Beta Participation and clicking onto Steam Families Beta? You get:
No more login sharing.
No more computer links.
You can now choose which person's library you borrowed from.
And you can play any other game from someone's library, even while they're in-game. It just needs to be a different game than what they're playing.
Pick five people. Invite them to your family. And now everyone has access to everyone's library. My goddamn library went from 150-ish to almost a goddamn thousand in ten minutes of setup.
Account sharing and password sharing are dirty words that "lose" billions of dollars. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Max. They aren't game storefronts, but they still allow you to access massive libraries and scream like you murdered their firstborns for daring to share your password with your mother after you moved out.
Microsoft tried pushing to demonize and undercut used games sales and borrowed copies of physical games. Remember the first attempt to reveal the Xbox One? People forget, but these vultures tried to make an always online console that checked to see if you were the account that owned the game, even if you had a physical disc, and prevent access to the disc's contents if you weren't the original downloader.
Valve walked the fuck up.
Valve tapped the mic.
And Valve dropped the fucking thing right onto the ground with one feature's revamp.
About the only issues I can see with this are twofold:
If someone sharing your library gets banned from a game's servers... so do you. No one else in the family does, but the both of you do. This is... rather unpleasant, because banhammers can be dropped quite frequently by mistake. I'd urge Valve to rethink this one, but I see the logic: don't cheat and effectively bite the hand feeding you. Still making me side-eye that, though.
If you leave a family you've joined? You have to wait a YEAR to join a new one. It's to prevent people form jumping ship to another group and screwing over who's in the former one in the process, but a YEAR? OUCH.
Problems aside, though... it's probably the biggest fucking power move I have ever seen a media distributor make in the current economic climate. It's the kind of thing that would let so many new games be available in a way that's easier than ever. Just a few clicks to send or accept an invite, and bam. Permanent access to dozens or even hundreds of new games with so much more freedom than earlier drafts of the system.
It's the kind of thing that slaps you in the face with positivity after so many Ls from the games and media industries. And I'm all the fuck for a W like this.
You ever feel like you've reached the end of every possible path you could, but failed every skill check along the way and wound up at the worst ending of your story?
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