I’m not disagreeing or saying this shouldn’t be made illegal (or couldn’t be illegal under existing law if we had sufficiently motivated regulators), I’m just stating the regulatory position that distinguishes this activity from traditional insider trading.

Trading a security based on material non-public information that you obtained under a duty of confidence is illegal. The problem is that these are not securities, but the bets here track with real securities - so someone can effectively get the benefits of insider trading without the consequences.

Definitely just made it up for the con, but it is kind of funny to imagine that a teenager tripping balls on a farm was the genesis of a cult lasting two centuries

Same, this made me feel like I was hallucinating worse than Joe Smith and his angel with a flaming sword

You relentlessly say “fuck you, you evil motherfuckers.” Reason has no place in the propaganda war. All we can do is rhetorically slam these people into the dirt long enough and loudly enough that normies notice and take up the battle cry.

When the Battlefront II revival happened earlier this year it struck me that there's a use that's cheeky fandom banter and there's a use that's 100% a slur substitute, but those two uses intermingle, and if you call out the latter people get VERY angry. Soured me on the game.

Getting dogpiled for having an opinion about the need to put a stake in the ground about the value of journalism labor (an opinion that has been broadly shared by professionals and educators for the entire internet era) is crazy. People need to chill.

Part of setting that expectation is refusing to do the work if you’re not paid enough - and pursuing other work instead (including outside the industry).

Clawing back to a sustainable subscription model when you’ve set a cultural expectation that writing is free, is a truly Herculean task. So to with workers in journalism - setting expectations of value has to happen at every level or it doesn’t work and everyone’s left in the muck.

I think this is straightforwardly correct. Tacit acceptance of downward price pressures has doomed the entire industry. It’s not just writers, it’s publishers too. At the dawn of the internet, publishers told the public what their publications were worth by making them free online.

Add in some UBE discourse and you’ve got a stew going.

Freaks of all persuasions in your mentions (Nazi or otherwise) can fuck right off. Keep fighting the good fight.

but it doesn’t stick. They wouldn’t recognize Earthbound in another context, if they even remember it in the first place.

See I think the average gamer probably doesn’t clock a link between “Ness” and the actual game Earthbound, because the average gamer mostly plays a handful of big games exclusively. They might have played SSB with friends, and maybe a friend says “this guy’s from something called Earthbound,”

Agree. I think the average gamer hasn’t even heard of any of these games.

I’ve been running around telling people this is basically Mario & Luigi combat for a while now. Glad to find someone who sees it the same way.