Root System

A quick update to start: One of the banks backing PayPal purchases in several currencies has decided to stop processing or accepting Steam transactions, making PayPal unavailable in regions that use those currencies. The slug says that PayPal doesn't support the transactions, but the article is quick to point out that it's actually one of the banks that has withdrawn their support for Steam transactions using PayPal. So we continue to get reminded that if the system of money decides that you're not allowed on their platform, it doesn't matter what the jurisdiction or the law says is allowed or not, you're banned from being able to do anything that involves the banking systems. People in places where cannabis is currently legal have already figured this out, because they continue to be denied access to financial transaction systems, and sex workers and their clients have figured this out, because they're regularly targeted for these kinds of purges and exclusions, but gamers are starting to understand how much their freedom to purchase and play works depends not on the laws or the interpretations of the laws, but on the control exerted by payment processors over the platforms they want to buy and play on.

Valve Corporation said that MasterCard was definitely pressuring them to delist and deplatform adult content, through the intermediaries of the banks and processors, after Mastercard claimed it made no such demands of the platforms. And I'm sure they also didn't say they'd been looking for the excuse once the group that was trying to get their attention did it.And they'd probably deny that they've been at this sex-negative prudery and denying access to their networks for legal, non-obscene content for at least two decades at this point.

A neat thing: a complete run of Computer Entertainer, one of the first video game magazines in the U.S., has been digitized and made available in Creative Commons, by the Video Game History Foundation. Hooray for accessible history!

Also because if you don't have history available to you, you start thinking that the methods of the past are superior to the methods of the present, when what you want is to draw forth the good things of the past into the present. The "90s parenting" being described here is entirely possible in the current decade, without any need for retro objects or such to bring back nostalgia along with what you want to actually do. Such nostalgia often makes people blame things improperly for creating the current world, or to start thinking that simply removing those objects will be enough to bring back the perfect world.

The only way not to build the Torment Nexus is not to build the Torment Nexus, and we have many reasons why we need to stay in the job that's going to build the Torment Nexus. Take care of your souls, and perhaps consider that if you're building the Torment Nexus, you don't have to do it at high speed or efficiency while you look for something that isn't on Team Torment Nexus. (What's also well-noted there is that there are a lot of people on Team Torment Nexus who have rationalized their participation, or who think this really is the way to go,.)

As we move into yet another year of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, what's been learned and what best practices are good to continue. Including vaccination, even though, as we'll see in the later parts of the post, the anti-vaccination squad are currently running the health house.

A primer on the history of what the phrase "land grant university" means. More often than not, it's "land seized from Native nations, then sold, and the proceeds used to fund the construction and operation of the university" instead of something like "the state legislature granted land for the university from their own stores and funds."

The civility of the women's game (of football) has some fans of the men's game feeling like they're being fed their vegetables with no chance of dessert. We hear that kind of thing in the States as well, even with a top-ranked women's team. Am reminded of statistics I was quoted that suggest most men believe a crowd of about 17% women is 50% women, and a 33% woman crowd feels more like 90% to them. Because they're focused far too much on the thing they don't believe belongs there that they over-represent it in their heads.

( And the rest inside )

Last out, something good in the technology: the engineers behind the Jupiter camera called Juno have been heating and then cooling the components to fix various radiation-related damage that has been seen on images, and the fixes bring the camera back to within specifications, albeit temporarily each time.

And the increasingly misnamed Sacramento Music Archive, and the progress being made on digitization, archiving, and sharing of concert recordings made by one person and/or the collections that have been given to them, many of which are for groups that never made it big, and some of which are previously-unknown performances, demos, or material for very big entities indeed.

A supposedly easy method for folding fitted sheets that they do fold appropriately and aesthetically pleasing-ly.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)