Proposed PA legislation attempts to put ‘Sin tax’ on Video Games

By Alex E. Proimos - https://www.flickr.com/photos/proimos/4199675334/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22535544

Today in “legislators are comically out of touch with how the world woks”, State Legislators in Pennsylvania put forth a bill that would add a 10% tax to any video game that receives a M for Mature or AO – Adult only rating from the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board). The state would then take that money and put into the “Digital Protection for School Safety account”…because you know, protect the children. Unfortunately, text doesn’t let me express just how big my eye-roll at reading this was.

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Nevertheless, I Persist.

Social media is drowning in misinformation and ideological war that many don’t even know we are fighting, even as they wade into ideological battle after ideological battle. Groups manipulate and subvert systems on social media to amplify their ideas, giving them a credibility they haven’t earned and don’t actually represent the will of the people. Death threats are common. Say the wrong thing, or say the right thing and the wrong person sees it and suddenly you are the target what can only be described as terrorist attack to silence you.

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Twitter, it’s not me, it’s you.

After months of toxicity, complacence and what amounts to the implementation of “there are good people on both sides,” I quit Twitter. While there was a straw that broke the camel’s back, it’s something thats been building since about 2014. Twitter has been a corrupt, hateful, toxic place that generates Jack Dorsey money, and destroys our national dialog — not because of the format of Twitter, but the greed of the company.

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Why I left the Church

Recently I was watching Season 2 of Queer Eye on Netflix, and it hit me with all the feels, and made me reflect on my own experiences with the Church. The episode, titled “God Bless Gay” follows the Fab 5 as remake Miss Tammy, a woman who’s given her whole life to her community and her Church. At the end of the episode, Miss Tammy launches into a sermon about love and acceptance and all the guys were sobbing, and I lost it. She is absolutely the best that Christianity has to offer.

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An Explanation of ‘Video Games are Better without Stories’

Monday, I took my normal jaunt over to MassivelyOverpowered in the morning and picked up The Daily Grind, which is a daily a prompt about something in the news or video games or just something that came up in discussion elsewhere on the website. Monday’s prompt was about whether games, MMOs in specific, need story.

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Does Skinny Mei Matter?

Blizzard recently made a bit of an embarrassing mistake– Mei, a curvaceous Overwatch character was significantly skinnier in her new skins than she had been in previous iterations.  Blizzard has already come out and said that that it was a bug and unintended and would be fixed in an upcoming patch. But of course that hasn’t stopped people from both sides of the proverbial fence from jumping up and down from how could Blizzard do this, to Blizzard is caving to the special snowflakes.

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The Media is the Bias

The medium is the message.

-Marshall McLuhan

Towards the end of the 2016 election cycle, people started chattering about the bias of mass media. It didn’t really seem to matter which candidate–networks were accused of having a bias both for and against both candidates. A quick Google search returns hundreds of results, all posted in the weeks leading up to the election and beyond. This is something that, for whatever reason, rocketed into the American Consciousness in October.

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