Sunset BROWNS SZN Shimmer

💕:🏀,🏈, anime, manga, FanFics, femboys/Yuri/loli, & lewdness! Long Live Sunset Shimmer & Skitter! Writing a novel. RB3D guitar. Closet trans. Fuck Censorship

[David Dayen @ddayen]

Kirsten Gillibrand's son, right out of college, getting a $300 million valuation on his "trade stocks as derivatives" company is a particularly ugly payoff for the Senator's stalwart crypto support, writes our friends at @revolvingdoordc.
https://t.co/EH4YDUHBVW

[Clipping Wings @ClippingWings]

Joy Reid says "It is not Vote Blue No Matter Who. It Matters Who" replaces Platner

"The people of Maine said we want a progressive. They did not say we want an AIPAC moderate"

"If the DNC shoves an AIPAC candidate down your throat, you have my permission to not vote for them"

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

In a hearing where residents grilled officials on data centers, a resident of Tyrone Township, Michigan, asked a simple question: Have you signed an NDA with any party regarding developments that could affect the town?

The majority of the township's officials refused to answer.

[Ashleyy @dontsippy]

Just a few months ago, I was fighting alongside leftists against the establishment and its corporate media arm, which supported Andrew Cuomo. Today, that same media machine has turned many of them into zombies who attack anyone who dares to question or go against its narrative.

Even journalists like Ryan Grim, who is generally on the left, are getting attacked simply for doing journalism.

Honestly, there is no hope for the left. If a media establishment that is generally hostile to them has the ability to turn them into zombies, then there is no hope.

[Abdulkadir | Cybersecurity @cyber_razz]

The EU Parliament voted 311 to 228 in March to kill Chat Control.

Parliament rejected it.

Dead.

Expired April 3.

The Council’s own lawyers said it violates the right to privacy under EU law.

Signal said they would leave Europe rather than scan messages.

WhatsApp said the same.

500 cryptographers signed an open letter calling it dangerous.

Everyone said no.

Yesterday the EU Council brought it back anyway.

Using a second reading procedure that requires Parliament to find 361 absolute votes to kill it again.

That threshold is almost impossible to hit.

The Parliament voted 311 against.

Now they need 361 against.

The Council used a procedure that has no clear precedent in EU history.

Roberta Metsola, the President of Parliament, is helping push it through.

Even though Parliament she leads already rejected it.

The vote is Thursday.

If it passes platforms must scan every message before encryption happens.

Hash-matching against known databases.

Machine learning for unknown material.

Real-time text analysis for grooming patterns.

All warrantless.

All without judicial oversight.

All catching innocent people at 13-20 percent false positive rates.

Millions of flags per day in the EU.

All of it.

The Parliament said no.

The Council heard no.

Scheduled a vote Thursday anyway.

The rules of democracy do not apply when the outcome is predetermined.

[CW @liberpopulus91]

I really don’t want to hear shit from leftists or centrist Democrats ever again about “democracy”. They have nominated a President candidate without a primary and dismiss due process as annoying and unimportant any time there is a scandal.

Platner might be innocent. Or he might be guilty! I don’t know! Neither does anyone else! We should see all of the facts and evidence. I have no personal affinity for Platner. But “innocent until proven guilty” is a key founding principle in this country and I’m disgusted so many are so quick to dismiss it.

So fucking spare me any message that “democracy is under attack”. It is certainly under attack from Trump, but the call is also coming from inside the house.

[NezahualDoomer @NezahualDoomer2]

"We made Persona 4 WOKE and we censored the game"

That's basically it, but the cowards rather gaslight you than openly admitting their evil shenanigans.

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

quick thesis: "kids today aren't even playing videogames the way we were, millennial relationship to gaming is now a cultural relic, like listening to the radio or drive-in movies"

TL;DR -- Millennials are the new boomers, Halo is Woodstock, WoW is the iPod, Dad gamers are the only "gamers" left by their own definition (& they don't have time to play anymore), the kids are all cracked out on Live Service Slop platforms that they can't escape and don't want to, competition is dead, E-Sports is dead, creative content is dead, screaming down the mic is dead, couch co-op with your friends is dead, couch co-op with your Dad is dead, AAA games are dead, consoles are dead, Game Pass is dead.

And at the end of the day it's all because, if you squint, the kids don't play games anymore.

long thesis:

supporting industry stuff:
- industry publications say average gamer is now ~37, up from 29 in 2004
- they also note that kids <12 have seen the largest drop in videogame engagement post-pandemic of all age ranges (-6%)
- Pew's 2008 report says "Fully 97% of teens ages 12-17 play computer, web, portable, or console games", whereas their 2024 report says "the vast majority of U.S. teens (85%) say they play them. Just 15% say they never do"
- Gen Z's favorite games are Minecraft, CoD, GTA, Fortnite, and Roblox
- PC gaming has a notably larger share of the overall market now vs. console gaming
- Console game sales were 4x-6x PC game sales back in 2004
- PC game sales were 1:1 with Console game sales last year
- Everyone being stuck at home in 2020 seemed to permanently inflect things here, with PC game sales stagnant from 2015-2019 but then becoming the dominant source of industry growth since
- Roblox (2006), Minecraft (2011), & Fortnite (2017) are top 5 gaming IPs for Gen Z....
- ....these are more live-service game-hosting platforms that actual games themselves
- Newzoo has a 2026 report saying only ~13% of gametime went to new releases!
- 2/3rds of gametime went to >6 year old games!
- That same report did an analysis comparing playtime concentration across PC/PS/Xbox platforms and their Top 20 Games vs. the long tail of their library (it's a really good report)

Note on the recent restructuring: for Xbox it was called out specifically that Game Pass caused a redistribution of playtime away from top titles and towards the long tail, without any actual expansion of the total audience/playtime.....basically, Game Pass nukes Xbox's ability to monetize it's big blow out titles without any offsetting gains from expanding the market.

oops.

supporting game stuff:
- let's call it the "Roblox" problem -- all the kids exist within a massively multiplayer online gaming ecosystem, with play, creation, socialization, and monetization all embedded in one platform
- the creation angle and the monetization angle also i think encourage parents to view these games as "educational" more so than, say, Call of Duty, and are therefore more willing to encourage their kids to play with time and/or money
- there is no clear off-ramp from this platform
- you can have totally new gameplay experiences within it, with low friction adoption
- as this platform captures a larger and larger share of player attention, it sucks the available playtime & monetization out of the rest of the industry
- this process naturally changes the incentives around making games, including what kind of games get made, for what audience, and targeted at what price point
- we got legions of "WoW killers" and "Halo/CoD clones" in the early 2000s because those games were platform beasts of their own...
- ...and so now we're years-deep into every financially motivated major game studio trying to figure out how to build a "Roblox" of their own, aka Live Service Slop 24/7, 365
- the fans might hate it but there's a giant pile of money labeled "Live Service Slop" in the middle of the room and it's clear to publishers & studios that the prize is there, if only they can be good enough to claim it
- [of course, all millennials know that WoW and Halo both killed themselves, nobody ever steals the crown by copying it]
- and so while all this is happening, it's opened up a previously under-served niche in the "lower-mid price point indie-to-double-A targeted niche game"
- Palworld, Enshrouded, Schedule I, Silksong, and so on, were all in the very top % of revenue-earners for newly released PC games in the year they dropped
- In console land, Space Marine 2 just blasted a quarter of a billion dollars in revenues of a budget way smaller than a typical AAA release
- If AAA studios had been dropping Halo/CoD/Gears-style games every other year chasing success, the niche for Space Marine 2 wouldn't have really been there, not at the same scale
- I think there's a similar effect even with BG3, whose awesome success likely would've been a little lower (though still great) if fans had gotten genre-adjacent Skyrim & Witcher sequels already
- but instead, we have the "Roblox problem" (Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, GTA), where cross-platform self-contained game-related live service platforms have monopolized huge chunks of (younger) gamer time and money......and warped the kinds of content big studios try to make in the process

supporting adjacent stuff:
- there's also a whole cloud of adjacent areas that are impacted as a result of the above
- picture everything as a big web and these nodes as farther out on the web
- but you see a related decline of "E Sports" and the rise instead of "Influencers", as community figures with large audiences they can monetize become higher status than ultra sweaty competitive pros
- the decline of competitive online culture has also coupled with intentional pushes by studios and their hardware platform partners to reduce online toxicity, changing the culture of online spaces
- the decline of forums & reddit and the rise of ig/tiktok/youtube has turned third-party game-content-ecosystems into more pyramidal "one mega influencer" structures
- chasing the Live Service dragon has led to a massive decline in couch co-op ("local splitscreen") titles, which reduces a certain KIND of gaming experience that, while not the norm from a playtime POV, was nonetheless an integral part of millennial gaming
- the above also makes Family Gaming a lot harder with kids, as what was once an expected default across most games has moved into a separate genre reserved for "Girlfriend Games"
- game-related content has been nearly totally evaporated by Twitch (which is itself in the process of being evaporated), short form video, and "creator talks at the camera" long form video
- "Machinima" and "Parody Game Songs" and "Montages" are both bizarre millennial cultural content that seems egregiously lacking in disaffected irony to the younger audience
- it's covered extensively elsewhere so wasn't worth jamming in here too much, but the explosion of MTX means in-game "status" derived from earned rewards & achievement, such as it is, has been nearly totally replaced with purchased status...and in so doing, game studios have *totally* devalued the actual status that playing their game used to convey
- we're already dealing with a young generation who is hyper-cynical, hyper-financially oriented, ""crypto-native"" and spammed with ""prediction"" markets 24/7...so to have yet another part of their lives see its earned status replaced with dollar-signs and a casino logo likely seems totally normal to them

[Sunset BROWNS SZN Shimmer @BluexXHorizon]

@chuckschumer Not if they support Israel.

If it ain't Troy Jackson, Maine will lose, the Democrats will lose, the US will lose, and the world lose– except for Israel cause they can keep commiting genocide and stealing all our money.

[Sunset BROWNS SZN Shimmer @BluexXHorizon]

@Sakuya_For_Ever @MadamSavvy I may never buy it and I probably won't ever. And I certainly won't buy it at full cost. But if it goes on a massive sale, and enough of my issues can be addressed with mods. Then I will genuinely think about buying it. Whether I do or not depends on my mood at that time.

[DannyKPolitics @DannyKPolitics]

EXCLUSIVE: Dark money conduit behind hit job on Graham Platner campaign, preserves congressional status quo

Reckoning Action, the group that connected Jenny Racicot to Politico, is a 501(c)(4) — a Delaware nonprofit that discloses none of its donors. Its executive director, Cheyenne Hunt, was instrumental in ending Eric Swalwell’s career.

It was launched May 20 on Capitol Hill alongside the Democratic Women’s Caucus, whose chair, Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, personally announced the expulsion resolutions that forced two congressmen out in April.

A sitting congressional caucus chair co-fronting an outside group that hides its funding and ends careers is the structure worth examining, separate from any single accusation.

The group’s donations run through ActBlue, but ActBlue is the payment processor — the merchant of record, passing funds to the recipient and expressly disclaiming endorsement.

The non-disclosure lives in the (c)(4) itself, not the pipe. A 501(c)(4) can raise unlimited undisclosed money and spend it on candidacy-ending operations, provided politics isn’t its “primary” activity — a limit that is loosely policed and rarely enforced.

Reckoning Action’s reach is real and demonstrated. It helped force Swalwell’s resignation, and it can claim a Republican scalp too: Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas resigned within hours of Swalwell in April.

But the mechanics matter more than the box score.

Reporting from the Texas Tribune and PBS shows the two removals were paired to preserve the balance of a narrowly divided House — expelling one member from each party cost neither side a net seat. Gonzales was already finished, having lost his primary runoff with GOP leadership pushing him out.

The bipartisan-looking action was structured around partisan seat math.

The Platner case strips that cover away. There is no cross-party pairing here — the target is the party’s own Senate nominee, who won Maine’s primary by more than seventy points. Within hours of the Politico story, Schumer and Gillibrand demanded he “immediately withdraw,” the DSCC pledged zero spending, and Khanna, Gallego, and Heinrich pulled endorsements. The mechanism they are racing toward is Maine’s July 13 ballot-substitution deadline, after which the party — not voters — selects the replacement.

The accusation at the center would not survive the standard the party pretends to apply. Racicot’s account has real corroborative structure predating the campaign, including a 2019 therapist email and a November 2024 Facebook warning to other women. But there was no police report in 2021, no physical evidence, and no court has weighed any of it. It is an allegation that would acquit under a criminal standard and merely contest under a civil one — being converted, on a two-week clock, into grounds to overturn a landslide primary.

The transparency question stands regardless of what happened in Racicot’s home. An undisclosed-donor nonprofit, co-launched by a congressional caucus chair, has become an effective apparatus for removing officeholders with no public accounting of who funds it.

Pointed at credibly accused men facing Ethics investigations, it looks like accountability. Pointed at a party’s own primary winner, before any adjudication, on a deadline that hands the seat back to the establishment that never wanted him, it looks like something else. The structure is the same in both cases. Only the target changed.

[Darth Powell @VladTheInflator]

The same people who are telling you we can't afford Social Security or building homes for families spent $9T on wars in the middle east

[Ashleyy @dontsippy]

The establishment is getting increasingly desperate as leftists continue to gain ground. They’ll use every tool at their disposal to stop them.

Think about how devastating it would have been for the establishment if a leftist like Platner had defeated Collins after years of the establishment failing to do so. He was on pace to make it happen. Before the coordinated attacks against him began, he was polling 8 points ahead of Collins.

A victory like that would have shattered the narrative that only centrist candidates can win competitive races. They couldn’t afford to let that happen. To them, stopping Platner even if it meant risking control of the Senate was the better long-term outcome.

After all, how are they supposed to convince liberals to keep voting for warmongering, corporate-backed politicians like Harley Stevens if leftists start proving they can defeat powerful Republicans?

[GenXGirl @GenXGirl1994]

We all know who’s behind the Platner attack &amp; why (Israel). DNC’s pulling a Kamala 2.0 to replace him with a crypto-Zionist.

@grahamformaine should pick someone MORE anti-Israel. If DNC sabotages, don’t drop—burn the race like they burned the campaign. You hold the cards.

[Dracomenda @DracoMenda]

So let me see if i understand the situation at large here;

We're giving away electricity to companies who have YET to make a penny of profit, while we have municipalities and whole states legislating forced sale of Self-generated renewables or outright banning solar panels

[Jenin Younes @JeninYounesEsq]

The left’s reactions to the sexual assault allegation— not a criminal charge, not a conviction— against Graham Platner illustrate precisely why freedom for the Palestinians and an end to US support for Israel will never come from the American left.

All it takes is an accusation in a newspaper article, and they’re prepared to let Susan Collins win. To let the Zionist stranglehold on our government continue at the expense of lives in the Middle East.

I don’t know whether or not the allegation is true. I do know Zionists are ruthless and will stop at absolutely nothing to ensure they maintain control over Congress. I also know that it’s not a liberal or left-wing value to condemn a man because of an allegation in an extremely politically charged race.

So I’m definitely not withdrawing support for Platner.

[Morris “Day and The Time” Katz @vodkasnowflake]

“If Congresswoman Stevens makes it, or Mike Rogers wins, either way, Israel will win.”

Acknowledging his primary opponent could win and suck as much as his GOP opponent. And making Israel the devil here. Never heard that before. Absolutely coldblooded lol

[Sunset BROWNS SZN Shimmer @BluexXHorizon]

@JeramyKitchen For once, US actually has this first.

[Adam Analysis @adamemedia1]

The amount of techno dystopian announcements in the past week is insane.

Facial recognition, internet passports, VPN bans, hidden trackers in our hardware.

They’re setting up the AI control grid in real time. That’s what all those data centers are for.