kind of funny that the two biggest criticisms of dess knight are “it’s a bad twist because casual players don’t know who she is” and “it’s too obvious, she’s the red herring”
I’m gonna comment on this for a second time today.
Shows like Little Bear, Blue’s Clues, etc need to make a comeback. They had deliberate pauses and incorporated space. We need to get our nervous systems in check again, and get our attention spans back. We need to cultivate more empty SPACE in our lives
susie being a player analogue by being fundamentally alien to the town akin to us and slowly learning about it alongside us is so interesting when you take into account that the first major line drawn between us and susie is when she learns about the final prophecy
I’m actually a child online safety expert and was one of the pioneers in this space with Club Penguin and so I feel uniquely positioned to critique this.
The groomer problem is real but it’s also vastly overstated. The far larger issue we saw at Penguin was suicidality or reports of sexual abuse in the home.
There is no solution for lazy/bad parenting. You can implement all the ID laws you want but if parents are going to just hand kids their phones unlocked, those kids will have access to all the same things the parents have unfettered.
What I found is that these draconian safety laws actually make it harder to be an honest operator of kids apps because on one hand it’s so much legal risk and so much user friction that it simply becomes uninvestible as a business.
Parents will just lie to let their kids use the unfettered internet. For example, I have a friend who works in mobile gaming who has two kids, one above and one below the age limit but separated by just 2 yrs, and the two wanted to play and chat together on Roblox - which is reasonable. To do this, he just verified that his younger kid is old enough for the chat feature when he’s not.
This happens all the time and will happen with these laws to. How far do we want to go with this? Scan the face of the user in real-time to make sure it’s not a kid using the device? We could do that but it feels like a massive unwanted intrusion of privacy.
That’s how you know this law isn’t about kids. COPPA and GDPR-K and so forth already make it illegal to allow chat and other grooming vectors to kids.
What’s really being done here is trying to eliminate online anonymity. And this is a far bigger issue that goes to core speech rights because if you cannot criticize the govt anonymously and if wrong speech is a crime then it becomes easy to identify all the detractors of the govt in power, and ban, fine or jail them for speech crimes.
Starmer has already been doing this and he wants to do it at a much bigger scale. Starmer won’t even acknowledge the problem of actual grooming gangs in Britain’s neighborhoods but he’s worried about online grooming?
No he’s not, and this hypocrisy gives away the game. What he wants is to kill online anonymity so he can enforce censorship of his unpopular policies. No politician should have this power.
its a real problem how deeply i relate to jax. like ive never related to a character in this way before
like i don’t harass ppl or dig at their insecurities but i DO lash out if i feel cornered and i DO reject vulnerability and i DO push ppl away and i DO behave very similarly