Once more for old time’s sake

staff:

🔥 With your help, we passed Title II net neutrality protections. Now we need to defend it.🔥

On December 14 the FCC will vote on Commissioner Pai’s plan to repeal Title II rules. This week he tried to justify that decision with a “myth busting” explainer where he makes a lot of sweeping claims he doesn’t think you’ll fact check. 

So let’s go through his big points:

❌ Mr. Pai claims ISPs won’t block access or throttle content

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These are the real facts. Before Title II, the internet was so “free and open” that… 

  • Comcast blocked P2P file sharing services (EFF).
  • AT&T blocked Skype from iPhones (Fortune) and, later, wanted FaceTime users to pay for a more expensive plan (Freepress).
  • MetroPCS blocked all streaming video except YouTube (Wired).

In today’s media market where the same huge companies make and deliver content, Commissioner Pai wants us to trust that corporations won’t use their dominance to bury competitive content or services. 


❌ Mr. Pai claims Title II keeps ISPs from building new networks

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Here’s another claim Commissioner Pai doesn’t want you to fact check, but:

  • AT&T’s own CEO told investors that the company would deploy more fiber optic networks in 2016 than 2015 when the FCC passed Title II protections (Investor call transcript). 
  • Charter’s CEO said “Title II, it didn’t really hurt us; it hasn’t hurt us” (Ars Technica).  
  • And Comcast actually increased investment in their network by 10% in Q1 of this year (Ars). 

❌ Mr. Pai claims repealing Title II won’t hurt competition

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As we mentioned above, ISPs tried to interfere with the services their customers could access and courts had to step in to stop them.

The FCC tried to craft net neutrality rules in 2010 called the Open Internet Order but the ISPs sued and won. The courts told the FCC that the only way to guarantee a free and open internet was using their Title II authority. Without those protections, any of these things would be legal:

  • Your ISP launches a streaming video service and starts throttling other streaming services until they’re unusable.
  • Your phone company cuts a deal with a popular music streaming service so it doesn’t count towards your data cap but lowers your overall data limit. If a better service comes along (or your favorite artist releases new tracks somewhere else) you can’t use it without incurring huge data fees.
  • A billionaire buys your ISP and blocks access to news sites that challenge their ideology. 

Repealing Title II would be like letting a car company own the roads and banning a competitor from the highways.


❌ Mr. Pai claims there won’t be fast lanes and slow lanes

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Let’s break this down: We won’t have fast lanes and slow lanes, we’ll have “priority access” and…non-priority access? Well gosh.


🚨 Please help us protect Title II one more time! 🚨

This week we co-signed a letter with more than 300 other companies—businesses Mr. Pai gleefully ignores—urging the FCC to retain the Title II internet protections. Now we need you.

Go to 👉 Battle For The Net 👈  to start a call with your representatives in Congress. Tell them to publicly support Title II protections. 

The FCC votes on December 14.

We’re only powerful when we work together.


Oh, also: that post about automatically unfollowing the #net neutrality tag—it’s not true. It’s really not. That’s not who we are. Whatever happened, we haven’t been able to reproduce it. We tried. A lot.

But if it were true—which it’s not, we feel compelled to say again—THAT’S EXACTLY WHY YOU SHOULD CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES and demand a free, open, and neutral internet.

We can do this one more time, guys! ❤️

crinosg:
“Alfred Hitchcock was not even in the neighborhood of fucking aroudn.
”

crinosg:

Alfred Hitchcock was not even in the neighborhood of fucking aroudn.

spankzilla85:

typhlonectes:

Where were the pundits and elected lawmakers who complain about the cost of providing healthcare to all Americans when the Senate voted to spend $700 billion on the military?

“Note ‘where will the money come from?’ deficit trolls will be silent on this $700 billion defense spending bill.”
—Adam Johnson, FAIRMany critics were raising this question Monday after the Senate—in what was portrayed as yet another indication of bipartisan support for endless waroverwhelmingly approved the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which will dump a larger sum of money into the military budget than even President Donald Trump asked for while also authorizing the production of 94 F-35 jets, two dozen more than the Pentagon requested.

Passage of the NDAA—which this year approves a $700 billion defense budget, an annual increase of $80 billion—is something of an automated process in Washington, one that often flies under the radar and garners little opposition…


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This ties neatly into the writing tips we were talking about earlier.
If you want compelling human villains and/or relevant targets for social commentary in your monster stories, “military industrial complex” and “corrupt politicians” is still every bit as believable for your inciting conflict as it’s ever been.

manesixdev:
“ Backers’ Beta NDA lifted ​Hi again, everyone.
As promised, today’s update marks the end of the NDA period of the TFH Backers’ Beta. Builds released September 15, 2017 and after (all the way until the Game’s release candidate hits) are...

manesixdev:

Backers’ Beta NDA lifted

​Hi again, everyone.

As promised, today’s update marks the end of the NDA period of the TFH Backers’ Beta. Builds released September 15, 2017 and after (all the way until the Game’s release candidate hits) are able to be freely streamed, recorded, screen-captured and played at conventions/tournaments/ events by crowdfund backers using their Steam accounts. You guys can also review the game if you want, but please keep in mind that the current state does not entirely reflect the final product, so please put in a disclaimer that reviews are of an unfinished beta build.

Builds previous to September 15 are still subject to the Non-Disclosure Agreement & End User License Agreement that you guys agreed to when first opening the game, so footage from said builds shouldn’t be streamed, screencaped, published or otherwise shared with the general public, unless done so with the formal consent of Mane6, in specific ways and media as set in a written agreement. (i.e. Ask first. We’re likely to deny most requests unless for very specific purposes, though.)

From here on, we start on what scientists call “the final crunch”, quickly iterating game versions, adding missing frames/animations, unlocking options/features, tweaking the final bits of balance (e.g. arcade mode), and giving an all-around polish pass. Critical & major issues have been mostly defeated (knock on wood), and thus we can move on to the lower priority stuff and the shredding of cardboard.

Your feebdack at this point is very important. What you like, what you think’s a bit over or undertuned, what feels a bit awkward, and any oddities you notice. All of it, let us have it on the forums, so we can finetune things all around.

1.0 release, as also mentioned previously, should be happening before 2018, Specific Release Date TBA. It will include at the very least, feature wise:

  • All 6 starting characters fully done, voiced, animated and playable.
  • Local and Online (Lobby room based) Multiplayer VS
  • Arcade Mode
  • Combo Trials
  • Target Practice
  • Survival mode
  • Training Room
  • Arizona’s and Velvet’s Pixel Lobby stages.
  • The first Pixel Lobby dungeon fully implemented (“The Salt Mines”, in Arizona’s Pixel Lobby stage)
  • The first episode of the TFH Story Mode, introducing the world of Foenum and featuring Arizona’s start in the quest to save Foenum from the Predators.

We hope you like what you see, and once again thank you for sticking with us.

<3 - M6​

On Pre-NDA lift Game updates

manesixdev:

Hello everyone!

We just wanted to let people know that folks in the $40 and above tiers should be seeing a beefy update to the game either tonight or tomorrow, unless “act of God”-tier catastrophes  (e.g Hurricanes, 8.2 earthquakes, state-wide fires) intervene, that is. Amongst the customary tweaks, fixes and features, this next update introduces the first iteration of single player Arcade Mode to the game, so please give it a try and throw us some feedback in the Beta sections of the forums. It also contains the Full Dynamic Music System experience, with all character/stage variations available to listen to as you pummel ungulates. Then the next major patch (somewhere this week) will be focusing on introducing fullscreen mode and screen resolution changes, as well as several QoL fixes to Pixel Lobby and menu navigation.

All of this in prepration for NDA lift for Backer’s Beta, which will be happening on Friday, September 15. More information on what NDA lift entails (i.e. what is and what’s not allowed) will be forthcoming as the lift itself happens.

For the folks that haven’t been able to participate in the closed Backer’s Beta, NDA lift means you’ll be getting your first-in-a-while look at all the game progress made since we entered the Beta from people streaming their experience, making videos and (hopefully!) bringing it to their local cons and tournaments. You might be noticing some rough edges here and there, but mechanically, the base game’s mostly there, and all that remains is filling the graphical blanks and polish the corners a bit. We’re (as usual), working full time to make sure that happens.

From NDA Lift onwards, we enter the very last bits of development on the road to the 1.0 public release (the Available-on-Steam launch, that is), which, unless the aforementioned catastrophes strike (and we hope they don’t), will be happening before 2017 comes to a close, with DLC 1 (Goat) and Mac/Linux ports coming in the first half of 2018.

We’ve also got some other stuff cookin’, which, if all things align properly, means good things for TFH in the future, and which we’ll hopefully be able to tell you guys about a bit closer to 1.0 release.

As always, thanks for sticking with us through all of the game’s development; We hope you like what you see!

- M6.

highs0ciety:

arabbara:

R.I.P. The 2976 American people that lost their lives on 9/11 and R.I.P. the 48,644 Afghan and 1,690,903 Iraqi and 35000 Pakistani people that paid the ultimate price for a crime they did not commit

this is the only september 11th post I’m reblogging

crimefighter-bae-b:

I was at work today for Labour Day and on TV was Good Morning America. The theme was celebrating the American worker and their accomplishments. I’ll tell you how it went down.

Kelly put on her glasses, smile wide, and pulled out a piece of paper which she read from. The paper was from an article (which I have issues with, but I will leave alone for now) by ABC news. Kelly proceeded only to read the opening of it, which reads: ‘Americans work more than anyone in the industrialized world. More than the English, more than the French, way more than the Germans or Norwegians. Even, recently, more than the Japanese. And Americans take less vacation, work longer days, and retire later, too.’

And everyone cheered.

And they kept cheering when Kelly put her paper down and smiled at everyone. (not continuing with the rest of the article which suggests that this may in fact be a problem).

And I just couldn’t BELIEVE that anyone was cheering. America. AMERICA you work more than the French, who are entitled by law to have 5 weeks off a year for vacation and can not work more than 35 hours per week. You work more than Norway, who average 33 hours per week and 44,000 dollars a year. Germany, where AGAIN, we see a shorter work week and better pay! And all of these countries have health care and better pay and free/affordable education!

WHY ARE YOU CHEERING?

I have a different interpretation of this information: the American worker is the most taken advantage of worker in the industrialized world. It’s plain and simple. You work long hours and get horrible pay. You take multiple jobs and work and work and work just to get by. Unions are disappearing, jobs are always looking for part timers and all you are doing is giving up your time for less money, less vacation, less safety and stability and less education than anyone else on the list.

Celebrate Labour day. Celebrate the accomplishments of the common worker, but don’t let these people trick you into thinking you should celebrate the theft of your time and energy, or the fruits of your labour.

They are using you. Stop cheering.

rootbeergoddess:
“ wildlythoughtfulsquid:
“SERIOUSLY
”
I am going to print this out and plaster it everywhere I go
”

rootbeergoddess:

wildlythoughtfulsquid:

SERIOUSLY

I am going to print this out and plaster it everywhere I go

fake-magical-girl:

theperksofbeingaperk:

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https://archive.org/details/DontBeaS1947

Here’s the whole video. It’s called “Don’t Be A Sucker” and it’s 17 minutes long.