As reported by Gamemakers and GameSpark and translated by Automaton, Fontworks LETS discontinued its game licence plan at the end of November.

The expensive replacement plan – offered through Fontwork’s parent company, Monotype – doesn’t even provide local pricing for Japanese developers, and comes with a 25,000 user-cap, which is likely not workable for Japan’s bigger studios.

The problem is further compounded by the difficulties and complexities of securing fonts that can accurately transcribe Kanji and Katakana characters.

the interview in question, which opens with the following exchange:

Newton: You have joined us today to talk about this new age-gating policy that Roblox is rolling out to protect kids. And I think we should start by just talking about the scope of the problem here. What has led you to this point? And how do you think of the problem of predators on Roblox?

Baszucki: We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well. (emphasis mine) How do we allow young people to build, communicate and hang out together? How do we build the future of communication at the same time? So we, you know, we’ve been, I think in a good way, working on this ever since we started. And when we were — this was almost 18 or 19 years ago — when we first launched the company and we had just four of us sitting in a room, we were literally the moderators, like we would rotate all the time. And so fast-forward to where we are today, it’s just like every week, what is the latest tech? At the scale we’re at, 150 million daily actives, 11 billion hours a month, like what is the best way to keep pushing this forward? And as you correctly note, we’ve just started adding that we’re going to be using facial age estimation with A.I. to complement that.

Children can still protest, fundraise, and engage in other forms of direct action. Children are not helpless or incapable.

you are shadowboxing with things i didn’t say and are the only person inserting the terms “helpless” or “incapable” here, but also once again: this is a game marketed at literal children. i stopped playing Roblox at 14 and doing some research i’m led to believe that would be quite old for a Roblox player. probably half or more of the player-base is 13 or younger. do you honestly expect the average 13-year-old (or younger) to be capable of anything other than performative activism relating to the genocide in Palestine?

Holding a pro-Palestine candlelight vigil in Roblox, for example, whilst there are still Palestinian civilians being murdered is a woefully inadequate use of time and effort if you actually want to help.

the people holding a vigil like this are probably literal children, because Roblox is a game for and overwhelmingly played by children, so i don’t understand the criticism here–it’s unlikely they can help in any material way you could as an adult, but they can be politicized into understanding who deserves their sympathy and who is perpetrating harm that must be ended, which such a rally helps affirm

please continue to “device hoard” folks

given that OpenAI has a vested interest in downplaying the severity of this problem (especially relative to its total number of users) i’d treat this as a lower bound of the scale of this exists at–pretty bad!

there’s some real deadpan gold in this one, such as the immaculate:

How do you feel about becoming a political lightning rod?

People occasionally just flip [me] off or whatever, but nobody’s come up to me and tried to make a statement about anything. Personally, it’s kind of dumb. It’s just a vehicle. So it’s ironic that it would even become a political statement, but nonetheless it is. [Editor’s note: Taylor was arrested and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. He was later pardoned by President Trump.]

of note: Italian dockworkers are threatening to shut down Europe if this flotilla is not allowed through or if contact is lost with the flotilla:

Speaking at a rally on the docks of Genoa, one of Europe’s largest ports, a dockworker representing the USB union said that if communication with the flotilla were lost “even for just 20 minutes,” port workers would immediately block all shipments to Israel, regardless of their content.

“Around mid-September, these boats will arrive near the coast of Gaza. If we lose contact with our boats, with our comrades, even for just 20 minutes, we will shut down all of Europe,” said the dockworker, a video of whom has circulated widely online and in Italian media but who has not been identified.

“From this region 13 to 14,000 containers leave every year for Israel, not a single nail will leave anymore,” he added.

see also the Detroit Socialist article Airgas Teamsters on Strike in Ferndale: Greed Is in the Air

?

on Chiapas:

• Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government Through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language (Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater)
• Zapatista Spring: Anatomy of a Rebel Water Project & the Lessons of International Solidarity (Ramor Ryan)
• Developing Zapatista autonomy : conflict and NGO involvement in rebel Chiapas (Niels Barmeyer)

on Rojava:

• Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan (TATORT Kurdistan)
• Revolution and Cooperatives: Thoughts about my time with the economic committee in Rojava (anonymous)
• Make Rojava Green Again (Internationalist Commune of Rojava)

on Revolutionary Catalonia and various aspects of the anarchism there:

• Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (Gaston Leval)
• The Anarchist Collectives (ed. Sam Dolgoff)
• The CNT in the Spanish Revolution (José Peirats Valls)
• Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution (José Peirats Valls)
• To Remember Spain (Murray Bookchin)
• Ready for Revolution (Agustín Guillamón)

most of these should be findable on Anna’s Archive, or by just googling the title. if not, i can track copies down.

communism is about works collectively owning the means of production.

to be clear: you’re kind of mixing terms up a bit here and this needs to untangled, because otherwise it will cause problems in answering what you’re asking. the correct word for “worker ownership of the means of production” is technically just socialism. communism, at this point in leftist history, consistently refers to a more specific thing: an ideological system that seeks to create a stateless, classless, moneyless society in addition to achieving common ownership of the means of production.^[1]

this might sound very pedantic–and, to be clear, it is likely the vast majority of socialists are also communists–but conflating these terms can be genuinely problematic when asking a question like this for the simple reason that they are understood to be two different things in practice. you can have socialism but not communism, in short. (indeed, “socialism but not communism” is the rule among states that have arguably been socialist. even if you play fast and loose with the defining characteristics of communism and think there have been existing socialist states, i’ve never met a person who believes those socialist states achieved anything resembling communism.)

in terms of the actual question you’re asking: most people would probably agree that no, the properties of socialism and communism make “authoritarianism” or a “dictatorial” figure antithetical to either–at least without that desire for “authoritarianism” being shared across the entire working class somehow. this is the reason many leftists consider most or all existing (and former) states that called themselves socialist–your Soviet Unions, your Chinas, etc.–to not be socialist or to have degraded back into capitalism.

leftists adhering to variants of socialism typically characterized as “authoritarian” and “dictatorial” would obviously disagree with this, however. to generalize a bit: they tend to believe that it is an acceptable tradeoff for a vanguard (the most revolutionary and ideologically advanced section of the working class) to steward and speak for the rest of the working class through the revolution, to the establishment of socialism, and toward the creation of a communist state. separately, they tend to consider the political structures of these countries as facilitating worker ownership of the economy, even if it is not direct. many of them had central planning of the economy, and most of them had highly delegated (for example village bodies which elect city bodies which elect country bodies, etc.) or sectoral (for example X, Y, and Z interest groups must obligatorily be represented in decision-making) political systems that meant workers were represented at every level of government and decision-making.

unfortunately, whether this is “really socialism” or “really communism” is not a falsifiable belief–and while there are better arguments for the view that “authoritarianism” is incompatible with either in my mind, it’s not as if there are no arguments for the contrary view. so you’re never going to get a definitive agreement on this.

However, when we talk about modern nation state, I believe we have not seen successful implementation of anarchism yet.

well, anarchism is completely antithetical to modern nation states, so if you’re using that as the basis for evaluation you’re obviously going to be misled. it also begs the question of what a “successful implementation” of anarchism–or any form of leftist ideology in governing–actually is, because ask five leftists and they’ll give you six answers to that. nonetheless, and as far as i’m aware, in spite of their massive difficulties (and despite a non-anarchist self-identification in the first case) both EZLN-held Chipas and Rojava are widely held as successful, practically applied examples of anarchist theories of practice and production. likewise, so is Revolutionary Catalonia.

One problem is that even if it works internally, what would happen when a colonial power tries to conquer it?

i would encourage you to look to the Spanish Civil War or the EZLN occupation of Chiapas as examples, because this was simply not a problem for either of them. particularly in the former case, the Spanish anarchists acted very similarly to a “centralized” power in fighting the Francoists (until they were organized into the broader Republican military).^[1]

The biggest problem with concrete is that the resource investment is front loaded.

the biggest problem with concrete is we use too much of it and it’s severely environmentally destructive; just on its own, for example, its manufacture contributes anywhere between 4 and 8% of all CO2 emissions, and most of that is from the production process and not from secondary aspects like transportation.

bluntly: why would an Indian news website use metric to satisfy a bunch of foreigners who don’t read their paper over a cultural numbering system that people on the Indian subcontinent have used for centuries without problems and which is almost universally understood across the subcontinent’s dozens of languages

better fit for the World News or Environmental sections, nothing more

When I see a comm called ‘Socialism’ I wouldn’t expext an analysis on the Haji in Saudi Arabia.

i mean, no offense but: virtually all contemporary subjects are shaped by class conflict or capitalist hegemony and it seems like it’d be a much better use of time for socialists to explicitly and plainly make those connections, than endlessly theorypost or relitigate the anarchist/communist or social democrat/socialist or Trotskyist/ML splits

The solution here is to just provide enough cooling methods I would say. I feel putting this in a wider ‘capitalist and climate’ frame is a bit overdone.

in what way? Saudi Arabia is already so hot (and at times humid) that going outside at all is potentially lethal–in no small part because it is a capitalist petrostate whose existence is predicated on cheap oil warming the planet–which also renders much of the Hajj literally impossible to do in any safe manner since it must be done outside. the climactic and capitalistic ties are fairly obvious here to me.

also, it’s worth noting, the article explicitly notes one problem (of several) with your proposed solution:

Technological adaptations such as air-conditioning do work. But they are not available to all. Nor are they fail-safe. During a heat wave, many of us turn on the aircon at the same time, using lots of power and raising the chance of blackouts. Blackouts during heat waves can have deadly consequences.

As many as one million black-footed ferrets lived on the continent in the late 1800s, but by the late 1950s, the species was presumed extinct. Scientists discovered a wild population in 1964, but even that group died out, and a captive breeding effort failed. Since a second rediscovery of a wild population in 1981, conservationists have worked hard to conserve the species using traditional breeding programs as well as more innovative technologies, including freezing semen and cloning.

One of the challenges conservationists face when tasked with bringing back a species from the brink of extinction is limited genetic diversity, which leads to inbreeding and can make offspring more vulnerable to issues, including hereditary abnormalities, poor reproductive efficiency and increased mortality rates.

The current population of black-footed ferrets—thousands of which have been reintroduced across the western U.S. since the 1990s—is all descend from just seven individuals, except for a few clones and Antonia’s new offspring. That’s a recipe for genetic bottlenecks that threaten the longevity of the species.

Cue cloning. In 1988, scientists had the foresight to collect tissue samples from a black-footed ferret named Willa after she died and preserve the material in the Frozen Zoo at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. Willa never reproduced, so her genetic material was not included in the modern ferret population. Her preserved genes contain three times more genetic diversity than living black-footed ferrets do.

my understanding is yes that’s the general avenue people are researching; there’s also the actual energy inputs powering steelmaking that hypothetically can be made greener (currently, it’s a process that seems to almost exclusively use fossil fuels because of the very high temperatures needed)