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Cake day: 2025年5月25日

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  • I’m not really sure that is the reason. I’m not saying I would put it past them, just that I really don’t think it’s necessary. Smart phone manufacturers have a million other ways they could spy on you if they wanted to. The U.S. Government already has the ability to know each and every thing you do on your phone, even if you never use Bluetooth. I think it’s greed pure and simple. It probably cost’s them a few pennies to add a physical jack and most people would lose their shit if a phone came out without Bluetooth capabilities, so they save those couple of pennies and put them into their greedy ass pockets.

    That being said I have never bought a phone without one and never will as long as I have a choice. I do love my wireless headset though but I am also not too worried about being spied on (yet).

    I’m 100% convinced that is why they stopped making batteries user replaceable though. In 2019 Edward Snowden did an interview with Wired magazine where he made the interviewer remove the battery from his phone as a condition of the interview. He explained that the U.S. Government can make it seem as if your device had been ‘powered down’ when in fact they can still listen to your conversations and transmit them back to the CIA or whatever other spooks that want to listen in. Shortly after than almost all manufactures stopped allowing you to remove the battery. Coincidence?

    My current phone doesn’t have a removable battery, because I literally couldn’t find one in my price range that allowed you to do so.

    The best advice if you don’t want to be spied on is not to use a smartphone altogether or just do whatever you want to be kept secret away from the phone at the very least. Buy a Faraday bag and keep your phone in there if that’s not an option.


  • I know this is a joke, but I would just like to take this opportunity to relate what I consider to be an interesting historical fact.

    Many Americans think that Australia was the only British penal colony, and that America was founded by Puritans, Quakers and the like. In fact Brittan was sending prisoners the North America well before they started using Australia after the revolutionary war. From 1610 to 1766 Brittan sent between 50-120,000 prisoners to America. In 1717 with the passage of the Transportation Act and continuing up until 1776, Brittan sent between 30,000 and 50,000 prisoners and ‘indentured servants’ to America, most of whom were political prisoners. I’m sure that having such a large number of people persecuted for their beliefs by Brittan and shipped off to a foreign land had nothing to do with the colonists declaring independence.

    Granted when they did start shipping prisoners to Australia (1787 to 1868), they ended up sending quite a few more there, approx 162,000, but still the U.S. can proudly claim to come from Outlaws, just like the Aussies :)








  • “…its portrayal of trans characters is anything but progressive. Many gamers have criticized how Cyberpunk 2077 and its developer, CD Projekt Red, choose to fetishize and commodity trans bodies and trans identity.”

    That’s… the entire point. There is a big, big difference between how CDPR feels about transgender people, and how the Late Stage Capitalist Pigs in Night City treats trans people.

    Yes, the advertisements in the game are gross, they’re supposed to be. Human beings are treated like garbage in 2077. You were never supposed to look at these ads and be like “Hey, this is totally cool and normal.” If your reaction was “This is gross”, that’s exactly how you were meant to feel. It was supposed to make you reflect upon the culture the game takes place in and realize how messed up and broken it is.

    You don’t (I sincerely hope) watch a film and conclude that the views expressed by the villains of the piece are the views held by the actor or director do you? There is a reason Ad Agencies in Cyberpunk treat human beings as commodities, because that’s exactly how they view them.

    “Obviously, Cyberpunk 2077 presents a dystopian society rather than an aspirational one. Trans identity is treated as a product because everything is a product designed to be sexualized in this future. However, there’s never any contrast established. With other elements of Night City, players see how the commodified image contrasts with the rougher, harsher reality. This is not the case with LGBTQ characters, especially not trans characters.”

    One of the main characters in the game is a trans woman, and she isn’t fetishized in any way. There are also some very prominent LGBT characters, and they are treated respectfully as well imo. The person who wrote that article never even played the game and it shows. It’s possible the “reviewers who have played anywhere from 40 to 60 hours have yet to encounter any meaningful trans NPCs.” simply missed the fact that Claire was transgender because no one makes a big deal about it, but it is most definitely mentioned. She has a trans pride flag on her racing truck as well.

    Edit: The same is true of the Gay and Lesbian characters as well. The “reviewers” may have missed that that’s what they were because they are not treated as if they are different, they are just treated as people. You wouldn’t know whether they were or not if you didn’t spend the time to build a relationship with them so that flirting seems natural. I think that is actually really heartwarming, despite all the brainwashing by the corpos, (the people that V interacts with at least) don’t seem to really have been affected by it.

    E: In my first playthrough, I was a * “Male” V. Another one of the main characters is a woman named Judy. After spending dozens of hours with her and going through hell together we became really close friends. Then there was this really sweet ‘mission’ where Judy took me scuba diving and basically opened up her heart to me and told me what a good friend I had been to her. I awkwardly made a pass at her and she just gently brushes it off to let me know that I was barking up the wrong tree. I could easily see someone spending 40 hours in the game not having a clue what Judy’s sexual orientation was- especially if they were a jerk to her.

    E: With a couple of the guy characters it gave me the option of flirting with them, which I didn’t try because my V was already in a relationship with a different character. After beating the game I still had no clue which one would have been receptive to my advances, I had to look it up. Basically the game seemed to be saying that someones sexual orientation is really none of your business unless you are tying to get with them.

    E: * “Male” in this instance just means masculine voice and body type, sex organs aren’t factored in when determining who you are able to romance.

    During character creation you can choose genitalia for your character independently from their ‘body type’. You can also choose a ‘male’ or ‘female’ voice artist for V no matter how your character looks. I don’t know of any other game that let’s you have that sort of freedom in character creation. This game let’s you be whoever you want to be in a way rarely (if ever) seen in other games.

    “Cyberpunk 2077 never makes an effort to reflect on this fetishization, which erases any possibility of satire or social commentary. If a game presents transphobic advertisements and never addresses these depictions, it just regurgitates and upholds transphobia.”

    Cyberpunk treats players as if they aren’t idiots, as is the case with any good satire. The idea that it must specifically call out any bit of satire it’s doing or ‘it doesn’t count’, is insulting and ridiculous. Would “Monty Pythons Life of Brian” have been a better film if at one point the main character had turned to camera and said “This is just like Jesus, get it?”

    After the tweet received massive backlash, the social media account responded with a non-apology.

    The fact that they used CDPR’s apology as proof that they weren’t sorry is just… come on. Calling it a stretch seems inadequate.

    I just think it’s really tacky and gross to do a surface level scan of a piece of media you haven’t personally experienced, put no thought into it, and then write a hit piece to get clicks on your website. There are plenty of actually transphobic assholes out there to call out. At the very least CDPR got people talking about these issues, name 3 other games you can say the same thing about.-