sp3ctr4l

No, that is not how that would work.

It is, actually, allow me to explain:

Visa and MasterCard have policies for who they do business with, ie, merchants and vendors.

The business they do with Valve is the business of processing online payments, Valve is one of their merchant partners.

They can absolutely shut everything down in the name of upholding their own moral / business standards, via deciding to no longer be a business partner with Valve.

If Valve uses an alt payment system for adult games, Visa and MC are still business partners with Valve, Valve is now in violation of their partnership guidelines, ergo, Visa and MC drop Valve.

Visa and MC are concerned with the reputations of the partners they have, in general, not so much with the exact transactions they actually process.

Being mad at Valve is reasonable, because they did not have to ban all games that their payment processors disagree with.

No, its not, and Valve did have to act in this way, see above.

Itch.io and Nutaku just did the same thing after Valve did, you can no longer buy any games that cost money, that have explicit sexual content, so by your logic, its Valve and Itch.io and Nutaku all being unnecessarily censorious, of their own accord, rather than the reality, which is that MC and Visa are strong arming all these digital market places.

EDIT: In itch.io's case, they even delisted their totally free adult games.

So yeah, being mad at Valve is stupid, people need to be mad st MC and Visa and probably also PayPal.

Being mad at Valve is shooting the messenger.

Fortunately the petition is at least correctly aimed at the payment processors.

But also...

If MC and Visa won't budge on their positions, well, if Valve then makes an alt payment system for adult only games...

MC and Visa go, oh, hey, you're violating our guidelines, we no longer support Valve/Steam, now no one can buy any game.

This is a MAD situation, Valve would have to come up with a comprehensive payment processing system for everything, in secret, and then deploy it all at once.

They would have to roughly make their own form of PayPal, alongside their own bank.

If you didn't know, PayPal technically isn't a bank, it and Venmo use Synchrony Bank... which is an actual bank.

If they did something like that, it could work, but it would have to be at a similar scale as PayPal, that is to say, massive....

Because doing this would/could basically be the nuclear option:

MC and Visa and PayPal would/could drop them.

So, they'd have to basically develop a massive project, in total secrecy.

... Which is something Valve has arguably done a number of times, they are notoriously opaque as a company.

......

Sort of as you mention, they already have a barebones backend framework to scale up from the steam gift card / user gift card balance system.

I am... uncertain if their backend for that already does or does not include an actual legally defined bank though.

...

Problem is that this would necessitate a massively costly undertaking, as well as ongoing maintenance costs, and Valve is also notorious for basically running on what most other firms would consider a skeleton crew for the size and scope of what they do.

Worth also noting is that Monero also, not too long ago...

They specifically rewrote/updated the uh, block solver problem that miners solve for a reward...

They updated it to make ASIC mining basically not work.

Because they do not want it to be feasible for some rich assholes to build an ASIC mining farm.

They want mining to be distributed, done by individuals, in remotely collectivized mining pools.

Yes, it is individually, not as energy efficient as PoS system... but if you have a PoW system, that is specifically difficult to scale a large scale mining operation for...

Well, then basically no one does that.

Go lookup how much power gets thrown into Bitcoin or Eth., vs Monero.

Yep, they have much larger transaction volumes, but they are also way, way, way more energy intensive due to at least in significant part, it being profitable to run a large scale mining op.

And, not having people able to run huge mining ops, also just keeps things more stable on the value/price/txn speed front.

Monero is the least worst of all cryptocurrencies in terms of being an actual, private, secure currency.

Everything else is to a different degree, some kind of a speculative investment asset, the major ones also all happen to be orders of magnitude worse at overall energy consumption, which is largely used to just do crypto forex trading... people still do not really buy anything tangible with BTC or ETH, outside of either basically, or just actually, some kind of scam.

Well, given our low voter turnouts...

Roughly 1/3 of our population is so stupid and hateful that they would rather have a President that hurts people they don't like, than uh... anything else.

I feel like a lot of non US people really do not fully comprehend the level of just literal hatred that fuels many Americans, as well as how common it is to be extremely charismatically performative in a massively hypocritical way, in just every aspect of life.

We are a country of adults that read at an average of a 6th grade level, with astonishing levels of religious extremism and cults (compared to other countries with similar levels of economic development), who are aware our society is collapsing, but are largely too stupid to even understand why.

We were sold the lie of American Exceptionalism, were indoctrinated into it as a sort of secular cult, it is now apparent this is/was all a lie, and people are (have been) essentially having a kind of mass psychosis in terms of how they handle this revalation.

Our systems are massively corrupt, they've been incrementally corrupting for decades, but the effect has been snowballing.

A few people and groups would pop up from time to time and point this out, and push for a specific, meaningful reform to actually stymie this at a systemic level, and they would be crushed by both corporate and political PR campaigns, but also just a general sense of 'you are overreacting and hysterical' in the broad population, that came from that smug security of the American Exceptionalism ethos.

Basically, we are largely a nation of incurious, brutish, overconfident, malignant narcissists, who revel in biased reasoning ortiented toward justifying an already held belief, who are often already taught from a young age to evaluate the world with the irrational magical thinking of religious cults, which normalizes cognitive dissonance and conspiracism, which then leads to the present outcome you correctly find to be so absurd.

Unleas you 'watch' the game with some kind of image training AI, that then learns how to approximately hallucinate a game.

https://gamengen.github.io/

So, technically, you can "watch" a game and sort of cause that to result in a sort of playable game.

This is however vastly more time and compute intensive that just ripping a movie, and results in... something of a fever dream version of a game, that tends to lose accuracy and stability the longer you play it.

This is the same guy who effectively overrode the seperation of church and state, and mandated bibles in every single school, basically just makes teacher teach PragerU propoganda instead of actual curricula, and is now also using a PragerU designed political purity test to weed out non-theofascist teachers.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/oklahoma-woke-teacher-screenings-ryan-walters.html

Porn for me but not for thee!

What a hypocritical piece of shit.

Hooray two tiered legal system, huzzah!

/s/s/s

Not intentionally, but, accidentally once.

Computer froze, stupidly tried to just unplug it instead of flipping the PSU switch, ended up grabbing the prongs while they were still mostly plugged in.

That caused my heart to skip a few beats, literally, gave me an arrhythmia for about 15 minutes.

Again, do not recommend.

Yep, same here, just 'hrm... i... wonder...'

I actually did this, tasered myself with my ... friend who is a girl but was not my girlfriend... with her self defense contact taser.

In summary:

Ho-Lee Fuck.

Yeah, that shit hurts quite a fucking lot.

I mean, I was laughing as well, but mostly out of being zapped into, ahem, a state of shock, full adrenaline dump on that much sharp, specific pain.

Up to that point in my life, I'd never been electro zapped beyond one of those plasma ball things or the ole rub a balloon on your hair thing...

Yeah, yeah, a loooot more voltage and amps in a taser, do not recommend, unless you just are an actual masochist.

Alternate plot based on similar concept:

Mr Garrison goes back to being Trump for some absurd reason, and then Stan and Kyle make a comic mocking him, Cartman basically becomes Steve Bannon/Alex Jones and leads an insane campaign against Stan and Kyle for making the comic, and ...

...now there is a whole conspiracy, invented by Cartman, about horrific secret encoded messages in a supposed secret vault or collection of all the student's doodles and comics and passed paper notes...

... and after not too long, Cartman stops talking about Mr Garrison being any kind of related to this supposed 'naughty vault', focuses instead on an insipid profundity of CSAM kept from the public...

... and then it turns out (revealed to the audience but not any characters beyond Garrison) that there is actually a 'naughty vault' of confiscated student messages and drawings and such (nothing beyond schoolyard insults from tem), but the only detailed, explicit CSAM is from Mr. Garrison himself, who has beem uh, doodling his own comics, and keeping all this in a vault in the school office somewhere that only him and the janitor have access to...

... janitor dies in a suspicious manner, Mr. Garrison wishes his wife well, janitor wife ends up being convicted of producing CSAM doodles, Cartman is now screaming for the entire 'naughty vault' to be released, Kyle and Stan think this is all I mean, yeah, bad, but Cartman is kinda going off the rails

Part (Episode) Two:

Summer break montage, which involves a bunch of rednecks breaking into a random pizza joint, trying to assasinate Garrison, and also then breaking into the school and largely destroying it... one or two of them are looking for the naughty vault, but mostly they're just angry for nonsense reasons, such as 'they took erh jerbs!'...

... somehow, Cartman becomes some kind of official school liason/resource officer/investigator, who is now formally/informally leading an outright pogrom, sentencing any students he thinks may have their works in the naughty vault to onerous amounts of after school detention, including Kyle and Stan.

Kyle and Stan are beyond fed up at this point, as Cartman has 'assigned' them to make a formal apology video for their involvement in the naughty files, so they just do the thing, make the callback reference to 'we're sorry' in the most sarcastic and insincere way possible...

... but basically half the town thinks its real.

Then, uh, somehow, Cartman gets Garrison's key to the naughty vault, and finds copious amounts of CSAM that is obviously drawn by Mr Garrison, while Mr Garrison is busy for the weekend judging a school beauty paegent.

Cartman has a mental breakdown, jams the contents of the naughty vault into a ... trapper keeper... then b-lines to the beauty paegant to confront Mr Garrison in real time.

During some kind of lunch break or something, the confrontstion occurs between Garrison and Cartman.

Garrison points out thar Cartman's own doodles and horrid missives are in the naughty vault, Cartman and Garrison begin brawling over all the documents, the fight stumbles into the girls changing room, the trapper keeper is ripped in half, documents comically go flying everywhere, Cartman is dazed, Garrison laughs maniacally and says he wrote all his stuff on flash paper thst easily combusts.

As the girls are now all scrambling to get dressed and flee, while Garrison pulls out a lighter and tries to burn everything that he can, but this literally blows up in his face, Garrison runs out of the girls changing room, past a bunch of crying half dressed girls, with his hair (toupee) literally on fire, hands red from his own blood from injuries sustained fighting Cartman, all infront of the paegant attendees returning from the lunch break, and a local media crew with camers rolling, getting b roll footage / interviews.

-end scene, roll credits-

I mean...

Looking at mic_check's figures...

Lets say we are just talking straight, hetero people.

We got all straight men at 43:55 Dem to Rep, thats a 22% higher chance of a woman randomly picking a Rep instead of a Dem.

Meanwhile you can just, as a woman who is looking into dating a man...

Just pick a random, single, never married dude.

Bam!, now its 61:37 Dem to Rep, a 65% higher chance a random, never married dude will be a Dem than a Rep.

...

We are talking about these stats in the context of dating, right?

Where people like, talk, get to know each other?

Not just being randomly assigned partners from a slot machine?

Do dating apps not like, allow you to filter by something like this, or... talk/chat to a person, and ask them questions before you meet them...?

Its kind of silly to paint individual people with a broadly accurate brush... when the ostensible whole point is to get to know a person individually.

Sure, use broad stats to form a broadly accurate general worldview, but realize its limitations.