The NSFW game purge

Recently, Steam purged a bunch of NSFW games from its storefront. This occurred as the result of efforts from Australia-based anti-porn group Collective Shout who applied pressure through payment processors. Collective Shout is a “””feminist””” group, although nobody with a passing glance would recognize them as legitimately feminist. Its founder is anti-abortion, what does that tell you? Collective Shout has previously fought to ban GTAV, Detroit: Become Human, as well as rappers Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and Tyler, the Creator.

The games that were banned on Steam primarily contain non-consensual and incest erotic content. I was curious what specific games were banned, and found a website dedicated to tracking it (warning: link contains thumbnails for NSFW games).

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Critical thinking as community value

Last month, I explored the idea that empiricism and critical thinking are (or should be) core values in social justice.

On the other hand… how good of an idea is that really? While we may agree that critical thinking is a good thing, just because a community values critical thinking does not mean they are good at it. In fact, communities that value critical thinking are often bad at it.

This is an easy observation to make, here, because I don’t need to argue for it, I just need to gesture at what we already know. In short, we are a community that’s been burned. The skeptical, atheist, and Rationalist communities all valued critical thinking in slightly different ways, and each has had its problems. All the praise of critical thinking did not save us.

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Link Roundup: July 2025

This month, the Ace Journal Club discussed birth order effects–often cited as evidence of the biological origins of sexual orientation.  I came away thinking the evidence is shakier than I realized.

The Fashion of Sci-Fi Futures | verilybitchie (video, 31 min) – Why does sci-fi use feminine men to signify decadence in the ruling class?  Well, sexism, obviously.  But the video also traces historical and literary precedent, to help us understand the intersection of sexism and fashion.

“Portfolios of the Poor” (book review) | Tell me why the world is weird – How do the global poor live on $2 a day?  It’s perhaps misleading to say they earn $2 a day, because their income tends to be volatile.  There’s a lot of discussion of how they borrow, lend, and save money to smooth out the volatility.

I was thinking about this in relation to my post about loans, and how loans function as a shitty welfare system.  The value of lending is smoothing volatility, and that’s something that poor people need more than anyone else.  But lending and other financial tools have an overhead cost–a cost that falls, unfairly, on the poor.  And when we’re talking about $2 a day, it’s hard to imagine anything resembling the US financial system operating on those margins.

Kanye West and The Daily Wire | Big Joel (video, 43 min) – As an example of how ultra-wealthy people become unmoored from reality, Kanye West openly praises Hitler in song.  In comes Ben Shapiro to say “Hitler is bad actually”, a banal observation turned desperate plea.  Joel explores a fracture in the right wing between anti-semitism and zionism.

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I released my game

I released my game, Moon Garden Optimizer.  It’s a puzzle strategy game about growing a tiny garden on the moon while optimizing water usage.  It’s inspired by deckbuilders like Dominion, but it supports unlimited undo.

Screenshot of moon garden optimizer

You can play for free in browser on itch.

Most people are here because they like my writing, so I’ll mention that the game has writing!  As a reward for beating challenges, there’s philosophical dialogue between the robot protagonist and her human manager.  It’s fairly silly, but takes a bit of inspiration from modern AI.  For example, the human has unwarranted confidence in the robot’s expertise.

Origami: Eye of the Wave

Eye of the Wave

Eye of the Wave, designed by me

This is a pleat-based model that I made in 2020.  You can see some other examples of pleat-based models here and here.

This is made with 64×64 divisions.  Where the horizontal and vertical pleats meet, the paper is layered in a way that causes it to contort.  I really like this one.

Social justice and empiricism

I’ve toyed with the idea that one of the major values of social justice is basically empiricism.  Social justice contains certain theories, but you can’t just rely on theories.  Theories live or die by the whims of empirical reality.  In order to figure out the best way to live in a diverse society, we need to rely on observations.  In other words, we have to actually listen to people, not just make assumptions.

Of course, I would think that empiricism is a social justice value.  I spent a decade involved in skeptical and atheist activism, then departed for more social-justice-oriented waters.  It’s natural for me to draw mental connections and decide that actually, both of these things that I have liked are founded upon similar values.  Call it a personal pop philosophy.  If we’re being serious, I think most skeptics would not have thought to apply empiricism in the particular way that I do; and most social justice advocates would not name empiricism as one of their core values.

But maybe they ought to?  I think social justice could benefit from more attentiveness to epistemology.

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Coming out as political action

Coming out isn’t what it used to be. Literally, “coming out” has a rich history of different meanings. Originally it referred to young women coming of age into high society. It had a derivative meaning within gay subcultures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

But in the 1970s, “coming out” started to mean revealing yourself to the general public.  “Coming out” was contrasted with “being in the closet”.  In the 1970s, coming out was advocated as a form of political action. You can see this, for instance, in many speeches by Harvey Milk. Here’s a line from the Gay Freedom Day Speech in 1978:

Gay people, we will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets…we are coming out! We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions! We are coming out to tell the truth about gays!

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