Hello again! I wasn’t even intending on writing anything today, just planning on a usual bye day before prepping for my next review and getting much needed rest. Unfortunately recent events made me want to comment on something, and I figured I’d throw in a few status updates in the meantime while I did so. Nothing new game review wise besides that Disaster Report 4 is my next Legacy Queue review, and it’s definitely gonna lean into the snap judgment territory.
Articles Articles Articles!
The big article I mentioned last time is still in the works and I don’t have a ETA. I’m prepping it very well by checking with more sources than ever before, making sure everything I heard over time was accurate or not, and getting the timeline of events I jotted down correct. It’ll be done when it’s done and then I’m never writing an article of that depth again, and I already stated that’s the end of anything Limited Run related from me. I really don’t want to write more about this company than I already had to, but my IRL Ko-Fi backer friend demanded it.
But there are other opinoin articles I have planned that are more fun for me to write! The first to come to my mind was a 1 year anniversary piece on the Analogue Duo and the utter lack of updates… Not a great subject either, but I still find it interesting to check back on a thing I covered a while ago and see if I still like it or not. Spoiler: It’s complicated.
The other opinion piece, besides my end of year roundup, is a shortish article that’s a pseudo followup to the Limprint Report card from years ago. Just comparing two companies this time, Strictly Limited Games and First Press Games. I could write full long articles on both companies, but I don’t wanna, but I figured since they’ve both done some weird stuff I feel should be pointed out, I’m gonna write that piece sometime near the end of the year or at the dawn of 2025. It’s obvious who’s the winner if you’ve read any of my pieces this year, but that doesn’t mean the winner of the report card is all that great of a company, either. Don’t expect it to be too terribly long, either.
Evercade Hardware Double Combo
I might not have anything fancy to announce for software reviews today besides the tiny bit I noted at the top of the page, but I do have two bigish reviews coming later this month/early 2025 that I’m pretty excited about! First up is the Evercade EXP-R… Which may seem useless to review as it’s just a recolor of a thing I already bought years ago, but considering how I noted in a recent piece that the original EXP I had suffered a battery death and had some slightly growing battery troubles, I figured the R model was worth a purchase to compare and contrast!
Needless to say, I’m giving the EXP-R a nice test run for a while and listening in on the community to see if this encounters the same sort of usual errors that the EXP would rarely have. That and being at a lower price point makes re-reviewing the system worthwhile, in my opinion. Expect this early 2025 or maybe before depending on what comes up.
The absolute certain first big 2025 review, and the more appealing one to most readers, is the Evercade Alpha! I have a Street Fighter one incoming and will be giving it a nice in-depth look with all of the carts/built in games to give my take on if this was worth the rather bulky cash amount. The Super Pocket review still does crazy well, so I’m hopeful this Alpha review, while a bit late, will do enough to help people decide whether to pick one up or not. Maybe if it does well, I’ll review the other mini systems I have just for the heck of it? I do have the two Astros and Egret, after all…
Ok now let’s just talk, Braixen to reader about Bluesky because i’m actually kinda scared rn
So this is why I actually made a status update and the article will conclude with this block. I dont wanna make a full opinion piece on this, nor do I want to try and drag this out further in my head than needed, but I feel for the sake of my friends in the LGBT community along with my own personal concerns, I need to call out something about Bluesky as of late, and announce my own focus shift for the platform and SFG.
Unfortunately, Bluesky got popular. Such is the bane of a lot of things I like. Popularity = more users. More users equal more people. More people equals more bad actors and people wanting to ram into a pretty comfortable space for well, a lot of people across minorities. I’ve noticed this for the past few weeks, and I think events on the platform this week have cemented some moves I’ve done for my mental health and what I feel the platform needs to do to help its users, not just for this week’s discourse, but in general as the site grows bigger and bigger.
So uh, to keep it simple and to really not drag this out to infinity, the concern this week among many in the LGBT community is how a known bad actor had joined the platform. This isn’t just another bad actor that the site could universally block and ignore or mass report and move on their day, though. (a lot of bad actors you might have expected to have joined months ago, did indeed join Bsky and either got fully permabanned or just shunned to oblivion and they got bored and left, and that generally is still a good tactic!) This is a bad actor known for stirring up transphobic shit again and again, under the guise of “just asking questions”, thus getting the guy cited by a ton of bigger outlets.
Which in turn, has led to passage and introduction of hateful anti-trans legislation all around the world, along with harassment mobs sent towards people who call this individual out. In fact, the person in question has already done such a thing, and thus should be permabanned by now for breaking the site’s own rules.
The word there is should. Because somehow, they aren’t, despite initially joining the platform, quickly getting banned, then unbanned, then labeled as intolerant for posting the usual “just asking questions” type of bigotry, then un-labeled, then just left alone, with some sort of invisible immunity shield. Ever since, they’ve gone more against the trans community on Bluesky, and have indeed, continued their usual habit of inciting harassment mobs on the LGBT community. All with an unusually long silence from the moderation staff, and I mean, unusually so to the point that I, a guy who usually doesn’t jump the gun on moderation staff for the main reason of “well no shit a site with 20M users is hard to moderate!”, is getting increasingly uncomfortable with how they’re handling this.
But let’s step back a bit. I feel in a way that Bluesky has had a big challenge in the past month, mainly due to the flood of new users. People jumping from the other place to avoid the toxicity (or spread it), have flooded the site. The slow growth of the website has faded away in favor of a growth that’s exploded like a powder keg and required the moderation team to go overtime on hiring new staff and modding a lot more rule breaking posts.
Lots and lots more spambots have flooded the site, and now even impersonation scam accounts have popped up tricking people into donating money. These quickly get banned, (keep that word in mind) as have people who openly post bigoted/racist things, which is good for a platform people want to move to compared to the place they’re moving from, which won’t even ban racial slurs anymore. The problem is I don’t think any moderation team could fully prepare for such an influx, no matter how much they would claim to be doing a good job because of the hundreds and hundreds of bad actors they do successfully stomp out each day. And while that growth seems to have finally slowed down, that is still millions and millions of more new users who joined the platform to manage, and the mood they brought along with it.
Yes, it’s a downer mood. No, I’m not gonna deny things in the US aren’t scary as hell right now, but I definitely noticed a tone shift from early last month, with a lot of people still encouraging supporting local communities and calling your local legislators whenever you can, while also sharing mutual aid support and great charity causes, along with phone banking efforts compared to now, where a whole lot of those new BSky posters are desperate to tell you there’s no hope left, best to give up and say goodbye forever, and the feeling of banding together to do the right thing is increasingly fading and being drowned out by the negativity and anxiety a lot of people understandably face.
That, along with dumb requests by these new people to the staff to just copy whatever thing the old place did in 2015/16/17 instead of letting bluesky be itself, and the rise of AI-controlled argument bots flooding the site (and also getting quickly squashed with reporting, but not enough to be fully eradicated even with good blocklist usage) has made the site incredibly stressful for me to use as of late, even with heavy usage of the site’s filtering options. It isn’t fun to be scrolling and seeing things from my friends, and then seeing someone post a great call to action only for the comments to be filled with people complaining “there’s no point so why bother!” (Pro tip for my American readers, even if your local legislators don’t match your party, it still is vital to call and leave a message anytime you are upset with them, they really do keep track of that! It is not useless!)
So yeah. The site is getting a bit stressful to use, even trying to filter it to just my friends while trying my best to stay informed. The tonal shift and flood of users has completely shifted the mood of the website, and I can’t be the only one who notices it getting worse, right? It really just makes me find Bluesky less fun to use and feeling less safe, especially when despite swift bans, bad actors and spambots keep cropping up, again and again, and even if their existence is usually brief, it really isn’t good to see toxic posts for even a short period of time. This was the site’s first big test, and they seem to have fumbled it thus far due to the high amount of users.
But then we get back to the issue I kicked off the section with; that guy. While other bad actors, even some equally big and arguably bigger ones have been swiftly banned from the platform, this individual just has not been, despite nearly a full week passing since the weird ban/unban routine that was witnessed by users. (if the first ban held, then this case would have been pretty much like any of the other swift bans I noted earlier for other bad actors) The usual quickness of the mod team to stop a bad actor has not happened, and it seems increasingly like they’re either supportive of it, or terrified.
So that’s why I’m calling on anyone who reads this post, anyone here from bluesky, any of my friends period, to stand beside your LGBT friends. Call on the Bluesky staff to do the right thing and protect the trans community by kicking the rulebreaker off the platform once and for all, and to not let his influence scare them into having a hands-off approach with him. Whether it’s due to secret support of his horrid ideas (I’m really hoping this isn’t the case, and I can’t imagine the entire mod staff/admin would have this stance if someone on the team does indeed have it), or fear of litigation/bad press, the right thing to do is to ban this bad actor anyway, and commit to banning all others like them in the future that may clearly break the TOS, and protect trans people. Protect all minorities, and work to keeping bluesky as the safe, transparent community you promised us.
Yes, while I still think the tonal shift and other issues will persist even post a ban of this bad actor, I still think there’d be time to right the ship before it is too late and more people get endangered by this man; the last thing I’d want to see would be for this guy to win, leading to more bad actors joining the site, and thus more people being allowed to corrupt a space LGBT people and their allies have felt safe in for months and bring over the toxicity that led us to fleeing the old place to begin with.
And I cannot tolerate that happening, for the sake of my friends. I’m joining in the call for the staff to do the right thing as a result.
And yeah, effective well, as of last week, I’m heavily cutting back on my bluesky usage. Not really exclusively due to this incident, more due to the general tone shift and needing to keep my mental health in check, especially to get my review queue finished. Still, I will autopost all articles like this one to my bSky, and chime in every now and then.
I promised I’d support LGBT rights however I can, and I will continue to do so for the sake of all my friends; for my departed bestie Chaz, and the many others in the community who helped contribute to projects like the Tomie Interview or other big projects SFG has done over the years. I will stand by my friends, to the best of my ability.
Now please. Bluesky. Do the right thing.
A very nice review! Your amazing!