Folks, have a belter of a weekend.

The News

Indie game seller bullied into hiding games because of overzealous puritans

Popular indie game marketplace Itch.io has suddenly deindexed many of its adult games following a campaign by Australian group Collective Shout (Itch dot io). With no warning, Itch.io made games marked as “NSFW” invisible in its search because of “scrutiny from our payment processors”. While Collective Shout’s campaign started with No Mercy, a pretty gross game which I covered in a previous Sizzle, this decision means that many games that don’t feature abuse or torture have been essentially disappeared (WIRED, $). Even Elon — sigh — has weighed in on the debate to push back against the campaign (Australian, $)

The Sizzle: The WIRED article above does a good job of pointing out how Collective Shout — a group that was obsessed with trying to get lingerie store Honey Birdette to stop showing ads of women in underwear in shopping centres (god forbid!) — has a history of conflating truly abhorrent material with normal, adult stuff that puritans don’t like. Even if you ignore their targets, the result of their actions is kneecapping many indie creators who’ve done nothing wrong. They are not a good faith group, and we should not accept a debate about the bounds of what is culturally acceptable being set by them.

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Ggl’s is kllng its lnk shrtnr

Google’s short link domain Goo.gl will stop working a month from now, meaning that all existing links will die (The Verge). Google first said it would stop shortening links in 2018, and last year said that 99% of the links had no activity in the last month (Google Blog). Google will continue using the domain for its own, internal services like Google Maps.

The Sizzle: I know there’s a joke about Google shutting down services with like 100 million users because it’s too small for them, but I gotta say this is pretty annoying. Sure, running the link shortener is another problem for them with no benefit, and it’s a free service so you get what you pay for, but sucks to know that a little piece of internet infrastructure that holds together old websites will break in a month.

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Leftovers

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Oh, Also

If you have this type of email, we won’t need to verify your age online

With the UK having various age checking requirements coming in today, Elon Musk’s X has put up some details about how it’ll comply. One estimation method that caught my eye: “users’ email address will be used to estimate their age.”

Immediately, I started thinking about what email addresses would prove your age? The serious answer is probably emails like .gov, but then I started thinking of ones like @bigpond.net.au or @ozemail.com.au that I associate with the more mature, wise types. I thought I’d throw it to the Sizzlers: What are the signs that might reveal the age of an internet user? Email addresses, choice of browser, whether they know how to use a file directory? Let me know!

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Bargains

Electrical & electronics

Computing

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The End

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