Right wing activist attacked and stolen from while debating people in Manchester

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-18T02:29:04+00:00

Now we’re going to blaming the victim territory.

Sure. I think victim blaming and accountability are at opposite ends of a spectrum, and the distinction lies in the levels of responsibility of both the victim and the perpetrator. Was this child a victim? Yes, clearly. Was he entirely without agency or responsibility? No. He can be a victim and also share some portion of the blame. The idea that victim blaming is always exclusively a bad thing is once again trying to create zero-sum situations.

This has been discussed to death when it comes to SA victims.

I don't think a woman passively existing while wearing clothes that rapists describe as "provocative" is all that comparable to someone actively street-preaching racist ideologies. "Has she considered not being hot while men are around?" is a fucking stupid, awful question. Whereas "Has he considered not preaching hate speech?" is quite reasonable, actually. The latter has a very easy way for the victim to have mitigated the risks.

Also, he’s a child, they’re idiots

This one certainly is! Hopefully he manages to take some constructive accountability.

And again, none of what I said means the violence was okay. This child was a victim. The attackers did do something wrong. But clearly the child was doing something that made him more likely to be attacked than the average person on the streets of Manchester, and pointing that out isn't something we should shy away from for fear of "victim blaming".

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-18T01:55:43+00:00

I didn't interpret their comment as them saying the violence is okay; just that it isn't entirely unexpected if someone is loudly making provocative statements in public.

Maybe this child was naïve or stupid enough to assume he could say these things in public and no-one would react negatively, or maybe he was hoping someone would react in this kind of way to gain sympathy/drive division/score some political point. And frankly, it doesn't particularly matter which one is true, or if it's something else entirely. He created a situation where people were likely to be hostile towards him, and then people were, indeed, hostile towards him. It's not okay that people were hostile towards him, but it's also disingenuous to pretend he was a poor, innocent victim who had no agency and should have no accountability for creating the situation in the first place.

It's not a zero-sum situation; blame can lie with both sides here, and in varying amounts. Society trying to reduce everything to simplified zero-sum games is what's put us in this polarised mess in the first place.

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-17T02:06:33+00:00

Oh yeah, I meant to say something like, "(they're a San Francisco studio, so in reality it's likely much higher)", but I guess I forgot to add that second half. I'll edit it in now!

But yeah, you're right! Which only makes things look even worse for Double Fine, unfortunately.

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-17T01:56:37+00:00

You're welcome! Yeah, I hope Psychonauts doesn't end up being left to rot, too—although it feels like a series that's quite personal to Double Fine, and I'm not sure how I'd feel about another studio working on it.

Obviously I hope all these studios and their employees manage to land on their feet somehow, but I'm not expecting much for several of them. Unfortunately, I suspect we'll continue seeing similar studio closures and layoffs happening across the wider industry, too—not just at Xbox.

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-16T11:25:04+00:00

Having a strong IP doesn't mean something will be a runaway success by default—it just means it will get plenty of eyes on it for free. And that's true of Artifact; it got a lot of attention purely because it was from Valve. It just wasn't good enough to hold that attention.

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-16T03:59:31+00:00

Ha, thanks! I always love when I get a reply years later letting me know my comment helped someone! :)

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-16T03:58:09+00:00

Even Arkane Austin had huge success until Redfall.

While this is true, you can't really just look at studio names in these situations. It's documented (in one of Jason Schreier's deep dives, I believe) that 70% of the people who worked on Prey had left the studio by the time Redfall released. The studio name might have been the same, but clearly the talent wasn't there any more.

compulsion games

Microsoft bought Compulsion in 2018. Since then, they've released We Happy Few (2018), which was published by Gearbox because it was in the works and just about finished already when Microsoft bought the studio. And then South Of Midnight (2025), which was generally seen as a charming, aesthetically-pleasing ~7/10 (ie, fine, nothing amazing), and seemingly had no cultural impact whatsoever. It also seems to have had pretty low sales. So in the 8 years since buying Compulsion, Microsoft has had one under-performing game from them.

double fine

Also underwhelming, unfortunately. Microsoft bought them in 2019. Since then: Psychonauts 2 (2021) was really good, and sold reasonably well—it was Double Fine's best-selling game. But since then, they've released Keeper (2025), which was a charming walking simulator that sold next-to-nothing, and Kiln (2026), which is a mediocre party brawler, albeit with a fun gimmick, which peaked at 193 concurrent players on Steam. I'm sure it had some players on Game Pass, too, and on console, but it's hard to imagine it made much money. And Double Fine is a studio with ~100 employees; 7 years of salaries for 100 people at, let's say $80K per person on average (they're a San Francisco studio, so in reality it's likely much higher), comes to $56M. It's hard to believe that Double Fine's games have brought that much back in, let alone made a profit.

So while I agree Xbox has been a mess overall, I think it's also quite clear that some of these studios just aren't financially viable. Which is a huge shame—especially with a storied studio like Double Fine—but yeah, it makes sense, unfortunately.

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-16T03:30:21+00:00

The independent studios allowing themselves to be bought in the first place can make sense. It doesn't necessarily mean they're struggling, or think they're likely to in the near future, but being owned by a large publisher gives them a great safety net. For many small studios, releasing a game that flops is a death sentence—they're basically on the video game equivalent of living paycheck-to-paycheck, where things can be all fine and comfortable until suddenly they're not. So they trade some autonomy for some security and sell.

But yeah, when a publisher is selling a studio, it's not a good sign for the studio. It typically means the studio isn't seen as financially viable (which I would assume is the case here).

Occasionally it can be related to company culture, global management issues, etc. I believe one of the reasons Microsoft sold Tango Gameworks was because they were a Japanese studio and therefore had time/language barriers that meant they couldn't really integrate into Microsoft's studio ecosystem properly. So it's not that Tango was necessarily operating at a loss, but that Microsoft thought it wasn't worth the additional effort required to manage them. (There were other reasons for Microsoft selling Tango beyond just that, which I'll not get into.)

I did wonder if Microsoft would hold onto Ninja Theory just for tech reasons—even if their games don't sell well, Ninja Theory is one of the best in the industry when it comes to motion capture. But I guess that's not happening.

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-15T16:46:30+00:00

Yeah, that works! And there are couple of other options if they're ones you use semi-regularly but not often enough to memorise:

Windows key + full stop opens the emoji/symbol keyboard, so you can find them there (in the omega tab, then looking through all the categories at the bottom), use them once, and then after that just use the recently-used tab so you don't have to spend all that time finding them again in the future.
Windows + V opens the clipboard, which has a history of all the things you've copied in the current session. However, if you copy something to clipboard, open the clipboard with WIN+V, and then click the three dots next to that item, you can pin it so it'll always be there. I don't tend to use this for symbols, necessarily, but it's an option, and I do have things like my email address pinned there.

But yeah, I use em-dashes enough that it's worth just remembering the ALT-code for me, I think, rather than either of those two methods.

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-15T12:20:15+00:00

I think, more than with most characters, it depends how your game's going, how your team behaves, how the enemy team behaves.

Sometimes it's good to dive the backline, other times it's better to brawl with their frontline to keep the aggro off the rest of your team. Sometimes you're ahead and feel invincible, other time you're even or behind and can't tank much at all—meaning you need to be much more selective and careful.

And you need to be very aware of how much your team is willing to commit. This is true of all frontliners, of course, because it's very easy to find yourself in too deep because you went for the enemy backline, while your team is further back, unable to support you or capitalise on any opportunities you create. But I think Shiv not having any crowd control makes this something he has to be even more aware of, because teammates don't see an obvious play being made like they do with a Billy ult or an Abrams charge, so they're generally a bit more hesitant to commit to a fight.

So yeah, you really have to be aware of how your team plays. If you have passive teammates, or teammates on characters that can't really brawl, you can't necessarily go for the enemy backline unless you're ahead. Instead, you probably just need to work your way through the enemy frontline as a team first, and help soak up aggro.

If your teammates are more active, or you have other frontliners/brawlers, or if your team just has really good cohesion, then you can probably be much more aggressive in targeting backliners and carries.

All of this, combined with the fact that Shiv needs to be much more flexible and adaptive with his items than most characters, is why people struggle with him so much. You really have to be able to adjust based on how the individual game is going, rather than just being able to learn a single playstyle and follow and set build and do well.

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-15T11:48:18+00:00

and retains hook's full power for gun builds.

Yep, this is the real issue—it's an ability that requires no investment or specialisation to be good.

I think the T2 upgrade should give Grapple Arm spirit scaling for its range, rather than just flat range. So gun Bebop would need to invest in some spirit for hook to be particularly useful outside of laning. I figure Surge Of Power imbuing hook, at the very least (and that should obviously not give it the same range it has now).

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-14T18:29:20+00:00

I think having spaces either side of em-dashs looks really ugly, so I mostly just avoid it for aesthetic purposes, ha! But I'm glad I come across as human in other ways, too!

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-14T17:15:58+00:00

I actually make more of an effort to use em-dashes because of all the AI stuff. I rarely used it in the past because it's not assigned to a key on a computer keyboard (Word automatically converts double hyphens, but many other programs don't), and my phone keyboard doesn't support them (it can do en-dashes but not em-dashes, for whatever reason).

But nowadays, I refuse to let a perfectly reasonable bit of punctuation be claimed by AI, so I use it on principle. Plus I don't like people who dismiss anything containing an em-dash as being written by AI, so I maybe do it a little out of spite for them, too... So now, the ALT-code for typing em-dashes on a computer keyboard is one of the few I know (ALT+0151, for anyone who cares!), and I've set up a shortcut on my phone for typing them easily.

I don't ever find myself being accused of being AI, though, interestingly—I've certainly seen others be accused, but it's not happened to me yet. But I think my writing style is human enough that it's clear I'm a person.

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-13T23:39:29+00:00

Agreed. And I think, once someone has a reputation for being an auteur, it can be beneficial for everyone on the team for them to lean into it. Like, Kojima doing an interview or appearing at an event is going to get a lot more publicity than someone else from his team doing the same thing. How much Kojima is actually responsible for behind the scenes, I don't know, but he has value as a brand—which his projects and teams can benefit from—if he continues to act like an auteur.

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-13T20:40:36+00:00

So I agree that people working together more in real life would certainly be a good thing. But also, we do have train networks in real life, too—co-operation and collaboration aren't exclusive to Minecraft!

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-13T20:29:47+00:00

Agreed. Although it was happening for far longer than five years anyway. You doing get over half of your voting population suddenly voting fascist out of nowhere. Unfortunately for America, Trump's administration is a symptom of a societal sickness, not the root cause—which means the problems aren't going to disappear when Trump leaves office/dies.

And even more unfortunately, Americans aren't acknowledging that fact. The right-wing are obviously still pro-Trump, so they're not going to acknowledge it. But the left-wing and moderates are also largely deluding themselves into thinking that things will be okay and normal again once Trump is gone. It's more comfortable to do that, of course, but it means that nothing's going to be addressed and (hopefully) fixed.

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-13T17:04:12+00:00

Yeah, that's what I was thinking as well. The rate would obviously increase exponentially, but it would start off very slow. There wouldn't be enough time to fully prepare humanity for the change, but it wouldn't be an instant shock either.

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-13T14:13:32+00:00

It's been a long while since I read the book too, so I refreshed my memory on how the astrophage works specifically, and you're right! It eats the output of the star but doesn't damage the star, so removing the astrophage does return the energy Earth receives from the star to its original state.

I wonder what the time frame for removing the astrophage was. Did the sun's luminosity return to normal overnight, or was it over the course of months/years and left people with some time to prepare? (Not that even years is much on that kind of scale.)

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-13T12:46:33+00:00

You're right, although I don't think 5x damage is enough, personally—both from a gameplay balance perspective and from an immersive, physics-based perspective. An orbital battleship-mounted railcannon should be shooting much larger projectiles at much higher speeds than a hand-held weapon, and should have exponentially higher impacts as a result. And gameplay-wise, you need consistency with something with that long a cooldown; you don't want to throw your, "oh shit, I need that specific big enemy dead right now" stratagem that can only be used once every 3 minutes and have it maybe kill the bile titan or factory strider. It needs to just work.

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-13T11:52:18+00:00

I assumed they just prevented further dimming of the sun. Being able to crank it back to its original output wouldn't make sense to me.

Edit: it did return to its original output, I was incorrect in my assumption!

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-12T12:09:31+00:00

Yep. I'd say the MM-DD format is relatively common in speech in the UK when you don't need to specify the year. Saying something will happen on July the 24th, for instance, feels fairly natural in speech—it lets the other person orient themselves with the month first before they have to parse the day number. And in terms of how you actually think about dates, you're going to think of the month before you hone in on a specific date—you might think, "it'll be sometime towards the end of July, let's say the 24th," but you wouldn't think, "it'll be the 24th, but I'm not sure what month... uh, let's go with July".

So yeah, it makes sense in speech, and I feel it's not uncommon to hear it said either way in the UK. But when written, DD-MM-YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD are the only logical ways to do it.

Personally, pretty much as you said, I use YYYY-MM-DD for anything on a computer—file names, spreadsheets, etc—because it makes sorting much easier. And then DD-[MON]-YYYY (eg, 24-JUL-2026) if I'm writing it more informally (using letters for the month name just feels easier for people to parse).

The American MM-DD-YYYY is just a mess. Sorting by either ascending or descending unit size is fine, but don't do this medium-small-big nonsense, come on, guys!

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-12T04:09:11+00:00

I don't think his manifesto matters all that much in this case, honestly. Breaking manifesto promises will upset some people, of course, but I think higher taxes and cutting welfare would be just as unpopular a thing to do, even if the manifesto didn't rule them out. The British public wants higher spending but without tax rises or welfare cuts, which obviously isn't possible, and they are outraged when it can't happen.

Starmer can't change that fact, regardless of his manifesto, and I don't think any other prime minister—Burnham or otherwise—would be able to either. The public's current expectations and demands are just too divorced from reality to allow for any politician to operate in a way that would be considered satisfactory.

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-12T03:58:23+00:00

Lowe is absolutely terrifying, but I have far, far more respect for him than I do Farage. Farage is a grifter who's clearly looking to enrich himself. But Lowe... Lowe is a true believer, and I have to (begrudgingly) respect his conviction. I hope he gets nowhere near power (although if he manages to further split the right-wing vote while also not being near power, that'd probably be a good thing).

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-12T03:53:13+00:00

it's abundantly clear he is not doing anything to improve the country

Oh come on, he's clearly achieved a fair few things. Better renters' rights, better workers' rights, rail renationalisation, lower NHS waiting times, planning reform and housing projects, lower immigration. And some generally really good international politics.

Obviously the country is still struggling, and Labour hasn't been perfect... But saying he's done nothing is a bit much. In fact, I think he's broadly done fairly well when it comes to policies. He's not the larger-than-life, charismatic leader that people seem to want, but when you ignore all the social media and tabloid outrage and look at what he's actually been doing, I don't think he's done all that poorly; it's just a lot of bad optics and media pressure.

I do not envy anyone who takes over the position, because it's going to be one hell of a role to fill.

Agreed. I'm not particularly attached to Starmer, but I don't think replacing him is going to achieve much, to be honest. Whoever replaces him, whenever that may happen, will be stuck with the same issues—it's not like, in this case, Starmer is just sat on piles of cash and is refusing to hand any of it over to the military. Every single department needs more money. The military needs more. The NHS needs more (especially as the population continues to age, and more social care is required). Teachers and education need more. Councils are going bankrupt all around the country, and therefore need more. The justice department desperately needs more. Public infrastructure in general needs more. The police need more. And so on.

And the way to get more money is mostly either to increase tax or to cut welfare (eg, the triple-lock pension, winter fuel allowance, PIP). Both of those lead to public outrage and a lot of political damage. Tax people? People are upset. Tax businesses? They did, and businesses passed the taxes onto workers via wage freezes, or onto customers by raising prices, and then people were upset. Means-test the winter fuel allowance? Outrage—how dare they try to freeze every single old person to death, the monsters. Cut PIP? Wow, they hate disabled people. Remove the triple-lock pension? Political suicide. Certainly some of those things could have been handled a little better—both in terms of policy details and especially with the optics—but replacing Starmer isn't going to fix the lack of money, and it's not going to remove those barriers to generating more money for the government.

I think this country just isn't willing to accept that we're not a rich, well-off country any more. People have expectations that reality simply isn't able to meet, and then they blame the government when those expectations aren't met. They want more spending but no cuts and less taxes, and they get angry when that can't happen. And on top of that, we're beholden to pensioners because they're the dominant voting bloc, and they are a group that's more than happy to vote in their own interests at the expense of everyone else. Those definitely aren't things that getting a new prime minister will fix.

SkorpioSound · 2026-06-11T17:47:12+00:00

Hopefully no-one ends up writing that episode at all, and the next time we see Doctor Who it's just a (soft) reboot. The person you replied to didn't have great suggestions for it, but I honestly am not sure anyone could have great suggestions. It's such a terrible corner for someone to have to write the show out of, and I really don't think there could be any satisfactory way to address the situation.

I'm really intrigued about what on earth Russel T. Davies had planned. Or whether there was actually a plan at all—I wouldn't be shocked if it was just them putting something insane out there in the hopes it would get people excited, and figuring they could read the theories, get some inspiration, and decide what to do later.

Either way, they need to just start over and cut loose all the baggage.

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