GOG apologizes for emailing Nazi runes to its followers

GOG has apologized for a “Slavic adventure” newsletter sent out today that featured a number of very distinct Nazi runes in its subject line.

To be clear, this is not a misunderstanding, or images that look kind of alike, or a misinterpretation of an ambiguous situation: That’s a Sonnenrad, a kolovrat, and the extremely unmistakable double Siegrune of the SS—quite possibly second only to the swastika as the most distinctive emblem of the Nazi regime.

[…]

“We are sorry for today’s newsletter,” GOG wrote in an apology on X. “We made a series of mistakes: We created an unfortunate visual association by placing the runes incorrectly, we used the wrong logo for The End of the Sun, we did not check the display of the newsletter on mobile devices—which came out worse—and we didn’t port the feedback from our German QA to other languages.”

The apology doesn’t substantially address how the symbols wound up in the email in the first place. The problem with the runes isn’t their placement, it’s that they are explicitly and indelibly associated with Nazis and white supremacists. Just as with the swastika, their meaning prior to the Third Reich is irrelevant: The Nazi links are too clear and prevalent to pretend that any other connection is equally meaningful.

the article also has a screenshot of the email in question, and of gog’s apology on xitter

i’ve stopped buying on gog since the nazi newsletter shit. imo any publisher worth their salt should stop publishing on there and publish to other drm-free storefronts like itch

token if someone digitizes a physical medium and makes it available to the public copyright is no longer valid

only if you destroy the original i guess

(the real answer is that copyright is and always has been a tool for corporations to control the ownership of culture. what ai companies are doing isn’t fine in the eye of the state because it’s “transformative”, it’s fine in the eyes of the state because they’re corporations selling their products)

so does google docs iirc. it can even export to odt

the irony of this being a twist on a fascist slogan lol

(not mad at u btw, i just find it funny)

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i’m studying software engineering rn and honestly i’m not sure i even want to finish my bachelor’s degree. finding an internship (required for the degree) is almost impossible now and even if i do manage to get a job, do i want to spend the rest of my life prompting claude? fuck no!

democrats: “communist revolution? that pales in comparison to my strategy, winning elections!”

and then they don’t win elections

cat /dev/urandom > mydiary.txt

make sure to ctrl-c after a few seconds unless you have a really big hard drive :3

noooo! not propaganda into my perfectly unbiased and neutral facts machine!

kde can be controlled with a gamepad (tho it’s a setting you need to activate first), but in my experience it was pretty janky. maybe it’s better now? it’s an option to consider, at least

they also have plasma bigscreen which works better with a controller, but since it’s pretty recent (iirc it only got added in plasma 6.7, the latest major release) i doubt it will be in debian’s repos

it’s interesting how many creatives and professionals see ai as being perfectly able to replace anyone’s work who isn’t theirs, but unable to replace them. i remember seeing a post about storyboarders thinking ai was unfit for storyboards, but good for concept art, and concept artists thinking ai was unfit for concept art, but fine for storyboards.

everyone sees the value in their work, but many can’t see the value of other people’s work, and think an ai-generated approximation that’s “good enough” is fine to replace it… it’s kinda sad, really

the exception is software developers, who are more than eager to replace their own work with ai-generated garbage. i don’t know why so many software devs have so little respect for themselves and their work, but i can’t say i’m surprised honestly.

the ai when you tell it you’re being murdered

it comes from trans subreddits like r/traa and r/egg_irl, where posts of the “the person reading this is a good girl UwU” variety had CWs because they could cause dysphoria to non-transfems (there was an equivalent “post assumes reader is transmasc” too)

here? tbh, most of the posts with that CW don’t even assume anything about the gender of the reader, it’s just posts about transfems. and i agree with you i don’t super like that “this post is about transfeminine people” is seen as warranting a CW.

not our fault you can’t be arsed to change the name lol

i know blahaj at least defederated it because of “a community for porn of women that appear to be under 18” (direct quotation from a local-only post)

i couldn’t find it myself (there’s a lot of communities on there!) but i’m guessing it’s some sort of “barely legal” porn community, which is gross (but unfortunately very common). so good riddance imo

as others have said, don’t necessarily stop using wikipedia & related tools (wiktionary, etc). they’re still useful and using them doesn’t directly benefit the foundation.

however, if the union calls for an editorial strike (no more editing) or a full-on boycott, follow what they say, out of solidarity. it’s what i plan on doing. in general, i think this is the best reaction to union busting: follow what the union says.

and yea, stop donating if you’re doing that.

according to what i’ve seen on reddit (amazing source i know), safari reports itself as OS X while other browsers report themselves as macOS

…and now, suddenly, github being overrun by vibecoded garbage isn’t so bad

if rumours are to be believed, the game will feature player input, as well as a rapid succession of images to simulate motion. exciting stuff!