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For people too lazy to click, the second post was:

> I think it’s time for the British to gang together, hit the streets and start the slaughter.

> Violence and murder is the only way now. Start off burning every migrant hotel then head off to MPs’ houses and Parliament, we need to take over by FORCE.

I'm not sure what the punishment for such a clear but ineffective incitement to violence should be, but it shouldn't be nothing.


"then head off to MPs’ houses and Parliament" - that's the bit that probably set it in motion

The US has a three part test[1] for what constitutes incitement:

- intent

- imminence

- likelihood

If the UK had speech protections like the US (which I wish they would) then it would fail the imminence and probably the likelihood tests (you rightly note that it is ineffective).

[1] https://uslawexplained.com/incitement


These tweets had 33 views. At least before being made a charge.

I think that puts the likelihood-factor at zero.


This is an convictable crime in the US. Inciting violence is emphatically not protected speech.

This is definitely not a crime in the US per the US Supreme Court. Several additional conditions not in evidence are required for speech of this type to fall outside of First Amendment protections.

The Something Awful Forums got investigated by the FBI after one or two people posted threats about the current president.

So, uh, yes. It's definitely something that the federal authorities take a dim view on.


You're mixing up "take a dim view" on and investigation, with charging and conviction.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/373

> Several additional conditions not in evidence are required for speech of this type to fall outside of First Amendment protections.

Perhaps your point would be clearer if you indicated what specific conditions you believe are missing. Maybe the tweeter had no followers? Idk, I can only vaguely guess at what you're referring to.


It didn't happen in the US though, so that's neither here nor there. America's political system is not some benchmark that the rest of the world needs to judge themselves against.

Sounds fine.

> I'm not sure if that has any impact on how fun a game is.

It might if the game has a more-than-perfunctory story, because authors often incorporate their political or religious beliefs into their stories. (This is usually a good thing: most of the novels that people love would be nothing if stripped of those themes.)


It's unfortunate that The Good Scott Adams occasionally gets mixed up with The Evil Scott Adams. It's so ironic that they share a name.

Many people know who the The Evil Scott Adams is, because he's such an unrepentant attention starved troll who is notorious not only for making a sock puppet to praise and flatter himself as a genius on internet forums, but for his obsessive unvarnished hateful bigotry, racism ("blacks are a hate group"), misogyny, conspiracy theories, anti-health-care-for-poor-people ideology, and Trump boot licking, and he obsessively infuses his MAGA religion into everything he says and does. Enough said.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Good Scott Adams, a pioneer of the Adventure game genre, who is devotedly Christian, but in the kind, uplifting, well meaning, Jimmy Carter kind of way. He's a really nice guy, who did lots of quality groundbreaking work!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer)

He didn't infuse his original games in the 70's and 80's with ham fisted Christian themes or any kind of bigotry. And he did a Bible based game in 2013, but it was clearly labeled as such, not trying to sneak religion in through the back door.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Scott_Adams_Adventure_...

https://web.archive.org/web/20130408091921/http://www.msadam...

He showed up to do an AMA on Hacker News:

https://madned.substack.com/p/the-further-text-adventures-of...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29330015

Somebody asked him about his faith, and he sincerely talked about his religion, but didn't evangelize or anything like that, he just talked about himself when asked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29330732

cenazoic on Nov 24, 2021 | prev | next [–]

To piggyback on MPSimmons’ question, have you played any of the interactive fiction from the 1995 revival on?

I read in your interview that you consider your company Clopas as a ‘company of Christians’, rather than a ‘Christian company’, and that you make games “[which] God can use in His glory to uplift people..”

Can you discuss more about what ‘uplift’ means to you, and how it’s reflected in your games? What’s an example of a non-uplifting game/mechanic?

I’m not a Christian, but I find this idea a fascinating one. My mind first goes to something like RDR2, which while perhaps not uplifting in the traditional sense, reminded me of the awe of natural beauty (or God’s creation, if you prefer). Or do you mean more like - the game somehow inspires the player to be a better person, for various definitions of ‘better’?

Thanks for taking the time today!

ScottAdams on Nov 24, 2021 | parent | next [–]

You raise execellent questions. Thanks for asking!

To me uplift means to leave the player in a better state than when they started.

To bring them closer to God's Glory and plan for their life. To see the Universe and as an incredible place to be and to see Life as an incredible gift from our most awesome and loving Creator.

I am looking forward to an eternity of exploration, discovery and insprired creation due to the agency of my savior and friend Jesus.

ScottAdams on Nov 24, 2021 | parent | prev | next [–]

I did miss your first part of your questions and appologize. In most cases I have not played most IF that is out there. Though Myst stands out as an incredible exception to that. But it of course was mostly non-verbal and delight to eyes.

Part of the reason of not playing many is a reticence to accidentally steal a puzzle idea (via absortion as it were) and the other is simply I have way more fun writing, coding and designing :)


Good stuff. I followed the link to Good Scott's wiki page and learned he helped out on a text adventure as recently as 2018. That's pretty interesting.

> The browser is just a tool, not a religion.

An ad blocker is a very useful tool. Being able to block ads effectively makes the browser much better. I'm not sure how you can call that "religion".

> People use Chrome because it's the best browser.

No they don't. They use Chrome because every Google service nags the shit out of them to use Chrome. People aren't as rational as you make them out to be.


Yes it does. Having a browser that truly has the user's back, without always trying to compromise the user's interests in favor of advertisers - that would be a benefit to society.

I wish Firefox would be that browser.


I can't be bothered addressing the rest because it's like trying to explain emotions to a robot, but if you have a poorly hinted font, you will notice, because it'll be annoyingly blurry unless you have a high DPI display.

That's because it's not an article, it's a section of Butterick's book. (He also has a book at https://practicaltypography.com/ that isn't targeted at lawyers, and I think a lot of the content overlaps.)

I agree that he's a bit too mean to mainstream fonts, though.


The problem with some of the less mainstream fonts is that they are not always readily available/transferrable. I don't tend to have issues with TNR going funny in another format. As for Helvetica, I don't think Microsoft supports it and created Arial which is an inferior version of it.

I agree! More praise: it's well-hinted, has good support for Unicode and math, and comes packaged with macOS.

It should be mentioned that the x-height is much higher than the usual Times New Roman, which is usually a good thing imo, but different.


> each judge could apply his own preferred styling for working with it

It kind of makes sense to ensure that everyone is seeing the same thing, though, which is something PDF is (relatively) good at.


Tbh whether I use spaces around em dashes depends more on the font than anything. Some fonts have em dashes that are so long that putting spaces around them would be ridiculous.

The "voice" of chatbots comes from the stuff after the main training, which is very different to the average human voice. Even the main training would give you something like "average on the internet" voice, which is quite different to the average human voice.

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