Online games will now be banned from giving players rewards if they log in every day, if they spend on the game for the first time or if they spend several times on the game consecutively. All are common incentive mechanisms in online games.

Besides banning reward features, games are also required to set limits on how much players can top up their digital wallets for in-game spending.

Games are also banned from offering probability-based lucky draw features to minors, and from enabling the speculation and auction of virtual gaming items.

Tencent, the world's biggest gaming company, tumbled as much as 16% at one point, while NetEase plunged as much as 25%.

"It's not necessarily the regulation itself - it's the policy risk that's too high," said Steven Leung, executive director of institutional sales at broker UOB Kay Hian in Hong Kong. "People had thought this kind of risk should have been over and had started to look at fundamentals again. It hurts confidence a lot."

Tencent Games' vice president Vigo Zhang said Tencent will not need to fundamentally change "its reasonable business model or operations" for games, adding that the company has been strictly implementing regulatory requirements.

Zhang added that minors had been spending a historically low level of money and time on Tencent's games since 2021 when minor protection became a focus for Beijing. In 2021, China set strict playtime limits for under 18s and suspended approvals of new video games for about eight months, citing gaming addiction concerns.

But the new rules included a proposal that is widely expected to be welcomed by the industry, requiring regulators to process game approvals within 60 days. Meanwhile, Chinese regulators announced on the same day licences for 40 new imported games for domestic releases, seen as a signal of Beijing's willingness to allow more games in the country, despite the draft rules on game spending.

I rolled my eyes until I saw where this was published. Huh, that's interesting. I'm way too uneducated to know what this means, but maybe the science peeps I follow will post some vids in the coming weeks.

This is freaking hilarious. I might buy this book just to read more of this:

"Imagine you're stranded on the Red Planet with three crewmembers," Seedhouse, a professor at Daytona Beach's Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University wrote. "You have plenty of life-support consumables but only sufficient food to last one person until the rescue party arrives. What do you do?... One day, while brewing coffee for breakfast, you realize there are three chunks of protein-packed meat living right next to you."

... the biggest of the Mars explorers should sacrifice themselves first because they "both consume and provide the most food." He went on to provide a "weirdly detailed look" at how to cut up one's fellow humans if necessary.

"We don't know where Seedhouse would fall in the buffet line because we couldn't find his height and weight online," the authors wrote, "and honestly we're scared to ask."

In "Survival and Sacrifice"... readers will also find... a photo of ten astronauts smiling in space alongside the caption: "In the wrong circumstances, a spacecraft is a platform full of hungry people surrounded by temptation. Is it wrong to waste such a neatly packaged meal?"

Great marketing.

death toll has risen to at least 10,022 Palestinians, including 4,104 children, with many victims still trapped beneath the rubble and an Israeli siege drying up access to vital goods like fuel, food and electricity.

“The number [death toll] is expected to go up as at least 2,000 people remain under the rubble. The problem is, with lack of heavy equipment and machinery, the rescue teams on the ground are unable to remove and pull out these bodies from under the rubble,”

The number of those wounded since the October 7 start of the bombardment has risen to 25,408… a result of Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of civilian homes, hospitals, refugee camps, and schools, said Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), a United Kingdom-based organisation

Running low on fuel supplies, 16 of Gaza’s 35 hospitals have been forced to suspend operations as the number of people wounded increases and the United Nations said that more than 1.5 million people, which is more than half of Gaza’s population, have been displaced.

Huh. I…don’t know if this is a good abbreviation. FF makes the most sense? Fx seems weird, I’ll be honest. I’ll try though.

They didn’t even give a reason.

So this account was made an hour ago by someone who claims to be an “Anonymous hate researcher that has worked with top academic researchers worldwide on combating hate on social media! Here to document hesitant and bad faith nazi instances!”

Say what you will about Hexbear, we are not Nazis. CTH was banned by Reddit for advocating the k*lling of the precursors of nazis ie slave-owners.

Also, while the majority of our users might identify as “Tankies”, from the very beginning, we have always been a non-sectarian platform that does not tolerate leftist infighting and welcomes all manner of leftists from MLs to anarchists. Yes, we have more MLs but we do have some anarchists and as soon as any shitslinging is pointed out, mods immediately ban it.

Framing us a tankie instance, like some of the others that actually declare so in their rules and ban other forms of leftists is an outright lie if not just a very bad indication of your research skills.

On Russia and China, you can have disagreements with the majority opinion on hexbear itself, as long as you don’t just parrot the US state department line. Is it as good as it can be? No, I myself would like more diversity of opinion on a lot of topics. But we are literally all leftist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. That means any criticism of Russia or China or any of these other “enemy” nations has to be from those perspectives i.e. they cannot be bad faith accusations from Biden or Trump stooges.

From our perspective, which is a leftist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist one, there is no argument that the Western states like the US and its various puppets/allies are obviously terrible and, what did you you say, are “genocidal” and carry out “rampant human rights abuses”. Does this mean other states aren’t? No, not at all.

But because most of us live in these states, which we call the “imperial Core”, these are the states we want to focus on and change, rather than empowering them more unlike the Libs and the Cons who think their own states are somehow better and more civilised than the others.

Again, you can disagree, but it has be well-reasoned and anti-capitalist at the very least.

Also, I was against federation from the start. I’ve always hated the idea. And posts like this do nothing to disprove me. I’ve also noticed you calling people commenting on this post as “brigading”. Pal, this literally showing up on our feed. What do you want us to do?

For the email, you can use an email alias service like Addy or SimpleLogin. They're both open-source and offer free tiers. I never give out my real email to anyone now except actual contacts.

After that, I think a VPN would probably still work to disguise what you're doing from Walmart, but I'm not a 100% certain on that so I won't link any.

But yeah, definitely use email alias wherever you can.

I’m vegan, but when push comes to shove, I can make a temporary exception for rich folk.

I use the firefox web browser app because I refuse to download more apps. I have the ones I have. I’m not getting more.

And how well does this work out to prevent slavery, colonisation, genocide, war etc. especially for the most marginalised and oppressed?

Maybe all it does is make rich people richer and people like you feel better about your powerlessness.

Look into proletarian democracy next if you want a better, still not perfect, but better system of governance for most people.

There are a few manufacturers you can look at. Other than Framework and System76, which you already know of, there’s Tuxedo, Starlabs, Slimbook etc.

Other than that, The Linux Experiment is my go-to channel for Linux-related news. He has a playlist for Linux hardware. You can find some good reviews for different products in there.

Specifically, the reviews for the Tuxedo Stellaris 17 and System76 Pangolin might be of interest. Both have AMD.