Ihave a congenial condition known as Septo Optic Dysplasia. This condition impacts my sight and endocrine system. It means I am severely sight-impaired and work with a guide dog. It's a very demanding, chronic illness.
Even though I knew these comments were from people hiding behind their keyboards, it still filled me with a sense of fear. The idea that being online could mean receiving more hateful comments, played havoc with my mental health. While I had hundreds of positive, kind and sensitive comments from my audience, my mind would always settle back on the negative ones.
When reporting comments on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube there needs to be specific options to report different kinds of hate crime, disability included. The police recognise the different kinds of hate crime - the same thing should apply to social media.
The truth is, the internet and specifically social media are instrumental to the disability community and the way we live our lives. We use it to get advice and stay social when our disabilities make it difficult to get out and about. We should all have the freedom to use social media and not have to face hate crime. But if we do face it, there needs to be a clear reporting system implemented by social media platforms to deal with it.
The site,
nohomeforhate.md.gov, comes as the number of hate-bias incidents in the state has been steadily increasing, from 388 in 2021 to 465 in 2022, according to the most recent report from Maryland State Police. The 2022 numbers were three times higher than the 155 incidents reported in 2014.
The portal can be used anonymously by victims and witnesses of hate crimes, but officials caution that it does not replace a police report. People who see or are subject to a hate crime should call 911 first to summon local police, then turn to the reporting site.
Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions:
edi...@marylandmatters.org. Follow Maryland Matters on Facebook and X.
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Analogue: A Hate Story is a visual novel featuring semi-static manga-style character images, and focused on reading text logs. Using the mouse and keyboard, the player interacts with the Mugunghwa's main computer to read log entries, communicate with the AIs, and occasionally enter commands directly into the vessel's computer system. At any time in the game, the player can save their game, adjust options, etc.
The main user interface allows the player to read through various diaries and letters that reveal the game's backstory and insight into its many (deceased) characters. For the most part, navigating this interface is similar to navigating a basic e-mail system, in that messages are chronologically arranged and searchable. They are grouped in usually numbered "blocks", released to the player by *Hyun-ae or *Mute throughout the game. For the most part, the AIs release blocks "out of order", or do not release all entries in a block, forcing the player to assemble the timeline of events out of what clues they have, and draw certain conclusions independently until (or if) the AIs can be convinced to be more forthcoming. In most cases, the player can, after reading a log entry, show its content to the currently active AI. This is the primary process by which additional information and message blocks are revealed. Players can also type in an entry's alphanumeric ID in the main log menu to obtain it directly, as long as its corresponding block is decrypted.
Due to the branching nature of the story, the game must be played more than once to unlock all logs to complete the game, as it is impossible to reveal all log entries and information from the AIs in one playthrough. A log system separate from the game's save files displays all discovered logs from all playthroughs, effectively tracking the player's overall completion.
Set several thousand years in the future, Analogue revolves around the Mugunghwa (Korean: 무궁화; RR: Mugunghwa), a generation ship that lost contact with Earth some 600 years prior to the events of the game. For reasons initially unclear, society aboard the ship had degraded from that of modern, 21st Century South Korea, to the intensely patriarchal culture of the medieval Joseon Dynasty.[8][9] In the process, the ship's clocks were reset to year 1, and the colonists began using Hanja characters to read and write. The reasons for why such a cultural shift has occurred is lost to time, leaving the player to formulate the cause on their own. Over the three centuries after the shift, the ship's birth rates began to gradually decline, to below the "replacement rate" of noble families.[10] By year 322, the ship inexplicably went dark, falling into a state of severe disrepair.
In Analogue's present, 622 years later, the Mugunghwa is discovered in orbit above Antares B, a star system en route to its destination. A friend of the protagonist's, a dispatch officer, is the one who discovers the ship on their radar; this catches the attention of the Saeju Colony Historical Society (which suggests that humans have established planetary colonies beyond Earth), who sponsors the recovery of any remaining text logs that can explain the ship's disappearance.[2] The dispatch officer gives the unnamed silent protagonist, an independent investigator, this "job" in the introduction message for its isolation from social situations; this implies that the protagonist is somewhat asocial,[2] but beyond this their personality and background is based almost entirely upon the player's decisions. The protagonist encounters two AI cores within the ship's computer. The first, *Hyun-ae (Korean: 현애; RR: Hyeon-ae), is a bright, cheerful girl who loves cosplay, and is highly curious about the player and the future they come from. The other, *Mute,[2] is the ship's security AI and self-proclaimed "social creature", who outranked all but Emperor Ryu, her master and Captain of the ship. The AIs dislike one another intensely, apparently due to the event that led to the ship's demise. The logs the player must recover are written by members of the Imperial Ryu family, the noble Kim and Smith families, and those linked to them. The game relies heavily on this unreliable narrator mechanic, where the AI characters and log entries thematically withhold key information from the player in order to add to the importance of certain elements of the plot (e.g. the administrator password to the ship's computer).
In Analogue's introductory cutscene, the protagonist receives a message from a colleague, who tasks them with accessing the text logs aboard the Mugunghwa, and download as many as possible, as sponsored by the Saeju Colony Historical Society.[2] After enabling the system AI using a Linux-style terminal, *Hyun-ae greets the player, pleasantly shocked to find an external connection. She expresses her gratitude to the player for contacting the ship "after so many years", and promises that she will do her utmost to help access the logs.[7]
As the player reads the logs, *Hyun-ae provides commentary on the letters and diaries of the late inhabitants of the Mugunghwa. A key series of logs discovered with *Hyun-ae is the diary of the Pale Bride, a sick girl on the ship who was placed in stasis so her compromised immune system could be cured by future medical technology not available during her lifetime. The Pale Bride was brought out of stasis many years later by the descendants of her immediate family, the Kim family, in order to serve as a fertile young bride to Emperor Ryu In-ho, captain of the Mugunghwa. She found herself in a culturally reverted, deeply misogynistic society, writing that "[e]veryone's so uneducated and stupid".[11] The Pale Bride, accustomed to the more liberal society of her own time, has difficulty assimilating with this reverted culture, and often describes youthful rebellions in her diary entries.
After giving the player a key entry from the Pale Bride's diary, *Hyun-ae reveals that she is the AI form of the Pale Bride, and asks the player to decrypt a block of restricted data by entering the override terminal in super-user mode (accessible only by entering a certain password). While attempting to do so, the player encounters a corrupted AI core and is forced to restore it to proceed. This activates *Mute, who reveals that *Hyun-ae may be linked to the ship's demise by referring to her as "that murderous bitch".[12] As only one of the AIs can be active at a time (determined by keying in Linux-like terminal commands), the path through the story and the revelations contained within the many logs and messages branch based on decisions made by the player - most relevantly, which AI receives the most attention.
Eventually, it is revealed that the Pale Bride (now *Hyun-ae) was brutally treated by the Kim family after they awoke her from stasis.[11] After many small rebellions and increasingly serious punishments, going so far as to refusing to be wed to Emperor Ryu, to whom she had been promised as a bride and concubine, her adoptive parents[24] cut out her tongue to prevent the young girl from speaking out against men (a trauma *Mute was unaware of to the game's present).[19] After her marriage, Hyun-ae became close friends with the Emperor's first wife, Empress Ryu Jae-hwa.[26] She calls her "stronger than I ever was", not letting men order her around "while still knowing her place"; as well as the only person to notice Hyun-ae's muteness and failing health. Upon the Empress's sudden death, Hyun-ae's sorrow and rage ultimately drove her to kill everyone she hated aboard the Mugunghwa by deactivating its life support systems.[22] As the crew suffocated to death, she retreated into the computer system as an AI by using a "neurosynaptic" scan of her brain and a copy of *Mute's AI coding, which she used to deactivate the security AI up until Analogue's present. This explains the *Hyun-ae's hatred of the Kims, *Mute's hatred of *Hyun-ae, and acts as a key factor for the player's decisions.
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