Roblox, kneecaps and lost cats.

I endure the inanity of that awful Roblox place so you don't have to.

There’s been a lot of talk this week about the federal ALP government succumbing to a long campaign by News Ltd against Meta with a ban on social media for children by the end of the year.

Not sure how it will work. Is it just Facebook and Instagram? TikTok too? WhatsApp? Will we need ID? God knows. It’s a mess.

“We know social media is causing social harm, and it is taking kids away from real friends and real experiences. The safety and mental and physical health of our young people is paramount. We’re supporting parents and keeping kids safe by taking this action, because enough is enough.” - Anthony Albanese

As a parent of a 10yo girl and a 6yo boy, I’m fine with anything to help us in big tech’s war against our children, but the onus always ends up on us, the parents to do the hard work. These vampiric, trillion dollar companies are doing everything they can to squeeze every bit of attention out of every member of our families and ruin our children’s health. The tech is designed to suck us in, and our kids don’t have a chance against it.

Did you know those little games they/we all play with are designed by the same companies that make poker machines? Yeah, that one linked to in the previous sentence is Aristocrat Gaming, the little Aussie batter, scumbag of a company that makes most of the world’s poker machines and makes garbage mobile games that half a billion people play every day.

Which leads us to Roblox.

Every few months we get a question from one of the other parents of either of our kids about Roblox. What do we think of it? Do we let them play it? It’s always a NO WAY from us.

Roblox is a creepy hole full of garbage games made by garbage people. And the games are full of garbage people who want to talk garbage with your kids.

To make it clearer for you, I just got in there and had a look. Created a new account as a 6yo kid, no gender.

The first game that the Roblox algorithm threw up at me, top left of my screen as a ‘hot’ recommendation was this…

“A bodybuilding simulator with realistic muscle physics and competitions.”

Hold on. This sounds yuck. Should a 6yo be playing this and picking up concepts of what a body should look like? Hmm… Nah, it’ll be okay, surely.

Here’s the game’s introduction video. Strap yourself in. It’s a lot.

What. The. Flying. Duck. So it’s saying that you better muscle up if you’re having a hard time at school. Oh god. Surely not. Let’s get into the game. You start looking round and flabby. Then you have to do exercises in an outdoor gym to get bigger.

So you can get buffed enough to go to school and take part in a competition.

Yeah, yeah. The competition is at school. It’s wrong on so many levels.

You’re smart enough to know that this is an incredibly dangerous body image message to give to young boys. It’s also an early training ground to the disgusting manosphere, a place where you NEED to have muscles, you NEED to act horribly, something great organisations like The Man Cave are warning us about.

This bad man stuff is affecting children you know. A close friend, a teacher, was recently barked at by boy students. A blind woman we know was barked (what’s with the barking? anyone know?) and sworn at by school kids at the end of my street, just last week.

And if that isn’t enough, the games you play on Roblox are using tracking cookies to read what your kids are doing in there. The data they take in can be used to serve ads when they’re online, anything from body building supplements ads to cage fighting videos on YouTube.

Sure, you can opt out of these cookies somewhere deep inside the settings, and sure, Roblox say they won’t help anyone advertise to kids under 13. But do you trust the millions of dodgy sweat shop developers who make those 40 million games at that place to be fully compliant? I don’t.

Besides, the entire platform is a ruse to get kids to get their parents to buy in-game credits, so that’s advertising to kids!

Then there’s the first person shooters like this where you’re given the same gun that school shooters to shoot other players with. What’s the bet that your kids get gun and NRA ads served to you after a few hours on this👇?

And of course, it’s not just the stuff aimed at boys that’s so icky on Roblox. Young girls love these games where you choose nice clothes to wear, put them on, do a fashion parade and afterwards get points based on votes by other players of how pretty you are. Here’s one I played. It looks completely normal…not.

I had a go and worked out real quick how to win the votes… don’t put many clothes on. This is me in second place out of 15 contestants.

The comments from other players are inane or CREEPY AS. I know you can make it so your kid doesn’t have message contact but do you really want your little girl to be in there with that?

And then there’s the withdrawal when you take these games that have been made to be more addictive than smack. It’s awful what a kid can be like when it’s taken away. But they don’t want to miss out on what the other kids in class are playing. That’s easy to understand, but it’s better to get them something else, maybe Minecraft, maybe the Apple Arcade subscription games that don’t rely on contact with other players.

Whatever. But Roblox sucks. It’s harming children you know. Just don’t.

This missing cat is all everyone is talking about in my neighbourhood. I hope they find him.

There's gotta be a sign on every street inside a two kilometre radius.

Kneecap is the best music movie I’ve seen.

Saw it on Monday and can’t think of a better music movie. Better than Purple Rain. I mean, Purple Rain is great but not great for every single minute like this is. What’s Love Got To Do With It might be as good so I might need to see that again.

The Belfast band themselves star and they’re charming as feck. It’s a heavily exaggerated fact-wise, yet gorgeously recreated vibe-wise biopic. This 👇 video is from one of their early gigs, and somehow the film matches it.

It’s more about culture, language and hope than the music they make. Also very interesting where the women portrayed drive this movie and its resolution almost as much as the band’s Roland 808. Loved every minute.

The lamest GPsBullsh1tcollab yet.

Limited edition due to disinterest.

A collab between Twisties and instagram. You’re supposed to take a photo of the QR code at the back and it’ll open instagram and tell you your fortune and give your next insta photo an daggy, corporate filter. I don’t want to open an app to like a pack of Twisties. I just want to eat the little d1ckheads.

At least it’s honest in that low energy ‘sweet n’ sour’ flavour description cos they’ve been formulated to taste like bugger all. It’s wilful blandness. Say that three times. Wilful blandness. Wilful blandness. Wilful blandness. Feel what that did to your tongue? That’s much more fun you’ll have with it than if you buy these lame Zuckertwisties. One star, Margaret.

Congrats Bang Fam.

Congrats to Myf and Zan for their 300th Bang On episode. They probably should’ve ran through a banner. It was a bloody hilarious episode, especially Myf’s alligator tour guide story, and I also feel honoured to be mentioned as the archetypal Brit Pop/Oasis fanbloke from the olden days - a very fair call.