Malaysia banned social media for under-16s. Applause. Headlines. Politicians pleased with themselves. And completely useless. The government arrived late and with dirty hands Platforms with more than 8 million users in Malaysia now need age verification systems, under threat of fines up to $2.5 million. Looks good on paper. But where was this government when those platforms colonized the phones of 9-year-olds for years? The law comes after the damage is done. This is not protection. It is image management. And there is more: if the solution is "show your ID to go online," Malaysia risks creating new vulnerabilities, including fraud, data leaks, and surveillance-style data collection. The government claiming to protect children may be building a control infrastructure for the entire population. The education system failed before any social network existed Schools spent decades teaching obedience, memorization, and digital passivity. No serious media literacy. No critical thinking about algorithms, manipulation, or echo chambers. The idea behind the ban is to prevent or delay harm until young people's brains are more developed. But developed brains without education remain vulnerable. A 16-year-old who never learned to question what they see on a screen is not protected by having waited one more year. Schools could have been the antidote. They chose to be irrelevant. Parents? Accomplices by comfort This is the part nobody wants to hear. It was parents who put tablets in the hands of 3-year-olds for some peace and quiet. It was parents who bought smartphones for 10-year-olds without a single conversation about what that device actually was. It was parents who did not know, and many who did not want to know, what their children were watching, following, and consuming for hours on end. Parents will not be penalized if their children bypass the system. Of course not. Because the system knows parents are part of the problem and does not have the courage to say so. A community initiative in Ireland in 2023 convinced most residents of a town to ban smartphones for their children until secondary school. Three years later, children and parents reported being happier and better adjusted. That was not a law. It was a collective decision by adults who chose to be parents instead of domestic conflict managers. What this law really is It is a government doing the work that parents never did, through mechanisms that schools never built, for a generation that the system trained to be passive and consumptive. A blanket ban is not the answer to legitimate concerns about the harmful effects of social media on children. This issue demands a more nuanced approach. But a nuanced approach would require parents, schools, and governments to take real accountability, and that is far harder than signing a law. Malaysia took the easy way out. And everyone will pretend it was enough.

The point about fragility vs weakness is underrated. Most people conflate the two, but they're completely different problems. Fragility is specific and situational, weakness is general. One you can address with the right conversation, the other you probably can't fix at all. Great distinction.

O what is happening goes far beyond a technical violation of an agreement. When someone in the audience shouted that Israel should take 100% of Gaza, Netanyahu did not dispute it, he simply replied "first 70%, we'll start with that." The direction of travel is explicit in the prime minister's own words. In March, the Israeli army quietly sent maps to humanitarian organizations showing it had already advanced 11% beyond the Yellow Line, controlling 64% of the territory rather than the 53% agreed upon. The ceasefire was being hollowed out quietly, long before this public announcement. More than 900 people have been killed since the truce began, according to Gaza's health ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the UN. It is hard to call this a ceasefire with a straight face. Two million people already living in disastrous conditions after two years of war would be forced to compress themselves into an even smaller area. The territorial mathematics has a name when applied to civilian populations, and the international community keeps hesitating to say it.

What an incredible article, Marc — this is exactly the kind of gaming archaeology the internet needs to preserve. What strikes me about the *Vic Viper: Battle Racing* story isn't just the fact that the game was cancelled, but the *perfect timing that was lost*: we're talking about 1995, the same year F-Zero was running on the SNES and Wipeout was debuting on PlayStation. The market was hungry for futuristic racing, and Konami was sitting on one of the most iconic spaceship IPs in arcade history. A racing game built around the Gradius aesthetic and lore would have been a genuinely surprising and distinct entry — not just another F-Zero clone, but something with its own identity thanks to the visual universe of Salamander and company. The vehicle select screen you shared says a lot. Attack, defense, main weapon, sub-weapon… this isn't a race with shallow ship collisions. There's a thought-out combat system in place, which pushes the concept much closer to an *Extreme-G* or even a *Twisted Metal in space* than a traditional F-Zero. That hybridization of shoot 'em up and combat racing was genuinely bold for the era. The detail about the soundtrack being released in 2011 as part of *Konami Shooting Collection* is both fascinating and melancholy — it means the game progressed far enough to have a fully composed score, and likely much more code than the "40% complete" documented in 1995 would suggest. How many builds are sitting on some forgotten hard drive in Konami's archives? For fans of historical gaming vaporware: this case sits comfortably alongside *Star Fox 2* (shelved for decades before its official release) and *EarthBound 64*. The difference is that those eventually surfaced in some form. For *Vic Viper: Battle Racing*, the chances look increasingly slim — especially given Konami's current state. And the question that lingers: if M2 is already reviving the Gradius catalog with *Gradius Origins*, is a conversation about historical prototypes happening somewhere behind closed doors? A playable "what if" would be enough to send the retro gaming community into a frenzy. Excellent work unearthing this story, Marc. This kind of content is what separates real games journalism from simple "best games of the 90s" listicles.

Your GitHub graveyard has more commits than your live products. You've been "almost done" for 8 months. You didn't lose motivation. You were never really building, you were performing the idea of building. There's a difference. A painful one.

Something that rarely gets discussed when people talk about Prescription 3 is how badly this hits bootstrapped SaaS founders specifically. You pour everything into acquisition, CAC is already brutal, and then the moment the customer converts you mentally move on to the next one. I watched three of my own products plateau around the same MRR for months before I realised the churn was eating every new signup. The post-sale experience was essentially nonexistent. No onboarding sequence worth mentioning, no check-in at day 30, nothing. The Zappos example in the article sounds obvious in hindsight but most indie founders are so deep in growth mode they genuinely do not register that the customer who just paid is already at risk.