Originally published at: Roblox award ceremony canceled after developer with "high capacity magazine" fights cops there | Boing Boing
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Now that’s what I call a headline.
ETA: that was flippant, but whoa. My youngest wants Roblox so badly because a lot of her friends use it, but I don’t want that stink anywhere near her. Any mutants have experience or opinions there?
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… why do cops talk like this 
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My two nephews play Roblox quite a bit and my sister explained to me that their accounts are locked down in such a way that no one can chat with them and they can’t chat to other people either. They can apparently talk to one another though. There’s also options to restrict the player to ‘all-ages’ content. So I imagine it can be fairly safe to let your kid play. Though like anything it probably needs to be monitored.
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I know Idiocracy is a bit of a cliche for this kind of stuff, but it did a real good job with ‘cop talk’.
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Thank you! I’m not sure that I’ll let the little one get it, she has Minecraft and Lego worlds already, Roblox’s immoral reputation makes me very wary.
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It is most likely how you say that a white guy did it without having to say that a white guy did it.
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AFAICT the only reason to say “the adult male” instead of “the man” is that the speaker wishes to create ambiguity concerning whether the person described is human or not 
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I think there’s two factors at play. There’s a mistaken belief that plain language is somehow imprecise, and for whatever reason, that belief is rampant in police departments. So they attempt to use some kind of formal legalese-ish language. Ironically, courts, and the legal field in general, are very strongly pushing to use plain language and get away from legalese and Latin.
Another factor is that referring to someone as an adult male instead of a man is dehumanizing. An adult male what? You see the same thing online a lot when a certain subset of men refer to women as females. It’s objectifying and dehumanizing. The police don’t want people to think of the people they arrest as people. They want people to think of them as criminals. People have rights. Criminals don’t. People are mostly good. Criminals are mostly bad. So, they refer to a suspect as an adult male, or a black male, or an Hispanic female. It makes it easier for the people reading these stories to see them as “others”.
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I’ve a similar situation. Though thankfully my 2 'NCodelings have only passively mentioned Roblox.
I
've skipped out on the Code-Ninjas learn to code camps and programs as they have a lot of Roblox in their advertising materials.
As a Sr. software dev myself, I hope I can get them their code learnings without it. Thankfully the peer pressure is mostly geared to Minecraft and I have that under sufficient control. Only local network multi-player allowed.
The Roblox ecosystem is not one I’m willing to subject my progeny to.
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We have Roblox installed on some of our patron computers in my library, specifically the children’s department and teen area computers. I only know this was requested by the respective departments, I don’t know anything about using the software itself. I know they are not provided with an account (and the computers are set to ephemeral mode, so nothing is retained between user sessions.) It may be time to read more about this and pass along the information to those departments.
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