Sometimes you just have to accept that the problem exists between the keyboard and chair and work around it.

That’s a great point about the poster and the contest, I’d never made that connection before. I mostly remembered the backlash targeted against the original artist of the poster and the bitter irony of the company using the poster to do the exact thing it was created to criticize. I remember the cosplay contest and thinking that that was a gross costume, but didn’t think any further about their use of the photos of a cis woman cosplaying as an over-sexualized trans woman to sell the game or anything. Just goes to show that even as a member of the targeted community, you can miss these kinds of things.

People are disagreeing with you, but as somebody from one of the most liberal states in the US, Massachusetts, it’s very much the same thing here - the cities are as progressive as it gets, but you don’t have to drive too far before you start seeing the Trump flags and Bible thumpers in their lifted pickups. It’s very easy to fall into that lifestyle if you’ve never been more than 50 kilometers from the house you were born in and never seen somebody with a different skin color from yours. And it doesn’t matter if that house is among fields, forests, or coastline.

New Hampshire/backwoods Maine.

New England does not consent to being considered a part of the same country as the Bible Belt/Florida.

Jokes aside, New Hampshire is known as “The South of the North” for its very…“conservative” political stances.

Reminds me of how something like 60% of video games only exist as emulators, because companies never bothered to preserve them in any form. There was even a remake of a game in the past few years that still had the Skidrow logo in it, because the devs had to go and torrent a pirated copy of the game since the original code was gone and they forgot to remove the cracker’s logo. There was also the infamous GTA remake that was made from the phone version of the game for the same reason.

I agree with you that it’s a complicated issue with no right answer and I don’t think that warrants the total destruction of the piece of media in question. And I don’t think you meant that it did either, but it seems that people think you did.

This situation reminds me of the old episodes of Mickey Mouse (Steamboat Willy? I can’t remember the exact cartoon the episodes came from, if they even came from a specific series at all and weren’t just one-offs) where Disney has a disclaimer on them if they’re ever shown anywhere about how they are for archival purposes only and that they reflect the views and culture of the time that they were made in, and how that doesn’t make those views okay. Because they’re super fuckin’ racist cartoons, like full on black people = monkeys racist, and Disney knows that that’s not okay (more like they know that showing that would lose them money at any rate), but that doesn’t mean that they’re not worth preserving so that we don’t lose sight of what the past actually was like and allow people to slap rose colored glasses on the “better days” or something.

As others have mentioned too, it also depends on how the depiction is used. Like when there was all that outrage over the Cyberpunk 2077 Chimaera “Mix it Up” posters of the girl with the giant “package” under her one piece. Yes, those posters are gross sexual objectification and horribly transphobic, but that’s the point. They’re intended to show how fucked up the dystopia of 2077 America is and how advertising has always used sexual objectification to sell products, and if a company thinks that using trans people’s bodies will sell a product, they absolutely will. Just like they do every year with Rainbow Capitalism during Pride.

There are times when the destruction of something horrible is absolutely the way to go, like when Germany destroyed all the Nazi statues right after WW2 and put a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust where Hitler’s bunker had been. But even then, it’s vital to preserve that past so it can’t be washed away. The Germans also took photos of the statues they destroyed, to preserve it so that something like that can’t happen again. We can’t learn from our mistakes if there’s no evidence that they even happened.

There’s a great video on this that was made when YouTube first started rolling this out called The Cobra Effect: Why Anti-Adblock Policies Could Hurt Revenue Instead, and one of the points mentioned in the video is the rising number of people who use an adblocker, and not specifically mentioned but shown in the video is a graphic from an article from 2015 which shows that just under 43% of people use an adblocker. That number will have obviously changed in the past 7 years, but if we just use 25% of viewers as an estimate, that’s 25% of all viewers on YouTube who may turn to more “malicious” forms of adblocking such as things like AdNaseum and ReVanced or sites that host YouTube videos without the ads, and tell others to do the same if they’re sick of ads. And even if they do give up and watch the ads, the science says that people who use adblockers are much less likely to click on an ad and make a purchase, which is bad for advertisers since they pay for the number of views an ad gets and their clickthrough rate would go down, making it more expensive and less profitable to do business with YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIHi9yH6UB0

For me, it’s more about how much I enjoyed the experience than a simple dollars per hour equation or something. It’s a very case by case basis for me.

I remember when Alien:Isolation came out, I told people I got my money’s worth in just the first hour from how scared shitless I was the first few times the xenomorph came out to hunt you.

On the other side, I got Starfield for $20 off in the release week, but despite how many hours you can sink into that game, I found the entire experience rather bland and dull and regret buying it.

I think this also comes from Keanu being an actor and not a voice actor.

I’ve seen it time and time again, from movies to video games. They hire celebrity actors for the name recognition, but who have no experience in a vocal booth and it shows. Just because somebody is a great actor doesn’t mean they’re a great voice actor. Mark Hamill is an example of somebody who’s both, but he’s spent decades at this point working in voice acting.

And your logic is bass ackwards. The solution is to educate people about how bad letting cats live outdoors is, not pretend that their pet is a feral. All you’ll do that way is eventually come home to broken windows once they find out who stole their cat. Tell them how much better (and longer) their cat’s life will be if they live indoors vs. outdoors and you’re much more likely to actually change something.

The majority of people don’t know any better. And if they grew up with cats, it’s very likely that that’s how they were taught that you care for a cat. It’s only been in the past 20 years or so that the consensus on how cats should be kept has shifted from outdoors to indoors. Hell, look at how common declawing cats still is.

And I want to cull people like you. A shame we don’t always get what we want.

Cats should be kept indoors for a variety of reasons, including that they’re one of the largest threats to native species in the world and that they live longer indoors anyways due to the lack of picking up parasites and are at no risk of being preyed upon by larger predators. But to say you want to murder animals en masse just because they don’t understand property laws and do their business outside like… some sort of animal would is absurd, bordering on psychopathic. Might as well sit on your porch with a shotgun on your lap in case somebody’s dog decides to pee on your bushes.

Even better. Supposedly, there’s a guy around here who flipped the frame of his pickup truck around so it looks like he’s driving backward down the road. Get creative with it!

You jest, but my dad actually had a friend who did this for a living with Ford Pintos back in the day, and one time an inspector of some kind remarked that he made them safer than they were when they rolled off the factory floor.

Wage theft (when employers don’t pay their employees what they’re owed) in the US accounts for more stolen value every year than grand theft auto, larceny, petty theft, and breaking and entering combined. Yet wage theft is not considered a crime.

It’s the same story all over the world. The real issue isn’t the economic system but rather greedy people in positions of power with no accountability.

There’s a reason they’re called “Human Resources” and not Human Relations.

It’s probably a uniquely American thing, similar to how many malls are dying here while they thrive in Europe. Cities have been dying a slow death since like the 70s here because suburbs are a net loss in terms of revenue because they’re more expensive to maintain than the taxes they bring in, so the only way cities can afford them is to sell more land to developers to build more suburbs, which then cost the city money, and repeat into infinity.

Cities have also had a general decline in the population within urban areas during that time, with people moving out to the suburbs for the “American Dream” of owning your own house with a white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and a cat or dog (and to avoid having to look at any poor people, immigrants, or black people). This was exacerbated further during COVID as people fled denser areas. The house prices in my town that’s about an hour away from one of the most expensive cities in the country (comparable to LA prices in the city here) jumped up practically 50% during COVID while prices in the city dropped something like 20% during the first year. Prices in the city have since come back up and are now above what they were before, but prices here never came down.

Cities here also tend to have a business district, sometimes even a “central business district” that’s at the heart of the city, which is made up almost exclusively of office buildings/other companies, with workers commuting into the city. Even my town has people who drive every day to their job in the city. With many of these buildings sitting empty during COVID, there’s been a push for urban renewal by converting them into apartments, but that’s easier said than done. Offices simply don’t have the same infrastructure that apartments need in terms of basic things like plumbing, and would need to be entirely gutted, but it would be a much needed fresh supply of housing that would probably help reinvigorate these city centers.

Steam doesn’t let you actually rate a game; only recommend it or not. So, a game may be a 7/10, but if people can’t recommend it for something like its monetary practices or frequent bugs/crashes, then it can end up on that list. That low rating doesn’t necessarily mean people think it’s the worst game on Steam, but rather that only about 10% of players think it’s worth playing. Though, it’s also worth mentioning that it has something like a 1.2 rating on Metacritic. It’s generally considered a worse game than its predecessor in many aspects (including the readability of its characters, apparently. I guess they made some changes to the original characters’ models that made them less identifiable?), and the reasoning behind shutting down the first one for this new free to play model was canceled. It’s also been having issues with player attrition leading up to the Steam release, so the complaints don’t seem unwarranted, but this probably wouldn’t be happening if these players had some other outlet for their grievances.

Even if you buy a physical copy of Overwatch 1 in a store, when you pop it in your system, it’ll install Overwatch 2 instead.

Why do you people keep talking about “the right to exist”? That’s nonsensical. You either exist, or you don’t. No one can take your existence away from you, it’s not a right that can be granted by others.

Because that’s exactly the kind of “anti-LGBT viewpoint” you’re asking about. You don’t have to go far to find people claiming that being Trans is just a fad, or a cult of pedophiles trying to groom your children, or just mentally ill men, or a nefarious group trying to destroy young girls’ wombs through dangerous surgery. The list goes on and on, and that’s just the recent anti-Trans crusade. These are the kinds of views that they want to bring to social media sites and claim their free speech is being censored when they’re punished for it.

And these views are having real-life consequences. It’s now considered a sex crime for a man to wear a dress in Florida. For several years, transgender people were more likely to be the victim of a hate crime than black or Jewish people in the US, and there’s been an increase of hate crimes against both of those groups as well in the past decade. 8 out of 10 trans women in the US will be victims of sexual assault. LGBT people are one of the most likely groups to be refused medical care, often under the excuse that “it goes against my beliefs.” Some of these groups have even outright said that their goal is to “eliminate transgender people from public life, and eventually, existing entirely.” Some have straight up called for a trans genocide.

These same kinds of arguments have been trotted out for gay and black men - “they’re a bunch of pedophiles coming for your kids!” Or for lesbians - “they’re just damaged women.” Or my favorite, said by a 20-something year old coworker to a 16 year old lesbian coworker, “you’re not a lesbian, you just haven’t had a dick in you yet.”

To the neutral observer, it’s quite clear that certain online communities cough are echo chambers that refuse to engage in honest discussion regarding LGBTQ topics and vigorously attempt to expel and shame those who do not adhere to the party line.

I could not have said it better myself. Time and time again, science has shown that not only do LGBT people exist, but also how damaging the anti-LGBT rhetoric is. And yet, the “anti-LGBT” jam their fingers in their ears and scream about “woke indoctrination” before returning to their echo chambers. And eventually, that’s what these kinds of “free speech” platforms become. Echo chambers for hatred, as these people harass and drive off anybody with opposing views. As a wise bartender once said after kicking out a skinhead just for being a skinhead, “You allow one Nazi, and you no longer have a bar. You have a Nazi bar. Because if you allow one, then they’ll bring their friends, and eventually, they’ll force everyone else out.”

Also, you seem to have fallen for the “both sides” rhetoric they use to make themselves look innocuous while villifying their opponents. Stuff like the people encouraging those who who called in bomb threats to Target and threatened their employees for daring to have a line of Pride themed merchandise by saying it was protesting - that it was the same thing as people marching with signs against police brutality. You talk about the in-group and out-group bias of LGBT people while conveniently ignoring the exact same thing from the other side. Ignoring that these “anti-LGBT” people think they’re being unfairly persecuted and anyone who disagrees with them is a “woke” communist or whatever.

And yet “anti-LGBT” was the term used by the comment above to describe the kinds of viewpoints that they’re questioning why they aren’t allowed. It’s also the label used proudly by some of these groups themselves. Like the term TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) which was coined by the group itself, but was later claimed to be a slur by that very same group when they realized how the majority of people viewed them negatively because of it.