The mods of a certain pair of tankie instances a few months ago were talking about taking over all other instances of Lemmy while the userbases became increasingly hostile towards users who disagreed with the idea that Stalin/Lenin did nothing wrong and that China is a perfect country who can do no wrong and has never done anything bad.
People have the right to not be harassed and take action to prevent said harassment.
WoW has historically worked on a daily limit to progression model for the endgame, so the 3 day early access is potentially a 3 day permanent boost for the people who buy it. I would imagine competitive raiders going for world first and “clearing hard difficulty versions of raids while they’re current content” achievements and their related rewards will be essentially mandated to buy it.
As for gamers obsessing over things at launch, I wish it were different, but I think of it like movies or TV shows. If you go and watch a movie a year after it came out, nobody is gonna be talking about it anymore. And for some people, that social buzz around a new piece of media is half the fun. Playing a game and talking about it with your friends, the sense of discovery finding things out before you can just look it up on some wiki site, etc.
I totally understand this, because we often attribute features that are either androgynous or culturally considered feminine (but especially androgynous features) with prepubescence. So you’ve got the rounded faces and lack of secondary sex characteristics that we would associate with older people, plus fashion that could easily be considered “younger,” and despite probably being intended to be 20 or so, they look much younger.
As somebody who’s got that scruffy white Jesus look going on but doesn’t have a square jawline and often wears hoodies, I’ve more than once been mistaken for a high school/college student - even by high school students no less - despite being in my 30s. Being hit on by college kids almost 10 years younger than you is an awkward experience I would not wish on anyone. As is having your mom be mistaken for your grandmother.
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.
Made in Abyss vibes, 10/10. A great worldbuilding aesthetic of a city of would-be adventurers hanging on the edge of the ruins they want to but can’t explore.
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.
Exactly. Shocking as it may be to some people, we can hate 2 flavors of fascism at the same time. And it’s not like lemmy as a whole has had to defederate from 2 Nazi instances in the past couple of months due to their awful behavior, which cannot be said for a certain 2 tankie instances.
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’ve seen people make the argument that no matter what you do if they successfully break adblockers, Google stands to make a profit, but it could actually hurt advertisers.
Obviously, if you stop watching, then that’s less overhead for them, and if you pay for premium, then that’s literal money in their wallet. But if you start watching ads, Google can leverage more money from advertisers for the increased views. But people who use adblockers are unlikely to click ads, so advertisers pay more for their ads to be shown to people who weren’t going to click on them anyway.
Ironically, it’s in both our interest and advertisers to stop Google from breaking adblockers.
On the one hand, you gotta do what you gotta do to put food on the table. But on the other hand, that’s 3 years to be looking for a new employer…
But they will stop hiring artists, and that’s more to the point of what they were saying. We’re already seeing some jobs being replaced with algorithms (mostly stuff like shitty click bait journalism, but still), and art has long been considered a skill not worth paying for. In centuries past, art used to be something only the rich could afford. Now, people get upset if artists charge $60 for a commission.
The algorithms won’t need to produce work better than we can, or even equal. It just needs to make stuff that seems value appropriate. People have already made algorithms to imitate certain popular artists’ styles, and they’ve seen a hit to their income as a result. Why get a commission done from one of them when you can go online and get 50 for free that are kinda close, and then just pick the one you like.
Yes, this is a political issue, and yes, I’m concerned about regulation, because of laws like this that will potentially hurt unrelated people like myself in the process because people who have little understanding of the subject already have an opinion on it. Simply stating the facts can drive somebody who has already formed an opinion based on their immediate emotional response even deeper into their stance without being concerned about how that stance affects others (or they might just jam their fingers in their ears and ignore any facts that don’t align with their worldview, like anti-vaxers).
I’m a trans woman who runs a business on Etsy selling 3d printed earrings. If I had a criminal record and lived in New York, this law could potentially put my ability to put food on the table at risk as collateral damage in the name of fighting ghost guns. Obviously, I have a strong opinion on the matter, as it could directly affect me.
My entire life is a “political issue.” In the first 6 months of this year, Republicans tried to pass at least 235 anti-trans laws. That’s more than 1 law per day, attempting to regulate me out of daily life, with the support of a voting populace with little understanding of the subject who have already formed an opinion on it. Like this law, those laws don’t affect me, but they’re still “political issues” that could put my rights at risk, just like laws like this one.
Obviously, I don’t know your opinion on the matter of 3d printed guns (or if you even have one), but the people who get upset at people who “always make things political” are the people who have never had their rights at risk of being revoked.
I meant to put it in my second paragraph, but I meant 100% printed PLA full auto guns chambered in pistol calibers (with maybe some basic metal parts inside). I’m not really into the gun part of 3d printing, but I keep an eye on it because there’s been a lot of innovation there that has changed manufacturing ideas in the rest of the 3d printing world. They figured out how to rifle a metal barrel with nothing more than a bucket of saltwater and an electric current, no milling machines or anything required! We definitely aren’t in the world of one-shot pistols using rubber bands in the trigger anymore.
There used to be a fantastic documentary on the history of 3d printed guns I would recommend people watch by a channel on YouTube called 3d Print General, which mostly does 3d printer reviews and stuff, but the video recently got deleted by YouTube, despite some of the VICE videos showing more about how to actually make 3d printed guns than his documentary.
But the thing I always want to make clear to people is that the vast majority of people printing guns are the equivalent of the guys making kit cars in their garage - hobbyists, not criminals. Because you can buy a $200+ printer and spend the time learning how to use it, or you can go to a state with no gun laws and buy a cheap pistol for $150 from a gun shop.
Yup. In California, in fact. By a Republican governor named Ronald Reagan.
Your average consumer grade 3d printer cannot print in metal. I looked into this at one point for jewelry, and you need commercial printers that cost thousands upon thousands of dollars for most metals.
Having said that, yes, 3d printing guns has reached a point where people can make 100% 3d printed full auto guns in pistol calibers. In fact, that’s exactly what the Burmese resistance groups are using to fight back against the genocidal regime in their country. Because nobody in the international community cares enough to support them with military arms, but they can get 3d printers to print enough guns that they can kill and loot soldiers for better guns.
As of a few months ago, lemmygrad is run by them as well. I don’t remember the specifics, but there was talk of some form of taking over every other Lemmy instance as well (I know there were calls for it from at least one of the tankie communities, either lemmygrad or hexbear), and the general hostility of both lemmygrad and hexbear users was why many instances defederated from them at that time.