A mentally ill person (possibly borderline) was exploited by predatory journalists who used her for sex and stories, went on to allegedly sleep with at least one GG supporter who "confronted" her with criticism (dealing with negativity in a borderline-like manner), and was just generally exploited by a community who milked their collective victimization to get donations and press from a niche audience of aggrieved zealots who treated it as a religious cause. It was a case that simply served to highlight problems in the journalism and game industries.
I read this as saying that it wasn't Steam's decision, but that's actually not clear. Does anyone know more about that?
I know that some Valve multiplayer games like TF2 are getting bombed by bots right now (and have been all year) and have speculated about who could be behind simultaneously running thousands of instances of bots for months, that have paid accounts running them (as in they have microtransactions in the game) and wondered if it's a state actor, because that's a lot for a small group of people to do just for trolling. I suspect China is pissed at Valve because they have no investors (unlike Epic, Riot, Blizzard, etc., that are part-owned by China and given in to them) and generally have never buckled to pressure, yet remain a top company, valued at billions.
Oh yes, I've experienced a couple of variations of that, and both were intentionally abusive of the "family" thing by forcing people together and calling on subordinates to be unwaveringly loyal (as one would be in a real family) while superiors would say "I'm the cool dad, you can trust me" but continuing to behave worse than a normal corporate asshole, because at least the corporate assholes of the past were frank with it.
I should've mentioned that the goal is to not only replace the family with a debased and useless surrogate, but to use it to control people's behavior through peer pressure, because unlike natural families, friends are almost always fair-weather. Without a genetic bond (or even a community one, which is increasingly being destroyed by design), it's unlikely that people will stick together.
"Friendship is everything" "Friendship is magic" "You wouldn't want to do anything to lose your friends, your only family, would you?"
We're at the point now where many in gen Y say that they have no real friends or family, and social media is basically their entire social world. Imagine how that controls their behavior, as they feel they can only do what the influencers or followers like, or be called out by the only human contact that they have.
They've already achieved that with pre-history by convincing everyone that "out of Africa" was real, or that humans, having existed hundreds of thousands of years, with artifacts tens of thousands of years old found all over the world, and evidence of surviving major worldwide cataclysms 12k years ago, had no civilizations before those in Africa about 10k years ago.
I was confused on that point for a while, because I noted that Disney movies all allegedly promote family, yes? Like the Carrie Fisher quote of saying, "It's all about family," in reference to nu-Wars. Except, there were almost no instances of actual, functioning families being shown in these films.
Then it clicked in place that they're not promoting real families, but the replacement of them with some fake "family" group. E.g. don't marry or have kids; get alienated from your parents and then join the Avengers and be an hero!
Real family bad because they might counteract your public school/media programming with their traditions and evolved unwavering loyalty! Satisfy your instinctual longing for a tribe of related peoples by instead pretending that some support groups for your mental illnesses are your family!
It's the same with any contract-worker service that I've tried in the northern coastal areas. Drivers that are not only recent immigrants, but angry and demanding.
Happy to say that it's not like that in the midwest or south.
The credit card payment processing refusal gave an excuse to purge unverified content, which I would guess conveniently included videos with Biden's son and/or other family, and who knows what else that hadn't been found yet.
Oh, I just happened to think of one other thing, re: if the Federation is multi-cultural.
There was that time that Sisko yelled at Worf (IIRC) that as a Starfleet member you must adapt to Starfleet culture and can't just do something because it's part of your race's culture (forgot the exact quote but I think this was in the episode where Worf's brother requests an honor-killing).
The Federation has limited tolerance for other cultures, but doesn't ease its own standards to accommodate them, which is how America used to be before the current generation of leftists gained power.
Most leftist organizations crumble over money problems within a short amount of time. Several in Portland did it in record time this year, taking donations for distributing food during lockdowns or riots, and then vanishing with excuses that it was hard. The orgs that don't crumble like that have corporate or wealthy sponsors, so it's impressive that BLM has both been around for years, had sponsors and public support, and is still disintegrating now.
I would guess that most probably eat replicated food for convenience, but there are alternatives that might actually be better.
The average Federation colonist appears to be a farmer, so there are many that are raising crops or animals for food. Picard's family has the vineyard, showing that farming and real food production still happens on Earth.
There are also restaurants that serve only real food, like the one run by Sisko's father. Nog visits there because they have live worms to eat.
O'Brien says that his mother only cooked real food, and I believe Keiko was growing crops on DS9, which Sisko also used to cook. Similar with Kes growing crops and Neelix cooking it on Voyager, although they had a shortage of matter for the replicator, which may indicate that the replicator is actually expensive to use and really is just about convenience.
We also see that Klingons are probably eating real food as they're eating live or raw animals or meat, which a replicator can't make. They go hunting when they're on a planet. There was also the Klingon restaurant on DS9 that appeared to serve real food, and Dax talks about getting in shipments of Klingon food for Martok's birthday. However, the crew of that station mostly seems to go to the Replimat or Quark's, which I assume is faster due to using replicators.
As for quality of replicated food, there are quotes of people saying its good, but others saying its not the same, so I assume its acceptable but noticably different and some people have a preference for natural food while others are happy to eat processed food all the time, as is true today.
Well said. I also don't believe, contrary to the popular leftist opinion, that the Federation is post-scarcity or even post-currency or post-capitalism, because there's many instances where they seem to not be and both the Federation and its members are engaging in trade and business. My head-canon on this is that they've made common goods on Earth cheap enough to produce that they're essentially free, so no one there "wants" for anything, but they haven't literally done away with all trade. Essentially, a technological rather than a governmental solution to poverty.
Some other things that I see as probably right-wing in it:
An argument can be made that the Prime Directive is gatekeeping and maybe even racist, because it advocates not sharing technology with or helping any society that hasn't reached a certain level of technology already, in most circumstances. There are a few instances where they intervene to stop extinction-type events, but mostly their policy is to stay away and let nature take its course where they can.
Although the Federation is presented as post-racial at least regarding people from Earth, they also openly discriminate in their postings based upon racial differences between different humanoids to some degree. E.g. when Kirk asks to replace Spock with another Vulcan; many crews are mostly from Earth, but there are crews that are mostly or entirely Vulcan, as seen in DS9; Worf likely receives his postings based upon being a Klingon, same with Troi and others, etc. Essentially, the Federation seems to acknowledge that there are different strengths for different people and to choose crew compositions accordingly, rather than treating all as being literally equal in all ways or doing some kind of affirmative action.
Yes. I watch old TV or film on DVD/BluRay (no streaming) and that's about it. I recently watched all of old Star Trek, which doesn't come off as leftist anymore (actually comes off as right-wing in some messaging) even though it possibly was for its time, showing what's changed.
I still play older competitive games and generally have avoided new ones unless they have no narrative, because the quality of storytelling has decreased along with average IQs since the 90s. The latest game with a narrative that I played was Alyx, because Valve is one of the last independent companies with no CCP influence.
Payola is very open and blatant to the point that nothing could be trusted.
Games journos/streamers will just straight up approach someone in public and say, "You want your game reviewed? Contact me and we can talk price." It's not happening otherwise, unless you have some clout that they can use to bring attention to themselves, or they can manufacture something out of you as they did in GG.
I would never give media people the time of day again unless I actually have evidence that they're not like this.