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.

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

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.

What is this “passing lane” of which you speak? All I’ve ever seen in America is the fast lane and the slow lane(s).

And only end up being farther back than if they had just stayed put, as everybody else had the same thought, making the new lane the slower one.

Dollar General in the US based their entire business model on tricking people like this. They sell stuff at 75% the price of places like Wal-Mart, while hoping people won’t notice that the item is half the size of the one at Wal-Mart so you end up actually paying 150% of what you would if you went somewhere else. They also run all the local stores out of business so that people don’t have any other nearby choices. Very scummy business.

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.

I mean, be the change you want to see in the world…

Sheer spite is a perfectly valid reason to continue to get out of bed in the morning.

Nobody on their deathbed has ever said, “I wish I spent more time in the office.”

A battle you don’t have to fight is a battle won. But if you do have to hurt somebody, hurt them bad enough that they won’t get back up. Otherwise, they’re very likely to come right back at you.

One of the common data points used by organizations to rate a country as “third world” or not is the state of its infrastructure. In that department, the US is certainly closer to third world countries than we are to our European brethren. It’s been ignored and underfunded for so long that there are many places where it’s quite literally falling apart, and that’s not even getting into the state of public transit (or lack thereof) or how the single family suburb sprawl is slowly bleeding cities dry of their capital.

There are other horrible things like parts of the US that have never had plumbing (Appalachia comes to mind) or things like the Flint, Michigan crisis (do they have drinkable water? I think as of last year they still didn’t. They might be able to take showers again, though, without causing permanent health issues for their kids). We have higher rates of women who die during childbirth than some third world countries. The quality of healthcare here is ranked the worst out of the first world nations while also being the most expensive. The wealthy go to Canada for prescriptions and surgery, or Mexico for dental work - Mexico apparently has better dentists than the US from what I’ve heard. We are #1 in number of incarcerated citizens per capita. The wealth disparity in the US today is supposedly worse than it was in France in the years just before the French Revolution, where the price of a loaf of bread was more than a day’s pay for the average worker. Upward class mobility (being born into a poor family and being able to become wealthy) is the lowest it’s been, I think, since the country was founded. A year or two before COVID happened, I was looking into starting a side business and found studies saying that a new business was more likely to fail today than in the Great Depression. If I remember the stats right, it was something like 40% of businesses fail in their first year, another 20% in their second year, and by year 4, 80% of new businesses have gone under.

I’ve heard the US described as “a third world country in a Prada belt,” and I think it’s an apt description. Policy-wise, we’re closer to third world countries than we’d like to admit. We’ve just been living off the postwar economic boom from WW2 that centered the US as the world’s largest economy and wealthiest nation to ever exist. The sheer amount of money circulating in our economy has kept the nation chugging along through whatever stupid things the corporations and the politicians have done over the years.

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.