Reist reviewed the controversial Netflix film Cuties (2020) for both her ABC Religion & Ethics column[20] and for the Christian newspaper Eternity.[21] She described the film as “a social critique on what happens when we allow misogynistic, violent, exhibitionist internet culture to ravage girls – training them to wield their immature bodies as currency.”[21] Reist related the film to the activism of Collective Shout: “In the past 10 years at Collective Shout, we have met many girls this age, who have felt the same pressures. Some have taken inappropriate pics and shared them, sexualising themselves either out of a sense of obligation, or because they have believed the lie that self-objectification is empowering or liberating.”[21] However, regarding certain scenes in the film, she wrote that “the complexity here is that in trying to make a serious ethical point about girls and sexuality, the girls may have been used unwittingly — but still inappropriately — to a noble end. The scene could have been filmed differently[.]”[20]
Yeah. As a society we seriously need to get on the same page about morality, but for my money it can’t come from a religious group tinkering with the beating heart of commerce. They may have points to make but it’s fruit of the poisoned tree.
Stuff like this is the strongest argument for a decentralized payment option. Hopefully some day crypto will not be so much a tool of monetary speculation and we can use it for that without having to have the same experience as the guy who bought a pizza with Bitcoin.
That’s what I always wanted “DeFi” to be, a systematic replacement for the legions of evil old banks who have happily collaborated with the worst institutions of the last several centuries.
You can thank Advance Australia for that. Huge think tank that likely bank rolls all this nonsense and more.
Also, down with Collective Shout! As someone who suffered child abuse, I condemn these cookers crusading under the guise of child protection. FFS, they were patting themselves on the back for stopping sales of plastic heads on Temu.
If it’s any consolation, I’m sure the American versions (Focus on the family, alliance defending freedom) are right there with them.
Props to them for figuring out a real way of imposing colonialism on impoverished countries and former colonies alike. Now their ideas and laws are spreading worldwide, like someone with diseases shitting into the local water supply. Ugh.
I have a terrible feeling that the people they duped won’t figure this out for 30 years or more, with some trappings lasting for 50+ years.
This probably has a lot to do with Texas’ new ID requirement law. These companies don’t want to have to collect IDs and be responsible for maintaining that database of PII.
not really. Collective Shout is a powerful collective that targets violence, adult content and i think also gaming in general even in contexts that make sense,
out of their sense what is right and wrong (which I and a lot of others dont agree with)
How do platforms like Patreon and OnlyFans circumvent this? I know OF had issues with payment processors in the past but I’m not sure what changes they implemented to stay compliant. There must be some way for itch.io to keep these things on their platform while not pissing off the payment processors (who can go fuck themselves btw, this is completely unnecessary)
Porn sites are categorized as high risk at these payment processors. So probably itch has to fall into the high risk category and incur higher fees or remove all porn content. If you fall into the high risk category the payment platform will probably audit you more often and thus charge higher fees.
OF probably had these same issues because they didn’t start as a porn site.
I don’t think OnlyFans had to do much of anything in the end. There was just enough media stink about it to make it go away.
Credit card companies don’t have to make a consistently applied set of rules the way a government of laws does. They can make it all up for each individual site if they wish. Capitalism can create a censorship regime that’s stronger than nominally democratic governments are willing to do.
I began playing Runescape in 2007. I watched it go through so many changes over the years. The original game is now almost completely unrecognisable from the way it used to be!
I dipped in and out of OSRS for a few years as well. I no longer play it, but I logged into my account a few days ago. Here’s the stats I had before I quit
I also recently started playing osrs again. I highly recommend using the Runelite client! It has a lot of extra plugins that will both make the game look better, run better and help you with quests. You can choose how much help you want too. That plugin is called QuestHelper. Runelite is also acknowledged and accepted by Jagex so no worries on that front, the majority of osrs players use Runelite.
I can see how it can be confusing, let me shed some context:
I’m not against grinding, though that’s not exactly what I was looking for right now;
The last final fantasy I truly enjoyed was FF-X, which I bought on launch. That was more than 20 years ago;
Final Fantasy games can be REALLY grindy if you want to kill the ultra bosses but not if you just want to follow the plot. You can kill everything in Final Fantasy 8 without gaining a single level (it’s actually easier that way…);
My tastes in gaming have changed quite a bit over the years…
I loved Dark Souls 1/3 and just couldn’t enjoy Elden Ring any more;
I recently-ish tried Final Fantasy 6, which is widely regarded as the best, and didn’t click for me;
Random battles in particular became a big turnoff for me
I mean, I tried FFX and once I got to the Seymour Wedding I dropped the game because I was apparently too low level (I do absolutely zero grinding in games, I hate grinding and random battles the most from JRPGs). There was some gauntlet of multiple forced battles one after the other I think with flamethrower guards and my party was on low HP, had no healing items, and I had to save state scum just to pass it. I think I was around level 20? Maybe 30? I dont remember. I just remember the fight with the flying dragon on the ship was very difficult and the fight with Shiva (which also is not explained very well in-game to the point I had to look up what to do just to find out Shiva was added as an Aeon) was also veey difficult, both requiring save scumming.
Then the cutscene where Yuna just completely gives up on everything she believed in as a character up to that point and that was kinda the straw that broke the camels back. That scene, combined with the few cutscenes right before between the thief girl and Waka just felt absurdly out of character to me. I didnt appreciate what was going on and up to that point I wasnt loving the game either so I dropped it.
Also didnt like Blitz Ball. Played it for the tutorial and the forced tournament, but never played it outside of those forced moments.
Mostly I kept thinking how much I would have preferred if the main character was Jecht. Less annoying voice actor and better visual design than Tutus IMO. His story seemed to be way more interesting too.
I never played Breath of Fire, so I can’t say much on it. But I did play a bit of Legend of Dragoon. It seemed cool, but my save file got corrupted and I havent wanted to start a new game.
Could also try Koudelka, which combines true Survival Horror elements with strategy/tactical RPG combat.
Seymour battles can be very challenging but there’s always a gimmick or gear to mitigate their attacks. It’s up to the player to figure it out. The only fight I did have trouble in one of my (too many) runs was in Mount Gagazet, that one can be tough if you don’t have zombie ward or a way to inflict poison.
Unless you’re going for the Dark Aeon’s you can totally skip Blitzball. If you don’t enjoy it you’re not really losing anything. I did like the concept of Blitzball in general, at first I thought it was fun. However, the matches become brain-dead easy really fast and each match lasts 10+ minutes, which is wayyy too long. It’s a huge time sink and the rewards are absurdly bad for the invested time (An ether, seriously? A single ether?)
I have to somewhat agree with you about Jecht. Instead of FFX-2, they should have done a FFX-0 where you follow Jecht’s pilgrimage instead. I’d play that!!!
Have you ever tried the shadowrun games at all? They’ve had a decent track record overall, and several versions exist on steam and play at least okay on the deck (can’t remember exactly which, but protonDB exists for a reason lol).
Might be too similar to d&d for you, but I’ve never seen them be that similar in execution.
The big recent release that’s missing from your list is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. For me, it really evokes that FF8/FF10 era of Final Fantasy.
I hear the developers are still working on the Steam Deck build so it might be a bit rough at the moment, but since streaming from your Linux desktop is an option, I’d highly recommend it. Yes, it’s as good as people say.
I didn’t care to play it because I don’t love FF style rpgs anymore, but I watched my girlfriend play and it was worth just for the story and music. The soundtrack is INSANE. Avoid listening to it until you play, if you can. It makes everything so much better.
Anything can run on anything if you have enough storage. Computing power is not a problem if you don’t care about frame rate and resolution. We first jumped from 24 FPS to 30, next to 60 and soon we will jump to 120. We jumped from black and white to gray scale to colors, from 16 colors to 256 then to 16bit and so on. From 320x240 to 800x600 to 1024x768 to full hd to 4k and we’re near to 8k. Rendering speed is the real limit.
Yes to all of the above! You just described my gaming childhood (except mine started in amber/ green screen). 80s and 90s were where it was at, as far as videogaming goes. Kids these days don’t know what they’ve missed.
The base game has the best quests and dialogue of any MMORPG I’ve yet played. The later expansions (Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Fallen Throne) are awful and cost money, so you can just play the base game for free and never even have to spend a penny to get eight unique class storylines to play for free. It’s honestly the last great game from Bioware.
Old school runescape free to play is a great introduction but you should go into it knowing that its not a free to play game and you’ll likely be paying a subscription fee.
Guild wars 1 is a old but its good and its like $10 one time payment. It can be done solo or with other players.
I used to love Mabinogi. It’s a bit different then most MMORPGs but it had some real cool features. My favorite is any character could learn any skill in the game. It also has a coherent story with some surprising plot twists. On to of that, you character ages and will even get fat if they eat too much. Haven’t played it in years, as well as any MMORPG for that matter, but this is one of the ones I have the fondest memories of.
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