Ding ding ding!

Winner winner, idiot dog barfing up your chicken dinner.

So uh, skipping a bunch of excess lore:

“Dogs are one of the most beloved pets in the world. They are loyal, friendly and make great companions. Despite their differences, all dogs share a few key traits – they are affectionate, protective of their owners, and eager to please. Dogs require proper care, including regular exercise, grooming, and veterinary checkups. In return, they provide unconditional love and can even improve their owner’s physical and mental health. Whether as a family pet or a working animal, dogs have been an integral part of human society for thousands of years.”

The chat bot is named after a dog because a dog-named chatbot is more likely to make users treat it with patience, kindness, and understand that it does silly things sometimes, but it means well.

Its marketing. PR.

There are multiple times where Jesus breaks with the established gender norms of the time.

Telling off the people about to stone the prostitute/adulterer to death would have been utterly shocking.

For starters… men and women were not supposed to be talking to each other in public, unless they were your family.

At the time, you basically needed two women to directly witness something… to be the equivalent of one man repeating hearsay, or claiming something with rather dubious evidence.

So… throwing himself into that situation… its actually so unbelievable that it would have played out as it did, that most non fundie scholars are almost certain it never happened… because Jesus most likely would have been beaten or killed.

If it is then a fictional story… the intent of adding it was clearly to indicate … not as equal of a view of women as say a modern feminist, but a radically, radically progressive and more equal view for the time.

As to being against biased treatment of ‘other’, foreign groups of people?

Jesus again talks with a woman, in public, a Samaritan drawing water from a well.

This is an oversimplification, but basically Samaritans were viewed by many other Jews as … not really Jews, as heretics, because they did not see the Temple in Jerusalem or its Rabbis as necessary or important to their version of Judaism.

Its… sort if analogous to how many modern Christians don’t view Mormons as Christian, even though Mormons believe they are.

But its much more extreme than that. Samaritans and other Jews would often refuse to speak to each other, beat the shit out of each other, kill each other, be very very intolerant.

But Jesus just sees this ‘foreign, heretical’ woman as another person, says it does not matter whether you worship at the Temple or not, and attempts to convert her as respectfully as with anyone else.

He ‘heals’ women with bleeding disorders, in a socioreligious environment where a bleeding woman would have been seen as untouchable, who should basically either be banished from society or sequestered and only tended to by other women, who would have to ritually purify themselves after every encounter.

…

You are correct that examples of misogyny and racism do exist in the New Testament as well. Paul comes to mind for having a much more traditional view of women.

But, there absolutely are ways to cherry pick or emphasize the … not as equal or progressive as modern views of equality and progress… but astoundingly more equal and progressive things Jesus did and said.

There absolutely are progressive churches that emphasize this.

You can interpret the totality of the Bible in many, many ways.

I agree with you that most fundamentalists who read it come away with very, very misogynistic and pro slavery views.

I do not agree that that is not the result of cherry picking.

I came from a fundamentalist upbringing.

For almost every single point espoused by them, ‘adhered to’ by them… you can find another verse that contradicts it, a parable that can be interpreted to negate it, a same story told multiple ways where various details of the different versions cannot possibly all be equally true and correct at the same time.

… While fundamentalists say that the entire Bible is inerrant, and has no contradictions… this just is not the case.

Even fundamentalist ‘literalists’ have beliefs that they base on non literal readings of verses.

Its… basically impossible to do a literalist reading of the book of revelation, for example.

Fundamentalists interpret that book metaphorically.

The Bible also very clearly states that one should never get a tattoo

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+19%3A28&version=NKJV

or wear clothes made of mixed weaves of different fabrics.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy 22%3A11&version=NKJV

Yet its very common to see Christians with tattoos, especially of a cross, or wear clothes that have some mixture of cotton and polyester and denim or whatever.

… almost like they’re cherry picking the Bible to support the positions they themselves already prefer!

EDIT: (for these two verses, the translation is the same in basically every … translation version, just went with NKJV because why not?)

I know.

I’d be embarrassed to be an out and proud fascist too!

The Shy Trump Voter theory is basically the theory that a whole lot of Americans are fascists, support fascist policies and leaders, but are self aware enough to realize they’d be socially ostracized for doing so openly, brazenly, enthusiastically.

I no longer care to coddle, or reframe the confusion or embarrassment or stupidity and ignorance of people who… know what they are doing is wrong, so they lie about what they’re doing.

Shy Trump Voter is an interesting way to phrase CryptoFascist.

Hey, I appreciate your honesty and integrity!

I suppose it is still possible that the Concord themed Secret Level episode will still air…

I still doubt it.

I’m still willing to bet 2¢ it won’t air, haha.

But yeah… the marketing (the video presentations of staff and developers, their public statements etc) seemed to me to very much indicate that the whole plan was to create an entire Concord Expanded Universe.

The game was supposed to have weekly story/character progression updates like some older MMOs, they talked about being in many different media formats, they literally used the phrase Concord Universe or Universe of Concord.

When you go all in on a new IP and … its the biggest failure in the history of gaming… all your plans are done, kaput. You have to wait for people to forget about it and then ‘reimagine’ it a decade later if you even want to try to resurrect it.

From a game design standpoint… it wasn’t designed to work as a heavily MTX dependent game.

That’s actually a whole lot more development, more content, more UIs, more testing… and thus money you have to throw at it to get it to be that… and it already has failed, and been stupendously expensive to develop, has a horrific general reputation/perception.

But as to at least the Secret Level episode airing?

You do have good arguments that basically boil down to it already being completed or mostly complete, and the … who gets paid by what contract with who for what… that kind of set up … may lead to it making more business sense to just air it anyway.

But I would still counter that Sony wants to memory hole this IP from collective knowledge, and that they value that, as a means of improving their public perception, more than whatever they’d lose from breaking their contracts with Amazon.

I actually had to do a double take and realize this was not an onion article.

S…sure, sure, we gotta take out this hospital because ub. uhm… its… got buried treasure!

What are we, 2 months away from ‘this hospital had a nuclear bomb in it!’?

We found the Ark of the Covenant! Hezbollah is hiding it under an orphanage!

NonCredibleDefense is a recreation of a reddit community.

The following is an oversimplification but its all so ridiculous it is still going to be long:

So… what NonCredibleDefense is, is a mixture of military enthusiasts who are pro Ukraine, pro modern western / NATO involvement in its defense, but also politically left of center, and also very often gay or trans.

And also very into anime, and esoteric internet memes, and video games. Because of course.

The lemmy community is an offshoot of this.

EDIT: Maybe a better way to explain this would be to present the example of the youtuber LazerPig, as basically my best approximation of condensing all of NonCredibleDefense into one person.

Oh yes, I am well aware that those things will happen, but its still probably better to be nearer to the actual resource than farther from it.

So far, my plan for this is ‘Move to Minnesota’.

Lots of fresh water, rental/housing prices are not completely absurd (yet?), and as the Earth generally warms it will probably make for more mild winters.

So, the goal here is to prevent ghosting by making ghosting minutely costly to the ghoster.

They pick from an array of multiple reasons why, and the app formulates an exceptionally kindly worded explanation to send to the ghosted person.

I don’t see this as dangerous to people who are ghosting potentially dangerous people.

Instead of getting nothing, and formulating whatever cockamamie explanation in their own minds (or maybe just going ‘sigh, oh well’), they at least get a facsimile of closure from a canned response.

Obviously this does not magically solve the many problems of dating apps, but I fail to see how this is more dangerous than just ghosting on its own.

The problem is that its minutely time consuming to provide a ghosting explanation.

This ghost explanation requirement requires people to actually explain themselves, and that’s gonna be very cumbersome to people who are not really looking for a serious, long term relationship.

It makes it very annoying to use the app in a scattershot approach for rapid fire hookups, with tons of potentials on deck, as you’ll be forced to consistently ‘tend’ to all of your simultaneous matches, or drop them…

…and for people who think they’re looking for a serious, monogamous relationship, but consistently ghost people, it will basically cause uncomfortable cognitive dissonance when they realize they don’t like having to do a modicum if effort to explain why no one seems to meet their standards or is due their attention, even though they previously thought they were interested.

Basically, the problem I see with this app is that it forces users toward being honest with themselves.

Even more financial fraud charges against her, and also her husband and niece.

A decade ago I was contracting for MSFT as a database admin / data analyst.

A far older and more experienced contractor told me that he had been part of a team in Saudi Arabia, in 1990, that intercepted computer and electronic equipment bound for Iraq’s air defense command and control systems, flashing the firmware with exploits and backdoors as fast as they could before they were sent to Iraq.

Supply chain interception has been a thing for a while.

EDIT: This is a total off topic aside, but hearing about and seeing shit like that at the various tech jobs I’ve worked is why I laugh when people say ‘oh but alexa only activates on keywords’ or ‘no its totally impossible for phones to listen to your convos and then give that data to advertisement systems’.

Call me paranoid, I don’t care: If you don’t have a hardware disconnect for your microphone and personally have the source code to every bit of software, at every level, then we just have to take the giant tech corpos at their word.

In the same vein, Simon Librande, lead designer of Sim City, decided to pretend that basically all plots above low density just have absurdly huge, invisible (underground) parking lots, otherwise a car centric city very often just turns into half parking lots.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240506163714/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-philosophy-of-simcity-an-interview-with-the-games-lead-designer/275724/

Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?

Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.

Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them – so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots – but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.

EDIT: I got some details mixed up, corrected and expanded now.

Well shucks, I could have used another 2¢.

No, no no, that is the current practice and origin of the entire problem.

If you legally class a game as an ongoing service that is temporary and subject to termination, without recompense, soley by the decision of and according to the terms of the licensor, then they can legally sell you a game for $80 bucks and then shut down the next day.

If you legally class the game as a good, well you can’t sell someone a chair which then has 3 of its legs disappear or collapse (due to no fault of the owner) the next day without that being a scam of a defective product.

…

If you’re saying the emphasis should be on raising consumer awareness that they’re buying a temporary, revocable and non refundable service…

Who, other than children, do not know this yet?

That would not force the industry to actually change their practices.

It just slaps a big bold 'haha the fuck you isn’t even in the fine print anymore’ label on a product and makes our cyberpunk dystopia a little bit more obvious, but doesn’t achieve any useful goal in terms of altering actual game design/support or consumer rights.

Normally it works exactly backwards to this in larger studios/publishers.

Game devs do backbreaking, insanity inducing levels of work, and all but 10% are laid off when the game launches, regardless of success or failure, and for this time they are making probably about area median wage, maybe 10 or 20% more.

Its the middle managers and higher up executives who make multiples to orders of magnitude that amount of money, and almost all of them are rewarded by either failing upward or bailing out with golden parachutes, even though its often their decisions and directions, often going against lower level devs, which lead to the ultimate commercial failure.

Perhaps this loss will be so serious that some higher ups will actually get axxed, but even then it hardly matters: They can easily retire on what they’ve earned so far, whereas the actual people writing code, making maps, making art assets, they’ll basically all be homeless if they don’t find another decent job in 3 to 6 months.

I am fairly, but not 100% certain, that Ross Scott’s proposal currently making the rounds in the EU would say that you either have to refund a game (and all in game purchases) when it becomes totally unplayable, or you have to release some kind of way for dedicated fans to be able to least run custom servers and bypass no longer maintained, proprietary, always online verification/anti cheat schtuff.