I get what you’re saying but instilling fucked up religious values in a kid is a completely different thing than marrying off a sixteen year old to a middle aged man.

I want to offer another perspective.

I knew someone who got married at 16. The groom was 18, they both came from religious families, and they ended up divorcing at like 22, which was basically a few months after they moved to a liberal area on the west coast.

I don’t think any sane person would call this grooming. At no point was I given the impression that the husband in this situation was abusive. However the situation was fundamentally fucked in a way that was unfair for both parties. My friend felt pressured to be a homemaker while still in high school, while her ex felt even more pressure to be a provider despite having no real emotional or financial capacity for doing so. They also both tried to make it work much longer than they should have, which inflicted a further set of scars.

We live in a world fundamentally more complex than what the average person had to experience 100 years ago. We don’t let teenagers do things like buy alcohol or smoke cigarettes. It is almost expected that 18 - 21 year olds in the US will be on some major level dependent on their parents.

Even in cases where there isn’t abuse, we shouldn’t be letting minors get married. It is just an unfair position to put both parties in.

I love how every major bank came together to create an alternative to Venmo, but somehow it’s objectively worse. It’s not like Venmo is this grand fountain of quality either.

I’m actually in favor of the death penalty in theory, there’s just no way I trust the government to not inadvertently execute an innocent.

Case in point, this week.

Exactly. The problem isn’t diversity. The problem is soulless corporations who put out mediocre games, and then try to shoehorn diversity in a fairly surface level and lazy fashion as a distraction.

It would have been weird if AC1 didn’t star an individual of MENA descent, because the game was set in the middle east. Origins had minority protagonists for similar reasons Connor being Native American in AC3 added a lot of depth when it came to the concept of freedom and how it relates to the American revolution.

I feel like I’ve seen the same story a million times. Mediocre IP, lazy forced diversity, culture war commentary, undeserved stellar reviews, underperformance with audiences due to fundamental issues.

I’m railing about corporate making a mediocre game and then jamming some culture war shit into it in a blantant attempt to distract from the fact that the game is mediocre.

Also AC has had “more than just white guys” featured since the first game.

I feel like a lot of companies that put the most emphasis on making diverse IP make the worst products. I don’t think that the lack of quality is due to diversity. Rather, I think that companies with soulless corporate leadership have a habit of producing mediocre content and attempting to obfuscate said mediocrity by making an otherwise uninspiring game a referendum on the culture war.

I’m willing to bet that there are developers who can make a game that is more organically diverse and genuinely fun, but that they don’t get an honest shot due to the state of modern gaming.

Anyway this game is gonna be crap, IGN is gonna give it a 10/10, and Polygon is gonna go on a tirade when it underperforms in the same way every AC game since black flag has underperformed.

That’s because the teenager who actually runs that account has no idea what 40 looks like.

Look man at this point saying either party has a monopoly on pedophilia is sort of ridiculous. It’s very obviously a rich/powerful thing, not a left/right thing.

I don’t see how anyone doesn’t understand that at some point. Diddy’s arrest was less than 24 hours ago.

No, but the idea that any random white guy could get away with what Trump gets away with is also laughable. Since 2016 there have been a million and one politicians trying to act Trumpian, and none of them enjoyed the nearly success Trump has.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, Trump seems to have this larger than life persona that has allowed him to escape scandal after scandal that would doom literally any other politician.

As a fun sidenote, look up DC Mayor Marion Barry. Dude made Trump look pedestrian.

The Klan should try to recruit a graphic designer first.

I feel like I would be more okay with this is snap didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

Look man I don’t know how old you are, but this type of comment is what I’d expect a teenager to write. it’s not just that you’re acting like a massive asshole; You’re using insults and arguments that I’d expect a teenager to come up with. It’s the sort of argument that only works if the vast majority of people in the audience are already both deeply in your corner and also immature. Otherwise you’d just come off looking like a massive jackass.

Do you have any experience talking to people outside of an echo chamber? How does that go for you?

This is a serious answer so it’s gonna get down voted to hell, but whatever.

There’s a huge portion of Americans who are suffering. Their personal lives are kind of awful, they live in communities that are impossible to get ahead and the communities are often that way to due the direct actions of the political establishment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Above all else, these communities don’t really feel heard by the liberal establishment. They feel as though their concerns are dismissed by what they see as the powers that be. They feel that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked. They also feel as though a lot of entities that fucked them are liberally coded.

To these people, Trump is the guy who makes those people seethes and tells them to fuck off. That endears them to him and offers extreme loyalty. They often dismiss the allegations against him because at some point every single conservative has been implied to be a disgusting person in popular culture.

Ironically I think a lot of Trump’s worst actions solidified the support of his base, because of where America has been at since his political ascendency. The US culture war has been raging for a decade now, and both sides have a habit of taking extreme positions while vilifying their opposition. That is naturally going to cause people to get more aggressive, which in turn villifies Trump.

An example I love to use is vaccine skepticism during covid. There were two huge groups of vaccine skeptics in America: rural whites, and black Americans. Both had suffered greatly at the hands of an aloof medical establishment, and both had their suffering ignored. While the Black community’s wounds run deeper, the rural white community was fresh off the opioid crisis. They had every reason to be skeptical about big pharma lying to them for profit, because that’s literally what happened just a few years prior.

The liberal response to the black community was understanding and outreach. The medical community made a huge effort to reach out to black community members and popular figures in black culture. There was a direct acknowledgement of the medical establishment’s bigotry in the past. There was not a culture of shame for people who did not choose to get vaccinated. This was also reflected in news articles and social media posts.

Their response to the rural white community was basically the opposite. The medical establishment’s outreach was extremely limited by comparison. The opioid crisis was written off as a failure by the Sacklers as opposed to any systemic issues that the medical establishment needs to address. Vaccine skeptics were repeatedly and aggressively shamed, with open discussion in regards to simply enforcing vaccination via mandates. Basically every MSM article talked about how the vaccine hesitancy was a character flaw. Social media went even farther. Not only did they call conservative vaccine skeptics things like death cultists, but there were forums dedicated to making fun of antivaxxers dying of covid. People would post private Facebook posts of people they knew by two or three degrees of separation, and then liberals would more or less celebrate their demise. You even had the return of the word “sky fairy” on reddit to describe when these people prayed to God.

Trump, for his part, encouraged people to get vaccinated. He stated multiple times at his rallies that vaccines could end covid, and that they were making him look bad by not doing so. He was, at his own rallies, booed so loud he had to stop talking. He quickly changed his tune.

A consistent trend in liberal circles is the belief that they have complete moral and intellectual authority, as well as the belief that this authority gives them the ability to treat people who don’t conform like shit. I’m pretty sure I’m voting for Harris, but there are also times where I felt like I should just say home. It’s completely fucking insufferable, and ironically has a ton in common with evangelical christian politics that dominated the US in the 1980s. So long as that mentality is there, you’ll have people like Trump gaining undeserved support.

A few years ago I would agree with you, but honestly I think female celebs also get away with this stuff, they just didn’t feel as empowered before.

Like nobody outside extremely niche Twitter spaces cared when Taylor Swift dated a 17 year old or when the owner of the Seahawks sexually harassed her bodyguards.

The gossip rags will milk a wooden cow for months though. Dude didn’t get cancelled or anything.

You know it’s kinda weird that nobody gave a shit when Arnold did this. I guess because Arnold didn’t make a brand around being wholesome, except when it comes to the gym?

Honestly this reeks of corporate politics. I’m willing to bet at some point in development there was a regime change, and current management pushed this out the door just to clear the board.

Everything I heard about this came seems to indicate that it isn’t terrible by any means, just mediocre and overpriced in an absolutely oversaturated genre. If management was invested in it, they probably could have spent a ton on marketing, achieved middling numbers, and then used those middling numbers to justify continued development for another few months.

I’m confident in saying that because there are a handful of shitty live service games being operated at a loss for no real reason other than shutting them down would mean management would have to actually admit they fucked up.

No you see they know it’s a cucumber because ancient Egyptian dildos had a compartment for bees so that users could experience a vibration effect.

Look I’m not saying that cooking your own lunch is a prerequisite for being an adult. However complaining about the quality of prepared food while not acknowledging you could just cook is sure as hell immature.