Yeah... I did not have a good time with that discussion, and thinking back I seriously regret involving myself in it (or at least listening to the part of my brain that insists on fact checking myself, which lead to reading some very... unpleasant scholarly papers...)
I don't really care what consenting adults do in fictional spaces, but keep that shit in fantasy, please.
I'm going off the Ars Technica article on this 🤷
Today's launch is for the PC version only. Versions for Mac, PS5 (September 6), and, eventually, Xbox consoles are due to arrive in the coming months.
You'll be waiting a bit, the release today was Windows only with macOS and console versions coming later.
Honestly I was the same way going into it, and after watching it my thoughts were "I don't regret watching it, but I wouldn't have regretted missing out either."
The movie is great, and there were multiple moments where I burst out laughing. It's also a really bizarre acid trip, and I mean that in a good way! But at the end of the day, it's a hot pink version of The Lego Movie, down to Will Farrell playing a (less evil and more well-meaning) Lord Business. It's a movie made by women, for women, about a series of toys designed for women. That's not a bad thing by any means, and it's not like men cannot enjoy it, but it also means it may not interest you, and that's fine too.
Yeah, fair. $3/hr for a 15/hr job is amazing. For a 45/hr job? Not so much.
Wait, $3 an hour, pay period, or annually? Because I would be kinda OK with a $3/hour raise.
They can all sit on a cactus and spin, wholeheartedly. The solution to seeing something you don't like is to NOT WATCH THE CONTENT YOU DON'T LIKE. Some of the more niche kinks that I enjoy frequently intersect with fetishes that I find personally unattractive and trigger some long-standing body image issues, but I don't go around telling people what they can and cannot enjoy, I just move on and filter out the keywords.
I've personally seen this bullying in action, when a dear friend of mine posted a relatively innocent picture they drew depicting balloon fetish (which wasn't even NSFW, BTW) and was harassed to the point they had to abandon the handle they'd used for over a decade (along with the name recognition and customer base they'd built up), and rebrand under a different handle.
It also really doesn't help that sometimes puriteen discourse itself is driven by an adult grooming children for abuse. There was a reddit post a while back where someone's daughter was suspended for bullying another student over a "problematic" (non-furry) ship--up to the point where she was actively encouraging the victim to harm themself. It turned out that the daughter was a member of a discord server where the admin was sending tons of porn to these children and telling them "this is what these sickos all want, you can't trust anyone but me, you need to fight against this and force them to give up these shameful urges," etc. It was honestly disturbing.
As others have said, the puriteen movement comes from christofascist origins, and originates from the same mindset as the current epidemic of anti-trans sentiments washing over the country: that the mere existence of any people who do not conform to heteronormative sexuality should be excluded from society.
A moment of silence in honor the sacrifice of Kent Shocknek, taken from this world too early while trying to jump his car o7
You didn't say that explicitly, but that's the implication of the world you're imagining. You're literally describing the death of all forms of creative industry--human musicians, human writers, human actors--all replaced with AI. You're describing the death of shared creative experiences; with an audience of one, nobody commiserates together over a movie they watched, or a book series they discovered, or talks about the new season of a favorite TV show together. You're describing the death of any form of subversive thought; with all media produced by AI, guard rails on creativity are trivial to introduce, gently redirecting, or outright prohibiting subject matter that is deemed inappropriate (and if you think I'm wrong, just imagine the world you're describing in modern day China--do you seriously think they would allow AI to proliferate that allowed you to create a movie about Tianenmen Square?).
The world you're describing sounds like a plastic, lifeless, lonely hellhole. It's the kind of world sci-fi authors would use as a dystopian background.
It used to be that there was an unspoken risk that ignoring all these norms would result in your being summarily tossed on your ass in the next election. But thanks to Murdoch, Limbaugh, Stone, Gingrich, and all the right wing media pushing hyper-partisan, no-compromise, the-other-guy-eats-babies politics, combined with a court system that refused to rein in the lies that were poisoning our discourse for decades, eroded that critical check on political society.