HalloweenSnarry
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User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
In some other contexts, I might agree with you, but I personally think that, in terms of both owner culture and user culture, Pixiv doesn't really deserve to be lumped in with the FAANG services. And, of course, it's hard to see how AI will help here, since Pixiv is an art site and AI art is still socially-unacceptable.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
If we want to drill down to chargebacks, we could still argue at some higher level that society is too prudish around sex work, which explains the high chargebacks. Chargebacks presumably come from men ashamed about their porn habits, because society constructed things such that porn consumption is shameful (e.g. what if the wife looks at the credit card statements? Easy to just claim it was a fraudulent purchase and charge back, no?).
Much like with firearms, your interlocutors are probably coming from a different cultural perspective, where sex work and porn are normal and healthy, where actually paying for porn is something of a point of pride (in opposition to just getting it for free).
As for whatever links evangelicalism has to credit card policies...well, okay, you likely have a point, though I do wonder about the political donations of Visa and MasterCard, if any.
Dispatches from the War on Horny/Payment Processors: the other shoe has dropped for Pixiv.
A year and a half ago, Pixiv made signs that they'd be clamping down on content on some of their services to appease Visa and MasterCard. Today, Pixiv announces that US and UK users will face restrictions on content they can upload. (Specific details here.)
Currently remains to be seen how much this affects the Western artists who are on Pixiv, but it doesn't bode well. Some think this portends a coming era of digital pillarization, and while I won't rule out the possibility that things will get so walled off that VPNs become a necessity, it's hard to say how likely that actually is.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
Besides, they're patient and rich enough to not genocide people as you can tell by what's going on in Xinyang.
...Is this sarcasm?
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
Honestly, I imagine what might happen then is that the tribes just rent out the land until they feel like they have enough money to justify clearing out the land, and maybe even going a step further and building something new on it like that one tribe in Vancouver(?).
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
What do you make of this, then? That this is happening at all in Iran probably says something. I'm with Lizzardspawn in that I'm under the impression that the theocracy, while enjoying considerable support, only barely has a hold on the nation, and that the populace is a little too liberal and well-educated to remain under its thumb for eternity.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
Side note, why were Mac games seemingly so focused on story compared to some PC games? There's Marathon, Journeyman Project, Myst, that first-person game made by the lead designer of the original Rainbow Six (or was it the founder of Red Storm?), those HyperCard point-and-click games...was it just because Macs had more fixed specs and already had a GUI, focing devs to focus less on how to make tech-demo games and more on how the gameplay experience went?
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
Perhaps they're referring to one of the oldest immigrations, i.e., the slave trade?
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
To summarize: guy makes a popular window manager for what will be the new standard for Linux desktop window display software, the community around it is composed of half "programmer socks" trans people and half toxic 4Chan shitposters, the toxic parts of his community prompt a Linux dev with more privilege to get him declared persona non grata from working within the "mainstream" of this tech.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
Somewhat off-topic, but: thoughts on RoboMaster?
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
I am going to join the others in disagreement and point out that it definitely seems like the Japanese have been pretty anti-war since 1945. Now, sure, attitudes can change, the Japanese aren't ignorant of the rising tensions and potential threats of the current age, and there isn't exactly a political monoculture, but one needs only to look at the freaking cartoons they make to see that the population seems pretty inoculated against the more warlike tendencies they had in ages past.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
But Tarn still raises a good point: the current ruling coalition of India is a political party and a strongman head-of-state who is considerably right-wing compared to the previous ruling coalition. Will Modi reverse every last element of socialism stemming from India's independence? Probably not, but I'm under the impression that much has already been done in that direction. And given the uncertainty about the old Congress ever managing to wrest their seat of power back from the BJP, it's hard to thus conclude that India will accelerate leftwards.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
This sounds like an excuse, it took me only a few minutes to read the whole thing and I could probably knock out a corrected version in an hour tops, maybe even less. I acknowledge that maybe the work of proofreading is harder than what I've dealt with as a student from kindergarten to college, but it can't be that hard.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
I think someone here linked this review (or linked to something else that linked to said review) of a book by Mao's former personal doctor, which detailed how closed-minded, filthy, perverted, and short-tempered Mao could be. As per Olive's reply, the totalizing ideology of Communism in China, paired with the general ability of the Chinese to go along with a proclaimed direction, would naturally have led to Mao dragging an entire country down with him.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
Didn't the Thames used to have a reputation of being kind of a sewer river at one point?
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
Just not doing it at all, but showing you a variety of sex scenes if you die
If you're talking about hentai games, some of those do have difficulty adjustments or at least aren't ball-bustingly hard--indeed, for some, you'd probably have to go out of your way to lose on purpose to see said scenes.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
I dunno, maybe it is something with the background scripts on ACX, but I could swear the reason is "the page for any ACX post is like 43 times longer than any non-TV-Tropes webpage needs to be, because the comments section is not truncated like on any other Substack post."
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
I did watch a video (from a rather...polarizing YouTube channel) once that showed that, while Andy Dick does still kind of have a career, his life is practically ruined, being reduced to slumming it in a motorhome and being used for livestream views while his self-destruction is not being reversed.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
Maybe not through Discord, but through text messages and physical proximity.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
ACX just seems to be Substack already, unless there's some other way to view the posts. I also notice awful, awful chugging on ACX. I think the problem is that the comments section always loads everything, which is a lot of text and images to render, whereas normal Substack makes you go to a separate page to see all of them.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
I would like to agree with you, but I absolutely must push back on something:
We can't forget our technology, too much is recorded.
We can and we most certainly fucking will unless something is done in the near-ish future. Right to Repair is somewhat of a live issue now, and that it's a live issue at all is a sign of deep trouble--same with video games. We will actively create new problems or un-solve solved problems simply because it helps enrich the pocketbooks of executives. If anything, I expect a collapse to push us back to anywhere between the 1980's to the early-to-mid 2000's in terms of what technology will be left, and that's assuming things aren't quite so total that we can still set up factories and maybe reverse-engineer the more proprietary stuff.
I'm not terribly, 100% convinced that we'll see the collapse of the USA in our lifetimes, but I can easily imagine that it will start, not directly via fire, explosions, coups, civil war, or turnkey tyrrany, but it will start with numbers on balance sheets and lines on charts going down, which will cause a cascade of various services mysteriously (heavy sarcasm tone indicators optional) becoming unavailable, as people in suits order servers to be shut down, following a cold, contextless logic driven by numbers and lines.
I guess Pixiv couldn't just carve out Texas? Granted, I guess that's a lot harder if you're a company based in Japan, whereas Mindgeek is in the West.
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