An employee of the Tesla restaurant that pretends to be staffed by “robots”.

Es ist schon interessant, wie solche Gestalten wie Özdemir die Geschichte der eigenen Partei bewußt zu verschleiern versuchen: Brokdorf, Startbahn West, Wackersdorf sind die Orte, wo sich die Grünen als politische Kraft etabliert haben, nicht in den Chefetagen von DAX-Unternehmen.

Oh, it surely is a crappy AI prompt. The point I am making here is that Musk’s aesthetics are stuck in a past. A past when the various elements of the picture were still considered “cool” to a certain degree, but it’s all trite now.

For example, the anime girl in the picture is meant to depict a feature of the Grok LLM, a sexy anime girl chatbot which will slowly wear less and less clothing. Even under the most charitable interpretation, it is cheapest kind of titillation and is no way or form anything new and innovative. Yet Musk puts her in the front anyway. Pretty much every detail in that picture harks back to the past: Cyberpunk atmosphere? We got that for ages! Edgy SuperGrok with a gold chain and a cigar? The look of an R’nB star from (at least) a decade ago!

It’s all been done for a long time and it only shows how much Musk is stuck in a past when he considered himself cool and on the cutting edge of pop culture. Yet it all comes down to Musk displaying how much he is out of touch with current pop culture which has progressed further in the meantime.

It all makes sense if you assume that everything Musk does is intended to impress a 4chan nazi circa 2012.

“Concord”'s character designs were definitely the least of the game’s problems, but - of course - it was what the far-right latched onto. After all, they rarely ever engage with anything beyond the mere surface level.

Oh without doubt: Ubisoft is a terrible company and I am glad that - at least - some of the perpetrators have ended up in court.

My comment was meant to provide examples of how the far-right employs “Go woke, go broke” and how they twist the stories of failed games to fit their deliberately misleading narratives. Unfortunately there are people who fall for those…

Ultimately the far-right loves to bring up examples of well-known flops and box office bombs and then perform mental gymnastics to blame “wokeness” or “DEI” for their failure. Though in most cases, their failure can easily explained due to different factors.

As an example: Sony’s infamous flop “Concord”, a game which attempted to do some representation in the character design (in itself a bad imitation of what “Apex Legends” had done previously), but “Concord” was terrible from start to finish and overall just another live-service game nobody asked for.

Or take Bioware’s “Dragon Age: Veilguard”: The far-right loves to insist that it was “wokeness” that killed the game - something that is in itself already a preposterous claim due to Bioware’s solid track record of being an inclusive and queer-friendly company. But “DA:V” was doomed right from the start: As Bioware’s corporate overlord EA meddled with the production, firing people, restarting the game several times, turning it into a live-service game, then forcing Bioware to strip that out again and finally pushing a badly compromised “DA:V” out of the door after a fruitless 9 years of stop-and-go development.

Here is a (slightly broken) PDF: https://files.catbox.moe/il992g.pdf

It depends on what you expect. Of course, most games - even with a leftist message - are more entertainment than learning tools, but there are hidden layers that are often dismissed: If you know how to organise a raid guild in an MMO, you have most of the tools to unionise your workplace. And most city builders are essentially “socialism simulators” which can teach you a lot about distribution of resources.

These may not be the hardest lessons and replace real-life experiences, but they are also not nothing.

If you consider every action by MAGAists as the behavior of a cruel, schoolyard bully who will hurt you and then mock you for your inability to defend yourself, everyone of their actions makes sense.

The cruelty is the point.

Yeah, even in the best possible light, they completely lost touch with reality.

Oh, she is going to be livid. Rightfully so, but I still fear for her blood pressure.

I could not agree more in regards to “Haven”. It is such a fantastic game in how it depicts the central relationship and I am always disappointed how rare it is to see two loving partners carry a story together.

Yeah, the non-disclosure is most telling IMO. 11bit is an experienced development studio, it is not credible for them to not know about Steam’s AI disclosure requirement.

Thus, to me, there are three possible explanations: They either decided to hide the use of genAI because they were aware that disclosing its use would hurt their reputation. Or they decided that it was “no big deal” and were willing to risk gambling with their reputation and their relationship with Valve. Or they will blame this on outsourcing and freelance contractors, which they then failed to supervise and/or instruct properly.

Either option makes them look bad and extremely sloppy at best.

Lowering workers’ wages is exactly why he got a pay bump. Capitalism working as intended.

How gender dysphoria manifests differs from individual to individual, people experience it in different way, particularly in regards to what someone struggles with: Someone may feel more dysphoric in regards to their face; others in regards to their chest;… And yeah, yearning for different genitals is definitely something that meets the criteria for gender dysphoria.

Does that make you trans, nonbinary, something else? That’s something nobody can tell you, because we do not know how strong your feelings are, how much they define you and what you make out of them. That’s why the trans community usually avoids telling other people if they are trans or not - or deny anyone that label who claims it.

If you wish to be trans nonbinary, then you are. If you think, these terms do not fit you, then you are not.

Personally I struggled with similar feelings when I was younger. Fast forward and I am now fully transitioning, because I realized it was “not just that.” I wanted it all. But that’s my way to deal with my feelings. You may chose whatever path suits you and on that path you can try out what this thing or that and cast them off again if they do not feel right. It’s a journey of self-discovery and - for better or worse - it’s all up to you to discover.

Also Mustelids, because Mustelids are hella cute and who can blame nature for wanting to create more cute things?!

Yeah, it’s a means to an end: Right-wing propaganda.

The artist is RustyAtom, u/khynra on Reddit

For those who want some context: Theosophy has always been a huge part of the New Age movement and the founder of Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky, was a white supremacist. She taught her followers about a “Great White Brotherhood” (aka The Masters) who were racially superior to others. She was also convinced of the existence of superior “root races” (one of them being the Aryans) and various “sub-races”…

Unsurprisingly Theosophy would (for example) merge with the Völkisch movement in Germany (the precursor of the nazi party).

Theosophy with its belief in a secret underground realms, ancient high cultures, lost continents, superior alien races and so on and so forth, was one of the big influences on the late 20th century New Age movement.