MolochAlter

Depends, lots of churches welcome lay members of the community to the ancillary activities they organise. Catholic churches in my experience are much more embedded in their communities in southern europe regardless of the status of the people participating.

My father has been lapsed for 40+ years, never shows up for church and doesn’t participate in any of the religious aspects but he still runs free arts and crafts workshops in the parish buildings, for the local kids whether they’re part of the congregation or not.

It’s the fact that church comes with an actual presupposition that it isn’t optional, while de facto being optional.

Going to church (in contexts where denomination shopping isn’t a thing at least) means going to a place where a person is not there to validate your particular perspective but instead often to tell you and everyone else in the group to do better, publicly, not because they’re better but because they appeal to higher principles whose correctness is taken for granted buly the congregation.

See also: the absolute brain lottery winners on the internet bitching that the pope isn’t a real catholic for telling them they’re bad catholics (arguably bad christians in general, definitely bad people) for dehumanising poor people and immigrants legal and illegal.

I’m far from a catholic (that is, I’m actually a lapsed catholic if you ask the church, but I was never a believer, just born into it) but there just isn’t a space where you’re going to participate, respect the ethics and morals, still fall short of them, be chastised, and be forgiven, that doesn’t involve some religious aspect.

Growth and constant growth are not the same.

Obviously growing a business is positive in some circumstances, the point is that growth for growth’s sake becomes the name of the game once you go public, whereas when privately held the company can decide whether it makes sense to grow in that moment or focus on other goals in the short term to benefit a long term strategy.

Then they collectively forgot about that last part.

It’s not “companies”, it’spublicly traded companies.

And the answer is quite simple really: the moment you become publicly traded your stock becomes your product, and everything else becomes a means to deliver better stock prices to your investors.

Not all companies are publicly traded, I patronise privately held companies wherever possible because as a client I’m still at the core of their business strategy, and I’m wary of the alternative.

At the end of the day, bad strategies result in bad products and services. Vote with your wallet, it’s very possible.

nothing but eyecandy

Not what you initially said.

I love this game so much and I’ll always defend it against all the eye candy accusations.

The implication was that being eye candy at all was in itself an accusation it needed defending from, which is where I extrapolated the rest.

Good if that wasn’t what you meant, but this is an extremely common talking point so I don’t think me coming to that conclusion was unwarranted from the context.

I’ll always defend it against all the eye candy accusations.

Why? What’s wrong with the game being unashamedly eye candy?

ISTG I hate this entirely american puritanical “can’t have fun sexy things” horseshit.

The character design is literally Kamiya and Nakamura’s fetish fuel, they themselves reported vibing super hard on the character design and insisting sexy librarian glasses were a must.

It’s one of the best action games of all time, its presentation is deliberately excessive in every way, that includes hypersexualization, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

you’ll never be able to see Bayonetta other than one of the most badass action game protagonists of all-time.

Also this implication that being a badass somehow overrides being hot? Excuse me? Since when? If there’s anything that enhances hotness, that is hypercompetence.

Being incredible at something so effortlessly that you still look stunning while doing it is a force multiplier, not a contradiction.

Not really, believing there should be affordable housing for everyone doesn’t mean all housing should be affordable to anyone.

I believe there should be different levels of density of housing and pricing in different areas, and that the state should subsidise some percent of rent based on income, possibly up to 100% up to a certain cost, if you haven’t had evictions on record; but I also own different properties I rent at market rate because it’s commensurate to the cost of living in the area, and a lower rent would not make living there any more affordable, and would open me up to possible tenant disputes if someone who can’t afford to live there were to move in.

If the cost of living went down in the area I would also adjust accordingly, as I don’t believe in fleecing people and it’s also generally beneficial to be in line with market value to maximise client volume.

Affordability isn’t a “rent is too high” issue only. It’s a “there is no place I can afford to live in that makes sense for the places I need to reach” issue too.

Cost of living is a huge factor, I have friends who work in the service industry who almost had to move completely out of the city due to the 22-23 price hike, despite local laws preventing rent from following inflation.

It’s only hypocritical if you believe no housing should be market controlled, which is a non-serious opinion, to be frank.

People aren’t exactly ranting about how Winston (a Gorilla) isn’t sexually attractive

Well that’s for 2 reasons:

1. He’s a single character, the vast majority of characters in any successful piece of media are at least somewhat appealing, and this stands true for OW.
2. Winston is a stud

demonizing queer repsentation as ugly.

They’re not, they’re specifically saying Concord’s character design is ugly for a lot of very practical and valid reasons, and also it’s only representing a very specific minority of people who are a spit in the bucket of the total audience numbers necessary to support a paid live service title.

So it’s both doing a disservice to itself by just being incompetently made AND playing into the stereotype that minority rep always ends up ugly (an already very common sentiment due to how often cases of it sucking are spotlit) because it has basically nothing but that.

Ironically had Concord had a more actually diverse cast, and not overwhelmingly represented a handful of pet groups the designers seemed to overwhelmingly favour, it would have not been possible to attack it as “they’re all lame fat and/or gay.”

It still would have tanked, so on balance not much of an issue, but still.

You absolutely can. Something bad and uninteresting is not an improvement on something mediocre and uninteresting.

You don’t get points for the jump if you shatter both your knees on the landing and the kneecaps fly out into the stands killing one of the hotdog vendors.

There’s something deeply funny to me that the same political side that demands representation for everyone in everything is then stunned to know that if EVERY character doesn’t represent something the typical audience likes/wants to see that audience will go elsewhere.

This is not rocket science, and it’s such a deeply american problem it’s honestly hilarious and frustrating at the same time with your culture’s obsession with moralizing media consumption and production only somehow ever registering one way.

If your game’s characters look lame, uninteresting, and nothing like most people would want to be, nobody’s gonna buy it. It’s that simple.

Progressives keep banging on about how people need to be represented to want to partake in a piece of media,* then when a piece of media that represents exclusively stereotypical members of a portland polycule shows up people are surprised if it’s played exclusively by some polyamorous portlanders (not even all of them if you look at the stats).

* which is yet more horseshit america-centrism, the rest of the world is used to not being represented in most media we see since americans make most of it, and i’d rather laminate my own testicles than subject myself at an earnest attempt from an american at representing my demo.

Furthermore:

Overwatch is super diverse, but all their characters (yes, even the fucking gorilla, Winston is handsome as fuck and he passes the harkness test) look appealing.

Their bodies look well proportioned, even Roadhog who is a morbidly obese alcoholic with visible cirrhosis looks more visually appealing than any concord character, because even he looks like an idealised and larger than life (pun very intended) version of a morbidly obese alcoholic.

Meanwhile concord characters look like frumpy cosplayers that wouldn’t qualify for 3rd place at a backwater anime con somewhere in whatever US state has the worst inbreeding rates.

Your example with DRG is very fitting as well because I don’t think most people would call those characters sexually attractive (but trust me, some absolutely do), but they are extremely visually appealing. Bold recognizable shapes that fit their roles, good color combinations, fun presentations.

Concord looks like it’s about to scold you for microaggressing someone, DRG looks like it’s about to attempt to burp another country’s national anthem it hasn’t even heard before.

DRG oozes goliardic fun, while Concord looks and feels like the used dishrag at the bar where that team’s art director will end up working if there is any justice in the world.

ETA: two words, punctuation

Baldur’s Gate got them all, sorry.

Stop Killing Games can focus on other industry problems later when it has established more of a presence.

Or just not? SKG is a consumer rights and art preservation movement, not a labor rights movement.

None of the people who signed up for SKG should expect it to pivot to something else once the stated goal is achieved, and especially not to legitimise itself as an organisation beyond its stated mission off the back of the support for it.

I guarantee you without a shadow of a doubt that a “Stop firing devs” would not have gone anywhere close to this level of support.

Moreover, it’s basically impossible to unionize any kind of digital asset production work, because with modern internet connections locations are a non-issue, and you can’t unionize across vastly different countries and economies.

Too many people are willing to work in games while being paid breadcrumbs to even make a union possible, even without the outsourcing issue, and frankly if you are that willing to get fucked why should anyone stand in your way?

Lol no.

If you want workers’ rights get your own movement started, you don’t get to come shit up the initiative others have set up for an entirely different purpose.

Well yeah, “shut the up” is not a correct phrase… ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )

I love communism

And I’m sure you live on one of the many successful communist countries in the world today.

Oh, wait.

and circus performers

Well at least you have high self esteem.

they both bring joy to the masses

The masses*

* the portion of them that is not in a gulag, is not disappeared, doesn’t have its rights curtailed due to social credit decline for disagreeing with the regime, wasn’t purposefully starved to death during the holodomor, and so forth.

And don’t get me started on the evils of the circus performers who propagandise for them from the comfort of their liberal democracies.

There is a reason communism is treated with equal acrimony to nazism in every former soviet satellite state, m8.

How’s the bile, you seething commie clown?

Jesus that is not a small bug lol

Wtf why?