It can and does happen to men, and trans and intersex people as well, but its far more commonly associated with women.

Most of the market for prostitutes globally is men seeking women… but not always.

It… also happens with children of all sexes.

Its unfortunately not uncommon for a child to be either abducted or lured into sex slavery, though being technical that now becomes child sex trafficking or sex trafficking of a minor, which usually has even more harsh punishments.

… Its totally fine to include a casino as a setting so long as interactive gambling is not a thing the player can do.

Did you read the article or the actual government literature it links to and quotes from?

Nothing is going to change about existing Mario game ratings.

I’d say it would be outlandish for family friendly Nintendo to suddenly reverse course on general world cultural/legal perspectives and re introduce gambling games when they have not done so in years, the same years many countries have been cracking down on lootboxes/gambling in games for their target demo, kids.

Finally, I didn’t downvote you. I only downvote people who are being exceptionally idiotic or abrasive or rude. I almost always prefer to engage with ideas or comments I take issue with but are not presented horrifically: the point of a discussion board should be discussion, not an internet points contest.

You’ll have to pay a subscription fee.

I still have not forgiven them for what they did to Maxis.

Now now, they innovated by turning Facebook from the way you could see what your friends were doing on your feed into algorithmically determining exactly which batshit insane ‘news’ stories from cranks and posts from crazy people would be the most effective rage bait to specifically you once they figured out that anger and rage are the most effective way to cause retention and engagement.

They basically scientifically perfected trolling, and figured out how to monetize it.

Sure it widely proliferated dangerous anti science nonsense, bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, fostered the Q Anon insanity mind plague and facilitated it going mainstream, but hey, hate sells.

Same apologies to you for my edit, but again as with the other similar reply, games are not retroactively rated R 18+ unless simulated gambling is added after September 22.

Yes, if older Mario Party games were patched or updated or remastered and released in a week, they’d be R 18+, but thats probably not gonna happen, and the upcoming Mario Party game doesn’t appear to have any casino like minigames.

Apologies for editing after you replied, I have a tendency of making a quick point and then expanding on it with an edit.

Hard to copy and paste lots of shit on a shitty phone.

But basically, its not a retroactive re rating of any game unless the game is patched to add in simulated gambling or loot boxes.

While sure, Mario Party 3 has simulated gambling minigames, I doubt its getting patched any time soon, and the upcoming Super Mario Party Jamboree does not appear to have any mini games simulating a casino type game.

EDIT: sorry for another edit lol, but yes, I do think its stupid that a poker minigame with in game currency only, which cannot be purchased or redeemed for real currency, is rated worse than a game with lootboxes.

… I’m sorry, what?

Do … does any Mario Party game even have microtransactions? You know, specific game content unlocked by an additional purchase with real world currency? Much less ones where the outcome of a purchase is substantially randomized?

EDIT:

Games that feature “simulated gambling,” such as casino games, will be legally restricted to adults aged 18 and over with a minimum classification of ‘R 18+.’ Projects that were classified before September 22 won’t need to be reclassified unless they lose their current rating due to “revocation or modification.”

This sounds like it isn’t a retroactive change, its a going forward change. It’s explained further in the actual guidelines:

Situations where video games may require reclassification Video games that were classified prior to 22 September 2024, but add in-game purchases linked to elements of chance or simulated gambling content may require reclassification if adding this content is likely to affect the classification of the game. For example: – video games classified G or PG that add in-game purchases linked to elements of chance after 22 September 2024 are likely to require reclassification – video games classified G, PG, M or MA 15+ that add simulated gambling content after 22 September 2024 are likely to require reclassification

So… yeah, Mario Party games would have to be patched or re released or something to add more gambling content.

It does seem to indicate that, going forward, a Mario Party game that simulates casino like gambling would get an R 18+ rating, but the Mario Party franchise does not seem to me to have had any minigames that even sort of resemble a casino type game, even with neutered or non existent betting/staking mechanics, in about a decade.

The upcoming Super Mario Jamboree, though public info on the minigames is incomplete, also does not appear to depict any casino like games.

Sex trafficking is basically when you break immigration laws and/or forcibly transport people against their will, or in some kind of unescapable debt/slavery type of arrangement, where you yourself know that the people you are illegally moving are going to be forced into sex work, often for little to no pay, often with the sex trafficked people having no practical ability to leave due to withholding their passports or bank accounts from them.

EDIT: And also often getting the sex trafficking victims addicted to drugs.

Its human trafficking + facilitating or operating a business of prostitution or non consensual pornography production.

Unless you are going to be forcing your gf into prostitution as her pimp following your out of state dinner, then no, what you have described is not sex trafficking.

If she is unhappy with going to an out of state restaurant but ultimately consents to this, and then consents to sex afterward, this is just an awkward relationship with you being pretty weird and controlling, but its probably not a crime.

If, however you threaten her or force her or drug her to get to this out of state dinner, and the do the same to coercively have sex with her without her consent, then that’s interstate kidnapping and rape… still not sex trafficking though.

Ok, if its the same person with sleep apnea and two different days, then what you’re looking at is two different data views or visualizations.

The top graph is more detailed, showing many different sleep states in detail, while the bottom is a more general, summarized view of just ‘in bed’ vs ‘good quality sleep’.

Probably the bottom graph is showing a more dull green for just being in bed vs the brighter green showing either just deep sleep, or core sleep plus deep sleep.

Somehow an option has been changed so that now you’re getting the simplified/summarized view.

The facial animations are somehow still wooden and lifeless as fuck, despite Half Life 2 doing significantly better fucking 20 years ago…

… so, acting wise, you don’t even need a mod for Tommy Wiseau levels of quality.

Is this data from the same person?

If yes, probably some kind of error is going on, idk what though.

If no, the upper person has sleep apnea.

EDIT: Ok on second look these are two different graphs, presumably of the same night… with the upper one likely tracking heart rate and movement to guess at sleep stage, and the bottom just… location in bed vs some level of deep sleep?

Yeah I don’t know, either its configured wrong, its not sensing correctly, or you have sleep apnea.

So I wasn’t there for 2042. I don’t know what the rationale was, but for me, it’s like the team tried something new.

The rationale was to make a 128 player battle royale ala PUBG or Fortnite. You know, shameless trend chasing!

It was supposed to basically be a spin off, non mainline BF game with the potential to be the next big thing while the next mainline game was being produced, but that only works if BF5 has staying power.

Which it did not.

And EA want MONEY, BIG MONEY ASAP!

So then BF2042 got massively reworked in a tiny amount of time to try to make it into a mainline series game by throwing a ton more developers at it than originally planned, ending up as a rushed, buggy, undercooked mess with tons of crap (half baked half reworked game modes) thrown at the wall to see what stuck.

That is why distinct armies were replaced with a cadre of mercenaries, as well as the entire 2042 timeframe setting in a world where nation states had basically collapsed already.

It is also why the maps are gigantic and seem like they were designed for a battle royale.

I’m guessing also their original plan was to have the much hyped dynamic weather systems serve a similar function as the the closing force fields or bubbles of death that battle royale’s have to force players into conflict and games to eventually end, but they couldn’t actually figure out how to make that work.

Any questions Vince?

Ok, so, she didn’t criticize Spencer in the same video she describes herself as an ex-MSFT executive producer… she’s criticizing the Concord producers… for basically poorly managing the development.

Here she is in an earlier vid criticizing Spencer:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=69gs773bZRI

And here is the later Concord vid where she basically blames the devs of multiple MSFT projects she was an executive producer on for just not listening to her.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IM11RtGLJ8

Like… I agree with her general message of ‘feedback from players is important’ and ‘don’t vastly misjudge your target demo’ but like… you were the executive producer and … you say your dev teams weren’t listening to yourself, and you are portraying yourself as the player advocate…

So … shut down development if they won’t listen? Pull the funding, or threaten to?

Or, if you were just an advisor and tangential contributor with no real power… then what was your job?

What were you being paid for? Talking at people for them to not listen to you so you could then be smug about it later and just bounce around companies based off of your own clout?

To me this is the exact kind of bullshit that leads to games with massively inflated budgets and design by committee:

You have all these corpos that don’t really do anything other than have mixed at best track records, who all act holier than thou and all are somehow involved in development basically so they can network and build their resumes, with little to no actual care that their unnecessary involvement blows up entire studios and ruins the careers of actual coders, level designers, artists, etc who actually make the game.

All these excess people who just generate conflicting demands and unnecessary meetings and emails that require extensive reworks… otherwise known as bad management.

Specifically to Concord, we saw how the lead art design person on twitter went from towing the company line about how great the whole project was to basically flipping 180⁰ after the game was canned and saying that development was excruciating with art being redone and redone by committee and then all the higher ups refusing to acknowledge any of their role in the process.

Its… Its the nature, seemingly, of nearly every single large studio these days that corporate office politics rules all, everyone has to play the game of humoring all the opinions of these overpaid execs, and then when shit blows up, nobody takes accountability for anything and everyone instantly becomes piranhas seeking a scapegoat.

I recently randomly came across a youtube channel of someone criticizing Phil Spencer…

…who in that very video, described herself as an Ex-MSFT executive producer for multiple failed or non successful games in the early 00’s, but blamed the failures on everyone else around her.

These people have literally zero self awareness.

They have absurdly massive egos and senses of entitlement, they all do exactly what they criticize other people for.

I was born and raised in the PNW and first saw the LaRouchies at the UW, with a large display of Obama with a Hitler mustache… though I did not spit at them lol.

Other posters have already come up with Huey Long, Charles Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, Lyndon LaRouche…

No American Presidential candidate before Trump has been so widely popular whilst also having a cult following of people who basically believe in an entirely different reality whilst also being so brash and brazen about it.

There have been demagogues before, with cultish followings, but they’ve not been anywhere near as popular as Trump.

To attempt to add a few:

Technically, Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, attempted to run for President back when Mormons were basically what we would now call a domestic terrorist group, and when most non Mormons viewed them as a dangerous cult.

He was assassinated by a mob, who stormed the jail he was in whilst awaiting trial for treason and other charges, before the election took place.

Also, you might be able to consider the fairly brief existence of the Anti-Masonic party at least somewhat akin to the living in a totally different reality attribute of MAGA people.

Basically, following the inciting incident of the Morgan Affair, where a William Morgan was apparently planning to publish a book outlining the evils of a Freemason conspiracy to control government and business in the US, but he was jailed, a bit of a circus trial ensued, and then he disappeared.

The Anti Masonic party was the US’s first third-party and basically it was built off of what we’d now call conspiracy theories stemming from the Morgan Affair, and called for Masons to renounce their fraternity or to be uprooted from positions of prominence.

Much like the modern MAGA movement, it was full of highly religious conspiracy theorists, but it didn’t really coalesce into also being a cult of personality around any of their more prominent members the way such reverence exists for Trump.

Millennial here: I think what Gen X and Boomer authors mean when they say ‘GenZ is more tech savvy’ is basically just that they use social media apps on phones and play video games, and that more of their culture derives from such things.

Maybe tech-immersed would be a better term.

As far as actual tech competency goes?

Yeah I agree with you. Phones and apps are generally reliable enough now that there’s far less need to figure out anything under the hood, unlike in my day where you kind of had to learn more about a system to do what is now common, and you had to type on a keyboard.

The short answer is no.

The long answer is, you might, just might be able to approach slightly higher specs than a Deck for the same cost if you do a custom build, assemble it yourself and get some wild deals or get lucky with a used but still good component.

I believe nuclear war was censored because the song came out in 2003.

FCC had temporarily banned a whole bunch of songs from live radio broadcast after 9/11 (Learning to Fly by Tom Petty, literally everything from RATM, many more) and in 2003 a while lot of Americans were terrified that Saddam would nuke us, or Israel, or terrorists would get a suitcase nuke or assemble a dirty bomb and blow up Chicago or something, as basically every journalism outfit in America was credulously reporting everything Bush admin officials were claiming about threats (which they knew were of dubious legitimacy), while the Bush admin itself was basically fabricating a claim to invade Iraq.

The uncensored version released in their album, but the music video and radio versions was censored likely so it could reach a larger audience on MTV and be allowed to be broadcast by the FCC.