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There are multiple times where Jesus breaks with the established gender norms of the time.
Telling off the people about to stone the prostitute/adulterer to death would have been utterly shocking.
For starters… men and women were not supposed to be talking to each other in public, unless they were your family.
At the time, you basically needed two women to directly witness something… to be the equivalent of one man repeating hearsay, or claiming something with rather dubious evidence.
So… throwing himself into that situation… its actually so unbelievable that it would have played out as it did, that most non fundie scholars are almost certain it never happened… because Jesus most likely would have been beaten or killed.
If it is then a fictional story… the intent of adding it was clearly to indicate … not as equal of a view of women as say a modern feminist, but a radically, radically progressive and more equal view for the time.
As to being against biased treatment of ‘other’, foreign groups of people?
Jesus again talks with a woman, in public, a Samaritan drawing water from a well.
This is an oversimplification, but basically Samaritans were viewed by many other Jews as … not really Jews, as heretics, because they did not see the Temple in Jerusalem or its Rabbis as necessary or important to their version of Judaism.
Its… sort if analogous to how many modern Christians don’t view Mormons as Christian, even though Mormons believe they are.
But its much more extreme than that. Samaritans and other Jews would often refuse to speak to each other, beat the shit out of each other, kill each other, be very very intolerant.
But Jesus just sees this ‘foreign, heretical’ woman as another person, says it does not matter whether you worship at the Temple or not, and attempts to convert her as respectfully as with anyone else.
He ‘heals’ women with bleeding disorders, in a socioreligious environment where a bleeding woman would have been seen as untouchable, who should basically either be banished from society or sequestered and only tended to by other women, who would have to ritually purify themselves after every encounter.
…
You are correct that examples of misogyny and racism do exist in the New Testament as well. Paul comes to mind for having a much more traditional view of women.
But, there absolutely are ways to cherry pick or emphasize the … not as equal or progressive as modern views of equality and progress… but astoundingly more equal and progressive things Jesus did and said.
There absolutely are progressive churches that emphasize this.
You can interpret the totality of the Bible in many, many ways.
I agree with you that most fundamentalists who read it come away with very, very misogynistic and pro slavery views.
I do not agree that that is not the result of cherry picking.
I came from a fundamentalist upbringing.
For almost every single point espoused by them, ‘adhered to’ by them… you can find another verse that contradicts it, a parable that can be interpreted to negate it, a same story told multiple ways where various details of the different versions cannot possibly all be equally true and correct at the same time.
… While fundamentalists say that the entire Bible is inerrant, and has no contradictions… this just is not the case.
Even fundamentalist ‘literalists’ have beliefs that they base on non literal readings of verses.
Its… basically impossible to do a literalist reading of the book of revelation, for example.
Fundamentalists interpret that book metaphorically.
The Bible also very clearly states that one should never get a tattoo
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+19%3A28&version=NKJV
or wear clothes made of mixed weaves of different fabrics.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy 22%3A11&version=NKJV
Yet its very common to see Christians with tattoos, especially of a cross, or wear clothes that have some mixture of cotton and polyester and denim or whatever.
… almost like they’re cherry picking the Bible to support the positions they themselves already prefer!
EDIT: (for these two verses, the translation is the same in basically every … translation version, just went with NKJV because why not?)
I know.
I’d be embarrassed to be an out and proud fascist too!
The Shy Trump Voter theory is basically the theory that a whole lot of Americans are fascists, support fascist policies and leaders, but are self aware enough to realize they’d be socially ostracized for doing so openly, brazenly, enthusiastically.
I no longer care to coddle, or reframe the confusion or embarrassment or stupidity and ignorance of people who… know what they are doing is wrong, so they lie about what they’re doing.
Hey, I appreciate your honesty and integrity!
I suppose it is still possible that the Concord themed Secret Level episode will still air…
I still doubt it.
I’m still willing to bet 2¢ it won’t air, haha.
But yeah… the marketing (the video presentations of staff and developers, their public statements etc) seemed to me to very much indicate that the whole plan was to create an entire Concord Expanded Universe.
The game was supposed to have weekly story/character progression updates like some older MMOs, they talked about being in many different media formats, they literally used the phrase Concord Universe or Universe of Concord.
When you go all in on a new IP and … its the biggest failure in the history of gaming… all your plans are done, kaput. You have to wait for people to forget about it and then ‘reimagine’ it a decade later if you even want to try to resurrect it.
From a game design standpoint… it wasn’t designed to work as a heavily MTX dependent game.
That’s actually a whole lot more development, more content, more UIs, more testing… and thus money you have to throw at it to get it to be that… and it already has failed, and been stupendously expensive to develop, has a horrific general reputation/perception.
But as to at least the Secret Level episode airing?
You do have good arguments that basically boil down to it already being completed or mostly complete, and the … who gets paid by what contract with who for what… that kind of set up … may lead to it making more business sense to just air it anyway.
But I would still counter that Sony wants to memory hole this IP from collective knowledge, and that they value that, as a means of improving their public perception, more than whatever they’d lose from breaking their contracts with Amazon.
Not sure if you are joking but… it does not appear to be making anywhere near the amount of money that has been invested in it.
It costs a stupendous amount of money to develop the models, to train them, to rent out or just buy the hardware needed to do this, to pay for the electrical power to do this.
So, the goal here is to prevent ghosting by making ghosting minutely costly to the ghoster.
They pick from an array of multiple reasons why, and the app formulates an exceptionally kindly worded explanation to send to the ghosted person.
I don’t see this as dangerous to people who are ghosting potentially dangerous people.
Instead of getting nothing, and formulating whatever cockamamie explanation in their own minds (or maybe just going ‘sigh, oh well’), they at least get a facsimile of closure from a canned response.
Obviously this does not magically solve the many problems of dating apps, but I fail to see how this is more dangerous than just ghosting on its own.
The problem is that its minutely time consuming to provide a ghosting explanation.
This ghost explanation requirement requires people to actually explain themselves, and that’s gonna be very cumbersome to people who are not really looking for a serious, long term relationship.
It makes it very annoying to use the app in a scattershot approach for rapid fire hookups, with tons of potentials on deck, as you’ll be forced to consistently ‘tend’ to all of your simultaneous matches, or drop them…
…and for people who think they’re looking for a serious, monogamous relationship, but consistently ghost people, it will basically cause uncomfortable cognitive dissonance when they realize they don’t like having to do a modicum if effort to explain why no one seems to meet their standards or is due their attention, even though they previously thought they were interested.
Basically, the problem I see with this app is that it forces users toward being honest with themselves.
No, no no, that is the current practice and origin of the entire problem.
If you legally class a game as an ongoing service that is temporary and subject to termination, without recompense, soley by the decision of and according to the terms of the licensor, then they can legally sell you a game for $80 bucks and then shut down the next day.
If you legally class the game as a good, well you can’t sell someone a chair which then has 3 of its legs disappear or collapse (due to no fault of the owner) the next day without that being a scam of a defective product.
…
If you’re saying the emphasis should be on raising consumer awareness that they’re buying a temporary, revocable and non refundable service…
Who, other than children, do not know this yet?
That would not force the industry to actually change their practices.
It just slaps a big bold 'haha the fuck you isn’t even in the fine print anymore’ label on a product and makes our cyberpunk dystopia a little bit more obvious, but doesn’t achieve any useful goal in terms of altering actual game design/support or consumer rights.
Normally it works exactly backwards to this in larger studios/publishers.
Game devs do backbreaking, insanity inducing levels of work, and all but 10% are laid off when the game launches, regardless of success or failure, and for this time they are making probably about area median wage, maybe 10 or 20% more.
Its the middle managers and higher up executives who make multiples to orders of magnitude that amount of money, and almost all of them are rewarded by either failing upward or bailing out with golden parachutes, even though its often their decisions and directions, often going against lower level devs, which lead to the ultimate commercial failure.
Perhaps this loss will be so serious that some higher ups will actually get axxed, but even then it hardly matters: They can easily retire on what they’ve earned so far, whereas the actual people writing code, making maps, making art assets, they’ll basically all be homeless if they don’t find another decent job in 3 to 6 months.
I am fairly, but not 100% certain, that Ross Scott’s proposal currently making the rounds in the EU would say that you either have to refund a game (and all in game purchases) when it becomes totally unplayable, or you have to release some kind of way for dedicated fans to be able to least run custom servers and bypass no longer maintained, proprietary, always online verification/anti cheat schtuff.
I disagree.
Amazon still owns and operates New World.
All of the other games/franchises slated to be featured still exist as purchasable products.
They do not own or operate Concord, which probably no longer exists as a product.
The servers will be shut down in a few days.
There are no announced plans to take it F2P, as that would require dumping even more money into a gasoline fire to rework it into F2P.
Why would you promote a product that does not exist?
Its no longer a headline IP… its a total flop of an IP.
I don’t know, maybe if the whole episode is basically already done, maybe it still airs, but all that does is remind everyone about what is potentially the most expensive disaster in the history of video gaming (barring possibly Google Stadia).
It’s an anthology style show, meaning a bunch of basically self contained plots and stories, you could easily just drop one.
It’s possible they air it, but again, I’ll bet two cents the entire Concord IP just vanishes as brand management trumps over anything else.
I will bet you $0.02 that they will absolutely pull the plug on that episode, that they will indeed fully kill it here and now, and that it will not be reworked into a F2P game with the same characters or art style ever.
Maybe they will take some of the core gameplay mechanics and work them into projects totally unrelated to the ‘Concord IP’ they spent so much time hyping, but I see 0 chance that Concord just relaunches as Concord F2P in 6 months.
I do not think this will go F2P at some point in the near future.
If you spend 8 years and 200 million + dollars on something that you expect to … you know, at the very least, recoup that cost… and it doesn’t even make a fraction of a percent of that?
At that point, someone with some modicum of business sense is likely to realize they’ve been chasing the sunk cost fallacy for almost a decade and that throwing even more time and money at this to develop it even more probably is completely insane, as its already shown that nobody wants this product.
I think its more likely this will be totally scrapped barring a few assets and code snippets that might be cannibalized into other projects.
This whole thing is an utter disaster from a branding perspective, if the core gameplay systems later emerge in some other game, its going to have nothing to do with the whole grand expanded universe they’ve envisioned and promoted as being a huge draw to this game.
As for the devs, sure I feel bad for them in theory, but it doesn’t help that you’ve got at least one that calls everyone criticising the game a ‘talentless freak’ and then having a twitter meltdown in response to a person saying basically: wow I’m sorry this game didn’t do so well on launch, it looks like a lot of time and effort was put into it.
The whole ‘feel bad for the devs, they did a good job, it was management that fucked everything’ is seriously undercut when you basically express that opinion to a dev and they act like a 14 year old responding to people that don’t like their Deviant Art OC.
The Day Before was playable from release on Dec 7th until the servers were shutdown on Jan 22nd.
47 playable days.
All time steam peak player count: 38,104.
Total Development Time: Approximately 3 Years, likely closer to 4.
…
Concord was playable on release on August 23rd, and will shut down on September 6th.
15 playable days.
All time steam peak total player count (after release): 697.
Total Development Time: Approximately 8 Years.
…
Fucking amazing. At least they’re refunding it.
While one part of me fucking absolutely hates the Mac Goggles for many reasons…
…the other part of me kinda really wants them to become normalized precisely so that Ghost in the Shell offensive hacking type bullshit can just ruin the lives of anyone who regularly uses one.
It doesn’t have to be as immediately malicious as cutting the feed while driving…
…You could do that watermelon green text from 4chan. Just have a watermelon, every day, thats always… not quite in the same position, but always there.
Wild thing is I am white, cis and basically hetero…
…and I don’t see how anyone can not take this all seriously.
Lots of non white, non hetero talking heads on major channels that don’t seem to care either.
A lot of it is just the lucky few that made the right connection, or were born into wealth, who never had any life destroying tragedy ruin their career, who had reserve finances or other contacts or safety nets to rely on…
Ive met loads if people like that. They’ll give you all the emotional support in the world, until either disagree with them about nearly anything somewhat serious, or if you ask for help that might actually cost them some time or money.
There’s programs for that! I donate to a charity that… yeah, its all underfunded, extremely difficult to apply to and pass.
Then they get angry because in their head theyre a good person, but this grates upon their fundamental belief in a meritocratic society, causes cognitive dissonance.
Survivorship bias is deadly.
Its fanboy/girlism.
If you pirate content from their favorite author/artist/producer/whatever, basically all of their screeching comes down to a hysterical emotional response that you are hurting a person or group that they worship as God.
They just learn rhetoric to justify their emotions as a side effect, a consequence of wanting to be able to argue against the bad mean people that are hurting their favorite creatives.
They are naive, ignorant or misinformed, immature… usually believing in some kind ‘just world’ type worldview where everything is fair and square actually if you just follow the rules.
They don’t understand that the actual ‘losses’ from piracy are far, far smaller than whatever the RIAA or game studios say it is.
They don’t understand that the people who actually create or perform the art basically get paid a tiny fraction of what their labels or corporate overlords make.
They don’t understand that some people are actually poor, and the poor deserve art as well.
They don’t understand that when a reasonable cost forma product with reasonable ownership rights exist, a great, great many will prefer a streamlined but slightly costly method over a complex but monetarily costless method.
They don’t understand that you don’t really own anything which you can’t use or view or listen to as you please without relying on some proprietary other system which may just poof that ability out of existence one day, without refunding you.