Youre right, its a game people are ‘told’ to buy, rather than a recommendation. The first thing they see when they start up their console will be an ad for it.

Virality cannot be planned for and, for the most part, none of these moments went viral. Most people in the world didn’t knew about the mission, a ton more aren’t even aware it happened. These kinds of moments aren’t “allowed” to happen, they just happen because humans are humans. NASA, and scientists in general, are not at all a bunch of stiff book worms like the stereotypes dictate. People are people and will make jokes and try to keep work environments light. There’s enough stress on trying to fulfill the mission and come back alive already.

They were also super busy though, this mission was a test flight and, well, they spent most of their wake time doing science and testing the spacecraft. Not much time for PR stunts and goofing off, really.

Funnily, it is not a cultural quirk. It was usually part of regional marketing. Copyright and distribution deals of exported movies are very complex. Many countries have laws with mandatory dubbing. Contracts sometimes includes local translation, marketing, and theater distribution deals all in one. So, they would do all that they could to promote the movie for the local culture. It’s akin to how some voice actors have dubbing contracts, so only they are allowed to dub a particular actor for a particular market. Because that market associated the voice with the actor. If it is a big celebrity, changing the voice could sour audiences to the new film. Mix that with a pre-Internet era and you get that sort of quirky name translations. It simply sold more tickets in that market, according to marketers at least.

In 007: GoldenEye (1995), although Bond movies are regularly filled with outrageous fiction and overt misogyny. The fact that electro magnetic pulses created by a nuclear detonation somehow make electronic chips explode is very ridiculous. Surely played up for spectacle for the camera, but completely unrealistic.

Lol, that’s exactly the point of the movie. The wachowskis decided to make it about why franchises need to die. It’s all a big parody of itself because they are attacking Hollywood’s film industry.

Always remember that, in the eyes of the law, the real crime is being poor.

They never released music, just metadata. It doesnt matter. This injunction is just legal posturing. They have no jurisdiction to tell foreign domain registrars to do anything. It takes an actual cop walking in on a data center to finally seize a site (surrender hard drives, reroute domains, etc.) If the server is in another country, it takes years to go through the red tape. If the country is not collaborative, it will never happen, specially since piracy is seen as a very low priority issue in the grand scheme of cyber crime.

At least 3

One of the greatest propaganda pieces, that is usually not perceived as such intentionally, is that anything having to do with penalties from justice systems is free. Penal justice usually do have statutes of free services, judge time and free legal counseling, but most other tribunals and also a lot of the penalties involved incur financial costs and debt into the convicted. House arrest, you either pay for the ankle tracker or a fine for the officer’s hourly pay; mandatory anger management, mental health counseling, etc, you are footing the bill; civil damages, win or lose, attorney times have to be paid; deportation, the receiving country is billed for the plane ticket, room and food during travel, which usually they pass down to you; in the US, convicts have to work in order to access anything that is not basic care (food, water and electricity), usually for slavery wages. And a long list of etceteras.

The cliché of getting yourself arrested for a misdemeanor being cheaper than paying rent and food sounds quirky fun, until the reality of fines and fees of the associated process come through. Justice systems are mostly poverty manufacturing systems.

Not personally but I think that tribalism is one of tools used by mega corporations to implement abusive practices. So claims that “console gamers will buy anything they’re told to” is a bad take that deviates conversations to put a blame on console gamers that is not honest.

the effects.

That you now know that a new product is being sold. Your arguments don’t make sense. How are people supposed to know what to buy if they don’t find out about it somehow, someplace? That place being Twitch, Steam, a webpage review, their best friend, a curated list by a popular YouTuber, etc. It is irrelevant. There’s nothing special on whether someone is a console or PC gamer. No one just buys whatever X source tells them to buy. That’s a desire to dehumanize someone just because they play games different than you. That’s intolerance and tribal thinking of the stupidest order.

If you see all the other comics of this series by the author (a woman, BTW) you realize it’s part of the joke. It’s all about calling out stereotypes and the point is that, all countries are weird in their own way and bringing to light subtleties, similarities and differences beyond the stereotypes.

Did I? the whole conversation is moot. Why wouldn’t a store show you what it is selling? Yes, launch titles get the spotlight for a while. Should movie theaters remove all the posters because it is disgusting marketing(?). There’s a difference between that and egregious, invasive and unethical advertisement. But it is impossible to expect a point of sale to not advertise what it sells. Even still, Steam allows you to disable startup ads and you can also boot directly to library so you don’t have to see the store page ever unless you want to. It’s so much different from what Play Station and Xbox do.

A store telling you what it sells?

Oh! The outrage! The audacity!

A rideshare is the name of app summoned taxis, like Uber.

The point is precisely that trains, trams and busses are infinitely more exciting than a plain car.

This is a place for genuine pursuit of knowledge. You’re asking in bad faith to pursuit an agenda. Which is against rule 1 and 5 of this community. Also, snarky replies are not welcomed. Either take the topic seriously or go to a meme community.

Patients lying about symptoms have been a medical issue for centuries. It is the main topic of Baudrillard’s philosophical analysis on simulacra and simulation. Think about it, a soldier who doesnt want to be deployed starts simulating symptoms of a disease to be discharged. How would you catch him, can you? The answer seems straight forward, until you scrutinize it in detail. Neither military or medical knowledge actually have an answer. The kid who doesn’t want to go to school says he has a headache and a tummy ache. How do you validate another’s conscious and sensory experience? Hypochondriacs affirm to develop every disease they hear about. People under stress feel and have somatic symptoms akin to physical diseases, even when functionally nothing is wrong with them. Etcetera. Disease and diagnosis are not so simple and straight forward, not even when talking about bodily functions.

That’s mostly irrelevant because Apollo didn’t have computers landing the ships. They were humans. Astronauts trained hard to achieve that. Computers only flew the initial takeoff and ascent. An IBM computer that stayed behind with the rocket. But Armstrong landed that bird on the moon by hand.

Also, while the on board computer allowed them to consolidate sensor input, and calculate and execute burn maneuvers (relatively easy tasks), everything was double and triple checked by mission control back on earth. With way more powerful, faster and capable computers. Anything that required reflexes or finesse was done by a human hand on a joystick.

This is why all those attempts are impressive even if ultimately failed some way or the other. Because they are autonomous landers. A technology that didn’t exist until the turn of the millennium.

Yeah, but they caught that one on the rise, changing from tower defense to battle royale. While extraction shooters are already old news.

I know, since 2024. I’ve seen what they did, and their windows tiling and snap management is still egregiously inferior to almost every other desktop environment. So much so that people still pay for the app because it is so much better than default macOS, adding shortcuts, for example.