Many noted a striking similarity to the case of Savita Halappavanar, a 31-year-old woman who died of septic shock in 2012 after providers in Ireland refused to empty her uterus while she was miscarrying at 17 weeks. When she begged for care, a midwife told her, “This is a Catholic country.” The resulting investigation and public outcry galvanized the country to change its strict ban on abortion.

But in the wake of deaths related to abortion access in the United States, leaders who support restricting the right have not called for any reforms.

My country’s aptitude for remaining entirely unmoved by preventable tragedies that utterly upend political trajectories in other nations has become one of our most globally defining traits.

Video clip of the comment and aftermath during discussion (via twitter): https://x.com/Acyn/status/1851085909435039789

“Are you a supporter of Hamas?”

“Are you a racist, violent person inciting violence against me?”

Yeah, what happened. They take it down?

Oh, I meant to mention the map, I know a lot of people take issue with it. It’s certainly unusual and makes hundred-percenting item collection challenging. There are some maze-like areas with different levers you have to pull in certain orders that I’m undecided if they were improved by having less information.

Definitely a point of contention though, to say the least.

I’m not sure if it’s makes any difference to you, but Gris is very abstract in its “storytelling,” such as it is. There’s no backstory to expose, no reality vs. virtual simulation or dream world. It’s about a player figure in a colorless world who begins the game in an implied state of incompleteness and melancholy. You guide her through a journey punctuated by moments of adversity, wonder, and triumph, communicated by an affecting marriage of gameplay, score, and cinema. But that’s it, there’s no dialogue, exposition, or narration, no backstory or plot twists.

The gameplay itself is fine-tuned and accessible. You learn a few new abilities during the course of the game that serve as tools for navigation and puzzle solving. And there are no fail states. It is meticulously lightweight in presentation and play, but equally powerful in emotional immersion and effect. At least, that was my experience.

Gris is a no-brainer if you haven’t played it. Fundamentally simple puzzle-platformer, but one of the most beautiful and emotionally evocative games I’ve ever played. Nearly every frame of this game is a work of art, and the wonderful score by Berlinist complements the gameplay perfectly, directly and indirectly.

Aside from Return to Monkey Island - never played any of them - the rest is pretty meh for me.

There are exactly two games that my kids have played consistently for two straight years: Lego Marvel Super Heroes and “Robot Game” (Astro’s Playroom).

100%. I was just reading this week due to the Concord fiasco about how disastrous many of the live service initiatives have been and Jim Ryan’s misguided influence in that regard.

I am very relieved to see games like these succeed so spectacularly. Here’s hoping the sales numbers follow.

Personally overjoyed that it’s scoring so well. Incredible success for PlayStation and Team Asobi - I hope they’re celebrating well today/tomorrow.

Thanks, I still can’t wrap my head around how it makes sense to pull the game and issue auto refunds. Unless PlayStation thinks it’s so toxically bad that its mere existence is damaging to the brand.

I’m OOL, what happened that was this bad? I’d heard it wasn’t popular, like it just didn’t latch onto the market (reasonably, due to oversaturation), but was there something functionally wrong with the game?

Thought this looked pretty interesting, but the gameplay trailer looks pretty rough. Reminds me of a 2010-era mid-budget action adventure. I’ll keep an eye on it though, I’m not terribly picky about entertaining single-player games.

My patience with Cult of the Lamb finally pays off.

It’s worth mentioning that article is from 2020, around the time she had started pivoting from TERF-lite to TERF-MAX. It was…reasonably possible to assume at the time, for someone who wasn’t paying close attention, that her opinions were still rooted in misguided concern rather than open bigotry.

She had only just posted her manifesto a few months earlier, according to Vox’s helpful timeline, which reads reasonably if you’re unaware of the multitude of false and misleading claims she parrots.

Personally, I am excited about Ender Lilies, it was on my wishlist, but don’t care about other games.

100%. I vaguely remember hearing about Ender Lilies a while back but it fell of my radar. I watched some videos after this announcement yesterday and it looks really great. I’m excited to try it out.

As for the other two, I think I am permanently Lego-gamed-out, and I don’t really understand what FNAF…is, and I haven’t the motivation to bother. What little I do know doesn’t seem up my alley.

Deadline is a film industry trade paper, so success metrics like Box Office are of interest to it, especially insofar as those metrics guide the trajectory of industry trends.

I view the first in a vacuum because the others actually harm it

Lol I do the same thing! If I watch any of the sequels I view them essentially as fanfic. Your point about emotional payoff in the first is really good too. It’s easy to forget watching the sequels that the dramatic core of the first movie was John’s grief for his wife. The dramatic core of the sequels is little more, as I remember, than the convoluted bureaucracy and politics of John trying and failing to be left alone.

The best moment in the entire franchise is after the assassination squad is sent to his house in the first movie. I saw it in theaters and fully, unconsciously anticipated that when the police strobe lights started flashing through the windows, that we would get a tense scene of John Wick attempting to distract the cop and send him away without the bodies being discovered.

When instead he opens the door wide, and the cop casually peers past his shoulder, and just asks, “you working again?”, it’s such a delightful, comical, surprising reveal. The concept worked best when we as the audience expected the world to function familiarly, and it could playfully subvert those expectations in small ways. They dove so deep into the capital-L lore beginning in the second movie, that we no longer expected the world to function familiarly, and thereafter stopped being surprised.

The first flick is a bonified good movie. The rest are, varyingly, titillating scenes of artfully choreographed and executed action set pieces loosely strung together by indulgently juvenile nonsense.

I rarely look at the text of legislative bills, but how does some of this language wind up in binding laws?

“Harmful to minors” includes in its meaning the quality of any material or of any performance or of any description or representation, in whatever form, of nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sado-masochistic abuse, when it: (a) Appeals to the prurient interest of minors as judged by the average person, applying contemporary community standards;

Who the fuck is the “average person”? What the fuck are “contemporary community standards”? Realistically, I know it’s on purpose to give the courts leeway to apply the law loosely, but it’s still outrageous.

§18-1513

§18-1514

forecasts ad revenue to hit $1 trillion

I didn’t go to the theater for a few years due to both the pandemic and a new baby. When I did return for the first time last year, I was truly shocked at how many ads there are now at the major chains before curtain draw. It used to be ads before showtime, then trailers when the lights dimmed at showtime. Now it seems like there are just as many trailers as there were before, but intercut by an equal number of ads, so the time between showtime and actual movie start is ridiculous.