Lol I’m on the visa line with Visa now, they have a prepared statement about this.
They are trying to say they only ever block purchases unless it’s illegal.
They explicitly said they DO NOT moderate purchases unless it is illegal multiple times. I kept challenging her and saying it’s not illegal, yet they moderate, but she told me she can only read the prepared statement and repeated it multiple times. She then told me I would have to email them to “share my perspective” and then hung up on me.
I love how facts are just rendered to perspectives now.
It’s a common tactic of fascists. If you point blank refuse to accept reality and just keep repeating the same lie over and over maybe people will believe it. Of course it doesn’t really work. The people that were going to believe you already believe you, and the people who don’t believe you, will never believe you. Sadly despite the fact that it doesn’t work, they keep doing it.
But it does work.
If they keep you busy arguing about what’s real they never have to discuss actions or resolutions.
Corporations lie blatantly all the fucking time.
Its just that they lie in ways that usually are not able to be legally defined as some kind of a legally actionable version of a lie.
They are usually more worried with ever having outwardly admitting something that they could be sued over, than they are with any kind of human to human sense of accountability or believability.
Every, single, thing they are mass releasing or designing as an official stance has gone through some kind of legal team, or a team under a legal team that follow’s guidelines from a legal team.
This is just how megacorps work.
They are not people, they are a sociopathic machine, operated by people who very much tend to be sociopaths.
That is true, these are perspectives. Nobody knows the truth, only a projection if it upon their world.
It’s just that by that they are claiming that it’s their perspective which decides what will happen.
In other words, they are saying “so whatcha gonna do”.
I could not have worded it any more succinctly. This is what capitalism + the internet has done to us.
I like the story but hate the fact it’s all in separate tweets.
They just wasted your time too with their strung out story. They’re in too deep!
Here’s the summarized version:
Be Polite.
Act as if you only understand ‘the effects’, have a nebulous notion of ‘the cause’.
Act like you know little other than this, and insist they explain it to you like you are a five year old.
Waste as much of their time as possible, without becoming hotheaded, instead become sad-confused.
“I’m not so much angry, as I am disappointed” type of vibe / energy.
And if possible, be genuinely kind to the low level, actual people you talk to, they literally do not make the rules.
If anyone has the GPUs to self-host LLMs to spam the shit out of them, it’s gamers. Gotta get on an easy-to-self-host project to distribute to the community 😄
you can probably use the tts tools from hume.ai
I think the limiting factor would be getting your number blocked. Maybe someone could get a bunch of VoIP numbers?
This is what spammers, scammer, credit collections do.
It absolutely works.
is there any EU law that prohibits this itch/steam situation and the mastercard email contact information?
No
Great
Time to cancel some cards
Now bombard senators and reps about Palestine, the global South, Africa, Asia, and domestically, rent caps, grocery caps, single payer, comprehensive health, living wages, safe working and living conditions, fossil fuels, climate extinction, taxing TF out of the ultrawealthy and mega corps, chemicals out of food, water, air…
“What about” is a fantastic way to breed apathy when people are protesting something. You’re doing nothing for any of those causes with this comment. You’re making things worse for all of those causes, plus the one this post is about. And your comment only tangentially relates to the Community this post is in…
But how can I be expected to sign the SKG petition, while people in West Sahara live under Morocco’s unjust occupation?
Tap for spoiler
\s
SKG is privileged western bullshit. It is a way to distract from real issues while feeling like you had an impact on something.
I just happen to have the foresight to know that 20 years from now it will sound stupid to brag that I helped change some obscure game development process for a tiny bit more convenience.
This is all absurd and a waste of time, but whatever makes people feel useful I guess.
Everyone has their path into activism and politicization. Last time this happened was when wikileaks got blocked by visa/mastercard, next time, with this experience it may be one of those causes.
Yeah they’re starting with something that hit close to home without feeling like they’ll get disappeared or ignored.
There’s always a gap between “Someone should do something about this” and “I should do something about this”.
Once that line gets crossed, plans like OP’s post start.
It’s somebody else’s problem.
Comparing blocking payment to wikileaks and blocking payment for porn video games is absurd. Is nuance dead?
Chemicals in food and water? You think you can live without chemicals?
Mate, some of my relatives are made of chemicals
Just some?
I can’t say for sure.
After the first one, it has become much harder to get core samples.
Hell, internet chemist here, I can say with certainty that they is chemicals…
Unless you’re a family with a free energy being background?
Given the reactions at Thanksgiving, I think some may be antimatter
I hate to break it to you, but antimatter is just extra spicy chemicals
Please. You should know what I mean.
Considering that “chemicals” is such a loaded word now with ignorant and dangerous people like RFK Jr in positions of power, maybe get specific.
honestly there needs to be a git project that I can clone that uses a local LLM to auto call all of the senators, congressmen, reps, whoever. Also call all of the visa/mastercard callcenters non stop. And I mean non stop. Bonus points to use public figure voices. As in use AI to do our bidding.
https://github.com/vndee/local-talking-llm
Seems like it would be a good place to start. You’d need to write the bit in order to send the output to a voip service and receive the input from the same service.
If you could get that going in a container you could spawn a bunch of them on VPSs (finding ones that have the hardware to run local AI would probably be expensive, probably better to use a hosting service if you’re going to scale this).
I’m sure there are more conversation agent frameworks that people have built (it’s a pretty simple loop to create), but if you wanted to get started this isn’t bad.
It’s already here, so…
What do those have to do with my video games?? I just wanna
grillgame!Nice empathy.
It was sarcasm. I really dislike that the only thing young men will protest about is saving video games.
Thank you for clarifying. Poe’s law is alive and well!
PS also Epstein files
Definitely
World peace, end hunger are not entertaining as “How to get an A from your professor - sorority/fraternity party edition” (coming to iOS and Android).
You have underestimated the power of porn games.
Getting downvoted for wanting people to advocate for better living conditions, way to go .world!
Edit: Sorry for wanting people to advocate for better things, glad to know that’s too much to ask.
It’s amazing that you posted this after having a fairly good explanation as to why it’s not a good idea to conflate too many things together.
If you string too many things to a cause you dilute all of them. Especially because MasterCard and Visa have nothing to do with what’s happening in Palestine so linking the two causes together just weakens both of them.
but Maeve said to call the senators about these, not mastercard. and you don’t need to call them about all of these topics at once either.
.world is full of children who dont understand time yet. They think everything is final, and you just need to judge a thing once. They compile lists of who is out and who is in, and make memes appropriately. They kick out anyone who doesnt fit their group.
If someone can point out the difference between middle school and .world, I’d love to hear it because I can’t think of one.
I think the people using the biggest whataboutism argument I’ve ever seen are the ones acting like middle schoolers, but that’s just me.
Feel free to make a new post listing senators’ contact information, walking people through calling their senators about those issues, and giving them a rough script or an idea of what to say. That would be a hell of a lot more productive than all the whining and complaining y’all are doing in this post.
They won’t, since they only want to nag and feel superior for caring “real issues”.
All consumer rights aren’t real issues but we still have them, SKG just wants the law to act on the companies clearly breaking it.
Our priorities are showing.
Couldn’t you just buy it on GOG or something? Steam sucks anyway why expend the effort
Talk about completely missing the point. Money processors have no business telling us what we can buy or where.
You’ve missed the point entirely.
Please enlighten me.
Not my job.
Hey now, why stop these people FROM CHANGING THE WORLD?! The stakes are too high gramps!
You are right, let’s all do absolutely nothing when corporations inch themselves into controlling every aspect of our lives.
Nothing like a gaming platform that won’t let you refund your purchases after 2 hours of playtime.
I think you are confused about this it works. Steam absolutely does refunds after 2 hours of playtime, it’s just that if you have less than 2 hours it’s mostly automated and you don’t need a reason for the refund.
My bad.
Still, that gives them the discretion to turn you down.
Better than no refunds?
I’m looking for something a bit more reasonable. GOG lets you do it within 30 days regardless of playtime I think.
They will go to gog next, genius, they also sell adult games since last year.
Maybe you should call and stop pay with their services
Wow. Imagine being able to buy a video game online with a credit card, without having to drive to the department store to buy it! You don’t even have to move from your seat! How draconian THAT would be!
Imagine if they cared this much about the Epstein files…
Protesting against christofascists in the government isn’t mutually exclusive with protesting a christofascist censorship organization. You can protest two things at once, you know.
Because Visa and MasterCard might actually change their minds. They are a business and they don’t want this shit if it becomes more annoying to deal with gamers than it is to deal with random whiny Australians they’ll reverse their decision.
Trump on the other hand is made of his mind and that’s the end of it. Obviously you should still continue to complain because it’s hilarious how upset he gets about it, but that list is never seeing the light of day until he’s out of office, one way or another.
I’d just like to point out that you seem opposed to activists bombarding a company to change its policy, but are fighting this by gathering activists to bombard a company to change its policy.
What’s changing here?
Wait what?
Are you sure you responded to the right comment because I don’t understand what you’re talking about. I’m not opposed to bombarding any company.
The situation, where public lobbying for morality alone is capable of unilaterally causing wide cultural censorship, is the issue that has arose. Correcting that situation by rising to the tools by which the puritans are attempting to force their backwards morality onto society is a reaction, not the root cause. It’s pretty explicitly different.
Well considering GOP reps are getting 500:1 call ratio on the Epstein files people DO care this much.
It’s possible to care about multiple things at once.
People care far more about the epstein files, its absurd to compare the two.
It’s impressive how much people get riled up about not getting porn. I don’t blame them but I also don’t see this as activism, I doubt anyone really spending the time on this cares about possible future censorship that others who are not them may face, they just want to buy their porn.
This is not about the porn. If you think about it for more than 3 seconds it becomes obvious how this is about the power finance institutions have over morals and society and how religious groups leverage moral panics as a way to weasel in harm and destroy minorities by associating immorality with marginalized groups. Just like pro-life anti choice has nothing to do with saving children, but is about hurting women and controlling their uteruses. Terfism has nothing to do with feminism but is about hurting trans people. Drug wars weren’t about protecting the youth but about destroying the rights of Hispanic and black communities. And a long list of etcéteras.
This is about defending fundamental rights that will get trampled under the guise of moral and religious righteousness. It’s about power and control. Porn is just the scapegoat. Several LGBTQ+ games were also hit, many which didn’t even have anything to do with sex, just because of this incident. That’s how it begins and it was completely intentional, the cruelty is the point.
I just sum it up to a failure of capitalism . The fact that two companies have so much power over this without having to pass any laws or legislation is really the worrying part. I just hope people continue to fight even after this one thing is resolved. Otherwise it will happen again because that’s how capitalism works
If these games are so important the devs can release them free somewhere else. Steam and itch aren’t the only place to find games, and sounds like there’s room for a new market just for these games if they are as popular as it seems.
Porn games were not the only games delisted. Many non-porn non-sex games were removed. Including LGBTQ+ games, and even award winning AAA games. There’s no rational argument but only moral outrage and FUD. This was not a financially motivated decision, capitalism cannot solve the problems it created. You can’t use commercial alternatives to dispel the damage done by this decision and again, this is not about the porn. To assume it is just about the porn is to fall for the distraction tactic. For example, the point of screaming “save the children…by murdering all trans people” is in hopes that you will get distracted enough by the first part that you’ll turn a blind eye to the second one. To excite your amygdala with enough outrage and adrenaline that your pre-frontal cortex can’t perceive that the intentions and the actions don’t follow logically from each other. You are being manipulated.
I don’t want Christians dictating what I can and cannot do.
they will go for games that have violence, horror and dark humor next.
- UK would like to disagree.
- France would like to disagree.
This isn’t about porn games. They removed Detroit: Become Human.
If you think this will stop at porn games, then you’re a fool.
oh I see so you’ve decided what’s going on and are now angry about that.
I’m sorry that your story version of me is letting you down. I’m not really sure what I can do about it though.
How about reading a bit instead of thinking you have it all figured out?
I’ve never bought a porn game nor ever played one, but I just think it’s stupid that such large companies fold to a lobby organization and start moderating the sale of products.Christian fundamentalist activists are persistent and organized, and it’s effective. I think it’s bad how a small minority is able to dictate the lives of other people and I like how people get riled up because I hope it will remind the people in charge of those large corporations that catering to extremists is a bad decision.TLDR: Idgaf about the games, I just hate it when religious zealots dictate the lives of others.EDIT: I might have been wrong about “Collective Shout” and didn’t look into it enough before forming an opinion.
EDIT 2: Yeah, I don’t think “Incest Daughters BDSM” deserves saving. They seem to be primarily targeting rape and incest games, and I can definitely understand that you want to see rape games gone from if you’re an organisation like this. Article However, I still don’t know how accurate their own article is, I might check out more sources/perspectives when I have time.
How about Detroit: Become Human? Because they removed that as well.
I’m against the censorship, to be clear, but a David Cage game might not be the best example to use in the future lol
There’s a solid argument that most of the porn games are some form of sexual abuse. You could argue that adults should be allowed to commit fake sexual abuse but its still likely not a positive for those who consume it.
Its interesting noone here has argued for porn games, just against censorship.
Right. Most of us don’t care about the porn, which is why we’re not arguing for it. Most of us just don’t like credit card companies being allowed to dictate what we do and don’t buy.
Plus, I’m guessing anybody with an incest fetish probably understands that isn’t something to go shouting to the world if they want their position to be taken seriously.
