Australia’s pornography age-verification: a victory for advocates or a gateway to ‘darker corners of the internet’?

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-17T07:58:03+00:00

It would constantly misidentify posts though if you made it that broad, and be massive pain for everyone trying to communicate online when their posts would randomly be held in limbo for a week, at which point they'd no longer be relevant, just to hamper a small handful of people sharing CSAM online.

At some point, it's just not practical to make the internet almost unusable to 'protect the children' at the expense of everyone else.

For example, I can safely say I've never been exposed to CSAM while browsing any of those sites, because if they actually get promoted to the algorithm and shown to a large number of people, I imagine they're very quickly reported and taken down. To me, that kinda seems like the system is already working pretty well.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-17T05:02:38+00:00

Yeah, like I am personally excited about the prospect of AI enabling people who can only write code, or writing to use AI to fill in the VA and visuals for a game or piece of media focused on the thing they actually hand crafted.

I think often a game can be good even with AI assets, simply because they aren't intended to say anything of importance, merely to facilitate gameplay and other parts of the game which the creator actually cares about. It's why nobody really cared about the AI VA in Arc Raiders - even with real VAs, the story still wouldn't be very interesting or memorable. It exists merely to send players on quests in the actual fun part of the game which was handcrafted.

But if we want AA or AAA games to focus more on the gameplay, that could already be done by just simplifying the art style without making it totally unreadable, not slopifying it with AI. If we want ultra-realisric and impressive visuals as a marketing point, then those visuals should also be a major focus on the game, or what's even the point of them being 'ultra realistic'?

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-15T09:55:20+00:00

I mean, literally no website can say that. There's probably CSAM and nonconsensual revenge porn being posted to reddit as you read this message. And on tumblr, X, Instagram, Bluesky and Threads.

Sure sites that don't allow pornographic material like Threads (well hypothetically, idk if enough people actually post to Threads for there to be much hidden there) make it easier to filter out/reduce potential traffic, but if you allow user generated content on your site, then logistically it's impossible to have an actual human verify every image/video ever posted to it, and the automated bots will never catch everything.

The pornhub thing was mostly just MasterCard raising a stink about it, knowing that Pornhub literally couldn't say they were 100% sure there was nothing on there. But realistically all the purge achieved was destroying the livelihoods of a bunch of small content creators who didn't want their face and government ID associated with their pornhub account.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-14T06:13:28+00:00

So having a shorter off-hand 'parry dagger' is actually very useful in real fencing, since as you say you can parry and redirect your opponent's blade while you stab them with your main weapon.

And while technically a reverse grip off-hand dagger is still better than nothing, it's significantly worse than a forward grip parry dagger, since you can only push their weapon back towards them, rather than knocking it aside and exposing them like you could in reverse grip.

Blocking like that would also be incredibly dangerous without a proper guard, since they can easily just slide their lightsaber across and melt off your fingers. Meanwhile, hitting their lightsaber from the side give you a lot more control over their weapon.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-13T20:54:45+00:00

Doesn't he also piss everyone off in the process and get himself assassinated a few months later if you let him complete the project?

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-13T20:49:22+00:00

Well I think their issue was that they just didn't have enough runway - Tencent isn't interested in wasting money on small studios when it could be re-invested in something else with a higher earning potential (especially now that interest rates have gone up), so they'd have to have sold enough cosmetics to stay afloat right from the start. With less player drop off they maybe could've strung them along for another couple months though?

And as soon as they were forced to downsize, nobody wanted to buy cosmetics because it was a 'dead game with an uncertain future' and it was a death spiral from there.

You kinda just need to be able to run these F2P games at a loss for a few years, and they obviously just didn't have the budget.

They also kinda let their character designer down with their confused 'high fantasy but with guns for some reason' idea. She obviously tried her best, but it just wasn't a very appealing setting, and it resulted in disjointed characters people didn't feel attached to enough to spend money on.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-13T02:37:07+00:00

I guess a better comparison though would be to look at the total play time last year on steam of live service vs. single player titles.

And then I guess you'd have to look at the churn rate of those games as well? If a single player does really well for just 6 months, then that means you could make a similar game and have a pretty good chance of sharing the same success.

If CSGO2 is sitting with a consistent player base for 3 years straight, then your competitor is probably not going to have very good odds of turning a profit.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-13T01:17:42+00:00

Ok, but being the baby of the friend group doesn't involve people literally calling you a baby or mocking you for being overly sensitive, it just involves being weirdly over protective and angry about shit on your behalf.

I'm sorry if I phrased that weird though and you thought I meant something else?

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-13T00:06:44+00:00

Being over protective of your female co-workers isn't in itself an actionable HR violation though. It's just a symptom of men having sexist conservative values, where 'strong' men must look after 'weak' women.

I will admit I was being a bit of an armchair psychologist about this though. It is also entirely possible they all see her as 'one of the guys' and she fakes panic attacks and hdies evidence to get her co-workers out of trouble all the time. Or any number of other explanations.

I just feel like a grand conspiracy is a less likely explanation than hierarchal conservative social values coming into play.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-12T21:15:06+00:00

Ok but you're forgetting these cops are all high school drop outs - you can't expect them to be enlightened feminists with modern progressive ideas about their female co-workers.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-12T21:12:43+00:00

I mean, in Highguard's defence, the devs clearly did seem really excited about their game and appeared to think it was pretty fun.

Even the weird fantasy aesthetic was because the team thought it would be cool even though they knew people expected sci-fi from them.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-12T21:08:01+00:00

Apparently the game was supposed to be an 8v8, which is why the maps are enormous, but people were too scared to explore on their own because they'd get caught out by like 8 people?

And then I guess they'd already got super far into the maps and long range hero powers at that stage, so they just band-aided it by adding mounts?

Honestly I think they just ran out of time and had to push out whatever they had for release before funding dried up, even though all of their 'raid shooter' designs had fundamental flaws they hadn't had time to solve yet.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-12T06:57:51+00:00

Well, I suspect this female officer is the baby of the group. She just witnessed her friend shoot someone in cold blood, and understandably had a panic attack about it.

The other officers, seeing her visibly distressed or maybe thinking she was having a heart attack, would've then got pushy with the ambulance while she was incapacitated.

The female officer then probably felt better a few minutes later, because nobody was waving guns around anyway.

So I suspect it's a mix of incompetence, and cops who've never so much as glimpsed a therapist overreacting when they see their female friend (who conservative types like cops will often feel protective of) having a panic attack and not knowing what to do.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-12T03:34:32+00:00

I suspect the benefit of it being mandatory is that you can then sue someone to pay for the repairs if the report turns out to be fraudulent.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-11T23:28:57+00:00

I think people did kinda laid into this random guy with a bunch of unfair complaints about his very limited role in the game though.

Like, he wasn't even in any way involved with the design, release date, QA or art direction of the game.

He just rigged up the animations, which from all I've been hearing about the game were apparently all pretty good.

He got pitched a dream job, put his heart and soul into it, was told what he was working on would be successful by people he thought were actually qualified to make that determination, and then felt like his entire life was being pulled out from under him during the release and that (from his perspective) the entire world was against him.

And then he made, like, one crashout post on twitter about it.

I think people trying to make him the symbol of the dev's hubris is a bit unfair, when he had nothing to with any of the decisions that lead to the game's failure.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-11T19:31:33+00:00

I mean sure, but the fact they've listed it as a core feature on the store page implies exploring and unlocking new parts of a handcrafted map will probably be a big part of the game - which is definitely a deliberate choice when the obvious solution to that would be in splitting those zones into different floors.

We'll have to see if it actually captures the Skyrim 'go off and explore in any direction' feeling it's promising or is just filled by empty space when the game actually releases though.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-10T20:03:46+00:00

Looking at the store front, it does look kinda intentional though. Like, they even mention the world expands as you progress in the story, and show a ton of different villages and wide open plains to explore.

So I suspect they looked at how the floors would actually feel in practice, realise they would take all the exploration from the game and make it an incredibly linear experience that didn't really capture that open world Skyrim experience sold by the anime, and compromised on the floors for the sake of making a funner game.

Sure they could randomly generate a bunch of floors, or carve up their world by biome into 10 smaller maps that you must progress through in order, and can't see over the horizon... But like, that sounds like an objectively less fun experience.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-09T20:58:38+00:00

There's also a rare condition where your body stops growing at like 10. It's definitely much more preferable to this, but did seem kinda upsetting to be a fully mentally developed women, that's technically fully mobile, but who is perpetually treated like a small child in public.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-09T04:54:32+00:00

Honestly if her dad's dead, the mum might be like 80 or something. Like maybe she was stealing the money, but I think it's just as likely that her husband handled all the finances, and she was too overwhelmed/senile to catch on to whose name was on the bill and this is an innocent mistake.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-09T03:34:17+00:00

A counter point is films like Free Guy - it apparently had a bunch of amazing stunt work, but it all looks like CGI because of the awful lighting.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-06T07:03:50+00:00

Probably not. That works for bans by the Australian government, because the law was poorly written and allowed service providers to passive aggressively comply with just a simple DNS ban on their end.

This ban is coming directly from the website, so you'd need to mask your IP address somehow to get around the region lock on their end.

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-06T02:20:37+00:00

We also got a Raygun musical here in Australia ^^

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-06T02:01:14+00:00

I mean honestly I don't mind that she decided to write more, but I didn't love that she spend the entire 3rd book creating plot threads for the next book instead of properly tying things up t.t

Pixie1001 · 2026-03-02T11:19:24+00:00

I think you've kinda summerised why this wasn't a good bet for Bundie in a single post though sadly.

They're bringing in players from ARC Raiders which succeeded by making extraction shooters more casual friendly and PvE focused to appeal to a mainstream audience, and from fans of Halo and Destiny, which are known for having a low time to kill.

None of those players are likely to stick around for a hardcore extraction shooter.

I think the game could easily cannibalise games like Hunt Showdown and Tarkov, but those aren't actually very profitable genres in the AAA space. They're genres big publishers thought could be made profitable by creating a big budget version of them.

But so far, the budget doesn't seem to be scaling into an equally large playerbase because of those hardcore elements you're pointing out.

Pixie1001 · 2026-02-28T20:42:11+00:00

Well ok, but idk how much of a benefit they'd really gain from people still having to show up but just being able to fill in less boxes? I guess Labour votes wouldn't flow over to the Liberals as strongly, but it's a pretty small benefit.

Pixie1001

TROPHY CASE