Ghazi

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A community for progressive issues, social justice and LGBT+ causes in media, gaming, entertainment and tech.

Official replacement for Reddit's r/GamerGhazi

Content should be articles, video essays, podcasts about topics relevant to the forum. No memes, single images or tweets/toots/... please!

Community rules:

Be respectful and civil with each other. Don't be a jerk. There is a real human being on the other side of your screen. See also the Blahaj.Zone Community Rules

No bigotry of any kind allowed. Making racist, sexist, trans-/homo-/queerphobic, otherwise demeaning and hateful comments is not ok. Disabilities and mental illnesses are not to be used as insults and should not be part of your comment unless speaking of your own or absolutely relevant.

No gatekeeping and being rude to people who don't agree with you. Leave “gamer” stereotypes out of your comment (e.g. sexless, neck bearded, teenaged, basement-dwelling, etc). Don't compare people to animals, or otherwise deny their humanity. Even if you think someone is the worst human on the planet, do not wish death or harm upon them.

No "justice porn". Posts regarding legal action and similar is allowed, but celebrating someone being harmed is not.

Contrarianism for its own sake is unnecessary and not welcome.

No planning operations, no brigading, no doxxing or similar activities allowed.

Absolutely no defense of GamerGate and other right-wing harassment campaigns, no TERFs and transphobia, racism, dismissing of war crimes and praise of fascists. This includes “JAQing off”, intentionally asking leading questions while pretending to be a neutral party. This also applies to other forms of authoritarianism and authoritarian or criminal actions by liberal or leftist governments.

NSFW threads, such as ones discussing erotic art, pornography and sex work, must be tagged as such.

Moderators can take action even if none of the rules above are broken.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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"History does not repeat itself but it often rhymes."

If you're not aware of what's going on Aftermath have an excellent write-up:
https://aftermath.site/sweet-baby-detected-conspiracy-theory-steam

Currently another right-wing harassment campaign is raging and it keeps escalating, drawing wider circles every day. At the heart is a small consultancy company, called Sweet Baby Inc. They are accused of "destroying games with diversity and inclusivity". It is - of course - conspiratorial nonsense, the company isn't even doing what the chuds accuse them of. The fake outrage is yet again a pretext to spout hate and revel in sexism, racism, homo- and transphobia.

If all of this feels familiar to those who have been around the last time, that's because it is: 2024's Gators have fully the moniker of "GamerGate 2.0"

In the tenth year since GamerGate, we're seeing a repeat of it in the harassment campaign against narrative design studio Sweet Baby Inc. The same forces that set off the initial one have changed their language and targets, but the reactionary current is back, only strengthened in the intervening years, and still enabled by a corporate class that cares more about profit margins than worker well being.

This campaign - like in 2014 - is a part of the larger right-wing attack against anything that their fascist ideology disapproves of. Like the last time, they choose a small group to punish and harass in order to send a wider message. This needs to be stopped. But what we get instead is yet another failure of management class: Valve and Discord who own the platforms where (currently) the majority of the harassment is organized, have yet to take any measure. All we can do at the moment is to support each other and oppose the fascists.

So to SBI and its workers, solidarity, always.

~ The Ghazi mod team

PPS: Free Palestine

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Several bands have dropped out of an upcoming metal festival in Orlando after Kyle Rittenhouse was announced as a special guest.

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The chief of the Shawnee Tribe grew up playing video games, including hundreds of hours colonizing a distant planet in the 1999 title Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.

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It’s going to be a lot harder to pull off massive protests.

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Earlier this month, the entire staff of Annapurna Interactive walked out the door in a group resignation. But while some of the circumstances around their departure emerged in the reporting, one pressing question was left unanswered: why? IGN has pieced together a somewhat complex answer.

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A union has called for staff at Ubisoft’s French operation to strike over a return to office order and pay dispute.

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We sat down with Tatum to talk about radical recent changes in the dubbing industry, what it’s like being a highly visible gay voice actor, and Ouran’s enduring appeal.

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Content warning: Death, grief

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Inside Out 2 is the highest-grossed animated film ever. But behind the scenes, Pixar workers grappled with crunch, layoffs, and an avoidance of LGBTQ+ themes. Our report of the tumultuous making of the sequel to one of the most beloved Pixar films ever.

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IGN interviews ex-employees of pixar who worked on "Inside Out 2". The article discusses crunch, layoffs, the company culture of pixar, and how the failure of "Lightyear" led to executive notes that "Inside Out 2" be "less gay"

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19624343

Ex-Sony Computer Entertainment Europe president Chris Deering does not believe recent layoffs across the games industry have been a result of corporate greed. Instead, workers who have lost their jobs should "drive an Uber" or "go to the beach for a year" until employment settles.

Deering was a guest on games writer Simon Parkin's podcast My Perfect Console, where the pair discussed games industry layoffs.

"I don't think it's fair to say that the resulting layoffs have been greed," said Deering. "I always tried to minimise the speed with which we added staff because I always knew there would be a cycle and I didn't want to end up having the same problems that Sony did in Electronics."

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Here, at the connection between technology and queerness–in the liminality between desire and technology–there is room for new imaginings. It is no surprise then that technology, which had always been promised as the horizon of the future, had placed into it the dreams of those who hoped for a new future beyond the limitations we had today. As the queer and trans community found new connections and language to express our imaginations on this new digital frontier, we expanded beyond the boundaries of others' expectations for our bodies. Our lives began to push and break the limits of what others said we could become. Is it surprising, then, that the internet has become a space for our collective queer imagination of a future horizon?

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Robert T. Tally Jr. reads Tolkien's corpus with the tools of Marxist literary criticism, delivering a devastating blow to the fantasy writer's rightist fans.

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Osmotic Studios’ Closer the Distance is a melancholy Sims-like where you play as several community members grieving one of their own.

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Another lighthearted documentary from your friends at People Make Games! This time Quinns explores the disconcertingly-familiar world of government-funded, military wargaming and its relationship with the commercial games industry.

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It said opposing the tech ignores “classist and ableist” issues.

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The Game of Sisyphus is about moving a boulder up a hill, but for its developers—and by extension, its players—it's about so much more.

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We’re gonna look at a TikTok account that uses Math to explain (Hate) women. While it’s tempting to dismiss this account as just another routine TikTok Mysoganist - because he’s so committed to charts, math and something that looks like science… he almost figures out why young men are struggling with women.

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