From the article, emphasis mine:

According to a report from Shanghai’s The Paper, the incident involved the company’s branch in Shenzhen’s Longhua district, where an employee involved in the filming said it was intended as a joke, and that the three employees in the video had volunteered to take part. The employee said the branch did not punish employees for small mistakes like forgetting straws.

On Wednesday afternoon, Good Me issued a public apology through its Weibo account. “We’re sorry,” it said. “We were playing with punchlines, and it went all wrong.”

Whether or not you might trust that statement, I do think it’s worthwhile context. This post seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill – even the actual article’s title/subtitle makes it clear this was a joke – and I find that in very poor taste given how high tensions are on this topic.

This is tangential, but am I the only one getting sick and tired of all the topics about China? The imperial core’s news industry’s obsession with the country has never been healthy, and none of the articles being posted have had me thinking any of that is changing. I’m seeing post after post, usually from the same two users, and I’m starting to worry that the line between “documenting the atrocities of an authoritarian country” and “sinophobia” might start to get blurry.

To be clear, I’m not trying to point fingers. I don’t want to make assumptions about the users in question. I’ve just been seeing this for a few months now and it’s getting on my nerves, especially given the political climate of the United States.

I don’t personally believe everything’s so bad as it looks. There’s a lot to be mad about, for sure, but it’s worth remembering that fear and anger are some of the best-selling emotions the news has to offer. Doubly so if it’s about China. But none of that means that things are substantially worse than they used to be. Some of it is that things weren’t as good as we thought, some of it is that things are being made to look worse than they are.

Either way, we didn’t start the fire.

Joel conceived the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon who said “It’s a terrible time to be 21!” Joel replied: “Yeah, I remember when I was 21 — I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y’know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful.” The friend replied: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties.” Joel retorted: “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?” Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.

I’ve always trusted games published by Annapurna to be something exciting, new, and high quality.

That didn’t make them good either, though. Companies like them and Devolver Digital have had a bad habit of, for lack of a better term, using up developers and throwing them to the curb after. You’ll notice that a lot of stuff they publish get marketed as though Annapurna made them, which ends up hiding the actual developers behind the curtain, thereby robbing them of fans and thus seriously hurting their long-term prospects.

You’re coming out here arguing in favor of a megacorporation keeping even more money for itself instead of artists getting paid for their work. I feel like you should have expected to have upset people.

They’ll get better at managing bugs. What we’ll have to watch out for is other shit.

In particular, I’m not keen on the main menu ad for the DLC they slapped on, which stays even if you own the DLC.

I really don’t think these are the same group of people. From the article:

The strike was ignored in some areas, reflecting deep political divisions in Israel after nearly 11 months of fighting.

Those are the people you’re thinking of, and they aren’t striking.

Organization (protests, unions, joining a local political movement), education (yourself or others), pressuring candidates (call your reps, protests), mutual aid & voter enfranchisement (food banks, clothing donations, volunteering at polling stations, any effort to protect the homeless). All of these are options, and this is just what I can think of off the top of my head. If you’d like, here’s a page with a gallery of 346 nonviolent protest tactics.

Much of America has become trained to think only in terms of a vote – a vote in a system that was deliberately unequal from its founding through to today – to the exclusion of all other action. To say this is suffocating to any effort to enact change is an understatement; it is self-defeating in the extreme, serves only to perpetuate the status quo or worse, and yet time and time again I see so many people who have spent next to no time thinking outside these terms.

Absolutely none of what you just said justifies Israel willfully bombing hostages.

It is, but DdCno1’s been taking a pro-Israel stance into a very, very pro-Palestine site. I really don’t know what else they’d expect besides pushback, honestly.

Why do you think voting is your only option?

It goes to show how I can say something so patently and obviously untrue and sarcastic and yet it still doesn’t register as such. America has developed such a hyper-focus on voting to the exclusion of all other possibilities that it’s basically learned helplessness at this point.

So you believe that erstwhile hostage rescuers have no responsibility to actually keep the hostages alive, then? Because you’re writing apologia for that.

a ruthless movement that would rather sacrifice every single Palestinian man, woman and child than surrender

You know, I’ve no love for Hamas whatsoever, but I can’t help but notice you consider “willingness to sacrifice civilians” to be somehow worse than, say, “actually, literally sacrificing civilians right now.” That’s not a very good look.

with the ICC waiting with handcuffs behind the banner

This implies other countries wouldn’t sooner dismantle the ICC than let it actually do its job, which sadly seems to not be the case.

^{(edit: typo)}

How would abstaining or voting for Trump help the situation in Gaza at all?

Why do you think these are the only options?

As we all know, politics is a dichotomy!

Though I hope you’re right, there’s no guarantee of that:

It’s unclear why the remaining approximately 50 staff didn’t join Krafton, but it’s possible they had already found jobs elsewhere as the studio’s closure was announced three months earlier in May 2024.

(Disclaimer: I’m a Phoenix supporter of SWG)

I’ve followed this drama pretty closely in the last few days, and it’s really not all so damning as others here have found it. I could write up something longer, but I don’t want to get too far into the weeds, so I’ll leave it at a few paragraphs.

The long and short of it is that the way this video was made and posted, in combination with the general atmosphere of the internet trending towards Huge Drama™, makes this look like more than it actually is. From everything I’ve seen and heard, I’d characterize Nick’s actions as “flawed human making mistakes” — which is to say, perfectly forgivable. He’s since owned up to the more egregious things, such as his comments in the Gameumentary call, and the folks at SWG have reined in his influence recently due to things like his social media troubles. I personally feel like this was a very good call, and will likely be enough to cover the complaints raised.

It is also worth noting, though, that not all of the accusations are worth much. I really don’t know how $10 in alleged Twitter bucks is even worth mentioning, especially considering the claim later looks to have turned out to be a misunderstanding entirely.

All in all, while I believe it’s very fair to want to address these things, and it’s also fair to want to do so in a way that Patreon supporters both existing and potential can use said info to make better assessments with regard to their money, the reality is that the method and platform upon which these grievances were aired lead to a far more bitter and unproductive outcome than was necessary. I still respect Frost, and I don’t think he meant for this at all, but it still happened. Such is the nature of the web, sadly.

Honestly, it still amazes me that this never got successfully ripped and emulated. I’ve heard that it’s because there isn’t a reliable PS4 emulator, but frankly that surprises me as well. I’d think that the sheer popularity of this game alone would encourage one to be made pretty heavily, especially since this game looks to be on track to becoming lost media otherwise.