That’s an odd consensus. I’ve never seen it, but going off the summary, it maybe shares some similarities to one minor plot point in the 2025 movie, of which there are many, many others, most of which are commentary on (if not outright emulations of) very current affairs and trends that a movie from the 80s wouldn’t compare to at all.

*Terrific (assuming you’re talking about the tech hero and not the Marvel movie)

To me, this just shows the ridiculousness of jewelry prices. Shiny rocks and metal priced at more than most peoples’ income. Fucking absurd.

I mean, red and blue are 2 of the 3 primary colors in pigments, so that probably has something to do with it. Why yellow missed out, I have no idea.

It really just means a one-sided relationship with a fabricated personality. Celebrities being real people doesn’t really factor into it too much since their actual personhood is irrelevant to the delusion - the person with the delusion has a relationship with the made up personality they see and maintain in their mind. And a chatbot personality is really no different, in this case, so the terminology fits, imo.

Is it actually that hard to talk to another human?

It’s pretty cruel to blame the people for this. You might as well say “Is it that hard to just walk?” to a paraplegic. There are many reasons people may find it difficult to nigh-impossible to engage with others, and these services prey on that. That’s not the fault of the users, it’s on the parasitic companies.

Well, he literally lied in the next sentence. So there’s that, too.

I’m aware of all of that. But it’s still necessary to assume the worst case for the past visitors since if it happened without one’s knowledge (while sleeping in the cabin, for instance), the only sign would be the onset of symptoms, at which point it’s far too late to do anything. Hence why rabies fucking sucks.

And to be clear, I have nothing against bats. I know it’s not a sinister bat-plot to infect humans with rabies. It’s just how things are, and precautions need to be taken.

Here’s hoping this is all “better safe than sorry” precautions and no one was actually infected. Rabies fucking sucks. Even just the possibility of having it sucks.

I didn’t say it wasn’t perfect. I said it was a mistake.

I don’t even think it’s blackmail. Like, maybe there is some, but the idiot is such a simp for dictators. He’d do all this with or without it.

It’s not irrelevant. Using a corporate mascot as a symbol against another corporate mascot/product isn’t going to spread the message Louis intended. You argue the people complaining about it aren’t getting his point, but do you really think it will/has survived the word-of-mouth spreading it? The game of telephone that viral trends like this follow is lightning fast and warps messages in extreme ways. And it’s not much of a stretch to assume that, if MS churned out a new Clippy chatbot, people would rally around it to spite the others since they have no understanding of why they were doing it in the first place.

*Also, people already mischaracterize the sincerity of early tech giants. I’ve certainly seen many people lament “the good Internet” of the mid 2000s, as if the very issues we have today weren’t percolating back then. None of those companies were ever good or harmless, the idea that them or their products are “different” now is naive, and relying on that naivety to push for change is a mistake.

Alternate title: “Matriarch of family that used man as conspiratorial lynch pin in their attacks on his father demands apology and retraction of statements shared by and corroborated by many other sources.”

What a bunch of lunatics.

Abuse of the elderly happens all the time, too. That doesn’t make it ok. And he didn’t just go to meet someone “he saw in the street”. He was convinced to travel to meet a person that wasn’t real. Those are not the same situation.

So if a human person lured the man out of the house on false pretenses, you’d really argue they shared no blame at all? That it’s just “something that happens”?

it literally [skirts] the entire issue

It literally doesn’t, as those companies can make these demands for whatever reason they want. The problem to solve isn’t “how do we appease the unreasonable processors”, it’s “how can we stop relying on these processors entirely”, and that’s a much bigger issue than Valve can solve on their own.

Also, again, Steam already has this system. If that isn’t enough to avoid the issues, adding another proprietary economy certainly won’t.

Ew, no. Proprietary currencies are just a way for companies to trap extra money into their ecosystem. It’s not a solution to anything. Just an excuse for additional bullshit.

Also, Steam already has this and has for a long time.

It’s not like he showed up at the fake address and got killed or something.

Because that would be the fault of the chatbot, but no other part of his journey would be? The journey made explicitly to meet a person that didn’t exist?

Missing the point and the problem evident in the story.

FB employs humans to catfish users?