-Sony knew even before the announcement that the players' reaction would be overwhelmingly negative.

-PlayStation Studios employees received directives instructing them not to comment publicly on the decision.

-Sony regularly issues this type of instruction during major announcements, but this time the rules are reportedly stricter than ever, according to employees they spoke with.

-Sony will not back down.

​

Theres something really important that most people dont understand about the whole woke thing and its that its not just a bunch of random trends. Its not just people being too sensitive or trying to be nice. Its a whole different way of looking at the world that is completely opposed to how most of us were raised to think. This entire way of thinking stems from drinking the kool-aid of critical theory and intersectionality, which teaches that society is nothing but a hierarchy of oppressed and oppressor groups and that everything must be viewed through that lens. And once you understand that difference everything else starts to make sense. The ugly women in video games the blackwashing of historical characters the diversity quotas in hiring all of it comes from one single place.

For most of my life the default worldview in America was colorblindness. This was the idea that we should judge people as individuals not as members of groups. Martin Luther King said it best when he talked about his children being judged by the content of their character not the color of their skin. This was the goal. We wanted to get to a place where race didnt matter. Where a black kid and a white kid could grow up next to each other and nobody would think twice about it. It was a universalist vision. Every person has inherent dignity regardless of their group identity. This was the foundation of the civil rights movement and its what most people over the age of thirty were taught to believe.

Wokeness is a total rejection of this. Its built on an academic philosophy called critical theory which says that society isnt a neutral space where people can be judged as individuals. Instead its a power struggle between groups. In this view white people as a group are oppressors and black people as a group are victims. Your race determines your moral worth your perspective and your role in society. This is the exact same racial essentialism that racists have always used. The only difference is that wokeness has just inverted the hierarchy. Traditional racism said your race determines everything about you. Wokeness says your race determines everything about you. The only thing that changed is which groups are on top and which are on the bottom.

This is the most important shift to understand. Under the old way you were judged as an individual. Your race, your gender, your sexuality, none of that mattered. What mattered was your character, your work ethic, your talent, your actions. You succeeded or failed based on who you were as a person. Under the woke way you are not judged as an individual at all. You are judged as a member of a group. Your race determines whether you are oppressed or privileged. Your gender determines how much your voice matters. Your sexuality determines where you fall in the hierarchy of victimhood. They call this intersectionality but really its just racism and sexism with a new coat of paint. They have taken the exact same essentialism that racists have always used and just switched which groups get the benefits and which ones get the blame.

Now here is where the equity vs equality thing comes in because this is the practical application of that worldview. Under the old colorblind system we believed in equality of opportunity. Everyone gets the same shot and you succeed or fail based on your own merits. But if you believe that society is a power struggle between groups then equality of opportunity isnt enough. You need equity which means equal outcomes across groups. You need to make sure that every group is represented proportionally in every institution. This sounds nice in theory but in practice it means treating people differently based on their race. Which is just racism with extra steps.

So now lets trace this worldview through everything we see today. Take video games. Under the old system you made characters that appealed to your audience. You had attractive women because people like looking at attractive characters. But from the woke perspective traditional female characters are a tool of the patriarchy. They are designed for the male gaze which is supposedly oppressive. So to fight this you have to deconstruct traditional femininity. You make women more muscular and less conventionally attractive. You cover them up. You use body type options instead of gender options. Look at The Last of Us Part II where they made Abby this incredibly buff woman and people were furious. Or look at the new Fable game where the female protagonist looks like she got hit with an ugly stick. This isnt an accident. Its a deliberate choice driven by the ideology that traditional femininity is oppressive and must be destroyed.

And the same thing applies to race in media. Under the old colorblind system you cast the best actor for the role regardless of race. You might even do colorblind casting where a character's race isnt important to the story so you just pick whoever is best. But under the woke system race is always important. You need proportional representation. So you get things like blackwashing where historically white characters are recast as black. Look at The Lord of the Rings where they cast a black actress as the fair skinned queen. Look at The Little Mermaid. Look at Cleopatra. They arent creating new characters for diverse actors. They are taking established white characters and changing their race. And they do this because from their perspective its correcting past injustice. They think that because there werent enough black actors in the past we need to retroactively fix it by changing existing characters. But this isnt about being fair. Its about a worldview that says race is the most important thing about you and that everything must be filtered through that lens.

And this leads to diversity hiring quotas which are the exact same thing in the workplace. Under the old system you hired the most qualified person. Under the woke system you hire to achieve proportional representation. You dont just want a diverse workplace you need a diverse workplace because diversity is supposedly a strength. But what this actually means is that people are being hired and promoted based on their race and gender rather than their qualifications. And you see this everywhere now. Corporate DEI departments are massive. Universities have diversity requirements. The Academy Awards literally have diversity quotas for Best Picture nominees. Starting in 2024 movies have to meet certain diversity standards just to be eligible for best picture consideration. They have four standards and you have to meet two of them. One standard requires either a lead or significant supporting actor from an underrepresented racial group, or at least 30 percent of the cast from at least two underrepresented groups which includes women, lgbtq people, people with disabilities, and racial minorities. Another standard requires similar diversity among the crew and department heads.

This is exactly why you see casting decisions like Christopher Nolans Odyssey movie where he cast Lupita Nyongo as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page as the Greek soldier Sinon. People are pointing out that this seems like a pretty convenient way to hit those diversity requirements. Whether thats actually why Nolan did it or not, the fact that the rules exist means every big studio is going to be thinking about this when they cast their movies. They have to. If they want to compete for best picture they need to check these boxes. So you end up with casting decisions that are driven not by who is best for the role but by what demographic boxes need to be ticked. Which is exactly what you would expect from a system that prioritizes group identity over individual merit.

This is all coming from the same place. Once you accept the core premise that society is a power struggle between groups and that we need equity of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity then every single one of these things follows logically. You need to change how women look in media because traditional femininity is oppressive. You need to change the race of established characters because they werent diverse enough. You need to hire based on race because the old system was supposedly rigged. Its a complete and total rejection of the colorblind ideal. And what makes it so frustrating is that they claim to be fighting racism while doing the exact same things that racists have always done. They are judging people by their skin color. They are assigning moral worth based on group identity. They are treating people differently because of immutable characteristics. The only difference is which groups get the short end of the stick.

And the worst part is the gaslighting. They will tell you they believe in colorblindness as a goal. They will tell you they just want equality. They will tell you that all of this is temporary and once we achieve equality we can stop. But you have to look at what they actually do. Every policy they push makes race more important. Every cultural change they make reinforces group identity. They never move toward a world where race doesnt matter because they need race to matter. If we ever achieved a post racial society they would have nothing to do. Their whole identity and their whole industry depends on keeping us divided and obsessed with race. So they will never stop. They will always find a new disparity to be outraged about. They will always find a new group to protect and a new group to condemn. The goalpost will never stop moving.

Martin Luther King had a dream. He dreamed of a day when his children would be judged by their character and not their skin. Wokeness calls that dream racist. They say colorblindness is actually white supremacy in disguise. They have taken the language of civil rights and used it to justify the exact opposite of what civil rights leaders fought for. They have replaced universal dignity with group identity. They have replaced merit with quotas. They have replaced a future where race doesnt matter with a present where race is the only thing that matters. And they have done it all while claiming to be the good guys. This is why so many people are pushing back. Not because they are racist but because they can see that this isnt progress. Its regression. Its tribalism dressed up in the language of justice. And its tearing the country and most of the entire westrn world apart.

So, my original post about the Rotten Tomatoes score for The Odyssey on KiA went viral, which has been a bit surreal to witness. Since it struck such a cultural nerve, I thought I'd do a quick follow-up with some further findings.

The Pre-2019 vs. Post-2019 Divide

Here's a sampling of well-known movies, ranked from best to worst using the "pull" method (note: this is the scoring method that Rotten Tomatoes used prior to 2019).

This chart lays bare the problem with the default "push" (verified) scores now used on Rotten Tomatoes, and highlights how the crowdsourced "pull" (unverified) scores do a much better job representing reality.

Once the inflated push data is removed, a remarkable sense of sanity returns to the numbers.

The North American Bias Bombshell

An insightful comment from /u/zincovit revealed an unexpected new bombshell: the default Popcornmeter only includes North American votes. Rotten Tomatoes does not currently verify user accounts or ticket purchases outside North America.

This effectively turns the entire international moviegoing audience into second-class citizens. The primary Popcornmeter is functionally restricted to a domestic Fandango echo chamber.

It is the height of hypocrisy for defenders of these corporate aggregators to posture as champions of global inclusion while actively backing a metric system that structurally disenfranchises the rest of the world.

The JSON Odyssey: Moderation Shenanigans

I've been closely tracking the raw JSON data for The Odyssey since my first post went live. Immediately after the initial thread blew up, the unverified score jumped from 56% to 62% within half a day due to a wave of activity. Since then, the pattern of updates confirms that RT releases unverified ratings in large, reconciled batch flushes rather than streaming them live (which matches what I predicted).

Even more fascinating is what the backend data reveals about RT's moderation pipeline. By comparing sequential JSON snapshots, I have evidence that unverified reviews are routinely purged after going live.

While the net removals are small (~10 reviews over three days), it confirms that backend sweeps actively delete full review objects in the background. Furthermore, this analytical data suggests that reviews submitted with text commentary pass initial automated filters faster than star-only submissions, which are frequently held "under review". I would be interested to see this tested to confirm or refute this hypothesis.

The Codification of the Pull vs. Push Argument

My inbox blew up after the viral post. First off, thanks to everyone who offered support, additional data, or shared their perspective!

The most common objection I received can be summed up in a single sentence: "Only people who have seen the movie can have an opinion on its quality."

On the surface, "only movie watchers can review it" sounds logical in principle. In practice, however, it fails completely. The only practical way to make a true "watcher-only" scoring system work fairly would be to gather a fully random global sample of at minimum 1,000 people, sit them down to watch the movie, give them three days to reflect, and then collect their scores.

Without that impossible setup, relying purely on self-selected ticket purchasers causes every single movie to sit comfortably at 90%+, rendering the metric useless.

The Case for the Pull Methodology

The pull method (where users independently seek out the page, log in, and leave a review) is not perfect. It biases toward extreme reactions and requires filtering against spam or coordinated campaigns. Yet, despite those challenges, it consistently yields a far more accurate reflection of public sentiment.

In the end, including unverified voices is an essential input for a true crowdsourced score. When properly filtered against spam and manipulation via robust platform safeguards, it is pull-based metrics that cut through sentiment inflation to deliver a realistic index of actual public sentiment across a wide range of films.

Now, I understand that these companies probably only care about profit and don’t see much else beyond that but if you use your brain for five seconds you’ll realise how badly it could blow up in their faces.

If the west continues to be culturally weak for decades while the cultural capital of the east (china, russia etc) just goes up and up. Eventually the investment will go into the eastern companies, not the western ones.

Like, we are already seeing the chinese gaming industry blow up with Black Myth Wukong and the soon to be released Tides of Annihilation. And I suspect that the russian gaming market will take off as well in the next ten years as well because of games like Atomic heart. That is simply what happens when the east only caters to the majority of gamers. Do they not understand that?

Like, you are getting funding form these eastern countries to directly sabotage your own cultural export and empower their own by comparison. Do they not see how badly that could go?

Never thought I’d see the day where the entire western entertainment industry decided to destroy all of their cultural capital purely for “catering for a modern audience” and causing a rise in eastern entertainment.

I personally dropped the anime golden Kamuy when the author said in one interview that he was going to beat up anyone who sexualized his female character, yet the entire series consist of sexualizing men for the bara/geikomi audience.

It frustrated me because you spend you entire series sexualizing men yet you suddenly claim that you are uncomfortable with the sexualization of your female characters when you spend your whole time sexualizing your male characters in explicit ways.

I mean, even if you don’t go broke the first time after going woke, it’ll catch up with you eventually.

Sorry don't let the title fool you into thinking I'm here as some idiot on the woke side here to gloat.

I'm very much creating this topic to mock the Anti-woke side because you'd think Stalin had risen from his grave taken power and sent his secret police with order to publicly escort us to the Gulag while Stephen Colbert filmed from the side lines making mock crying gestures.

Case and point Kotaku and their piece#

The Odyssey’s Critical And Box Office Success Has Completely Broken Online Chuds Who Forgot Twitter Isn’t Real Life

https://archive.ph/iaGjz

Where they talk about how it's all a conspiracy theory to suggest numbers not being accurate.

There's been plenty of the woke side doing a victory lap and I just find it hilarious to watch because:

1. It's a culture war not a culture 1 and done battle
2. That somehow they think this win, this time will be the ones that mean we happily watch whatever slop they push and claim we're evil for not watching and blindly consuming.

In the end it kind of shows up the woke side for how hilariously pathetic they are thinking The Odyssey doing well will change much. It won't mean people go see whatever they promote because they can make it seem popular. It's been the woke side refusing to support smaller projects and latching on to popular stuff exclusively almost for years and then being shocked when having tried to control it said property like Doctor Who starts to crumble and lose support.

So what do you think will be the next piece of media that isn't a big IP that tries to appeal to the woke side and fails badly joining the ever growing graveyard of titles that tried to appeal to the woke side?

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/front-row/id134045372

Link as it's the easiest one for international people to access.

The segments starts at 35:00

Points out how Dominos UK dunking on Playstation.

Points out people being unhappy over it.

Points out removing the ability for films from peoples accounts.

Point out how they're now closing older console stores.

Points out how this is another attack on the second hand market.

Calls out Sony for how previously Sony previously mocked Microsoft for doing similar.

Points out how GenZ are actually buying more physical releases like actual DVDs etc.

Regarding what I've done so far:

• I've reported the issue to Pearl Abyss support far enough time
• There have been many posts about it on the Steam forums.
• I create posts like this on the Crimson Desert subreddit after nearly every patch.
• I tried contacting the community manager on Discord, but never got a reply.
• I even commented about it on X.

My goal is simple: spread awareness as much as possible. If someone has better contacts than I do, or if a gaming news is willing to cover this issue and encourage the developers to fix such a basic missing feature, I'm all for it.

Pearl Abyss's Black Desert Online support movement keys rebinding since over 10 years. Its also a very basic configuration since easyly 30years.
Given that keyboard (or controller) is the player's primary interface with the game. If that interface provides a poor experience, it already negatively impacts the overall experience.

Yes, there are "workarounds," but when even a $9 indie game lets you rebind movement keys, it should be a basic option in a AAA game like Crimson Desert.

Third-party software can introduce input lag.
Remapping keys through keyboard software requires constantly switching profiles, which is a real hassle. On top of that, you lose proper in-game key prompts.

Interesting discussion:
(it was a discussion from another subreddit regarding movement keys configuratin, but this particular subreddit do not allow me to post the link)

As someone pointed out once, the Keybind Manager mod does not allow WASD to be rebound because those keys are hardcoded (or at least inaccessible through modding). On top of that, the mod has not been maintained since May 2.

Rotten Tomatoes made a major change to how audience scores were calculated back in 2019. Many people don't realize what happened, but this single change is why The Odyssey score currently sits at a glowing 97%, yet standardizing the data properly reveals it is actually 56%.

The discrepancy comes down to how RT creates the "Verified Audience" score versus the "All Audience" score.

The Background: "Push" vs. "Pull"

Before 2019, RT used a "pull" mechanic: an unverified user had to actively decide to leave a review, log in or create an account, navigate to the movie page, and submit their rating.

After 2019, RT shifted the primary score to a "push" notification via ticket processors like Fandango. A ticket buyer walking out of the theater gets a prompt: "Did you like the movie? Tap 1 to 5 stars." They tap a star, and they're done.

Removing UI friction is fine on paper, but making "Verified Audience" the default score under the new "Popcornmeter" branding changed everything. (And yes, given how predictable the resulting score inflation was, this was likely deliberate obfuscation by RT.)

How to See the Real Numbers Yourself

Fortunately, the old "pull" audience data is still sitting right inside RT's page source code—if you know where to look:

1. Open The Odyssey on Rotten Tomatoes.
2. Right-click anywhere on the page and select View Page Source (or press Ctrl+U / Cmd+U).
3. Press Ctrl+F and search for media-scorecard-json.

A few lines down, you'll see a JSON data block that looks like this (the likedCount and notLikedCount are what we want):

{"audienceAll":{"certifiedFresh":"certified","averageRating":"4.6","bandedRatingCount":"5,000+ Ratings", "likedCount":7858,"notLikedCount":646, "reviewCount":1719,"score":"92"...}

{"audienceVerified":{"certifiedFresh":"certified","averageRating":"4.8","bandedRatingCount":"5,000+ Verified Ratings", "likedCount":7360,"notLikedCount":258, "reviewCount":1126,"score":"97"...}

Extracting the True "Pull" Score

To find the actual sentiment of independent web users, we just need to isolate the unverified votes from the combined "All Audience" pool:

• Verified ("Push") Score:
  7,360 likes / (7,360 + 258 total) = 96.6% (This is the 97% Popcornmeter score RT displays prominently for The Odyssey).

• Unverified ("Pull") Score:

  • Unverified Likes: 7,858 - 7,360 = 498
  • Unverified Dislikes: 646 - 258 = 388
  • Calculation: 498 / (498 + 388) = 498 / 886 = 56.2% (This is the more valid audience score for The Odyssey)

Summary

Out of 886 active Rotten Tomatoes users who – at the time of this writing – navigated to the site on their own to rate The Odyssey, only 498 (56%) rated it positively.

The current generated 97% score displayed so prominently is simply an artifact of a push notification pipeline heavily biased toward opening-weekend ticket buyers.

Nintendo is asking the court to dismiss the case. Its argument is simple: consumers paid the advertised price and received exactly the products they purchased.

Nintendo maintains that there is no obligation to retroactively refund sales already completed simply because economic circumstances have changed.

Please tell me this isn't supposed to be the same version from the Fox films.

For comparison. Here's a scene from the old anime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBlxxW2A28U

Here's a scene from the new one:

https://youtu.be/6_SasJf3oeM?t=1

Superior, demake, not care?

I'm biased, but I think the original was better in animation and visuals.

“For Greek translator Emily Wilson, the release of director Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” has been gratifying in various ways. Her acclaimed 2017 edition of Homer’s epic has reached the top 5 on Amazon.com, leading a wave of similar books boosted by the movie. Nolan has even cited her translation, notably the opening line “Tell me about a complicated man,” as inspiration.

But the film itself, which brought in more than $260 million worldwide during its opening weekend and has received raves from many critics, left her unsatisfied.

“I want to celebrate the fact that so many more people are aware of ‘The Odyssey’ and were brought back to the poem,” she told The Associated Press. “But at the same time, I had the sense that Christopher Nolan was trying to pack everything in while missing themes that were essential to the poem.”

….

Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said she didn’t want to come across as a “snobby,” nitpicking expert at odds with any deviation from the original text. But she questioned a range of omissions and other choices, from the absence on screen of the Gods Zeus and Poseidon (Athena is played by Zendaya ) to the “incoherent” messaging that condemns both war and physical cowardice. She found Penelope’s role so thinned out that it endangered “any possibility of believing in this marriage.” Wilson also that thought parts of the movie, notably the scenes with Odysseus’ dog, Argos, “catered towards modern sentimentality.”

“Everybody’s a sucker for a dog,” she said.

I’ve started noticing this over the years and I find it very peculiar, it seems that games like ZZZ are one of the only type of games that are still unashamedly made for straight men.

And it’s interesting because while I get that games like Stellar Blade exist, in some ways I think Gachas go even further with their commitment to their target audience.

And more to the point, lolcowlisers don’t seem to mess with them either. (Or at least not nearly as much as they do with japanese games. Granted that could just simply be because it’s fucking china.)

It’s also quite hilarious that the “problematic” live service games from the east keep making boatloads of money while the “for modern audiencesTM” games from the west all died or are in the process of dying.

And it just goes to show that men DO like to play APPEALING female characters. Do you have any idea how much money these games make? How much love is given to the female characters in ZZZ?

In fact, if you look at the ZZZ community online, they are like the happiest people on the internet RN. There’s no toxicity or negativity. Everyone is just there to appreciate their waifus and chill out and it makes me happy honestly, it feels like how weeb spaces online used to be and I feel like it’s one of the last true otaku spaces online in the modern day.

Idk, it’s just something I’ve been thinking about lately, that and seeing the usual suspects cry about the game is quite funny lol.