Not super keen on the bombardment of cutscenes so far in 4, but it’s still pretty neat.

This isn't a spoiler but I need to warn you: the final cutscene is 40 minutes long with no break/checkpoint and you can only save your game after, not before or during. Literally everyone who goes into the game blind ends up trapped there late at night wanting to go to bed.

Possibly one of the best soundtracks of all time.

More testing of what? How to do basic market research so you don't release a full priced game in a space where the thriving competitors are free to play?

I used to use imgur daily, even after the god-awful update to their app and website which plastered ads everywhere. I never updated the app and constantly saw people complaining about the new app or the website. When they later made that old version impossible to use, I stopped going to the site. Not out of some protest or whatever but it was just so fucking awful to try to use.

"Land of the free"

Thank you for expanding more on this, it's gone a long way to helping me understand better.

I still believe that social media, as it currently exists, is something which is harmful to children for reasons I laid out previously but connection and support are important.

The perfect solution would be to disallow any kind of traditional social media outside of break times whilst bolstering better spaces for support and friendship both online and offline; the first part of that is definitely a symptom of the second but I'm not sure how to best solve that outside of direct community support and advocacy for such spaces.

Not really what we were discussing and trivialises the harm done by systems of retributive punishment but okay.

The thread lays out my opinion retty clearly; characterising a discussion as an obsession is being deliberately disingenuous.

I'm showing my age here - I was alone in school. I am neurodivergent and part of the LGBTQ+ community, both things that were not well understood or accepted when I was in school. The only brief pieces of support and connection I had was online needed to be on a PC as smartphones were simply not a thing.

Are you saying that children today must have instant and immediate access to friends and like minded people online during school hours? The children I know (i.e. children within my family and the children of friends) don't have smartphones at school and are able to wait until break times or after school to socialise but they're also not American; is this a uniquely American issue?

Sure, but the phones are the tools which are facilitating the harm and they're not necessary for a child to have in school. I'd even go far enough to say that no minor should have full unfettered access to a smartphone or the internet but this requires a level of involvement from parents.

As if anyone is actually believing she's suddenly developed empathy.

Smartphones are the medium through which children are most oppressed through social media apps, poisoning their brains. Instagram and Facebook deliberately targeted young girls to make them feel like shit about their bodies, and engagement based algorithms (particularly YouTube) pumped harmful fascist ideas to young boys.