What the heck is even happening?

People commonly defend this practise with "But the audience isn't meant to understand!" or "It's inconsequential!", neither of which actually address a) their assumption that the [ideal Anglo] audience wouldn't understand, or, perhaps most crucially in the context of CCs, b) that this is a failure of accessibility. A hearing person who speaks that "foreign" language will know exactly what's being said. A deaf or HoH person – the people CCs are primarily intended for – who speaks or reads that language should therefore have the exact same opportunity to understand. It very much feels to me like an assumption that we deaf and HoH people couldn't possibly understand any language but English, so there's no point in getting those languages transcribed for us. I hope it goes without saying how profoundly audist that sentiment is.

There is also, I think, a profound misunderstanding or ignorance of Deaf culture at play. Which is to say, CCs in English-language media are written with not only the assumption that the audience will be native English speakers, but that all d/Deaf and HoH people speak English as their first language, so all other languages are as supposedly foreign to them as they are for hearing people. But sign languages are their own distinct language. BSL, ASL, ISL, AusLan, NZSL etc ≠ English (and are indeed different from one another), LIS ≠ Italian, JSL ≠ Japanese, and so on. So, if you follow the captioners' logic to its natural extreme, all non-signed dialogue is "foreign" to many d/Deaf and HoH people and should therefore be labelled [speaks foreign language] / [speaks English] / [speaks own language] / etc. – which is, obviously, a terrible idea that perfectly highlights all the biases implicit in closed captioning.

and then we also have houses like Einfasen and presumably Royce regularly speaking heritage-specific languages amongst themselves - Helvarian which we've clearly seen, and Sylvan - which has me also quite curious about whether the younger generations especially would know/speak any Obridimian at all at this point.

purity politics

1) Labelled Old Dogs: seemingly a woman and man gossiping. The man says, “She makes freak pornos in her basement,” and the woman replies, “I don't want that degenerate in my neighborhood...”

2) Labelled New Tricks: an exchange of messages.

Sender: I found her NSFW??? (skull emoji)

look at this freak shit (two nauseous emojis)

(A screenshot of an 18+ profile)

Receiver:

I knew there was something off about her lmfaoooo

DMing my mutuals to unfollow her right now (two yawn emojis)

In just the past two months, Sony has:

Said the PS6 will be more than $1000 at launch

Announced the end of all physical PS game releases

While simultaneously announcing the end of two of their console game stores — ensuring multiple games will die forever

Declared that they are wholly dedicated to (A) leveraging A.I. when making games and (B) creating live-service games above all other game types

Announced that if you bought any movies through their PlayStation Store, over 550 of them will soon be deleted from all users' libraries — with no restitution offered of any kind

Gamers, it is time — to paraphrase Robert Vann — to turn Sony's picture to the wall. Any one of these insults would be bad, and taken alone? Maybe it could be swallowed. But this is an ongoing campaign of disdain towards customers, with each declaration worse than the last.