cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/48708819

Women ruined gaming again… Note: This is my first EVER scripted & researched video essay commentary video! Leave a like to let me know if you want more of this kind of video in the future!

This video is interesting insofar as it’s the creator’s first venture into video commentary. Due to the hype surrounding GTA6, the fascist/anti-feminist backlash bleeds into the mainstream and now people who had previously not been aware of the fascist/anti-feminist content on social media are exposed to it. [Most of the fascist/anti-feminist content creators she mentions are the usual suspects of fascist/anti-feminist content and have been at it for years.]

Is anyone else continuing to have issues seeing posts from piefed for the last 2-3 weeks? I made a post a couple weeks ago and have patiently waited to see if these issues resolve and unfortunately they have not.

Specifically I can no longer see any updates on the womensstuff community that is on piefed. I checked a few other piefed communities and same thing. No new updates, no new posts, nothing since the issues that popped up a few weeks ago.

The beta for the hotly anticipated World of Warcraft: Forever has been marred by fans of the streamer Asmongold who have filled the game’s public spaces with spam and slurs. To fix the issue, a player named Solastro created a mod called OlympusMute that hides any chats from players associated with Asmongold’s multiple associated guilds and fandom. Funnily enough, Solastro told 404 Media he used to be a big Asmongold fan too.

OlympusMute, named after the main Asmongold guild Olympus, is a client side mod that creates a mute list designed to prevent players from seeing anything from players associated with Asmongold. It works simply by hiding chat messages from players with Olympus in their name. It also auto-declines group and guild invites from the muted players.

Solastro is a longtime WoW player who told 404 Media he found the Asmongold related spam in WoW: Forever intolerable. He said it’s worse when Asmongold himself logs in. “The trade chat is spammed with people wanting to get near him, on his layer, etc. The guild invite spam is prevalent, as he’s encouraged his followers to invite as many people as possible to Olympus,” he said.

The mod, essentially, is an attempt at a nuclear block. It “hides all player chat from muted players: Say, Yell, Emote, Whisper, General/Trade/custom channels, Guild, Party, Raid, Raid Warning, and Instance chat” and “hides their chat bubbles in the open world,” according to its description.

There are good reasons players may want to never hear from Asmongold or his guild. “Turned on @Asmongold stream for 3 minutes and just instantly see them harassing some random player and spamming shit like this in stormwind,” X user @mrfishpsirit said in a post on X. The account shared screenshots of chat bubbles calling to “deport all greenskins” and sexually assault Palestine. Asmongold himself replied to the post with a list of slurs he’d invented for the game’s fictional races.

“When the army of followers is in a single location, the chat is filled with /yell messages that often include slurs (with special characters to not get flagged), racist chants, misogynistic terms, etc. It’s something I heavily dislike, but it was too pervasive to be able to /ignore each player, so I found another solution just to filter chat,” Solastro added.

After tackling witches, vampires and werewolves, Robert Eggers is tackling perhaps the scariest of monsters: teenage love.

Eggers is setting up an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at Focus Features, which has come out on top of a bidding war that included A24, Sony and Warner Bros.

When the deals closes, it will reteam Eggers with the Universal specialty arm that released his 2024 surprise hit Nosferatu and will be releasing his latest, Werwulf. Eggers will direct the feature and produce. It was not immediately clear who else was producing or executive producing.

As befitting a filmmaker who is known for his meticulous attention to detail in capturing a time period, even when it comes to dialogue, sources say that this adaptation will feature actors speaking in Olde English.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/67195538

Paris (France) (AFP) – Paris prosecutors said Tuesday they had opened several probes after receiving complaints concerning women filmed on the street without their consent using smart glasses.

Anyone wearing smart glasses can take photos, film videos, listen to music, make phone calls, translate text or interact with an AI assistant.

Meta’s smart spectacles, developed in partnership with Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica, have become a commercial success. Meta sold seven million pairs in 2025. Other companies, including Google and Snap, are also preparing to roll out AI-powered glasses.

Calls have grown in Europe for action against what campaigners call “pervert” smart glasses after secretly filmed footage of girls and women has appeared online, with a petition in Britain demanding a ban on their sale.

In France, the e-Enfance association, which operates the national hotline for victims of online abuse, earlier this month sounded the alarm about videos recorded with camera-equipped glasses and shared online.

The Paris public prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday it had received “complaints relating to violations of privacy linked to the use of smart glasses”. Prosecutors did not say which brands were involved.

Prosecutors pointed to a “growing trend on social media involving women being filmed on the street with smart glasses without their consent and the videos being published online”.

Under French law, such an offence is punishable by up to two years in prison and a 45,000-euro ($51,000) fine.

Prosecutors said that in some cases investigations had also been opened for sexual assault when “the acts are accompanied by non-consensual sexual contact”.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said its cybercrime division “tested smart glasses in September in order to identify the commission of other cybercrime-related offences”.

Such offences could include the theft of a cryptocurrency wallet’s recovery phrase, enabling criminals to steal the funds.

…

Under the policy, which appears in a Lakeview high school gym syllabus, female students who miss swimming because of their periods must have a parent submit a written note or email identifying the length of their menstrual cycle before they can make up the missed days.

The syllabus states: “Female students will be given the opportunity to make up days, which are missed only because of their menstrual cycle. A written/email note from a parent stating the length of the menstrual duration is required, so the student can make up the days.”

“Students will complete dry land workouts to be able to make up the days,” it continues. “Students will not just sit out. Each day that is not made up will be considered a non-participation day and place the student on the grade reduction scale.”

The requirement caught the attention of Andy Amsdill, whose daughter attends Lakeview high school. Amsdill told WXYZ Detroit that he was stunned when he saw the requirements in her gym syllabus.

“The teacher wants us to either send a note or an email with the suspected length of the cycle which, by itself, is ridiculous,” Amsdill told the outlet.

Menstrual cycle length can sometimes be difficult to predict, and the US National Institutes of Health estimates between 14% to 25% of women experience menstrual irregularities. Irregular periods are even more common in young girls.

Amsdill later told CBS News that other parents contacted him after he spoke publicly about the syllabus, saying they were glad he had brought attention to the issue.

Among them was Bryan Shishakly, whose daughter is now a sophomore at Lakeview. Shishakly said she faced the same requirement during her freshman gym class last year and that it affected her grade.

“My response was like, ‘If they ask, you have no obligation to tell them,’ and it did affect her grade,” Shishakly told CBS. “She’s a straight-A student, and she ended up with a C in gym, and I don’t know how fair that is since it’s only going to apply to the girls at the school.”

The Lakeview public schools superintendent, Karl D Paulson, issued a statement that read: “We recently became aware of a parent’s concern relative to certain class expectations. Given our commitment to partnering with parents to address any issue that might arise, we immediately sought to schedule a meeting with the parent to engage in a conversation about the concern.”

It added: “We look forward to meeting with the parent in the coming days and working collaboratively with that objective. The Lakeview school district remains fully committed to educational excellence and best practices in all it does.”

“I feel like there’s been so many people taking what I say about this exact thing out of context and saying: ‘He just wanted to make the movie that he wanted to make, and then slap Resident Evil on it, so he could get a bigger budget.’ Which is not the case. It was conceived to be a Resident Evil story. And when you watch the movie, you’ll know that’s the case, because it’s undeniable.”…

… So while Cregger was – and is – a big fan of the games, the films? Not so much. When I ask what the relationship is of his film to the rest of the series – a sequel? Prequel? Universe-expanding retro-reboot? – he shrugs and says, somewhat proudly: “I couldn’t really say. I’ve never seen one.”

Still, as Cregger appreciates, video game adaptations are tricky for a reason: they are expected to serve the play-experienced aficionados and the clueless noobs. Cregger’s big idea for bridging this gap is to create a moviegoing experience that feels like a 90-minute session on the PlayStation, even for those audience members who may never have previously heard of Resident Evil. Narratively, this means following a single character, medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams), as he attempts to deliver a cooler containing a transplant organ from hospital A in the flatlands to hospital B in the remote mountains near Raccoon City, Colorado, where – unbeknown to Bryan – a zombie outbreak is now under way. As in the game, Bryan regularly switches environment, progressing from snowy road to deserted farmhouse to sewage tunnel. In each new place, he must find the resources to survive. Shooting the film in a rural part of Czechia was, therefore, an appropriately gruelling experience for Cregger. “It was dark. It was cold. It was unrelenting,” he says. “I had pneumonia for the first half of the movie, and a horrible bacterial infection for the back half … It sucked.”

It may have sucked, but it worked. Judging by the 30-minute preview made available to press, Cregger’s film is exhilarating and immersive. He utilised the over-the-shoulder camera angles now synonymous with third-person shooters to mimic gameplay, and Bryan’s dialogue is mostly a soliloquy of disjointed profanities. “That’s how I talk to myself when I’m sitting on the couch playing Resident Evil,” says Cregger. “I mean, I basically only say ‘fuck’ and run away from things.”

Women continue to face systemic barriers to entering political life.

The UN report highlights the persistent concentration of political power among men, finding that six in seven countries are currently led by men.

Indeed, the cost of running for office can exceed 100 times a country’s average per capita income, excluding many women before the race even begins. In some countries, up to eight in 10 women running for office also face violence in public life.

Even when women do enter government, they are disproportionately steered away from the portfolios that hold the highest security and economic power. Close to nine in 10 defence ministers and more than eight in 10 finance ministers are men.

Beyond government, women make up only six per cent of CEOs globally and lead fewer than 20 per cent of the highest courts, leaving the decisions shaping business, law, employment, and the global economy overwhelmingly in the hands of men.

This imbalance seriously undermines democracy as a country cannot fully uphold human rights or democratic principles while half its population lacks an equal voice in leadership and decision-making, the report stresses.