The media doesn't often lie directly. Instead they use a variety of techniques to maintain plausibility as purveyors of "fact."

1) Lie by image manipulation. This is subtle but effective. They color tinted Trump to be more orange, and they color-tinted Joe Rogan to look more sickly as they talked about him taking "horse pills." Another example is when they took pictures of the "noose" in Bubba Wallace's garage, which looked huge and head sized in the closely cropped photos, but turned out to be a 3 inch wide loop used to pull open the garage door.

A 🧵 (con't).
2) Lie by Omission. This is the most common one. They state a fact, but leave out another fact that gives important context. An example might be "The old woman was shot by police" but then neglect to mention the woman was a psychotic who was gunning her car directly at a policeman with intent to kill. This was done by Kotaku when reporting on Kabrutus while omitting the fact that SBI was trying to cancel him and take away his Steam library.

(con't)

Did WuChang Fallen Feathers JUST LIE to everyone?

WuChang's patch 1.3-1.4 performance increases are sus as hell. YouTuber Daniel Owens claims that all they did was REMOVE native resolution and FORCE you into lowered internal resolution WITHOUT telling you.

His video link and the results from his video in this thread. 🧵 WuChang is getting bad reviews on Steam because of performance issues. In response, the publisher/dev released patch 1.3 and 1.4 to address the issue.

The patch notes claim "supersampling resolution limits have been adjusted on select GPU models to prevent unintended performance degradation."

This is pretty vague, but more importantly, the game setting screen still reports native resolution at the highest settings.

HOWEVER, these gains are ONLY at the highest setting, and selecting lower resolution upscaling doesn't improve much at all.

Since scaling is on the GPU, any real performance increases should affect all resolution upscaling settings, improving them across the board.

But here they do not. You can see a shot of Daniel's excel sheet here with the numbers.

(con't)

Daniel Owens video here.
youtube.com/watch?v=r2YxTJ…

I fixed Dragon Maid's localization with AI.

Dragon Maid has the most cited botched localization with the famous "Pesky Patriarchy" line. So I tried to fix it with @FishAudio AI.

Here is the original woke localization compared to the version I created by cloning the original Japanese voices and having them speak English.

How did I do?

I'm sponsored by Fish Audio but I can say what I like and will go over the pros and cons and techniques in this thread.

First, the original cringe woke version, my AI version in thread.

🧵(thread con't) Here is the AI version.

I collected clips from the characters in original Japanese, which cloned it speaking Japanese. But Fish Audio will let you use the voice and change the language, so I used the English subtitles to replace the Japanese and got them to speak English.

It took about 10-15 seconds of audio for each character to get a clone.

How did it come out? Could this be used as a tool for fan localizations?

It wasn't that simple, more (con't)

While you were sleeping...

...confident the culture wars were in the bag, Kabrutus avenged, and gaming healing...

A revenge tour of cancellation and deplatforming is sweeping the Youtubers that helped win many of the battles for gamers.

Starting mid May, every key voice against the woke virus has been systematically targeted, demonetized, or eliminated.

They are just getting started, and it's time to notice the pattern.

(Thread)🧵 Target: Kirsche

It started with @KirscheVerstahl , who was targeted, false slandered as a conspiracy theorist Nazi.

Her sponsors were threatened, some left, and multiple hit-piece articles were written about her.

Luckily, she hit back hard, and the articles were retracted.

Others were not so lucky.

(con't)

Here are the 5 times Bungie has had to apologize for stealing art for their games. 🧵

Bungie is having a hard time. Marathon art theft is confirmed and they are trying to make it right.

It can happen, contractors or rogue artists on a deadline can cross the line under pressure.

But when the same problem happens 5 times in a row, it might be time to admit there is a deeper problem at the studio and gamers and artists patience is rightfully stretched thin.

(con't) In 2021, Bungie had to apologize for using fan art of Xiva in a trailer for Destiny 2: The Witch Queen.

Original art by @relay314

(con't)

The 1st weekend results are in, and Clair Obscur Expedition 33 has pretty much demolished AAA with a peak of 121,422.

This puts AAA games in the entire industry to shame and shows that something is very very wrong in the industry.

They key takeaways for me are (con't)🧵 AAA game teams are vastly bloated with hundreds of devs and dismissing returns for team size.

The entire Expedition team was 30 people.

The larger the team, the higher overhead in communication and co-ordination costs, and you also lose VISION as devs are just cogs by that point and passion plummets. (con't)

X is pretty good for gaming news, but could be better. Instead of starting a new website for gaming news, it would be cool to be able to build a hub on X.

One feature that would be neat is if you could create a "landing page" for your account that let you tile and arrange your current X posts and articles, almost like a front-page.

I think this would be useful for getting the top stories you cover on X and establishing your profile brand at the top. The best trust is your own eyes. That's why video is the number one way that people form their opinions on games. They want to be able to see the gameplay and judge for themselves, rather than have it filtered by an article.

Even if there is commentary, people can see the game and tell if they agree or disagree with it.

(con't)

A modest plan to preserve the purity of Warhammer 40k.

I know many 40k fans are disheartened and angered by the gaslighting female Custodes debacle, and now there is more and more pressure to make 40k female Space Marines and Emperor knows what else.

Games Workshop continues to entertain the destruction of their lore and their game to satisfy the mythical, non-existent “modern audience” while spurning and even disparaging their core tabletop audience, who buys thousands of dollars worth of minis, codexes and supplements, by calling them all sorts of nasty names.

I also know that you love the hobby and many are loath to abandon it or are unable to resist the plastic crack to do anything like a full boycott (I’m there with you, but I have a technique).

You don’t have to.

For over a year, we’ve run a successful campaign in video games to push back against the mind virus ruining our hobbies.

We did it by voting with our wallets and being very vocal. Now, giant companies like Ubisoft are on the edge of folding, and medium and small publishers are embracing gamer feedback and sentiment. You can do this too, and you don’t need to swear off 40k to do it. You just need the mantra “underperform expectations.”

A short thread 🧵
Games Workshop is a public company. They are very sensitive to their stock price and investors sentiment.

They are also expected to deliver results quarter after quarter, year after year. If a single quarter shows a decline, it’s a big headache for management.

You must rally and time your activities to these quarters, which often have major releases to try to “goose the numbers” and show demand, which increases the stock price. It’s like when rent is due at the end of the month, except on a stock basis.

(Con’t)

BREAKING LEAK:

No, Kingdom Come Deliverance is NOT woke.

I received exclusive information from someone who has completed the game which clears up many rumors.

(Note, game director Daniel Vavra JUST posted clarification, he is 100% telling it to you straight)

According to this player, who wants to clear the air so the game can succeed, this is the exact content of the game’s main storyline (not all side quests completed):

A thread (con't)
- Yes, Henry can romance other characters in the game.

- Henry can romance another male, however, this is not forced upon the player in any way.

- Similar to how Bioware did romance checks, you must a) Initiate the dialog and b) pass around 5 dialog choice romance checks without missing one in order to unlock this romantic partner. You have to go out of your way to do this and do it over the course of half the game.

They are trying to cancel Notch and Minecraft 2 all over again, including using AI run accounts to do it.

I dissect the playbook here and how they go after targets.

This post went viral attracting the creator of Minecraft through distortion, false implications and outright lies.

I've seen these tactics before, they've been used to try to cancel myself, and I can't stand to see it being used against Notch just because he is making Minecraft 2.

A thread🧵 (cont') The first attack is to falsely correlate Notch's sale of the company with some bad event.

This is untrue, as Notch corrected himself.

He is no longer with Minecraft not because of "bad rerasons" but because he sold it...for 2.1B (Billion) dollars in 2014. This is a great success story and has zero to do with any controversies or "bad things" as the attacker is trying to imply here.

In fact, at the time, the mainstream press wasn't busy cancelling him and held him up as the success he is, giving him full credit and lauding how he awarded staff with huge bonuses at the time of the sale.

This is what I call a timeline fallacy. Notch was cancelled later in 2019, many years afterwards. But when doing a timeline fallacy, what they do is to imply causation even when the dates are flipped or do not support the argument. They try to imply a later event is what drove some earlier event to make it seem like a bad thing.

(con't) 🧵

Mouthwashing. The popular indie psychological horror game, is embroiled in controversy. A summary of what happened and how Asmongold triggered one of the devs who went off on a rant about how the "anti-wokes" have found the game and are not welcome to play.

Mouthwashing is a short but well received indie game that went viral.

Everything was going great until some very sensitive people started to harass artists for making fan drawings of one of the characters, Anna.

They were upset her breasts were drawn larger, or put into more revealing clothing.

The harassment got so bad that one artist was forced to apologize. It was the usual twitter mob that goes after artists whenever they do a fanart "wrong."

(con't) 🧵

Source: Art by SpoiledMuffin, Rakusakugk, and USA.


One artist was bullied so hard that they felt forced to apologize to the trolls.

It was then that the developers took a great stand and condemned the harassment.

The fervor died down, but was brought to light again by @Asmongold, who made a video praising the developer response.

This, it turns out, did not sit well with one of the developers of the game.

(con't)

DnD creators, Gygax and others, are erased and slandered at the same time.

WoTC and Hasbro just released the new Players Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, as well at the 40th Anniversary "Making of DnD" book whose foreward slams the original creators and attempts to distance themselves.

I spoke with one of the original creators, Rob Kuntz @threelinestudio , about the problem.

🧵

One of the main issues, cited Rob, the last surviving member of the OG crew, were the "DnD Historians" who write books and articles about the hobby and are left-leaning and continually slam the "problematic" creators and early books.

The problem? Not once did they ever reach out or ask to interview Rob or many other original creators.

Rob met Gary Gygax when he was a teenager, and joined the company soon after. He co-authored "Deities & Demigods with Jim Ward (whom I had the pleasure of playing in his recreation of the Greyhawk campaign. He is greatly missed.). Rob also assisted Gygax with the creation of the Greyhawk campaign setting.

Rob was so upset by the foreward in "Making of DnD" that he posted a rebuttal on his X account.

(con't)

Dungeons and Dragon's FALLS OFF the WOKE CLIFF in the brand new DM's Guide (Dungeon Master's Guide).

There is an entire section where DMs are encouraged to have players fill out sensitivity forms about what might trigger them, and an emergency X gesture where any player can stop a game if they feel uncomfortable (in a fictional fantasy setting!).

Funnier still, WotC @Wizards_DnD are being accused of STEALING these ideas from other games without credit.

A thread. 🧵
The new DMs guide features two "core tools" for "player safety" which are nothing more than safety blankets for coddling the perpetually offended and afraid...and EVERYONE at the table has to agree to this pandering where ONE PLAYER can DICTATE what you can and can't have in your campaign.

The first tool is the "Game Expectations" FORM where players list their Hard and Soft Limits. A hard limit is what you campaign can NEVER HAVE, and a soft limit is where you may only "lightly touch on" an area.

What are some of these limits? Here are examples used in the past in the tabletop community:

- Romance
- Mind Control
- Cultural Issues (yes, any snowflake topic)
- Harm to animals
- Natural Disasters
- Paralysis
- Thirst
- Claustrophobia

Here is a previewed pic of part of the form:

The second "tool" that the DMs guide wants you to use is...

(con't)

Dustborn used far more government money than has been previously reported.

The Norwegian Film Institute funded the game for 14 million kroner, or nearly 1.4 Million USD. This is in addition to the 150,000 Euros from the Creative EU grant program.

Dustborn is basically an antifa training game. You "bash the fash" across the "Divided States of America" by using vocal powers to call people racist.

The game has 33 players currently on it's opening week.

A thread. 🧵

https://x.com/LavenderGhast/status/1826675834801041539/video/1

The company, @RedThreadGames , looks to be funding multiple games through the use of these government grants.

The games do not make money, as you can see from the Steam Charts below for their prior games Dreamfall Chapters and Draugen.

Their existence seems to be dependent on repeated grants, wastes of taxpayer money that fund games that fail over and over.

(con't)

Black Myth: Wukong BREAKS NEW RECORD. Another peak at 2.36M users, their highest number so far.

But Western Media tried to kill the game.

What is the story of Wukong and how did it rise to shatter Steam records, reaching #2 game of all time, and #1 single player game of all time?

A 🧵 Black Myth: Wukong is created by Game Science, a studio founded by former Tencent devs in 2014 and lead by Feng Ji.

They were tired of creating mobile and gatcha games that plague the China gaming meta. Endless copies of live service and such.

They survived by doing mobile games to get their start, including games like 100 Heroes and a PC game: an RTS called Art of War: Red Tides, based on the classic Chinese novel "The Art of War."

In 2021, Tencent took interest in their former devs, taking a 5% minority stake in the company. But the studio was very much an underdog. Their desire to make a single-player game and not a gatcha clone, was doubted as a successful strategy.

(con't)

Everyone is talking about ScreenRant's slanted review of Wukong.

Here's what happened with the infamous @screenrant review of Black Myth: Wukong after they gave it a 6/10 for not being DIVERSE ENOUGH.

A thread 🧵 The review dedicated an entire section to Wukong's supposed "lack of inclusion & representation" repeating the infamous @IGN hit-piece on the developers, Game Science.

The problem is that the IGN article was full of mistranslation, including misunderstanding of cultural idioms (the translator was not native, and interestingly enough never paid and was stiffed by IGN), including the insertion of phrases that never existed. Example below.

The western gaming press continued to repeat the flawed IGN article, bringing it up every time they interviewed the developers or discussed the game, despite the accusations having no merit.

This reporter for ScreenRant repeated those allegations as fact, and had an obvious axe to grind.

(con't)

The Cancel Culture history lesson in gaming is still growing, but I've compiled all my examples so far into one thread. Just read through replies.

https://x.com/Grummz/status/1813626636350484499

Something big happened yesterday and most people missed it. Every theory we had about the uglification of women in AAA gaming turned out to be true.

Look at what happened to Jean Grey from @insomniacgames Marvel's Wolverine from these leaked early screenshots of the first, beautiful model, to the masculine, world weary version we have today. They are ruining @Marvel

And yes, Marvel's Wolverine is a Sweet Baby Inc. game.

We were told it was the difficulty of scanning actors, or just tricks of light and bad screencaps. We were told we were incels for even questioning it. As a game dev, I knew this was BS. As gamers, YOU knew it was BS from comparisons with Asian games.

Yesterday, we found out.

A Principle Artist (read this as lead) at major studios including Naughty Dog, Rocksteady and Respawn told the truth...

(con't) 🧵


Yesterday, a Principle Artist (lead) at major studios such as @Naughty_Dog, @RocksteadyGames and @Respawn talked about his frustration at trying to get his designs for beautiful female characters approved at AAA studios.

Every time he concepted the, every time he pitched them, every time he brought it up at meetings, he was ignored.

Inexplicably, each character went from beautiful to "grocery store aunties." Each revision worse than the last.

This is no fan of gamers or GG2, this is a liberal, woke dev, with seemingly a lot of talent, who is bringing you this information. And he hates to have you use it, but he feels strongly enough that even he has to say something.

This is no myth. This is no conspiracy theory, this is happening in AAA and you were RIGHT all along.

Why is this happening?

(con't)

Something is happening with Homeworld 3 @HomeworldGame published by @GearboxOfficial

- Gamers are being banned for asking about the story or DEI or SBI involvement.

- The story has been changed.

- The Managing Director of Narrative Properties for Gearbox has vanished.

I asked @TArchcast if I could summarize his excellent videos here. A thread. 🧵 Moderators on the game's official boards have started to hand out bans for anyone criticizing the story, or asking if DEI or Sweet Baby Inc. was involved in any way.

Fans reached out to myself and @kabrutusrambo who has placed the game on his DEI detected website.

While Sweet Baby Inc. does not appear to be involved. Kabrutus's community sent him receipts of other DEI involvement (con't)

I have a love for miniature gaming, even if I collect minis and books more than I play.

So I'm sad to hear about a Warhammer alternative grim-dark project that just Self-Destructed through needless woke knee-jerk reactions by the dev team.

Let's talk Trench Crusade @TrenchCrusade 🧵 Trench Crusade is a miniature game where Templars discover and unleash demon hoards, are corrupted, and the Church now has to wage a crusade against the corrupted Templars.

Sounds really cool.

It started to take off. Gamers started to back it and talk about it on social media.

And as soon as it started to get popular (as always), the cultural marxists moved in.

But it turns out, the game was already infected. (con't)

The Helldivers Community Team is the worst I've seen in gaming.

They are also extremely political, woke, and hate gamers.

Let's take a look at the lead first, Baskinator.

I've written about Baskinator before, and since then she both removed the flags in her bio but has since replaced them, as if we wouldn't notice.

She is a DEI advocate and appears to hate men, gamers, and white people.

Next up, Spitz. (con't) 🧵
Spitz ignited the PSN backlash with (his?) mocking of people who complained about the PSN policy. This extremely unprofessional approach to legitimate game issues that block thousands of gamers in non-PSN countries made the problem much worse for Arrowhead.

He is also a reddit mod, of course, and appears to be very anti-gamer

And next up is Misty (con't)