FlashFeed

Full text

Indie creator Robert Yang—who makes good, funny, incandescently homosexual videogames—has an ongoing project. Radiator Forever is a free megabundle/remaster of Yang's experimental, short-form games that includes titles like Hurt Me Plenty (description: "consent, negotiation, spanking, and aftercare"), Succulent ("juicy cheek physics and demonic possession") and Stick Shift ("autoerotic night-driving, manually pleasure a gay car").

I'm sure we both agree that this news piece would have been worth writing just to get a chance to tap out "manually pleasure a gay car," but there's more: in a recent blog post on the experience of putting together Radiator Forever, Yang shone some light on the ongoing fallout from last year's purge of "adult" material from storefronts like Steam and Itch.io, for which right-wing anti-porn group Collective Shout claimed credit after putting pressure on payment processors, as well as on the impact of regional censorship laws like the UK Online Safety Act .

With indie storefront Itch.io forced to more-or-less shadowban adult games on its platform, projects like Yang's are impossible to find on there, driving him back to Steam. "Of course I will continue using and supporting Itch as a much-needed alternative to Steam, but the cold fact is that Itch reaches a lot fewer people these days," he writes.

But even on Steam, these sorts of games continue to run into problems. "Unfortunately Valve has tagged my game as "frequent nudity and sexual content" and now hides it from most Steam users," writes Yang. "Since no one changes their default settings, this amounts to a delisting / shadowban from 99% of the Steam user base.

Radiator 2, by the by, is on our best sex games on PC that aren't garbage list. (Image credit: Robert Yang) "While I was careful to avoid explicit nudity, compliance-in-advance is never enough to appease a zealous censor, and the Steam content reviewers have decided the game's general "nature" was just too gay, regardless of my good faith efforts." Yang points to Steam's no-appeal ban of Horses to suggest that "Valve isn't interested in a nuanced conversation or in admitting any wrongs in moral judgment.

"If video games are a form of protected free speech, I do wish there was a bit more hand-wringing over blocking access to my games that were designed directly to be political speech," says Yang. "Valve loves it when Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3 throw customizable genitals at you in the first five minutes, but of course I can't, because I actually have something to say about genitals!"

It's an eminently understandable frustration, and a reminder that—though the discourse around last year's censorship of online storefronts has died down—the impact of the reactionary crusade against adult content continues to impact creators.

Full text

There’s a particular kind of disappointment that only a good filmmaker can deliver, and Disclosure Day is steeped in it. This isn’t a bad movie, exactly. It’s something more frustrating: a missed opportunity, made by a director standing on the most fertile ground and for some reason refusing to dig.

Steven Spielberg has spent his career circling the idea of first contact with aliens. The closest comparison here is 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind , and the comparison is not kind to the new film. In Close Encounters , the government is secretly working toward contact, while ordinary civilians, struck by visions they can’t explain, get pulled into the orbit of an enormous, cosmic project. The film breathes a beautiful rhythm of mystery, reveal, and renewed mystery. The secretive authorities turn out to be, in their own way, the good guys. And the civilians at the center — above all, Richard Dreyfuss, the film’s protagonist — risk everything to reach the mountaintop in the finale. They have agency. They earn the encounter.

Disclosure Day throws nearly all of that away. The government is absent. In its place is the Wardex Corporation, a shadowy government contractor that functions like a secret-police outfit, existing mainly to suppress the truth and be disliked — a point the film hammers home with a video of them interrogating and torturing a helpless alien for no discernible reason. Meanwhile, the humans drawn toward contact don’t understand what’s happening to them and never gain any agency over it. They’re possessed, compelled, going through motions they don’t choose. They aren’t protagonists so much as passengers.

The deeper problem is that the film withholds the one thing it exists to deliver. Disclosure — the actual event, the thing the whole title promises — doesn’t arrive until the final seconds. We never hear what the aliens have to say. There’s a single, interesting line suggesting they regard empathy as nature’s greatest evolved capacity, which is a genuinely beautiful idea, but the movie does absolutely nothing with it. It’s stated and abandoned. We never see how the world reckons with the revelation, never watch humanity absorb the news. Every hard, interesting, worth-writing question — what does disclosure mean, what does it cost, how do we change — gets quietly sidestepped. The screenplay doesn’t fumble those parts. It declines to attempt them.

What’s left is suspense in search of a subject: a hollow chase movie about getting away from contractor thugs.

The characters suffer accordingly. Colin Firth’s antagonist spends the entire film going to extraordinary lengths to bury the truth, then, in the closing moment, simply sits down in a chair and lets it happen. Nothing has changed his mind. He just seems tired. It plays less like a resolution than a surrender the story never earned. Emily Blunt’s protagonist is even harder to hold onto because she’s possessed for most of the runtime, and we never actually meet her. We know she’s buried a childhood trauma, and we know she wants to be a news anchor, and that’s about the sum of who she is. You can’t root for a person the film never introduces you to.

The waste is sharpest with Josh O’Connor, who plays arguably the film’s lead. The movie opens strongly on him, trading the top-secret material he’s smuggled out for the safe return of his girlfriend from the secret-police thugs — an Edward Snowden figure who leaked the truth because he believes it belongs to the whole world. It’s a terrific setup. In a better version of this movie, he would use his training, skills, and insider knowledge to stay one step ahead of his pursuers, a Jason Bourne with a conscience. We get exactly one scene of that in the first ten minutes, and then it evaporates. From there, he mostly runs, trips, gets captured by the bad guys, and is eventually simply found by the good ones. O’Connor is a wonderful actor handed a bland character, and by the end, he’s given us no more reason to root for him than anyone else.

Spielberg being Spielberg, there are reaches for emotional weight, and they mostly land on the same note: Both leads were abducted as children and have blocked it out. It’s a decent idea on paper, but it never grabbed me — partly because the film leans on it instead of giving these people present-tense desires worth caring about. There’s also a baffling subplot in which one character objects to the truth coming out because it might compete with people’s belief in God. Every gesture toward religion in this movie is unnecessary; reaching for profundity it hasn’t built the foundation for.

I had some fun. It’s a popcorn movie, and it moves. But it’s also very long, and the length only sharpens how little is actually underneath it. That’s the real verdict: not that Disclosure Day is terrible, but that it’s inflated and hollow when it had every reason to be awesome and compelling. This was Spielberg returning to the richest material of his career, and the result is all mystery, no meaning — a movie that gestures at the biggest question we could ever ask and then looks away just as the answer arrives.

This article “Disclosure Day”: Spielberg’s latest alien film is all mystery, no meaning is featured on Big Think .

Full text

Toyota has delayed production of the 2027 Highlander before its official launch.

The automaker says it needs more time for final pre-production adjustments.

Gas and hybrid Highlander production will continue through December.

It was a big deal earlier this year when Toyota announced that the next Highlander would be electric-only . At the time, the company planned to launch it late this year, and while that’s still technically on the table, there’s reason to doubt it. Toyota just told Carscoops that production has slipped, while staying quiet about what pushed it back. With the schedule sliding, US buyers might not see the SUV in dealerships until early 2027.

var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]};

adpushup.que.push(function() {

if (adpushup.config.platform !== "DESKTOP"){

adpushup.triggerAd("0f7e3106-c4d6-4db4-8135-c508879a76f8");

} else {

adpushup.triggerAd("82503191-e1d1-435a-874f-9c78a2a54a2f");

}

});

The automaker reached out to say a special media preview event for the SUV was being postponed, adding that fresh dates weren’t available yet. The holdup is “to allow timing for final adjustments prior to launch.” There wasn’t a firm market launch date on the books before this announcement, though Toyota had hinted it would happen before the end of the year.

More: Subaru’s New Getaway Is Basically A Faster, More Powerful Highlander

Toyota

A Toyota spokesperson told us the delay would run at least eight weeks. A surprise two-month holdup this deep into the process is odd, but not unheard of. Setbacks like this aren’t uncommon on all-new or heavily updated vehicles, especially as automakers push through final quality validation, software refinement, supplier readiness, or manufacturing calibration before volume production begins.

var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]};

adpushup.que.push(function() {

if (adpushup.config.platform === "DESKTOP"){

adpushup.triggerAd("ea4d4b5a-f8e5-4d5d-9d9a-53a3b956b6cd");

} else{

adpushup.triggerAd("44c0a4dc-e25b-4ba5-ac64-2c510461b92a");

}

});

In many cases, manufacturers would rather delay a launch than rush a vehicle into production only to deal with quality issues or early recalls later. Toyota did not elaborate on what those “final adjustments” involve, nor did it indicate whether the production delay will have any impact on the Highlander’s planned retail launch.

Stephen Rivers for Carscoops

The company also didn’t provide a revised production start date. It’s unclear at this point if the delay will affect the Subaru Getaway or the Lexus TZ, the two other SUVs that share the same platform as the Highlander. To that end, we’ve reached out to both companies for further information.

Interestingly, Toyota confirmed to Cars.com that production of the gas and hybrid versions of the Highlander will continue through December of this year. The report questions whether Toyota might simply be delaying the EV to rake in more profit on the gas-burning versions. Either way, the brand has committed to moving to an EV-only platform soon.

var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]};

adpushup.que.push(function() {

if (adpushup.config.platform !== "DESKTOP"){

adpushup.triggerAd("bb7964e9-07de-4b06-a83e-ead35079d53c");

} else {

adpushup.triggerAd("9b1169d9-7a89-4971-a77f-1397f7588751");

}

});

Stephen Rivers for Carscoops