GarbageShoot [he/him] @ GarbageShoot @hexbear.net

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4,025

Joined

3 yr. ago

In addition to the other nonsense, she says "authentic reactions" as though acting isn't a thing and hasn't been used on TV, both pre-recorded and even live, to shill for various products for decades now

You are fedposting to the right of the Ayatollah whose countrymen you appropriated that slogan from. "Death to America" does not mean "Death to All Americans" or "Most Americans" or even necessarily "Very Many Americans," it means "Death to America", you know, the state that is responsible for perpetrating the crimes that I don't need to list off. Calling the slaughter of a population desirable because of how white it is (or isn't, obviously) is unhinged, reactionary racial chauvinism. It's replacing class analysis with racial essentialism and then adding punitive justice on top of it all. To promote such a thing, whatever your intentions, you are a wrecker.

I'm really into vaguely- or extremely-Earthbound-like games. Since Omori was already mentioned (and it's the best of that subgenre along with grandpa OFF and Undertale), I'll mention the Endless Empty, which is a giant CW for suicide and drug abuse, and also admittedly kind of buggy. Also I don't see it currently on sale despite it mechanically being very much a conventional RPG, so I guess that defeats the point of the comment, but it might go on sale on a later day! On a related note, Nepenthe (which is like if Undertale was written by Toby Fox's dad), is also not on sale.

Let's see . . . there's LISA and its offshoots, with basically every content warning short of snuff being applicable to those, and also it's full price right now . . . West of Loathing is cool and I assume the sequel is too, and those are actually on sale. Suits: Absolute Power is pretty good and also on sale. In Stars and Time is on sale and I really recommend playing the demo first because a) it is a better game and b) it doesn't have the same impact if you know what you learn in the full game. Neither Hylics 1 or 2 are currently on sale, which is unfortunate, because those are up there.

Moonring is free but also more of a CRPG I guess and also not Earthbound-like (which, to be clear, all the previous games are). Virgo and the Zodiac isn't substantially Earthbound-like but it's a good rpg on sale. "Get in the Car, Loser!" could only be more of a Hexbear sim if it was a) actually Bolshevik or b) framed around a trainride instead of a roadtrip, but as-is you're still a gang of transbians/cisbians fighting industrial demons and doing dumb quips, and it's also not on sale yet (I got it when it was free).

Uh, Franzen and Grimm's Hollow are both pretty good and they are free last I checked.

I don't know, I think this mostly wasn't very helpful, I just like RPGs.

I haven't played Cesspool but it seems neat and it's at a large discount

I don't think it's taken as a primary cause, the primary cause is whatever is making them not read. Furthermore, yeah, they could read stuff, and yet they don't. That's OP's point, not there being a lack of English majors.

Crime fiction is substantially different from true crime. Do you think a podcast about a serial killer has the same sort of content as a detective novel? Yeah, sometimes they revel a bit to much in the violence of the murder, but they really aren't the same thing. One is basically about the crime from a pretty third-person omniscient perspective and the other is usually grounded very strongly in the perspective of the detective and involves their interiority and sometimes other issues they have going on (addiction and exes are the classic ones, but there are others).

I'd also argue that crime fiction typically isn't exploiting the murders and grief of actual people, which changes how you relate to it.

Of course, today we live in the society of spectacle, so these people do not usually read, but are merely educated by images.

The Spectacle certainly includes writing. It's hard to get more Society of the Spectacle than by being a Hemingway Guy. The point of the Spectacle is that it replaces "being something" with "having the aesthetic of something," and literature most definitely conveys aesthetics that people have chased after, and in fact that's very strongly a trope of writing aimed at younger men.

Edit: See also: https://web.archive.org/web/20210610042340/https://the-toast.net/2013/11/04/male-novelist-jokes/#idc-cover (including some of the comments)

You don't need to go to a university to read Hemingway or Hunter S. Thompson, even if they are also taught at universities.

They aren't writing in support of Hemingway, Hemingway is just an easy "Even dumb guys at least read this" example

not to mention all the crime fiction, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy

This part is important in understanding their meaning. They aren't being narrowly prescriptive, they're just pulling at recognizable examples.

If something isn't immediately understandable it's "badly made".

Applying this standard to art is a bad idea

do you get the same reaction when someone says "I saw this YouTube video"

How could you not?

The website itself seems to be struggling sometimes

I've thought about this for a while and I'm not sure what to say. I don't think I'd go so far as to say that reading any single book "revolutionized my entire life", I just got useful information and perspectives from them. I think that your guess is at least partially right, that some of the people who have the strongest enthusiasm are probably ones who haven't read much philosophy before and therefore are getting more groundwork covered in reading State and Rev [or whatever] than you and I did, because a fair amount of that stuff was already familiar to us.

Reading theory generally shouldn't be revelatory in some grand sense, this isn't a religious text and you aren't supposed to fall into some kind of transcendental rhapsody, you're just developing your understanding point by point.

That only makes sense if you completely discount the husband as a moral patient. While I'm arguing that he's been slightly over-emphasized, I am by no means discounting him and in most possible scenarios believe he should be informed. If he has no history known to his wife of probably 4+ years of being an abuser to her or others as far as she knows, it's pretty unlikely that he is. Making the decision to not tell him anyway on the very, very unlikely chance that he, as a historically normal dude, snaps and blows her head off with a shotgun, is completely discounting the guaranteed outcome of him being wronged by being left in the dark about this.

Talking about this in terms of social contract theory is really sidestepping the morality of the issue. Would you say that her lying entitles OP to punch her in the face? Surely not, two wrongs don't make a right, punitive justice is bad, etc. What OP should do is investigate the issue with her not because she "gets to" tell her side or has a right to, but because he doesn't know what the consequences of telling the husband would be. For all he knows, the husband is abusive and would beat her for this transgression, transgression though it is. The most likely outcome is, of course, that the husband is not abusive, but the most likely outcome of a round of Russian roulette is that you go unharmed. In either case, there is a real risk that is severe enough that it's worth checking, even if it's substantially less likely.

Assuming OP was right, I'd frame it more as his having an obligation to the husband as a human being making the choice correct rather than as a lack of obligation to the wife making the choice indifferent. We should be trying to make the world better, not carefully demarcating the bounds of social contracts so we can find out exactly where we're allowed to do as much harm as we feel like.

But I also think SadArtemis is right that OP, to put it charitably, got ahead of himself

I'd more say that the military occupation was done for the sake of confrontation (this is similar to the official Chinese line). It was a really senseless invasion, as far as I can tell (and I disagree with the Vietnamese line that the war was expansionist).

It's also cool in Sorcery

Come on, you're more well-read than this. You know that military occupation and annexation are not the same thing.

At least Mai is an adult