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

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4 yr. ago

Shit u right (I was not down with the bizkit)

Matt Christman high pitch cackling at the realization that Limp Bizkit's "Break Stuff" music video was filmed on top of the twin towers and aired on Sept. 10th 2001

The Pale is a vibe, the creeping understanding of everything that isn't, the realization that being capable of imagination beyond the here and now means, terrifyingly, that we can imagine absence.

We can project our thoughts into the past and the future, into what might be or could have been, into what we want and what we hate. And even once you've built the structures and systems to make ever more distant things "real," even once you can confidently say that the tree does make a sound in the forest even if nobody hears it, there is still a point that is too far, where there's nothing to work with. You can think about what led to how things are now, or where we are headed, but your narrative for it gets simpler the further out you go.

The fact that the pale is encroaching on the real does prompt a lot of things, since in that magical realism style it's like metaphor made material. Maybe it's climate change, maybe it's the mental deterioration of age, maybe it's depression. Those holes in reality, maybe they are traumas that made cracks in your Normal, maybe they are where the nukes first struck, maybe they are leaks sprung in our dimension by sci-fi tinkering, maybe they just represent the moment(s) when you first came to understand death.

The church quest is perfect, everything's so drenched in pathos in DE but it reminds you of that great hope of relief from this constant awareness of decay and collapse and deterioration. At da club, or at church, where ever you are carried away by music and dancing and the presence of dazzling lights and most importantly, lots of people with you, somehow it doesn't seem to matter so much. It's like the hole wasn't there at all.

(Also it's worth mentioning the phasmid's line about how it pities humans who don't live at the back of a funnel of reality like it does.)

It's usually justified to make fun of STEMlords but scientists with highly specific skills are still a vital part of our societal whole (I choose to believe this for my own sake)

I warned you about wet roots dawg, I told you bro

as always the problem is systemic but changing that is a big ask so we come up with little clean-living rituals to give us a sense of control as we white-knuckle through life

I hadn't even read a single bit of feminist texts back then but maintaining a lens of "people have always wanted to live comfortably without fucking dying unnecessarily" was a pretty reliable way to be at least 75 percent correct in my assumptions

I remember a conversation I had with a friend who'd been getting really into Hardcore History and wanted to talk some cool ass history with me, the history minor

We got on the topic of how the aztecs had instituted a sort of doctrinal loophole saying that women who died in childbirth also got to go to the Valhalla-equivalent that was normally for men who died in combat. I laughed and said "well yeah, I can imagine plenty of women didn't want to risk their fucking lives by having kids back then, makes sense that there would be a lot of reluctance towards childbirth that they'd try to address with a little media campaign."

This friend got really upset with me and claimed that I was projecting modern attitudes (woke wasn't really a big term yet) onto the past. I wanted to smoke his weed so I didn't start an argument but the patriarchy detector was beeping like crazy

honestly it's Fucking bull shit how people will say stupid fucking wordlists instead of letting me do my own brain thinking which I'm supposed to be doing????? like they just give me their songsing fucking bookwords that they probably practiced to say good instead of showing me the thing there fucking showing me with fucking normal people words that explain stuff good to people who dont just spend all their time getting good at saying stuff they heard other people saying

Probably the most beautiful place I have ever been and with some of the worst people I've ever met. There are places there with a stark primeval majesty that is unique across the whole world, and to see them I had to deal with some of the most naked racism I've ever encountered.

The image that emerges out of all my memories of the place is looking out the window at the incredible flat red-sand expanse of the outback while a motel owner was warning me about how the local indigenous population comes out at night and steals wallets with fishing poles.

Oh yeah the Marine iguanas, incredible footage, some of the best ever imo.

Really feels like I picked a bad time to be interested in amphibians sometimes

Definitely jealous of getting to work with condors, sounds awesome.

Larry David frowning and muttering "It's the result of my generous testosterone"

I haven't played d4 since release but I'll be honest the story actually wasn't their worst and did not fall into that trap, you just fight Lilith at the end. Iirc she was just Mister Diablo's daughter.

Baseline warcraft stories were almost good, like if I squinted I could pretend they were doing a big and at times subtle plotline about stuff like imperialism and indigenous displacement/resistance but those days are long gone even if I was giving too much credit

It's true, the gameplay in 2 was pretty slick but let's be honest, story disappointment stings like nothing else when it comes to games

I remember being enthralled playing through a copy of StarCraft 2 I "appropriated" from a friend's house (yes I was that friend, we exist and we DID steal your copy of that game you thought you lost). The story was pretty damn good by the standards of videogames, especially at the time, and I basically ate slept and breathed that campaign for the week or so I was playing it. StarCraft 2 had so much hype and totally failed to live up to the quality of that campaign.

It's not even a matter of rose tinted glasses, Wings of Liberty was decent and was pretty well-produced but all its best moments were just callbacks to sc1 and brood war.

(And JESUS CHRIST, nobody who gave two fucks about that storyline was asking for all the boring trite Kerrigan redemption plotline across sc2's campaigns, brood war was sick because it specifically tossed aside the idea that she wanted to be redeemed, she was a great character and villain until they just made her sci-fi Sylvanas Windrunner. My theory is that all the now-obvious sexism at Blizzard is why they cannot conceive of a woman having a role in a story that isn't ultimately concerned with her being fixed for the sake of a dude who wants their cool monster gf to become a blonde wife)

I visited a lab where some of the last remaining dusky gopher frogs are cared for.

(reminder that frogs may be in what is considered the sixth mass extinction ever on earth)

I don't think I've ever actually shit myself as an adult but I will stand in solidarity with my doodoo-assed comrades

I don't mean it like "don't be informed," just that being correct is not inherently productive, like the game is telling you to at least try and take part in the society that you know to be tragically out of balance. (The game wants you to take Matt Christman's grill pill)