how do you do fellow wink libertarian wink, just pointing out you're giving the game a- it sounds like the thing it's obviously a mistake!!
you know when you understand the intent but choose to be serious anyway? i did that, now excuse me while i cackle defensively
you don't get power, be it wealth, infuence, celebrity, all of that, without figuratively or literally selling your soul. Your faves are problematic. All of them. You can't name a good one that can also sell out a large venue
i think shunting off non rational belief into a category of "bullshit not worth exploring or interrogating" is kind of, i dunno, itself ignorant? you can at least take the approach of people who study these matters academically, and separate your ego and emotional responses from the equation and seek to actually, not just approximating marx fourth hand, actually try to understand the phenomenon before jumping to this kind of shit.
astrology fits this category for me - it's not remotely productive for anyone to silo yourselves off from understanding for a lack of "getting it" - you're not omniscient, there's shit you don't know. Human tendencies towards these phenomena, whether imaginal or real, and you already know what you think about that, are not something to just go "lol i dont get it fuck all that noise" because you wanna actually reach people and find common cause with them, you refusing and even being hostile to this shit is gonna lose people who might, despite your assumptions, be radically useful.
you know, when i was a younger, worse person living a different gender, i ran into a skit he did with uhh, filthy frank i think? and i thought it was funny
he did like, two more okay videos with kinda funny concepts before pivoting to a drama guy, fucking boring. i couldn't invest myself in youtuber drama. Then that inane fucking podcast
i realized he sucked pretty early, i just kept hoping maybe the bad take machine would do some funny stuff a bit more, but nah that idiot knows how his bread is buttered and it's not being funny or interesting, but being an incredibly deranged unselfaware narcissist so whatever
for love of my father and a distaste of his brainworms i'm selfishly gonna hold his ass down and make him drink deeply of the mystik röt
what's the justification on critical?
when i transitioned i lost all interest in his content, which was looks at calendar SIX YEARS AGO jfc, but he used to be kinda fine if deeply himbo, what happened?
Are you me?
My parents were way too edgy to ever take a satanic panic seriously, but other than that i felt this post deeply.
I picked up the riven remake recently and it was like flashing into my 10 year old self just absolutely in awe of that fucking game.
My first exposure was playing at a rich kid's house, using his sister's copy. Was wild shit and I got home and basically insisted on getting it for ourselves.
Gonna go play some more in a bit, awesome op.
i ran out of content right before the 1.0 announcement
did they unfuck the dire and unfun act 3/postgame content because this game was a delightful ride until the end of act 2 where resource gathering advances into deep tedium and the fights got worse
the entire late game needed at least one more fuckin' pass and im skeptical they did it is all
This is good. This was deserved. Rest in shark piss
transforming oneself is difficult. The default mode we all have is what's raised into us. Tradition inherited via parents, and schooling. It's often trauma or something as un-anchoring as psychedelic experience that makes people crack and change themselves, and this process is so uneven and often incomplete because change is random and unsupported except by the whims of the altered ego.
There are very few unchallenging ways to honestly reject framing you've been trained to see as your only window to reality, and because of this it's easy for westerners to find themselves unable to fully break from the frames that define their understanding of their relationship to their society, government, the world, whatever.
I remember the day after I tripped for the first time because it really was that meme of like "wow so all of this is a fucking lie". I had to go to school and I was laughing at the things a teacher said [they were dealing with political material] because it was just fucking wrong. Presumptions about the way things are that the average liberal or conservative takes as sacrosanct, just all fucking nonsense. But I lacked the context and knowlege to develop this further at the time. A break was made, and it would take almost two decades to widen things further properly. An early lesson was that it didn't feel safe to fully leave the frame we're trained to accept as authoritative reality, because those frames determine social pecking order, they determine the jobs you can get. If you can't at least fake the faith in the dominant frames society lets you have, you'll be quickly ousted for being too weird. It's not even conscious for most folks, these mechanisms operate subconsciously to exclude difference of thinking and approach.
Even a good education is unlikely to, by itself, let you break free. Especially if you're educated in a prestige or elite context, you're being shaped to be the next generation of demonic overlord - the education you get is structured so that you're invested in the existing power structure - these places strictly do NOT educate in a manner that lets you go your own way intellectually.
So everyone from Qualified Experts to the average person on the street is operating on a framework that directly serves the interest of the country and the ruling elite.
I think people get fucked up because they take this to be conspiratorial, when social engineering is a field that's been in the process of being born for centuries now, a lot of the key players don't even know what they're doing, and that's by design. The structure is designed to maintain and propagate itself.
It's easy to break from it when you're the frontier of empire- you live with the politics of empire as a victim, as a deeply exploited resource.
People in the core are just as exploited, on the whole, but as beneficiaries with narrow education and limited interest and ability to educate themselves (on the whole) - they will not understand just what's happening.
I'm 34, and I have a love of learning. I literally get dopamine from study and acquiring new knowledge. How many freaks like me are there, really? Most people have trauma around education, or fully accepted it as a means to an end: there is rarely ever any love for the process of discovery and the requisite change that comes with it. Most people my age are figuring out how to live with themselves as they are, they're not trying to shake shit loose. My experience as a trans woman probably has more to do with my plasticity compared to my peers, but at no point are any of the individual circumstances that made me able to, finally, accept a more fundamental reality about my relationship to the world, to empire; things that are automatically salvific.
I'm a freakshow. We are freakshow. This is difficult work and most people who have the tools to wake up, never will, because the conditioning is strong, and breaking it requires the awareness and will to do so that the average ego just won't abide.
nothing more alarming than high profile people trying to normalize eating substandard but still mass produced food because it means they think this is an angle that will benefit them downstream. Yes, even someone like this idiot demon. She isn't the first person to start saying weird shit about food and now i'm wondering when they're gonna start starving us lol
it's gotta be the right kind of dominant, i kinda don't want latex and protocol, but i really felt this
I guess I'm looking for myth that promotes communal ideas, relates to worker alienation, etc.? I think of the book of Acts in the bible, that's somewhere between an example of how christians are supposed to live and a defense of paul before he's executed, right? but incidentally the book has ideas that can be carried forward and developed into a marxist-friendly understanding of how to live, even if it's loaded in stuff a well read marxist would find objectionable, there will be no perfect examples and i find it tiresome to get lost in pedantry about it so spare me!!!
I also wanna write some. Like "hades began to push and proliferate communism because he was horrified by the trauma of the humans coming through his gates and despised our cruel fates" feels like a decent basis for a mythic story idk
look i dont wanna get into the relationship of myth and religion to marxism, not really, i just like writing fake myth and i need an idea of what's out there in order to make something worthy of the concept
it couldn't be that the incidence of folks whose life is improved by transition is greater than the special kinds of privileged and extremely long-suffering women who were able to jump through the hoops of the old gatekept process that inevitably funnelled you to GRS with no regard for the individual's needs...
No, the proliferation of my very special secret identity that i'm revealing now is bad, actually.
A better person would use their position to make life better, not kick down.
what a piece of shit
Trying to armchair theorycraft why a story about cops being fucking pigs to a minor as suboptimal "agitprop" codes to me as someone who sees themselves as a planner and manipulator, or is trying to portray themselves as 'pragmatic' with regards to signal boosting and spreading stories that serve a narrative, and tells me they have some kind of experience, real or imagined, that leads them to naturally think like this. Maybe they're doing a "how do you do, fellow leftists" thing, and their specific brand of neurodivergence and employment is making them give the game away, or maybe it's just somebody that has been told they're very smart their whole life and has never had that challenged, and never been forced to confront themselves or ever do meaningful self crit - the positioning of making this about its value as propaganda in order to play it down comes off as kinda 5D chess-y to me in a way that's either accidentally sincere or delusional.
The inability to present any kind of thoughtfulness or empathy, the inability to read the room, to not understand why the story was posted and shared, to resist constructive criticism outright and get lost in dumb fights just comes off like exactly the kind of guy that will die on this hill because they're a fool, or because they're trying to stir shit up. Either way he sucks and needs to go to therapy or work on himself.
All of you have been immensely helpful. I've saved or acted on a good chunk of the advice here, so thank you all!!!
!I wish to encourage everyone to be extremely complacent, happy, and not to seek any sort of punitive vengeance upon the people suing the internet archive. !I want to encourage love, forgiveness, and hope, but not excessive action, lest tomorrow be darkened with the sin of your actions.
It was as easy as reformatting a usb stick, changing the boot order and turning off bitlocker, which was on for some reason?? but i havent used linux since, i dunno Mandrake 10? I was a kid, and it has been ages. It changed to mandriva about a year or two after i bought their CD set.
anyway I'm decently competent at computers i guess? i occasionally do stuff in powershell on windows, and the terminal or w/e seems neat. I used to do more coding, a skill i refreshed and picked up during quarantine. I'm mostly familiar with Microsoft's .net stuff though.
i shoved vs code and some stuff on it, but like, what's needed to kind of, well, replace a windows desktop? I gave it a 300gb partition, which is 30% of my available space, so i need to use this thing.
I am mostly getting peeved as shit and annoyed by Microsoft's increasingly aggressive "we gotta force people to upgrade, gotta shove horseshit AI nonsense on our stuff, gotta re-enable ads on the desktop" bullshit. I even paid for windows 10 pro, this isn't a free license, and it's still a nightmare in this way and frankly i'm done. the appeal of starting with a fairly barebones OS (i'm aware i can go much more stripped down with OSes like this, not the point) is intense right now.
but i realize now i genuinely know jack shit about dick outside of microsoft and android environments and i want advice.
The laptop itself is mostly a niche use laptop, but while I'm not an advanced dork in these matters, i probably know enough to leverage it to replace windows if i can know what the strengths of this platform are, what the good software is for software development (is Code gonna be it?), whether Wine is still the emulation software of choice, that stuff.
One thing I'd really like to do is learn what the default install of Mint+Cinnamon is doing, how to go over the different components, how to pick and choose what i want this thing doing. I didn't find the official documentation overly helpful, troubleshooting the install aside, so i wanted to ask here
If i can get there, and get some windows based software running that I need, i'll ditch the windows partition entirely, and i'd like to get there.
like, how do you really approach the average american and just like, empathetically convey that they need to raze this fucking barn
i mean especially the groups out there who historically had some level of buy-in to the system and are in denial about their exclusion - like what is the metaphorical eye-piece nada can force onto their eyes to see the basic truth: we gonna have to do something unpleasant to change this sitch
Is it because he's always nailing smug weirdo rich fuckbags? Is it the peter falk hard carry? Is it because despite being canonically a cop he does anything but act like a cop?
Is everything downstream of columbo an attempt to erase his legacy as the hound of wealthy sociopaths?
Is Columbo a demigod?
I've had a love of history generally, and I know a bit more than most about the Roman empire, and that's kind of a red flag i guess, but I genuinely think they're one of the worst things to ever happen to the world, much as i find the endless stream of civil wars and coups to be very fun to read, the brutality of their empire wouldn't be surpassed until England somehow went from a backwater to a globe spanning empire and to be quite honest i'm not a fan of them except as a gateway to knowing what some of my ancestors got up to.
Weird Ass Rome Guys are why the American feds are the way they are, it's obvious there is something deeply wrong with how Rome gets portrayed in popular media and stuff that makes this a seemingly wide-spread phenomenon, but honestly what's with the glorification of Rome? is it downstream of American Nationalism? No, that can't be, because Rome Guys go back so far we have popes making fake roman states and tsars and sultans trying to prove their dick is the most Roman. It's hard to miss a lot of Rome Guys are pretty regressive people. Like, you don't ever think something like "Augustus was a role model" unless you've got some twisted bullshit shit going on in your heart.
It makes me uncomfortable to engage with the history sometimes, because Rome Guys are always listening and ready to project their noble fantasy of them and the idiot narratives of Rome's decline as a sickness caused by foreign invaders sure does sound like deeply right wing revisionist history to me, but I've never really thought through the how and why of these guys, i wanted to solicit Hexbear's thoughts.
First of all, I wasn't really a big kojima gal? I had played the first and a bit of the fifth MGS until earlier this year, where i finally finished MGS V
i realized it is an extremely precient and political game, and I think i like kojima's brand of crazy.
So then I read about death stranding. I saw the promo footage years ago, and it followed that cutscene where Deadman finds himself on that combat beach, and I assumed it was more action heavy bs that I was growing out of (hormones change your tastes what can i say), so i completely ignored it until i grabbed it on a whim recently
and anyway, WOW! so I fucking love this game. Everything is so weird. Astrology and esoterica are canon, everything is a fucking insane metaphor for something else, the world has been utterly bent the fuck over by cataclysm, and you're just a dude out there with your artificial womb, making deliveries and linking up the remnants of humanity.
I love the vibe of these little communities and holdout preppers coming together, sharing what they have to move forward into a post-cataclysmic future. I love all the stupid shit with Lockne & Malingen, I love the bridge babies, i love that one of the most potent weapons in the game is made by running around until you're so tired you piss blood, and that bloody piss gets turned into a grenade. I love having weaponized body fluids. This shit owns.
I'm not even sure death stranding 2 can live up to this.
also the multiplayer features can be a bit much (I have it set up to log in offline and to not automatically share structures because people will just spam structures in the most annoying fucking places, but they're also awesome.
I love how much cooperation and community effort is the front and foremost thing, to the point it's literally one of the stats the game tracks.
Sorry, I needed to gush about how rad this game is, years after its heyday
edit: Also if anybody is currently playing and wants to form strand contracts, i'm on the Steam PC version. I'd rather see like, specific people's stuff in my game world than like, random people's.
Right now i use strand contracts with inactive friends to sort of make it less likely i get six bridges in a forest when i go online, but i'd actually enjoy building the world map out with some people. Not gonna put my steam id out in public though, pm me for all that
a caveat that maybe state and municipal government is still somewhat democratically functional, like at that low level enough of the day to day of administering people's lives is delegated to actual democratic authority maybe
but then i look at stuff like the debate (i didn't actually watch the debate i respect myself too much) and i look at how stuff happens and how it like doesn't seem to matter at all who is in power for the average person. Like it's pretty obvious that there is corporate and wealth buy-in for domestic policy, and think tanks and stuff that set a social agenda to some degree, and I guess the democratic apparatus serves to enable that buy-in, but on the federal level it really feels like voting happens at all merely to provide a democratic legitimacy to stuff that's actually decided entirely by unelected bureaucrats and moneyed interests that are either employed by the state or privately, right?
everything connected to voting is there to give social consent right? if you vote you assent to the legitimacy of the government - and this is like, its sole function? because if not enough people did that, and people actually didn't believe in the legitimacy of the government, there might actually be a problem I guess?
Like how can we think it actually matters which of these guys [the goo brain prez candidates] ends up elected from the pov of an average person? womens and queer rights are dissolving before our eyes regardless in most places, labor rights movements get stomped the fuck out the second they start to do anything interesting, and the few state bastions of safety come from the fact that local governments still sometimes represent citizen priority in some limited sense.
like foreign policy is gonna be the exact same in most cases, like there's no voting mechanism that will end the genocide in gaza - there's no mechanism to get the MIC to stop bombing random places and sending demonic spec ops raids wherever, nor will the steady stream of funds that go into toppling any government that so much as hesitates in its fealty to the us - so ideas that democracy is the answer is meaningfuly deluded, right?
federal politics feels like a really boring kind of WWE thing where the stage are national elections and their personalities and horse races, the kayfabe is the idea that a vote translates into anything meaningful other than the governed consenting to the process, whereas WWE's actual function as entertainment and a RNC pipeline is somewhat obvious, liberals are an entire class of people who actually stake their identity on its sincere legitimacy.
I know this post is long and probably sucks, but this all reeks to me and I'm so tired of seeing people care when the actual options for positive change are narrow, unpleasant, and sometimes illegal to voice.
I want people to disengage, start building parallel structures and outright refusing to live as if this farce is legitimate and even if i'm wrong about the particulars, that feels unreproachably noble and needed.
