RiotDoll [she/her, she/her] @ RiotDoll @hexbear.net

Woo Fool

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1 yr. ago

Beneath A Steel Sky was abandonware for years and years, and is now technically just freeware. it's so free that it's just straight up downloadable on steam. It's a very strange sci-fi adventure game with a tone problem that makes it one of my favorite games ever. It's not the best adventure game, but it doesn't have too much "moon logic" for its puzzles, and the art direction is so grimy in a way that's really lovely and kind of unique compared to most dystopian fiction. I feel like it'd be best to just point you to it to go experience it than detail it too much, but you are a guy forcibly brought in to a dystopian city after your village is attacked, and the rest of the game is a kind of descent into this highly industrialized, capitalistic fascist dystopia. It's neat.

It has a sequel called Beyond A Steel Sky. It's pretty solid, but it's also, imo, a completely different game. There is exactly one level that evokes the aesthetics and sensibilities of the original, and it's got these "HEY REMEMBER THE FIRST GAME?" bits bolted into the story, but you could excise all of it and lose nothing, so it's hard to recommend it as a followup-in-spirit, but it's a solid sci-fi adventure game with a lot of modern amenities (read: no soft locks, no impossibly obtuse puzzles, regular autosaving), and it has interesting stuff to say along the way so vOv I'd recommend it, even though it isn't necessarily abandonware

i want havana syndrome to be something weird & paranormal instead of fake as shit because it would be funny to crack jokes like "good job losing to the space dragon, semper fi" and instead i just have to be bored and sad

I've been to the seattle one [i live in the area] but i kinda hate it because it's in a pretty expensive area. Nowhere is cheap around here, but you can't even get a cheap bite in that area and it's like, almost reflective of Seattle's tendency to take and display objects of the conquered lol

still it's cool

the radicalization of peter daou was one of those weird moments of 2020 that i thought was fake - it's really funny to see that it was real

i used to think this woman represented a socailist incursion into congress.

lol. turns out she's the type to deploy with USAID to a developing country on the eve of a coup, so you know, the opposite of socialist. ah well, nevertheless.

I also dropped TV, and later, because my partner needed it, I began to release myself from immersion in pop culture, and I was already a socialist - I was liberal but socialist in self-conception, and open to leftist politics before I ever left highschool - the intervening decades saw steady radicalization - but I can echo that it really accellerated in the last half decade - where i just absolutely do not, and will not, plug into "news of record" - some time away initially must've made me attentive to former blind spots, because at some point, and i can't even measure when, I suddenly saw what you mention - the pump n dump fast talking bullshitter nonsense. It didn't help that these personalities really showed their ass regularly on twitter - it became obvious in 2016 and 2020 that, to anyone paying attention, they weren't dealing honestly - and it kind of made the curtain come up on the entire media operation in the US.

I am not sure everyone invovled understands their own place and role though - some of these people are bitterly stupid, and possibly true believers - but many of them just are on the take and defending their financial interests and putting their employer's ideology before their own in the interest of climbing up the ladder - but seeing these dweebs show their ass on social media for several years really effectively undermined the illusion of authority they used to project in days when most media folk were invisible except as a name under the banner of their employers.

That's probably why there's a turning back to that - musk running everyone that's not an insane fascist off twitter is gonna end up serving that crowd even if they're not happy about it (egos are like that lol) but it's honestly a good antidote to the illusion at-large to see how dishonest these people really are, and any leftist org worth their salt should emphasize their importance by rising to the unchallenging goal of being more honest and consistent than these folks in presenting information and processing world events.

I think it really ties back to the rigid fictions we have drilled into our heads in primary school. If you take it on faith that the system works as advertised, you just will not see it what you need to see to go, "hey, what the fuck?"

Dispelling this illusion requires breaking the basic understanding - which is some school house rock ass shit - but also breaking the more complex "adult" understandings like what is conveyed in drivel like the west wing - there are several layers of "here's how it *actually works" spoonfed to us that is as equally fictive and serving of this viewpoint as the basic shit children are taught - it's just a transformation appropriate to beguiling an adult that thinks they're figuring out how the world really works.

You need to be able to shake those up, and just doing that on an individual level is like pulling teeth and requires willingness which is a resource that only appears in select conditions - drug trips, or during trauma directly caused by the government's real nature - very little else primes anyone in the US to be even willing to see how it really is.

It fucking sucks.

the only purpose of voting is legitimizing the system to you, personally, psychologically, by participating in the meaningless expression of preference you've been conditioned to believe is meaningful.

You might as well accept communion and pay your tithes because voting is just communion wafers for the legitimacy of the govt instead of the legitimacy of the church

If you are familliar with the history of CPUSA this doesn't even strike as out of character, but it is very funny to see a bunch of libs larping as socialists and successfully replicating just the drama but none of the politics

the episode of south park about Britney Spears but it's joe biden

What happened to bernie in 2020 broke me in a big way, like "i dont believe in the efficacy of democracy anymore" broke - but I knew he was irrelevant the second his campaign ended, and this does kind of affirm that.

I enjoy the back-handedness of what he's saying, it's like perfunctory and absolutely a non-defense of biden, but it just depresses me that this jackass isn't president instead and every time he speaks it just reminds me that democracy is fake and that all the insufferable buzzkill anti-electoralists were completely right about goddamn everything

i wouldn't say "considerable" - there are some higher payout missions aboard the nexus that are hairy/annoying to solo, but there's very little i'd say can't be done by yourself - that said, I've never had fun playing multiplayer content in this game. To say nothing else, my computer shits the bed when more than half a dozen people are in-system

The nexus has a lot of stuff you're gonna want - and that is a multiplayer hub where you'll run into other players, but AFAIK there's nothing meaningful gated behind multiplayer stuff. If there is, i've still got north of 300 hours in the game without needing to touch another human being so vOv

I've been playing off and on lately - i really don't like the multiplayer stuff when i can't solo it - but i've been sitting with my little township that i guess is capped out, my little automoton robot buddy, a shitty fleet i barely have the spoons to manage, and a ship i haven't modified an iota in like three years.

I did the grind for the bio ship but lost it because the save didn't make it up to the steam cloud somehow, and now i don't have the werewithal to get it again (all that fucking quicksilver and two goddamn weeks of timed horseshit AND THEN having to reset the mission over and over so the random stats on the testicle ship weren't garbage just stole my love of the game)

but this seems cool. It feels like one update a year baits me into trying the game out again, and this sounds like a pretty large overhaul

phallocentrism is a scourge

probably some rite with a bunch of fucked up components, i wouldn't worry about it

left hand path buddhism dead???

1

it was

As with the phallic-obsessive throughline of the post, the bigger the gear, the lazier and more incompetent you can be providing a serviceable ride. Anybody can build a gmer rig in an atx case. You can shit out a steamdeck without needing to order too many specialized parts or actually figure out what you're doing, and gmers are by nd large hogs hooked on the easiest available dopamine supplying skinner box so it makes sense they'd give in to the thickness

I think most people are self interested. That's not an innate matter - we could be raised to be better, we can learn to unlearn the worst things capitalist society imparts to us - but most people are self interested, and Natalie comes from a cohort economically that is insulated from the consequences of the status quo, and even benefits thereof - they were never going to be a proper comrade, and any vision of Natalie as this, was predicated on a misreading of the things she said, and also built from incorrect assumptions about elements of her identity (this idea that trans women are de facto comrades does a lot of harm to trans folk tbqh).

Even in properly left circles, there can be extreme hesitance to surrender to a collective identity and a collective interest, due to any number of things ranging from trauma to just pathological chips on shoulders, to the flatly self-interested seeking to exploit people, but even outside that context, it's just weird anybody ever thought the bougie, well-off white lady was gonna have the life experience needed to be what some leftists saw in her.

She was always lib and her content has been stylishly devoid of substance for years now but hopefully this nonsense will continue to make her a non presence in trans community discourse going forward