Pisha [she/her, they/them]

Flanagan’s two previous haunted house series really pissed me off in the end. Hill House started off strong, but by the end you know exactly how the haunting works and it’s basically just one ghostly “insane” woman who’s the cause of everything despite having no relation with anyone. That’s not how character-based horror is supposed to work. Bly Manor was even worse and I turned it off after some interminable monologue by a ghost misogynist about his ghost powers. In both cases, I think the source material played with the idea that you cannot be certain there’s anything supernatural going on, so to instead have a clear list of rules about how ghosts work, like we’re in some bad anime, really seems like a wrong decision.

Standing lessons not paying off somehow

I was hoping for someone to post this on here. The racism among Sci-Fi fans has been off the charts ever since the location was announced, which, compared to the lack of outrage when Raytheon sponsored a convention recently, really puts the nail in the coffin of this genre for me. (See also the elections for the AO3 board, where there was one Chinese candidate, leading to incredible conspiracies about the site being subverted by the CPC.) Honestly, if some Western authors got disqualified simply for sinophobia, I’d find that pretty funny, in a chickens coming home to roost way, but I’m assuming that there are much more boring reasons that the organizers can’t be bothered to submit to the scrutiny of Western fandom, which is fair.

I like the classic red beans and rice: Hot sauce, cayenne pepper and thyme is a strong combo of spices, especially over a base of onions, green bell pepper, celery, garlic and tomatoes.

Just for clarity’s sake: The anime series is somewhat different in style to the movies. The former is more grounded and more directly about politics, while the latter go into more philosophical territory and focus on sci-fi ideas like androids, body augmentations and digital versions of people. (Also, the one sub of Innocence that I saw used sub- and surtitles simultaneously at some points to give context on which classic authors are being quoted, which is great.) I don’t think there’s any real continuity between the series and the films, save for the general premise and characters, so it should be possible to watch them apart from each other.

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children’s primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.

Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme

See, this is what happens if you don’t ban people based on their transphobic votes on posts and comments. Now I know there’s 13 accounts on there that are absolutely rotten with brainworms. Uphold Transcomrade69-thought!

Yeah. There’s also something to be said about how complex games like IWD2 don’t ever get remakes, so an improved re-release would be the only way to get some new publicity for something that’s still worth looking at. It worked for the Baldur’s Gate games, at least.

I’ve been wondering about the RA2 remaster. They did the first game, it was a success as far as I know, and now it’s just radio silence. I grew up with that game and played it a bit last year (local multiplayer works on Linux!), so I’m interested in what they’re doing. It would explain a lot if they’d just lost the source code.

Oh, and one more example comes to mind while I’m on the topic: Saints Row 2. The PC port is really bad and didn’t work for me, and neither did emulation. The developers had lost the code, found it again somehow and gave it to one dedicated employee to remaster, but he, unfortunately, died and then the company went defunct. Now it’s all just corporate assets of some holding company that doesn’t care one iota about the preservation of culture.

It’s a cult of personality party based on an ineffectual politician who promotes right-wing opinions in talk shows and on Youtube. I find it hard to imagine that they’ll go far as a real political party.

Remember “people of NATO”? lmao

Citizen Sleeper is a nice little game. It’s a bit too short, but it’s almost like reading fiction in that you’re mainly following individual stories with various characters (there isn’t that much gameplay). I kept wanting to play another and another day in the game because every story advances in its own time and so you’re constantly switching between them. There aren’t many choices to make, basically just different endings you can pick, so it’s too linear to replay really, but I enjoyed my time with it.

Good to see that their mods are still out there protecting the brave people of NATO and their allies 🫡

They’re called Sandwich lmao

“tackle”, “protect”, “safer”, “strengthen”… What a vocabulary. I can’t tell if I’m reading something about football or a war report.

In Wrath of the Righteous, the one female love interest only available to male PCs is a flesh-eating serial killer, which should be the standard for romancable heterosexual characters.

Was there another Lemmy update? The piss’s gone grey for me

It does make me sad how the only time there’s a great number of comments about art or philosophy is in the monthly struggle session about whether all Western culture is just a tool of the CIA. I’m still holding out hope that we could get some genuine discussions going, especially because all other Internet venues for discussing literature are extremely fucked in terms of politics, but it doesn’t seem likely.

Was that the person who, it turned out, was keeping fetus remains in their home or was that a different anti-abortion leftist?

Wait, whatever happened to Bari Weiss’s fake university? Wasn’t that basically the same thing?

Under that perspective, Chibnall kinda comes across as somebody who went “Why can’t we just all be friends?”, tried to take some ideas from everyone, and gets hated by everyone as a result lol