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Every time someone on here complains about how community or third spaces are dying I do feel a little like when people who order exclusively off amazon bemoan the death of small local businesses.

Like were you actually participating in the community you claim is dying, or were you expecting other people to keep it running in the background so you could feel good about it being there without ever having to leave your house or talk to other people

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God I hate how normalized not being in control of your own devices has become. My phone updates in the middle of the night without asking me shit or getting my consent for anything and its like "Oh hi I'm your new AI, please enjoy this forced overlay that you can't exit out of until you go through my tutorial"

"Great fuck you, I would like to uninstall you" "Oh I'm sorry you can't uninstall me! I'm a core system application and if you uninstall me your phone won't function correctly despite the fact that I did not exist yesterday and your phone worked fine" "....." "You can disable parts of my functionality but I will always be here and I will pop up notifications asking you to re-enable me unless you figure out how to disable those too! Then I will still show up in a different color at the top of your settings application telling you that you need to 'fix" a 'problem' with your phone, that problem being that I am disabled. Does that help?"

Like, you know what I can do on my desktop? "sudo pacman -Rdd linux" , this will just fucking remove the entire linux kernel. Fundamentally breaking my computer until I boot up a live disk and chroot in and reinstall it or whatever, and the computer will go "Are you sure (y/n)" or whatever and i'm like "y" and it will just go "Ok you got it boss"

But its mine, I get to do what I want with it. I control the computer, the computer does not control me. I refuse to cede control to my phone or anything else. The thing is a lot of people will joke that like "Oh I love just letting the machine tell me what to do, I don't know what I'm doing, it knows best" or whatever but the thing you have to realize is that when you say that you are abstracting away that "the phone" or whatever is not some value neutral logic driven robot like from sci-fi, it is a collection of the the capitalistic and fascistic desires of the tech oligarch fuckwits that are burning the world to the ground right now. You aren't submitting to the phone, you are submitting to Musk, Bezos, Nadella, Pichai, Cook and all those other evil bastards.

Fuck them, fuck their little AI toys, and fuck this.

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(wolframalpha)

so did the UK just never recover from the great financial crisis or what

like... what happened.

i can't really relate these statistics to anything familiar... I mean I know that during this period the US created a bunch of new industries (iPhone introduced '07, Tesla Roadster '08, first liquefied natural gas export '16) and i guess the UK didn't, but that's just anecdotal, i doubt individual stuff i can think of really shows up in these kinds of statistics ,and idk if it reflects some general "trend of innovation" or even if that's the main thing this kind of statistic measures

I guess there's also this, from 2007:

Banks, insurance companies and financial firms again dominate the Forbes U.K. 40, our ranking of the country's biggest companies, taking up nearly half the list.

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i've never been able to work out what problem the trinity is trying to solve... like why does there need to be a holy ghost. i can see why arianism is a problem, as if jesus is only the son of god rather than god then that opens the door to other sons of god to pop up. like you're basically islam at that point, where jesus is a special guy but still just a guy. but what purpose does the holy ghost serve for the theology

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Least favorite two-step on here is the kind of, like, scrupulosity-baiting where when they get pushback the author goes 'well I'm just talking about institutions and structural issues I really don't know why you're acting all personally attacked.' and then when you scroll down the original post is 'every SUV driver on the highway s a fascist who should be first up against the wall'

like yeah wonder where they could possibly have gotten the idea there's some personal animus there.

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It’s a common opinion round here to make a claim something along the lines of “Jesus was a nice reformist hippie and Paul was the old conservative asshole who ‘ruined’ Christianity”, but I think if you just start digging a little into Pauline analysis and the history of the early church you get something more like, “Jesus was a mostly benign but likely unwell apocalyptic preacher and Paul was the competent PR manager who applied a fairly impressive theological system onto the burgeoning messianic movement”

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(Trans) (of color)

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Very specific type of purgatory is getting into a new show/game/series/etc and finding out it has does have a real, vibrant fandom!

Unfortunatally the fandom is somehow entirely dedicated to what were by far the least interesting parts of the thing, and show little to no interest in what you actually liked about it.

This goes from purgatory to a circle of hell if it's an ongoing release and you can see the thing start engaging with and being shaped by the fandom.

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One of the funniest 'What if's' to me is the timeline where Kurt dragged Jack along to Cauldron. You can get the ultra powerful math nerd ☝️ but. You have to tolerate his stupid boy bestie.

Anyway they figure out soon enough that Broadcast is a thing, and Jack is now a secondary 'fixer' for Cauldron. He's less of a fine edge, more like a shotgun they can fire when they need a certain parahuman dead, and it's not worth wasting Contessa. Toss up if you're getting Boogeyman (scary hat lady) or boogeyman (guy who won't shut the fuck up and has a knife).

He keeps monologuing about the true nature of Cauldron to people, but then just kills them. Because like. Lol. Guy who cannot help himself with leaving breadcrumbs. But also it doesn't matter too much because again. He'll just stab you.

Doesn't care too much about the End Of The World thing, though he's less inclined to cause it on purpose. Marginally more well adjusted than canon in that way. Still just in it because (1.) they keep setting him on people so he can murder them (fun!) and (2.) Kurt is there (gay)

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okay I did laugh out loud.

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malt paste wars

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I don't think the Trinity is that hard to understand or explain. o:

I usually think of it like this:

You have a friend; they have 3 jobs.

They have a job as a engineer, a cashier, and a janitor.

You wouldn't go to your friend in each job and ask "Are you the same guy I know????" - You know it's the exact same friend at each job, even though they're doing something different at each job.

Or think of it in gaming terms:

It's like someone with three different characters in a game. They switch between each character whenever needed, but you know it's the exact same person controlling each character, despite the different skills/class abilities.

Heck, even further think of someone who changes their hair color + style every day. You don't question or ask if they're the same person from when you first saw them. You know it's the same person, just different presentation.

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How do you think fail states, specifically dying and reloading a save, affect the narrative of a video game? Because in a lot of games they feel like a pretty detrimental compromise to me, it always feels like I'm not actually supposed to use that mechanic. I haven't really found a way yet to interpret a lot of them in a way that doesn't just make the game worse.

hmm i mean

like, i think there's a lot of ways a ''fail state'' can inform a game's narrative, right? like...

there's the way you're talking about here, right, where the fail state is something you're not 'supposed' to experience, it exists as a structuring element guiding you away from or towards certain actions, right? like... in subnautica, it's pretty rare to actually die. and it can be a frustrating and unfun experience when you do and you were carrying a bunch of stuff and you're like oh great gotta farm all that shit up. but the threat of dying is really really important to building the game's tension, putting some actual real-world weight (even if it's just in terms of threatening a purely digital object that represents a time commitment) into the idea of a reaper leviathan eating you. if there was no 'consequence' for getting Gotten by the Scary Getter, it would suck a lot of tension out of trying to avoid them, right?

this is a recurring thing in horror game design, right, if you make the chase sections too hard they stop being scary because knowing that all that happens is a scary cutscene + the impact of it being diminished by seeing it over and over again turns the Scary Getter into a nuisance that you groan at rather than something scary. so i think there can be a lot of value to parts of a game that you're not really ''supposed'' to experience but that need to exist to structure how you experience the parts you are...

& then of course i think there's a lot of games where you are meant to experience the failure states and they teach you important things about the world and characters. like recently i've been trying out this underrated indie gem called dark souls, you've never heard of it, and within an hour of playing i'd died like five times. and each time the death taught me something iomportawnt about the game: dying to the asylum demon taught me that you don't always have to fight enemies the first time you see them. dying in the middle of a skeleton clusterfuck taught me that you should try to fight enemies 1 on 1 as much as possible. dying when that cunt pushed a boulder onto me taught me to look the fuck out for traps. these fail states are essentially a form of tutorializing, and also help tell the story of dark souls, that you're an insignificant little fuck in a bleak and crushing world.

or, like, take disco elysium -- i think a lot of people who've never played it know you can get a game over screen because you sat in an uncomfortable chair. and yea if your last save was an hour ago i get why that's frustrating. but not only does the whole evrart sequence also serve the tutorializing function that my dark souls deaths did (demonstrating that you should unlearn the traditional CRPG correlation between 'danger' and combat) but it and other potential game overs like it tell you so much about harry du bois: that this is someone whose mind and body ahve been pushed so close to the edge that it's feasible for him to have a fatal heart attack trying to get his tie off the ceiling fan or have a complete mental breakdown because a child called him a faggot or just straight up shoot himself in the head trying to win an argument.

and ofc the fact that people who've never played the game have heard of the chair death speaks to another thing about failure states, which is that they can be fun and memorable. there's a reason why ykow some people demonstarte nostalgia for the king's quest death messages

& then of course there's the ways that 'bad endings' can inform you about the reality of the world of the 'real ending'. crpg ending slides that show you sme horrible fate for the companion that you didn't complete the quest for provide information and context for the quest itself and how it helps them grow and change. & then there's the most literal possible execution of this, zero escape, where due to all kinds of temporal bullshit the events of the 'bad endings' directly causally influence the events of the 'true ending'.

finally, of course, there's games where what would be a 'fail state' elsewhere is just part of a diegetic narrative. pyre is my absolute favorite example of this. if you lose a game of prison basketball then you just lose, and the other guys win, and when the stakes are escaping to the surface that means an npc leaves and you and your friends stay underground. on two occasions, this led me to deliberately throwing matches because i felt the NPCs on the other side deserved the win more than my guys. hades, as much as i hate it for a bunch of other reasons, did pull a really cool maneuver in making the constant death and grinding repitition in-universe features of zagreus' experience and the game's themes. katana zero also goes cool places with this, taking the route of "every failed attempt is the protagonist's precognitive abilities showing him a future where he dies" and exploring what that means for him emotionally and psychologically.

so, yknow! i think there is a huge amount of super worthwhile space for failure states, whether it's by teaching you about the game's world and characters, or helping create a specific experience by pushing you to avoid them, or by simply integrating them directly into the narrative and interrogating them... i think they're pretty neat and a storytelling tool that's unique to games :)

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whose fucking child is this

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Original tweet: (x)