#earn with every step

[superglitterstranger]

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[caputvulpinum]

The more I think about Wildmender the more I grow invested in it. It's a fascinating interpretation of terra nil and solarpunk since so often the genre is fundamentally rooted in settler-colonialist philosophy, and even games which are intended to be the opposite of that--terra nil comes to mind as the obvious one--just end up actually revealing a different side of the factorio problem, because terra nil is an incredible impersonal restoration of ecological systems. Terra Nil acknowledges climate destruction on a global catastrophic scale and it accepts the responsibility to fix that, but it isn't shown as a human act, nor does it really allow itself the realism of just how terrifyingly impossible the task is to try and literally fix the entire world. Its game structure is supposed to be the anti-factorio but its puzzle structures focusing on efficiency and robotic engineering patterns of rewilding end up feeling more like a dialogue than an inversion. It's trying to say that the idea of humanity as fundamentally destructive is wrong while it doesn't actually ever address the human element.

And then there's fucking Wildmender. A game where you are a single human child in a world of endless wasteland and death, where the only other things are ghosts who remember a halcyon era and the hubris that ended it, wraiths which are consumed by their own greed and destruction of the land for their cursed immortality, and a couple god statues. The entire map is just ceaseless grief, filled with the literal dessicated remains of all the biodiversity that came before the countless disasters. And it's a big fucking map.

And then...the game gives you a shovel and a sickle and a mirror that shows the wraiths what twisted reflections they've become.

And the game says, "The entire world is waiting to be better, and the only way to do that is by doing it yourself, long and hard and hopeless as it seems."

I cannot emphasize enough how overwhelming the task you're handed. There is not a single speck of life left in the world. You are given a shovel and a water bottle and just...expected to do something about it. To look at the literal endless wastes and think you can heal it.

This is what Wildmender cherishes that Terra Nil denies: This is an impossible task for you alone. But it has to be done...and you can actually do it. The way you can turn sand into soil and dig irrigation channels is beautiful. Every single scrap of land that you reclaim is something you had to do on purpose. You had to do it yourself. You had to actively choose how to do it.

And the game makes the reward of even just getting a bit more water into the sand feel like victory. Your starting oasis turns from soil into lush and beautiful meadows--sure, technically instantaneously by doing magic on a specific type of plant. But it took me 4-5 hours before I got there. You have to travel so far into the desert to learn how to grow grass again, and then you realize that this endless hostile wasteland is a fraction of the map you're given. And you look at this sudden profusion of meadowy grassland surrounding your spring and despite how sudden it feels you remember how big the world is. You made more progress in a minute than you did in 5 hours and it's not even a speck on the map. How the fuck is this gonna happen?

And the answer is by accepting that it's going to take a long fucking time and a lot of hard work.

That's how it's gonna happen. Get to work.

[13eyond13]

I love the way that, in addition to his origin story with his over-sized sword and the scar on his nose, the flashbacks to Guts's childhood show how much of his insane work ethic and reckless self-endangering abandonment in battle were all kinda ingrained into him by his craving for attention and approval from shitty father figure, Gambino.

Random nice mercenary guy: "Don't overexert yourself, kid. Just do what's needed. 'Cause if you die, you lose everything."

Gambino: "It's your first battle. Work hard!"

Guts: [throws himself into battle so hard he nearly dies multiple times, fixating on pleasing Gambino the entire time]

Gambino: "C'mon, hurry up! Work! Work!"

Guts: [gives Gambino his entire earnings, Gambino tosses him back a single coin]

Guts: [more motivated by this one mild bit of encouragement than anything he's ever experienced before in his life]

[thepersonalwords]

Get up in the morning on a mission to save prospective clients from the shabby, ill-fitting, overpriced and worthless alternatives that those charlatans - who are your competition - are trying to get away with flogging them.

Chris Murray, Selling with EASE: The Four Step Sales Cycle Found in Every Successful Business Transaction

[kineticallyanywhere]

at what point does Willy realize that he’s an inch away from joining the step-fathering family tradition

[broodygaming]

rewatching she-ra again while I draw and and and omfg

In S5 when Wrong Hordak (never not funny) asks Entrapta about her "facial tic" and she IMMEDIATELY just explains to him what it is - a wink - what it's called and how it's used and THEN gives him encouragement to try it out so he understands it better and feels more confident??

My. Fucking. Heart. neurodivergent ppl looking out for neurodivergent ppl and showcasing EXACTLY how to just not be a dick to people who don't get social cues. It's not our fault. It's not personal. It's not us trying to be difficult. We just don't get it. Explain it, give an example, a safe place to practice it and boom, logged and loaded.

[bullagit]

some days it's just like yeah if the good omens fandom is gonna do one thing, it's watching aziraphale make choices that he clearly feels he has to make, despite whatever he personally wants or what would personally make him happy, because he wants to protect crowley or earth and humanity or whatever

and immediately making him out to be selfish/manipulative/cruel/abusive/too naive/a bigot/etc, solely bc of the fact that crowley is sad in the aftermath...

[elytrafemme]

tldr stop using transformative justice as an excuse to watch your favorite twitch abuser

people are really fucking strange about redemption sometimes in a way that pisses me off. i'm a transformative justice girlie, i believe in abolition and the fact that in the end every person who hurt me has the potential to realize later in life what they did and never treat someone like me again (vs them rotting in our current carceral system, where consequences are displaced and self-reflection is obstructed, etc.). But we also have to acknowledge that abuse is a conscious choice, it's a continual thing a person does deliberately to hurt someone. and it hurts them for a long time. i am almost 19, i was groomed when i was 14, i told myself it "wasn't that serious" but I still have memory issues and struggle to talk about my emotions, black hoodies and a certain color of hair dye fucks with me. and i'm sure that guy who hurt me had pretty fulfilling relationships otherwise, but that does not mean he didn't hurt me, that doesn't absolve him of anything. Nobody else has the ability to forgive him for what he did to me, and I don't have to forgive him either (i don't intend to). And even if he saved my life today I stil wouldn't forgive him.

When people find out that their favorite content creators are abusers, they sometimes get the knee jerk reaction that this content creator is going to improve. They're going to therapy, they're self reflecting, they're taking a hiatus -- can't people be allowed to recover? But this guise of "people can change" is twisted and leads people to never really stop supporting someone who is an abuser, to keep platforming them, to defend them, etc. "People can stop being abusers, but they never actually were abusers, but even if they were abusers they're like actually not abusive, they didn't mean to do that, but they're going to stop doing the thing I'll say they never actually did, i just have to send them a couple Twitch bits!" <- what people sound like

If you want someone to change, you can't defend the shitty things they've done. And if you want a streamer to experience the consequences of being a fucking abuser you should stop watching him play Geoguessr or whatever that fucker's doing right now. And, most importantly, there is absolutely no world in which an abuser is "reforming" when they acknowledge having abused someone, but downplayed that abuse, and didnt apologize. They don't have the foundations to change. They might get those, later, but you can't act like they're already changing when they haven't done the fucking internal work to start.

I believe people can change, and that they shouldn't be ostracized from every last resource to do so. I also believe that constantly justifying an abuser's actions by saying 'they just need the right resources to change, it's not their fault they're doing this' feeds into that abuse. Storytime, that's the reason I stayed in a relationship that I didn't even realize was bad until I got out. I was convinced the bad things he was doing to people were because he was struggling and I, the victim, the person hurting at his hand, needed to help him. Sure, it takes money to go to therapy. But if you call someone out for what they're doing, the first step -- recognizing they did something wrong -- is free. You don't need to babysit an abuser to realizing they abused someone.

Victims don't owe their abusers shit. And if an abuser hasn't started that self reflection process-- which by the way, any fucking rational person who was self reflecting would get their freakass off the internet, quit their job go to therapy etc.-- there's no rationale behind defending them. A victim choosing not to forgive their abuser doesn't mean that the abuser should not change; an abuser losing their job, their fucking Twitch career whatever, doesn't mean they shouldn't be a better person. The reason a person should be a better person is because they should have a moral compass and realize what they did is wrong. Ball's in his court.

Mental health is correlated to moral health. Abusers might not be damned to being abusers forever, but that damnation comes from inside their own behaviors-- what they choose to do. An abuser starts to reform and change once they acknowledge what they did, to their core, and stop staking their life changes on getting the forgiveness of other people or their material things back. Supporting a victim isn't even a question, that's the basis of transformative justice. They will live with the pain that their abusers dealt them for a lot longer than you will ever miss the abuser's content.

Anyway, sorry if that's messy and poorly explained. I can elaborate on anything here! Just... being an abolitionist, for me, coexists with me having survived abuse. And I don't like this weird idea that "people can change" means you should watch someone's Twitch stream when they clearly do not feel sorry for abusing someone.

[vee-tdc]

Its been 6 hours since I walked out of the theater, and I'm still crying about Barbie like holy shit

[royalreef]

Yes, she is functionally also someone on this blog which you can ship with. But if you thought Miranda was hard to date, then, buddy, you haven't seen jack shit yet.

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

Hallelujah I woke up before 7:00 AM FINALLY

[neverendingford]

.

[cominy-kiwami]

the problem with disco elysium is that it takes up a lot more mental energy than most games. like i just went through the hardie boys and klaasjes testimony and im kinda feeling killed. like what am i supposed to keep going. that was a whole story arc. and now in game its 9pm so i need to go meet the apartment smoking guy! im picking this back up in irl tomorrow i can't handle all this.

[thepersonalwords]

If you sound like a contestant from The Apprentice or if the customer believes that they are being sold AT, you have already failed.

Chris Murray, Selling with EASE: The Four Step Sales Cycle Found in Every Successful Business Transaction

[tkbrokkoli]

finally this week w that horrible shift that i had to cover at work is over and i can play disco elysium again!!!

[tr4ggot]

Look into Claudia De la Cruz! She's a 2024 presidential candidate with the Party for Socialism and Liberation and she is actively participating in pro-Palestine protests.

on the off-chance this isn’t a bot that flagged my account because i posted that i won’t vote for biden, i wanted to clarify that i purposefully will be abstaining from voting, not just voting for someone else, in the 2024 election for a few reasons.

for one, i live in california. in los angeles county. we will be a blue county regardless of my vote, including my district. my abstention will have no effect on the outcome of the election. i would have otherwise held my nose and voted for biden again, but the point is that he lost my, and many other of my peers, votes, through intentional inaction in the face of genocide. to vote for another candidate would just be stepping on a different rake.

secondly, i am a progressive, but also understand how politics really works in terms of parties. voting anything other than democrat or republican is in practice casting a symbolic vote. there is no near future where any other party gains any degree of power in our government, by design. the last time there was a powerful third party to vote for in this country was a good 25 presidencies ago. when the upcoming election will be between someone who has enthusiastically and emphatically positioned the force of an empire against a people suffering a genocide against the will of the empire’s citizens, and a bumbling fool who is ready, willing, and eager to fully embrace fascism and punish political enemies, where both candidates are so reprehensible and morally bankrupt, to vote for either or even participate in the system that enabled them would be such a betrayal of every value i hold close that i could not and will not, especially when my vote would be in effect meaningless otherwise.

people can do as they wish, but i will not play a part in any of it.

and as a side, palestine will be free, but it will not be because of whatever american politicians do, it will be in spite of what they do.