[-] Aculem@hexbear.net 2 points 1 month ago

Haha, thanks, edited back then

[-] Aculem@hexbear.net 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Oh yeah, thanks, and also a guide for what it's worth: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci

I think you only get one try and it's fairly easy for the system to reject a vote.

[-] Aculem@hexbear.net 1 points 1 month ago

Ah yes, always forget. Edited!

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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Aculem@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net

Long story short, Ross Scott, who you may know as the Freeman's Mind guy, has been annoyed by games as a service and the industry practice of requiring online connections to company run servers to run their games. The primary reason is that once the game becomes unsupported, access to that game altogether usually goes with it. He's a hardcore game preservationist, and has been keeping a running count of games that have completely died with absolutely no way to ever play them again, so he decided to vanguard an international campaign to see if this issue can be settled for good.

His latest (and most promising) endeavor has been an European Citizens' Initiative called "Stop Destroying Videogames". Once it reaches a million signatures, the European Parliament will discuss the matter and move forward with whether or not this is a valid consumer protection violation, and if so, write into law a way to stop the practice.

There's been some recent drama with some youtuber called Pirate Software who seems to take issue with the initiative seemingly from a bad faith argument perspective. Fortunately this brought some attention to the initiative, but it is a classic tale of reactionaries coming out of the woodwork the second political traction against corporate interests starts taking place.

[-] Aculem@hexbear.net 20 points 2 months ago

According to this article there's been at least 2 toddler shootings a week over the last 10 years on average.

Also, just for fun, you're about 200 times more likely to be killed by a child shooter than a bear in the United States.

[-] Aculem@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago

If you're implying there's more movies where anthropologists save the day you gotta let me know man

[-] Aculem@hexbear.net 8 points 4 months ago

I think this is actually the last movie I saw in theaters that truly emotionally affected me on a spiritual level. I think there's something about the ambiguity of how real the replicants are in both movies that is used for great emotional effect, but the way K ultimately rejected the reality that was handed to him and sacrificed himself in pursuit of a deeper humanity within himself is something that just fuckin' resonates with me man. I still tear up thinking about it.

Was an odd experience seeing that the movie was actually quite polarizing. I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about people's criticisms, and while I understand their reasoning, I ultimately don't think there's a single thing this film could have done differently that would have made its emotional impact any stronger. The biggest criticism seems to be the slow pacing, which I understand, but it irks me the most. The pacing is a staple of thoughtful science fiction, (think the original Blade Runner, 2001, Ghost in the Shell) and absolutely serves the purpose of letting the themes, setting, and underlying philosophical questions posed by the movie to stew in the mind and sink in. In that regard, the pacing in this movie is about fucking perfect. The opening scene establishes everything you need to know about the plot with zero filler. In fact, the only times the movie seems to slow down is when K is going through a psychological transformation of some sort. Trying to understand his perspective, why he changes, why meaning emerges out of the events of the movie, is the meat and bones of the whole experience. If you can't get on board though, yeah, I can imagine it being a bit of a slog.

Other criticisms like Leto's performance or the lack of fleshing out Freysa or the resistance also seem kinda silly. They each have like 5 minutes of screen time and ultimately serve their purpose in the story just fine. You don't really need to know much about them other than their motivations and their importance to the story, which I think they both do just fine. This movie is just simply not about them, and really only serve to remind the viewer that there's bigger forces at work all vying to control things in their own way.

Another criticism that caught me off guard is the accusations of misogyny in the film. The movie certainly has a lot to say about the commodification of sexuality, which is another strong point of the film imo. There's quite a lot I can say about how the movie thinks about gender identity and sexuality, and how it either contributes or detracts from our inner humanity, but there's an excellent youtube video on that topic so I'll just link that here: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=6GsXBh5PGZU

But... yeah, anyway, good film. 10/10. It's kinda strange because while I like Denis Villeneuve, I feel like a lot of his movies don't really hit the mark that well. Honestly found Dune kinda boring. Would recommend Arrival and Enemy though, those are solid. But 2049, another level man, another level.

62
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by Aculem@hexbear.net to c/movies@hexbear.net

Not sure if this is a proper post to this community, but I've been trying to be more active so figured I'd give it a shot. Mostly just want to get this off my chest really.

I've had a similar feeling with The Boys, also on Amazon Prime, where for the most part you're just watching something that's fun, dark, and light hearted, but seems to be intentionally peppered with anti-capitalist rhetoric, but like, in a safe way. The platform being owned by the richest most capitalist dickhead on Earth probably has something to do with it, but really that's just how capital works: it co-opts the social and cultural anxieties of the era into a form that can be packaged and sold, and so on and on it goes.

But there's one line in the show that I can't help but feel does have something sinister behind it, and it's Moldaver's line: "I'm not a communist, Mr. Howard. That's just a dirty word they use to describe people who aren't insane."

Without going into her character too much, she seems to be a scientist that's more focused on finishing her research on cold fusion than aligning herself with any sort of political ideology, so she's using the communists as a means to an end. But the fact that she's aligning herself with the communists, giving speeches to communists, understands that capitalism is undermining her research and is leading to a worse world, then why wouldn't she just be explicitly communist, unless the showrunners are trying to imply something very specific about communism, or at least, a sentiment towards communism?

Now I may be reading way, way too much into this, but there's something nagging at the back of my head about this kind of wording, that these kinds of sentiments represented in liberal media are used in a way to actually reinforce negative stereotypes about communism by acknowledging that while right wingers do misuse that word to mean essentially 'anything they don't like', that you still shouldn't be asking too many questions about communism itself because that's irrelevant. In essence, you don't have to be an "extremist" to poke fun at conservatives, implying in a weird round-a-bout way that communism itself is too extreme for most people, and isn't exactly a position a true intellectual should take.

I remember feeling something similar during The Last of Us when Joel brother denies he's a communist but his wife says something to the effect, "No, we literally are, this is a commune, we're communists." It's played for laughs and it's harmless enough, but it still seems to be one of those weird lines that seemingly puts a positive spin on communism, but ultimately reinforces the idea that it's an outlandish concept that doesn't really deserve further scrutiny, or at the very least, seems to be content on keeping the term vague enough so that you can reasonably argue that the showrunners could fall on either side of some argument of whether or not 'communism is acceptable'.

I understand that communism is a bit complicated of a subject to thoroughly explore in a show meant for mass appeal, but I can't help but feel that these shows are intentionally messing with the cultural anxiety of aligning yourself with communism, and maybe intentionally, maybe not, reinforcing the idea that people shouldn't align themselves with communism through some sort of meta-narrative hidden wink.

That's all. thx.

[-] Aculem@hexbear.net 3 points 10 months ago

I'm a big fan of worldbuilding and historical lore in shows, so I was pretty impressed with Attack on Titan, plus the characters all seem to have rational motivations, and it was fun to piece together everything on a re-watch.

I'm a bit confused about the claims that the author is fascist. I admit I haven't looked into in great depth, the biggest evidence I've seen is that the character Pixis is based off of Akiyama Yoshifuru, an imperialist general, and that the author has stated he admires him greatly. Granted, that's not a good look, but I'm not entirely sure about the context on this, for all I know, he might admire him the same way one might admire Genghis Khan, not based on any sort of moral compass, but rather on a "Wow, that's a lot of conquering."

But I digress, regardless of the author's views, just from watching the anime twice with at least a modest amount of literary analysis ability, I can't see how the show can be interpreted as anything other than anti-fascist. Eren Jaeger is not sympathetic at all once he goes genocidal. Marley is basically a stand in for Nazi Germany and is portrayed as barbaric and monstrous. Most of the atrocities committed by the Titan Holders is based in trauma and is the direct consequence of military indoctrination and nationalistic fervor. I must admit, Armin justifying the slaughter of thousands of civilians left a bad taste in my mouth, I do wish the show went further into exploring his traumatic change in character. As it stands, he's usually portrayed as the level-headed one, so people might think of him as morally justified. But all in all, it seems like the thesis of the show is that trauma begets trauma, and nationalistic attitude is the root cause of most of it.

I mean, please correct me, I definitely do not want to be militarist apologist, but I've heard this sentiment quite a lot on the internet, and I don't think it's been satisfactorily explained to me yet.

Aculem

joined 4 years ago