hughtopia.bsky.social
Member of the Homosexual Underground | Free Palestine | he/him | There’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons
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I've asked loads of people about this film, including queer people very into the pop-slop of this era, and *no one remembers it*.
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It makes me sad that the modern economics of gaming and the reduction of "quality" to higher fidelity graphics, more voice acting etc. means that this kind of off-the-cuff, silly, bespoke and experimental game design is basically impossible. IMO, modern games are poorer for it.
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I’m too lazy to go downstairs. What did I leave out today?
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And the TV show should just soft lock halfway through and it’s just four episodes of them all in a room saying a random line at each other.
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This allows the player to engage in horrific acts without it becoming (too) fetishistic, while also underlining the notion that life is cheap. The thematic function of the violence is political rather than personal for the most part. The TV series is pulling more from Cormac McCarthy novels.
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In the non-Bethesda games, violence has typically served an aesthetic function (to emphasise the absurdity of the setting) and to emphasis the precarity of the little civilisation that still exists. It rarely emphasises pain, and abstracts away the humanity of the victims.
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I have no issue with the amount of violence; my issue is with its narrative function. In episodes 3 and 4, we spent most of it watching a man torture a woman so he could “bring her down to his level”. The pain and degradation is emphasised, and it’s that pain and degradation that influences her arc.
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Could do that in the original fallout!!
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I really don’t like 3 but I’d be lying if I didn’t think it had some good stuff. While I think overall it’s a bad fallout game and a bad RPG, it can be a fun playground.
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Well yes, but that's the problem, right? It shouldn't be a charity. Most political organising non-profits are not charities; they tend to be Companies Limited by Guarantee because then they can actually function as a political entity rather than as a marketing opportunity for Coca Cola.
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That is shameful. You should be afraid. You’re not allowed to enjoy bad things.
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Bethesda have never made a Fallout game. They have only made crimes against humanity.
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The series and the Bethesda games never got that.
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Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas are all about politics in its most basic sense: how do we live together? What should that look like? Who is included? Who is excluded? Who decides? How are these things governed by material and ideological conditions? How do differing visions conflict?
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And of course, there's a big question about whether this will actually be Trump's last term, either literally or whether whoever comes next will break with his overall policy direction.
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Obviously, this is particularly important in a context where Trump has aligned himself so heavily to Russia. Moreover, given how much of NATO relies on American funding, it's effecting Europe's ability to respond to Trump's destructive economic policies: www.ft.com/content/75c4...
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I don't think he's saying we need to leave NATO *now*. He's saying that it cannot be reformed under Trump, and so we need to be preparing alternatives. Moreover, Trump can do a lot of damage in 3 years and I'm not sure it's wise to assume that things will "go back to normal" after Trump's term.
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I am slightly surprised by your response to this. In the article, Polanski argues that we need to build alternative defensive alliances to NATO because Trump's threats to places like Greenland and general unreliability. Do you think an alternative is impossible?
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And we'll see them fail to win any votes because they too "pragmatic" to change course. Starmer's "pragmatic" approach of borrowing social policies from Reform and economic policies from the Cameron hasn't worked, but they'll try it again with someone new.
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I am not saying *this* will be the thing that lead to his downfall. I am saying that the ideologically right wing of the party are starting to turn on their man. This does not mean they will suddenly elect a leftist, they'll put someone who they perceive to be more ideologically aligned with them,
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You call these people pragmatists, but like all "pragmatists", their pragmatism is driven by their ideological conception of pragmatics. For them, historically, that has been driving the party ideologically to the right, as Starmer has done. Now, they are are turning on him.
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Your only point seems to be weird references to "pragmatism" and "ideology".
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I have no idea what your point is. I never said that WFP isn't the major thing here?
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Exactly. They're not the left of the party (if there is even anything resembling "the left" still in the Labour party). They're the right of the party, and they're turning on their guy.
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The Red Wall Group are some of the most craven, careerist, right-wing Blue Labourites in the party btw. They're meant to be Starmer's people.
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Yeah, Starmer just has to fire Reeves, reverse the cuts, announce a plan to use nukes on small boats on Good Morning Britain and then call Jeremy Corbyn a f****t on GB News and the British Press will start going on about how “the adults are back in charge”.
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I've been staring at a blinking cursor for half an hour...
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Watching carefully. Polanski has moved quite far to the left in recent years, but I'm not sold yet.
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tbf I have Doctor Who muted on my timeline haha, I just saw the stuff that broke through.
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In other news, I need you all to stop claiming the new Who episodes are good so my boyfriend doesn’t put it on when I’m too hungover to resist.
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Although it seems to think fascism is when people say mean things about the government on the internet. It has no sense of the actual, material reasons behind far right popularism, so it has to resort to individualistic psychobabble instead of addressing why UNIT is kind of fucked?
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So much of modern British television is driven by this desire to a simpler model of power in which individual government officials really do have the arbitrary power to decide who to kill. It’s a fascist fantasy, and yet is used in an episode that critiques fascism.
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As Stafford Beer said, ‘the function of a system is what it does’, and Labour’s function is, as it has been for a long time, to push politics to the far right.
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The lack of policy redirection also shows Labour’s failure to grasp that it will always be chasing Reform, who will move the goalposts further to the right whenever Labour approach it. This is the dynamic of the Labour Party since at least Thatcher, with the brief exception of the Corbyn years.
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No idea. They were there last year.
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Booing Labour might make the Labour bloc upset (which is a good thing), but it does little to actually get the Pride organising committee to actually change anything.
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Politics can't just be performative, it has to target these institutions where it will actually hurt them. The economics of Pride are ignored, but corporations use it to advertise and governments use it to bring consumers into the city.
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Why do you have your tits out for the Zoom call?