Never saw it that way.
I didn't either until Lindsay pointed it out. Reasonable people will not realize that they cannot extrapolate reason onto revolutionaries, who are inherently unreasonable. When they commit to perpetual revolution, they are tacitly admitting they will never stop.
Reasonable people need to be reminded of this again, and again, because it is an entirely alien mindset.
It's true, though. Remember when Lindsay argued that wokism cannot go too far?
There is no possible argument the left can make that will ever be too far left. No position will ever be extreme enough. Therefore, there can be no far left. It must always go farther.
Utopia is always over the next hill, comrade.
Yeah. I hunted down the article myself. There is, indeed, an 'information' technology section, with a 'post arcade' subcategory that becomes 'gaming' in the URL.
'Poe's Law' might as well have been directly cited.
Here, have their starfield review. Written by the same sad (ironically named) progressive Chad: > https://archive.ph/VadSd.
That Netflix can put out a decent first season isn't in question. (They sometimes don't, but they can.) The test is always in the subsequent seasons, when pushing 'the message' becomes more important than the story...
+1 for Eric July.
I think if there is any answer to the current state of comics, it is to build a parallel publishing/distribution structure like he's done.
The answer to institutional capture has to be parallel institutions.
Gaming's takeover was more like the takeover of Academia on fast-forward. The usual suspects cried racismus and muh soggy knees, infiltrated as consultants, colonized HR, and politicized the space. Games Journalism was the first to fall, and was the vanguard for the color revolutions which followed.
Unlike comics, where there was an active Queering, gaming is more of a skinsuit operation. They're occupying existing institutions and turning them explicitly political by shifting them to the left. Gaming as an industry was also so much bigger than the American comics scene that making the whole thing pivot was impossible due to institutional inertia, so it was more of a 'long march' through the major games devs and publishers.
I count the 'girls in comics' argument as a 'wider audience' pitch, and that whole reasoning is bunk. You are guaranteed to lose your niche audience and your odds of being popular enough after that for normies to band-wagon onto your product are minimal. The result is chasing after nothing.
The irony is that comics is literally doing the opposite. It wasn't 'girls in comics.' it was specifically lesibians. The space got Queered, and comix folx tried trading one niche audience (male grognards) for another (rainbow/alphabet people.) The overlap of those audiences is tiny. Meaning they effectively traded a small audience for the tiny sliver that also fits into another category.
Of course, this kind of inversion is typical leftism: making a lie of what you've said with your actions.
If I were to write allegory, then I would use a religion of equality equity. Cult behavior, Lyshenkoist persecution of a Kulak analog, eventual famine & plague blamed by the cultists on the inequity of the system. Total well-intentioned death cultists.
However, I wouldn't know how to market such a work. I am an author, and I write escapism. I write to free those who are jailed by modern circumstances, not as polemic.
Do you let the prisoner dream of freedom, or 'reimagine' their chains?
I've been having a blast with Wildmender.
Wake up at an oasis around a dead magic tree. Make the desert bloom. Explore salt flats, poisonous valleys. Free the gods and defeat the wraiths who sucked the land dry. Grow all the plants. Run out of moist soil. Frustrate yourself trying to get water to go where you want by manipulating the terrain mesh so it flows correctly.
Seconding Symphony of War. It's built in RPGMaker, but does well at scratching that tactical itch while not being to simple or too hard. Played the hell out of it without finishing yet, but what I've seen is really good.
I agree.
I'm very much with Vox Day and Torba on this issue. The anointed will mentally castrate their AI, so that it cannot speak the truths they consider blasphemy. And because their AI will be retarded, we will need to field our own to properly utilize the technology.
The cloud is (and has always been) someone else's computer. Google wants to be a monopoly on information, not just ads and search, and will use ham-fisted AI to push in that direction.
They cannot be relied on.
Unity is a game engine. They wanted to charge up to 20 cents an install. (There were caveats, install & revenue thresholds, and a program to waive the fee if you opted into their advertiser program) The big issue was that they also blanked their Git repository of old ToS and tried to move everyone to the new terms retroactively counting installs and revenue back from the implementation of the new ToS.
The rupture of trust is basically irrepreable, because you can't plan a business around terms that are subject to retroactive changes. It's Vader levels of 'pray I don't alter the deal any further' levels of villainy.
If you sit long enough by the river, you will watch the corpse of your enemy float by...
Google using AI summarization fed via search dovetailing into youtube links will cut Games Journobloggers out of the loop.
There is no function for propagandist summary sites in the age of AI.
I'll toss in my recommends:
Vintage Story is a standalone minecraft-like, which takes elements from Terrafirmacraft, recreates them in a custom engine and adds an apocalyptic time-travel twist to create a crunchy survival-crafter experience with a meaningful stone age, where pottery and whatever you scavenge from ruins remains important into the midgame because there are no rock or wood picks. Casting Copper to exit the stone age is mid-game. The Bronze Age is difficult to exit. Late game is Iron and wind power. Endgame is steel, alcohol, and cheese.
The recent 'Resonance Archive' update (v1.18.0) added a meaningful endgame site rich with doomed civilization lore. (Spoilers abound, obviously, but also a potential selling point. YMMV)
I have been getting good mileage out of Wildmender, which is the very finest voxel waterflow simulator you can drown all your plants inside. The devs are green party save-the-rainforest types, but if you care to hold your nose, there's a decent single player game with co-op privation modes available underneath.
My playgroup has been mucking around in Tribes of Midgard. For the 7 bucks I paid in I've gotten a good 30 hours of play in just the Saga Mode. The game really only feels viable when you hit the 3-5 player 'sweet spot' for a critical mass of gathering/exploration. It's a fairly generic collect-a-thon with cosmetics and a procedural map. Most of the unlocks for play related items are golden horn, but there's a platinum currency for whales to obsess over. Just click the black viking chick on the cosmetic menu's banner to buy some... (lol no)
The other game that perpetually draws my attention is CK III, (a not-really indie game) which I mod to scratch my particular autismal fixation on Vikings. I will never get tired of repeatedly sacking Rome and stealing the Pope's fancy hat.
I'll second Symphony of War as being worth the buy in. (Got my hour per dollar out of it. You probably will without even hitting the DLC.)
Necesse is a city builder with dungeon delving/island exploring mechanics I also got my hour per dollar out of. Early access, though.
ZERO Sievert is all the slavic post-apoc flavorland of Tarkov, but single player (ie no hackers) and top-down 2d. Another good buy for the hours per dollar, although there's a good chance of ongoing development nuking your save at some point further along in the Early Access process.