A terrible smelly person
Sometimes yeah it’s frustrating reading it because some parts assume cultural familiarity with very ancient names or places. I think I remember in the book of Genesis an ancient military leader is named and it’s said he did some kind of trick to capture a town, but it doesn’t explain what he did or why.
Storytelling has gone through a lot of development over the centuries
I never had an easy time imagining a future for myself and I never had realistic goals. When I was a kid I wanted to be a Ghostbuster, then a power ranger. Then I think I disassociated for a long time, briefly got the idea to be a programmer in college, but that didn’t work out since I was no good at it. Then I randomly had the idea to study genetics, which also didn’t work out. I changed majors eight times in college.
Won’t say what I do now so I don’t get doxxed, but it’s not exciting and it’s a dead end job. I still don’t know what I want, but maybe that’s a good thing. I make music though so that’s kind of neat.
Others have said it already, but anti-intellectualism at its core is alienation. It’s a lack of trust in academic or professional authorities and substituting that trust for either ones own experiences or complete hallucinations. People will find alternative communities to trust, especially if they can find something that verifies their existing biases.
If you sense something’s wrong with the world, but lack an ability to pinpoint it, you’ll go to whoever seems most immediately relatable to you. Reactionaries like Qanon people ended up in that situation. They no longer trust authorities on information outside of cranks on Facebook.
So the question is how do you get more people to adopt a consensus of reality that’s based on expertise, professional research, investigation, etc? You have to convince more people they’re part of that process and that experts share their interests. America has had that before, but usually in times of conflict against a foreign enemy. The average American used to be really into space travel tech for instance.
There was also a period around the 1890s where the average American was really into electricity as a hobby, like making little circuits or trinkets. It was considered pretty normal back then to have an understanding of how simple circuits like a doorbell worked.
those games are amazing. Monolith was a really good studio before Warner Bros gutted them. Problem with the NOLF games getting a reboot/remake is the rights are split between Fox, Vivendi, and Activision. It’s a complete mess and I doubt it’ll ever happen sadly
There was a reboot attempted by Starbreeze in 2012 but it was a bog-standard FPS that wasn’t up to the quality they normally make. It’s been dead silence since.
There are some games you might enjoy that are similar to Syndicate. Tokyo 42, Satellite Reign, Brigador, and this cute little free indie game called DataJack.
Oni would be great, problem is the rights to it are split between like five different studios and it’s effectively abandoned. It’s why it’s not on GOG, Steam, etc.
It also wouldn’t surprise me if the source code has been completely lost, meaning there’s no chance of an HD upscale or anything.
Came here to mention this one. It’s wild.
The most expensive single meal I’ve had was a 20,000 yen (~$170 usd) vegan full course meal at a 1 Michelin star restaurant called FARO in Tokyo. I bought some wine for my friend too, so it was more like 24,000 yen.
It was actually pretty good. Some kind of fancy bread appetizer, a main course meal of potato pasta, a really good set of seasoned vegetables, then vegan dessert which was a slice of cake and some kind of extremely fancy cookie perched on a bed of hazelnut spread.
Honestly most of the cost was the presentation I think. Every meal was set out in front of us arranged all fancy on these big stone plates and bowls. The food was good but not worth the cost. My memories of the meal is still good though because I was there with a friend and I hadn’t seen him in a while.
Make something vibrate fast easier than make something vibrate slower
Push heat into something is easier than pull heat out of something
Can’t go wrong with looking around at the blogs and stuff at https://neocities.org/browse Lots of creative people with an interest in retro style website and blog design
I also like https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/
And of course gotta mention the GOAT zombo.com
I used to think all food for adults were called Sad Meals, as opposed to Happy Meals (like at McDonald’s).
I thought some wild stuff as a child that feels more fantastical than strictly dumb. Like I thought everyone was psychic except me and could hear my thoughts. I thought time worked differently depending on who I talked with. I thought the earth was both flat or round depending on where you were standing. I’d often get dreams and reality confused too. For some reason I thought dogs were people who had been cursed into becoming pets, probably because of me seeing the donkeys from Pinocchio. I thought half of people were robots fueled by pieces of the sun they’d pluck out of the sky.
This one is common, but I thought water simply phased through your body if you touched it. There was an episode of Bill Nye where he mentions that water “goes through your hand” and says it just like that. So I thought water simply phased through hands.
I think I was just abused as a kid and neglected
There are only 24 episodes of the initial run of The Jetsons and only 25 of Scooby Doo. They got aired as reruns for decades before more episodes were made. There are only 15 episodes of Mr. Bean.
Planescape: Torment made me slow down and realize a game can be an entire world onto itself and I shouldn’t skim over stuff I read.
The Outer Wilds is probably the most recent game that changed how I approach stuff. It’s so good. Nothing is given to you, you have to figure out everything on your own. It’s good for developing patience and curiosity.
For twitchy gameplay type stuff, I recommend Radiant Silvergun. Makes every other shmup feel like they’re in slow motion. That game is why I was able to beat any of the Touhou games.
The show plays into several right wing fears, like widespread gun control (cops need permission over radio to unlock their guns), black people getting paid reparations, white people living in shantytowns (nixonville), cigarettes are illegal, religious people becoming a persecuted minority, stuff like that. The first few episodes play up an angle of “what if cops mainly profiled poor white people.” That’s because the premise is that there’s been an uninterrupted 30 year liberal hegemony under president Robert Redford, similar to how the 1980s Watchmen comic took place during an uninterrupted conservative domination with Nixon.
The glorifying cops part is because it dips into the idea there are some good cops who are struggling against an entrenched structure of bad cops. That’s the whole arc of the show, the main character Angela is a “good cop” who is routing out the “bad cops” in order to repair the structure. It’s the liberal nonsense idea that putting oppressed minorities into positions of power like wealth, the cops, politicians, etc will correct the structure, since the problem is presented as individuals within that structure rather than the thing itself. In the show’s attempts to subvert/criticize corporate liberal dystopia, it still presents the same conclusions.
Although another way of reading it is that it’s a criticism of how generic American liberals, even when granted full control over society, still manage to recreate the same conditions. That’s a better and more interesting reading honestly. But I’m stuck because I know that Damon Lindelof (the writer) is himself a generic rich Hollywood liberal type.
I actually like the show by the way. Jeremy Irons was good. The Trent Reznor soundtrack is beautiful too.
The worst aspect is Zack Snyder seems to think Rorschach is a cool dude with cool ideas. They made him talk normally in the movie, maybe that was so he could be more easily understood, but it didn’t feel right. He’s supposed to seem deranged. In the comic he talks in squiggly text boxes and in an odd kind of halting, broken English. He’s not bad at speaking English, he’s become so unstable and antisocial his social skills have atrophied. Jackie Earle Haley came across as too earnest or too confident. Like that scene with the therapist reading the ink blots, Rorschach in the comic comes across as pathetic. He’s done, doesn’t care, doesn’t want to live. He says he sees flowers and trees because he just wants to leave the therapy session. In the movie he comes across as like this snickering badass ready to cause trouble. He’s like “heh, you can’t handle my twisted mind, doc.” I hate it. Synder completely misread the scene.
At least the TV show had the guts to show Rorschach would eventually inspire a white supremacist movement
I appreciate Postal 2 because the premise is kinda funny. It’s deliberately designed so you can beat it without doing any violence at all. You’re given tasks like get milk, pick up your paycheck, etc. And it involves standing in lines or people berating you. You’re stuck doing tedious annoying repetitive tasks, or you can get a flamethrower. I think standing in line to get Gary Coleman’s autograph takes 90 minutes if you do it normally.
Otherwise it’s very silly early 2000s edgy white guy dudebro humor
The two adaptations of Watchmen have both missed the point. The Zack Snyder movie treats the characters like gods rather than deeply flawed losers and weirdos.
The HBO series is better, and does get very close, but collapses from a meandering plot and glorifying cops
Marx talks about most of what you just mentioned in the first chapter of Capital. Socially productive labor transforming nature is the source of value in any society. He also mentions rarity as a source of value, like I remember him specifically mentioning pearls as an example a few times.
He included machinery and technology as what he called “constant capital,” and the labor is the variable capital. To say Marx didn’t consider technology would suggest he was unaware of what a factory was and that he didn’t observe the industrial revolution as it was happening. He was born in 1818. He watched Germany in his childhood go from empty fields full of peasants to factories, railroads, and telegraph lines in his adulthood. You know what made that technology possible? Labor? And who operates that technology? Laborers. This is all cooked into his work.
I’d also like to point you over to the Grundrisse, the chapter called Fragment on Machines, where Marx even speculates on if machinery were all fully automated, saying laborers could move aside from production and just become just “watchmen.” This part is good:
“Capital itself is the moving contradiction, in that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as the sole measure and source of wealth […] On the one side […] it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature […] to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it […] On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created”
He’s saying capitalism would have a hard tike reducing labor time to zero through technological advancement, since it would defeat the concept of value itself. In simple terms, how would you even price anything if there was no labor cost involved? How would a capitalist sell their product or assign value to it? Who would they sell it to?