rubpoll

the American mafia

5th-generation Italian-Americans sitting around a room eating sandwiches, and occasionally murdering someone for like $10,000 tops, and occasionally murdering each other.

Communism is when your genetically superior superpowers are taken away from you.

You see this trope a lot in children's fiction.

I know My Little Pony had an episode about this.

But what does that actually translate into in real life?

It's not like expropriating someone's property or restructuring how an economic system works. It's more like ... Communism is when all the tall people have to be reduced in height so we're all equals heights ... or something.

The fact that Sato, the stand-in for Henry Ford, is one of the Equalists tells you everything - that "Equal" just means "Evil" and has fuck-ton nothing to do with economic structures, just magical genetic individual superpowers.

I'm done apologizing for Stalin and Mao's mistakes if Liberals are gonna go this mask off for Churchill's deliberately genocidal actions.

child slaves sent into rare earth mineral mines so rare earth minerals can be sold and manufactured into computer servers and tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of servers, literally millions of tons of resources* ... are being used to create and maintain Meta.

This is what it's all for. This is why the third world has been plundered further this year. For this. Fucking shit.

See, I’ve always felt that the best console in history was the Playstation 2. Not for being the most powerful, but for being the last console where the tech was advanced enough to realise most artistic visions without being so advanced as to alienate smaller developers without so much money to throw about, so it had a very strong third party library full of quirky weird and innovative stuff like Katamari Damacy and Okami.

Yes, obviously there’s still indie games now and they’re still full of innovation and quirk, but it can be very discouraging making them these days, knowing they’ll probably be drowned out by the hundred million other indie games coming out on Steam every second of every day, where the ones getting the most attention are the ones with the biggest boobies flapping about. The PS2 was an age of equality when stuff like Viewtiful Joe could proudly sit side by side on the shelf with Call of Duty. There’s just not the same social mobility anymore. You either have all the money and all the spectacle and all the attention ‘cos you hire entire small towns worth of people and work them to death, or you get patronized rigid and struggle to escape obscurity.

There’s no middle class to act as a stepping stone. And that brings me to my next point. ‘Cos sure, maybe things could change in the future. Maybe I’m just an ageing curmudgeon blinded by nostalgia for the early aughts. Maybe someday video games will stop being designed primarily around the publishers demanding that they make all of the money that currently exists in the world. But the problem with that is that it would kinda hinge on the rest of society no longer being designed primarily around trying to make all of the money that currently exists in the world. And at this point the corporations are just too entrenched, and government too corrupt, to prevent society’s continued acceleration into inevitable collapse. And when that happens ain’t no one gonna be designing innovative new video games from a climate disaster blasted hellscape.

These are the dark thoughts that nag me and make me worry that gaming has already peaked. But what do you think, commenters? Maybe you think I’m wrong. Let us know because oh lordy would I very much like to be wrong. Sorry, I swear I’m not trying to make all of these end on a depressing note. Hey, you probably can’t escape the system but you could at least find your own way to get by within it.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/dark-souls-is-the-ultimate-game-of-all-time-extra-punctuation/

We could have had statues of giant gorgeous people as far as the eye can see, but instead we got funko pops. That's cool too I guess

:trans-sad:

But belief in reincarnation tied in with a belief in Karma leads to a justification for unjust hierarchies. "He was born into a rich family because he was good in his past life, he was born into a poor family because he was bad in a past life." It's like Determinism but only so much as it benefits people born into power.