hauntingspectre [he/him]

Lol, the 12 Red Guards who aren’t feds must be crying their eyes out today.

Neil Gaiman wrote this years ago, and it’s something I try to remember when these conversations come up:

"I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’. That’s just treating other people with respect.”

Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile.

You should try it. It’s peculiarly enlightening.

I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!”

Literally costs you nothing to treat someone with respect by using their chosen pronouns.

I grew up playing on a Tandy 1000, whose most notable feature was the huge amount of games that said “640k RAM required (Tandy: 768K)”.

I still remember a few DOS commands, even.

That, to me, is why it’s accessible for more people: for $400 you get a machine that will get you 5-8 years worth of useful life. It’s a walled garden, but it’s a damn big walled garden. And you don’t have to worry about checking specifications, you don’t have to worry about shady sites for pirating your games, you don’t have to be annoyed by needing to upgrade one item to run a game. For an additional $60 you get a AAA title that should, in theory, work, plus you can pay for access to a huge backlog.

Now, that costs more than PC can for games, but in return you get convenience. For many people, that’s a good trade.

Oh, the PCMR types are definitely a minority of people who play on PC. PC is definitely my preferred platform for strategy games, but anything besides that I play on console. Sitting in front of a TV with a controller in hand just feels like how I’m supposed to play shooters or RPGs.

And I think modding is really an amazing scene. Sure, there’s bad mods, but in general mods as a concept, and often as an execution, are fantastic. Beyond the obvious political aspects of “who would work voluntarily under gommunism?!”, they democratize the gaming experience and can make it much more cooperative between developer and players.

At the same time though, in terms of mass accessibility consoles are an achievement. They’re the iphone of the gaming world - they just (usually) work. No need to download a mod manager and queue up your mods so that dragons don’t spawn in your house or whatever. That’s part of why Cyberpunk was such a failure: you assume a base level of playability with a game released for your console. That peace of mind was shattered.

I think that’s true for a significant chunk of male gamers. There’s a lot more concern about AAA titles and FOMO/FOTM, it seems. Plus there’s the whole PC master race of “gotta have the latest graphics card, also please look at my $10000 ‘battlestation’ and validate my life choices”, etc.

It seems almost perfectly designed to make toxic people more toxic.

I’m not so sure that they are, but in the American left, historically they’ve been the cause of a lot of splits. Like, we make fun of Trots for splitting, but recently, since the 60s on, white Maoists seem to have been the real driver of splits.

Still, the only Maoists I’ve dealt with IRL were the local ones, so it’s entirely plausible I’m painting with an overly broad brush. I tend to discount most online tendency talk as just keyboard commando stuff. If you’re busy typing out screeds about how the People’s Front of Judea screwed you over by reserving the library meeting rooms for two straight months, so that your group couldn’t book them, ya probably ain’t gonna be leading a revolution anytime soon.

I was involved with DSA for a couple years, til 2017 “officially” (I’d moved away a few months before my dues ran out). It was a weird group: a clique of succdems, a clique of idpol obsessed Maoists, and like 4 folks who wanted to engage in “normal” direct action. It got better as the Bernie obsessives left, the Maoists tried to launch their own group and split from DSA, and more folks interested in direct action joined.

Eventually (surprise!) the Maoist group fell apart and narced to the cops on each other, the direct action types took over the DSA, and I occasionally join their actions, and the succdems ran for positions within the Democratic party. I’ve not renewed my membership, though, and don’t plan on it.

And I’m still wary of self proclaimed Maoists since then. Just hearing the toughest talk from them for two years, to then find out they ratted each other out after some pretty mild police pressure.

Seriously, she and Notch are basically the same at this point: billionaires who’ve spent their “post getting wealth” lives punching down.

Imagine being able to do anything you want, and you choose to spend it being cruel to those beneath you.

The Just World fallacy is incredibly strong, particularly here in the US. It’s extremely powerful, particularly as part of the basic Protestant belief package of the country.

As far as dealing with it, there’s basically no way to go after it directly. You can stay friends, and try to move their opinions through discussion of individual events, but honestly the most effective tool against folks who believe in this is bad things happening to them in the course of their life. So, if they lose their job, they might be open to revisiting their beliefs.

It sucks, but it does fall under the “I can’t teach you to care about other people” header.

These morons have advertised on podcasts for a couple years. They try to be self aware about the name, but it doesn’t quite work WHEN YOU’RE THE PEOPLE WHO NAMED IT.

That’s why community is the strongest survival tool, so that people can take on different roles and pool skills and aptitudes.

Good read.

Food & friends being the most important key to survival is something I’ve been telling folks for a while.

Guns are good, but you can’t boil up a gun for dinner. Plus, there will be lots of guns available from weirdos who stocked up 20 guns and had no more food than was in their cabinets.

Also, I know whenever this conversation came up on the sub, there were comrades who didn’t feel comfortable owning a gun due to mental health issues. Dehydrated/shelf stable food is cheaper and safer, so take that $ and invest it into food, supplies, vitamins, first aid kits, water treatment, nutritional supplements, etc. Rechargeable power supplies are also good, if you can afford them. An old fashioned clock radio, listening for updates, could become far more valuable than an iPhone.

A bike with a pannier radically increases your mobility and carrying capacity. Don’t forget your pets! A dog is a hunting companion, source of warmth, a guard, etc. So throw an extra bag of food or two in your supplies.

Yeah, I honestly thought my friend was going to wind up dead (multiple car wrecks while nodding, at least one OD), but it’s been one of the great pleasures of my life to see her get clean.

I’m glad it worked for you too!

For anybody looking to get off opioids, kratom can definitely help the withdrawal symptoms. It’s the only thing I’ve seen help a friend of mine who tried several times.

There’s a lot of kratom types and brands, apparently, so do some research first!

Edit: I ran this by her, she said to also research delivery methods (powder, cap, or disk(?)), and dosage, before starting.