Honestly, I agree, putting a gender slant on it, unless completely necessary, can easily arecomplicate the situation, as its putting these expectations at the front of mind. I often see this leading either into resentful sexism, or original sin type self-loathing for being a man.

I honesty just think tbe topic of gender online is so toxic, that mixing it in with mental health can cause lots of unnecessarily complications, and makes it easy for third parties to take advantage for their own ends.

Weirdly it’s the other way for me. I love Cyberpunk and am trying to replay it, and my favourite games have always been long and story driven, I love turning over the rocks and seeing how deep it all goes, playing KOTOR as a kid was just fascinating.

But, they’re a slow burn that take some engagement to really enjoy. When I’m tired I miss all the details and nuance, find I’ve not been listening to dialogue and stuff.

But I can fire up something like Overwatch and can play well effortlessly almost instinctually. I often don’t get much time to game, so the fact its full-on actually helps, whereas in an RPG, you can easily burn half an hour on what’s basically just dialogue and travel. It’s hard to take your time to enjoy it when you don’t have time.

But it’s fine, it’s something to look forward to occasionally. You don’t watch a movie every night, and ultimately I could find time, but I feel better spending that time on other things usually, or just letting off steam on a less thinky game.

They’re just not, though. Meta and Reddit are not the same. Reddit and my employer, where we make thing that people choose to buy, are not the same.

People can have preferences on different platforms and products, and they can have different amounts of confidence in different companies on how capable and trustworthy they are.

It’s the kind of meaningless vague posting that rightoids are rightly criticised for when they post shit about the people they consider to be the ‘problem’. It’s vaguely shaped like the way they see the world, but really this is about as substantial as the ‘immigrant benefit fraud’ posts your shitty uncle posts.

I don’t even know what this is referencing, or how this would work, but everyone is in here saying ‘Omg so true’ and believing that this is the reason that things are shitty.

Like, everyone’s quick to jump on bollocks conspiracy theories, and consider such things as flat-earthers to be significant in any way, but you’ll constantly see vague shit implying these enormous, unlikely conspiracies between multiple competing companies, the government, involving the collusion and silence of thousands of people, and they get up voted because people believe it’s the sort of thing that could happen.

What bothers me is that it ends up coming to ‘someone should do something about this!’, but exaggerating constantly makes extreme options look reasonable or even necessary.

Very few people can actually say what they’d want the new status-quo to look like though, outside of vague slogans or utopian ideas that those in power will somehow do things wisely, justly and selflessly, like they never have before. We can’t compare to any other attempt at communism, and even the most prosperous socialist state would be considered ‘neolib’. Because the thing is, it’s really not clear how communism is the silver bullet many think it is, but also, the vagueness and disparity about the end goal means that we can’t really look at our current situation, look at the proposed one, look at what it will take to get there, and make an informed decision on which is likely to actually make things better.

Examples? I would love some free billions!

*exist for the good of those in power. I really don’t see the value of concentrating power into a single point of failure.

German government procurement is horrendously inefficient, but it’s because of incredible levels of transparency to try to prevent corruption.

It means that even the most minute purchases come with lots of beurocracy attached.

You can look at it almost as its own kind of corruption, that syphons money into the beurocracy, but it does mean that things aren’t happing without people knowing, and that, for an extreme example, when you decide to invade another country isn’t the moment when you discover that you discover that most of your equipment had been sold for vodka money a decade ago!

Efficient and not necessarily too neutral, classy. But coiling that condenser/feed through every single plate must have been a real fucker!