I think it’s her articles unless I am missing where she states she prefers he/him pronouns.

In the online discourse it seems to be two camps. There are the people who reflexively appeal to authority and intimate towards some institutional or academic notion of art. Then there are people who skip to the end by saying everything is art and view you as problematic if you try to specify it at all. It’s obvious that the idea of art is heavily poisoned by centuries of being defined by those who could afford it. Also the chauvinism that art is made by only Western cultures. People want to push back by opening up the realm of art to cover all the neglected categories, genres, techniques, and mediums. But I find it specious to say everything is art based on it’s existing lack of exclusivity. Maybe “art” is just a limited concept for what we’re trying to describe. Luckily there is a third way!

I’m a huge believer in craft vs art. It seems that craft is what most people like more than art anyways. Craft is more Marxist than art because it focuses on actually making a thing rather than how it exists in the mind or heart. I’m not saying the two don’t coexist in pieces that we all agree are art, but craft is my favorite child and the more noble pursuit. Also no big coincidence that you see a huge push in craft in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Also, also art academia pushed indigenous and non-Western art under this category, hmmmmm.

Games undeniably have craft and I think that’s what most people mostly respond to that. When I see arguments like this blog saying “rules are art” without really expanding on that, I just assume she means rules are art because it’s a crafted experience. That’s the key word, craft, showing up to give us a clue. When people are saying games are art they really mean they enjoy the craftsmanship of certain games and want to celebrate it by elevating them to art. Crafts are just fine and we should instead work to elevate craft.

Corporations more often operate in the space of art because it’s easier to tamper with concepts, reactions, and ideas of art than it is to fool someone on the material craft of the product. These companies have advertising, marketing, PR, and run influence campaigns. That’s why these entities are completely on board with calling games art and stressing that in the media. Once everyone accepts games are art then it’s only a matter of using the media you own to declare your products art and give yourself awards. Now you have a new marketing claim against your competitors.

It’s much harder to operate in a space where craft is important. Craft demonstrably declines over time as companies cut costs and squeeze labor in favor of profits. Just as a heuristic, it provides a much better space for the game consumer. Even if a billion dollar company creates a well crafted game, that’s okay. If every game company did that then gamers wouldn’t dwell on this art question so much.

(I did read the article)

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

I’ve got over 2,400 hours in Dota 2 from my misspent uni years, and I’m currently sitting on 183 hours with Valve’s latest and counting. I’m having a good time, and by “good time”, I mean I am magnetically attracted to this dopamine machine and cannot pull away, even while I learn about all the fun new slurs I can be called by strangers online.

The gaming industry is truly a child of techno capitalism. I get why the company wants games to be addictive, so they can capture attention and money. No reason for a consumer to think this way and desire to be captured. The full court rush corporate takeover, the destruction of anything creative, the anti-labor actions that you couldn’t get away with in manufacturing or probably even the service industry. It should be studied academically.

That was a Star Trek reference/easter egg in a random encounter which is officially non-canon.

I wasn’t arguing that the trope didn’t exist in Fallout, I’m arguing that it’s Jon Nolan falling back on his older material and that it’s lazy. If synths exist, then you don’t need to create a different version of that. Because now you have what is essentially the same mystery duplicated.

I also have a major problem with synths existing in Fallout but I will spare you those thoughts. We might as well just demolish the rest of canon and establish time travel too. Fallout can be every other sci-fi franchise story retold in vault suits and iconography from the older games.

Nolan seems to be working his way back into his Westworld plots. Instead of spending seasons on the mystery of who is a robot and who is real, they’re going to do the same with mind control. Pretty boring choice imo when you have the entire world of Fallout. Mind control chips seem like small potatoes.

Not on board with showing the NCR as this force of almost pure good. The game would show you something like that Shady Sands utopia and then the dark side of it. If this was a game you would find out that the NCR used the mind control chips to punish people which is why things are so good. That would be a side quest too. The show feels like the Bethesdization of New Vegas were the iconography of the NCR is more important. On that note, I did stand up and clap when the ranger sniper showed up.

I reinstalled New Vegas and played it for the first time in probably 14 or so years. I was never was into traditional role playing games like D&D, Cyberpunk, etc. I mean I know it’s kinda obvious that rpg videogames are computer versions of the analog thing, but I was never exposed to the analog thing. I had no frame or reference for why the game was set up that way. More recently I watched people playing traditional RPG games and it all clicked. I now realize that Ron Perlman’s narration is basically just what the DM would say before your campaign. It’s kind of endearing how Obsidian didn’t try to abstract every mechanic just because it’s a computer game. Modern games are so heavy on the abstraction.

Anyone want to start a polymarket on when the White House official account will tweet a picture of the dead Canadians with something soy like “Awe, render unto Caesar!”

Getting kicked out of a bar for the fifth time this month and realizing there is a vast network of underground activists tracking me every time I want to drink

I know this person can’t respond but I want to make an important point for the people reading this.

You absolutely are saying it’s right. You say that ICE was harassing a woman because they felt it was necessary, with no interrogation of what that actually means. As if ICE can only react rationally to what they perceive as threats, as if ICE can soberly and rationally perceive threats. Then you frame the shooting as an almost mechanical consequence, like that of a ball rolling down hill due to physical forces, of state power interacting with perceived hostility. Again this is without critical thought of what that truly means and assumes the state is just a rational actor abiding by some rational law, of which the victims failed to account. You’re essentially saying it’s like standing in front a freight train running at full speed. The nascent law of the universe says that the human sized object will be obliterated if they don’t respect the kinetic energy of the multi-ton behemoth. Therefore it’s kinda their fault for not stepping out of the way. Painting these human actions as some natural system of mechanics is endorsing it as the rule of nature. You are saying it’s right because to go against it is to fight against the inevitability of nature.

None of this was inevitable. It’s not the result of natural laws. It’s not a Rube Goldberg machine that is impossible to stop once it’s in motion. It is an intentional, manufactured outcome. It’s an intentional decision by the leaders of the state to not intervene in protecting its citizens. It’s an intentional decision by the leaders of the federal state to point untrained, highly ideological murderers at the citizenry to make a political statement. It is an intentional, multi-generational effort to make sure citizens are as defenseless as possible with the least amount of oversight or input into the state. These things culminate in yesterday’s events. It is nothing to do with the individual decisions of Alex or the person he was defending. To frame it like their individual decisions is just as much a cause as the historical confluence of class struggle is morally repugnant and lacks any intellectual merit.

Classic cop move to pull a gun and mag dump into a corpse so it looks like a firefight rather than an execution.

One of the best to do ever do it.

Any news outlet that posts shit like this right now is actively trying to get people arrested or killed.

Pushing GTAVI to 2028 so you can lean into anti-woke and make Vice City a cool place full of crypto kings and very stable, normal people and team up with the President who lives north of Vice City.

If he can pull off 2% interest rates you better have some goddamn anti-doomer pills because you haven’t seen depravity yet.

Bread and circuses used to distract from stuff like this but now it is the circus. They have done such a great job of building up a genre around military action and imperialism since the 90s. Every lib who spent the Obama years writing woke CIA fanfic about invading Libya has led to this. President TV, of course, is going to ramp it up and remove all subtlety. Why produce fictional Jack Ryans when you can just go invade and film it for Paramount+?

Perfect example of why trying to pin the lack or failure of organizing on idiosyncrasy is specious. Organization is hard because it’s constantly being thwarted by people in positions of power. It’s not because there aren’t enough sociable people. The issue isn’t whether organizing is a social endeavor or if we have enough sociable people, it’s how do we become successful in spite of obstruction. That’s a much harder question for an entertainer/podcaster/youtuber to answer as a neat soundbite.

This is what drives me nuts about r/trueanon. There is a group of “the left” that thinks the only way we can gain popular support is if we throw someone under the bus. It’s like we have to sacrifice some marginalized group so no use in worrying about it too much. Just pick the one that causes the least stink aka the ones least likely to push back. This is the only way to appeal to blue collar workers. It’s like they picture some dirty oil rig driller in Texas that is almost sold on socialism if it weren’t for people accusing him of doing microaggressions. We need that guy on board so stop making a fuss about me, millionaire podcaster, talking like a 2004 shock jock on satellite radio.

no way this is not his kid. idk what the dna test says or his “real” parents say.