DTulpa
2d ago
Then I think your nose will serve you right here. I know here in TheMotte we've had people praising the writing and also those unimpressed by it, and the latter consistently brings up zaniness and the 'it's a fun romp' vibe as criticisms. And regardless of writing quality, everybody pretty much agrees this is a Larian game with a BG skin, not a proper continuation. The horniness of the companions alone makes it feel juvenile to me.
Outside of a dabble or two, I don't table-top. But my understanding is that Critical Role played a big part in reviving DnD in the age of streaming and Let's Plays. I went to a DnD birthday party years ago for a girl who had no awareness of any of the rules or anything, but wanted a game held because the show looked so fun. She was very confused when we explained to her that she had already wasted all her spells in the first combat encounter, when all she really wanted to do was girlboss a mage.
That night was fun, don't get me wrong. But I felt like I got a decent insight into the kind of person CR was appealing to: people who like the drama, the self-expression, and the costumes of table-top, but are quickly in over their heads when they have to roll for crit or w/e. So they just watch others do it.
DTulpa
2d ago
What a take, indeed. What exactly would NPR have to do to qualify as 'too left' in your book? Softly recommending guillotines for the rich in the coming socialist revolution? I bet even that wouldn't count!
Look, we get it. There's about a dozen principled leftists that are keeping laser-focused on 'real issues' who don't truck with facile wokeness. They never count for shit, and the ones who do show up are seemingly always Squad-type woke/socialist hybrids, but they have my sympathies. However, wokeness is a thing absolutely concentrated on the Left, and I don't think you get to cleave yourself from it so cleanly just because you too don't like their company.
DTulpa
2d ago
This may hinge on two things.
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Are you a devotee of RTWP? Then BG3 is an abomination (I personally prefer turn-based).
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Do you like or tolerate DnD post-Critical Role, or do you find the sensibilities it has developed to be subtly but omnipresently obnoxious? I'm not well-versed in the franchise, but it doesn't look like BG3 matches the tone of the original games based on some writing samples.
I'm a semi-fan of RPGs, although I'm not good at them. Given their lengths and complexities, I really only have the appetite for one RPG on occasion every few years. And if I'm going to spend multiple hours and nights with one, I need an interesting world to retain me. I don't know where people stand on POE these days, but that managed to hold my interest even after the combat started getting sloggy and boring. FO1 is still my gold standard.
But every piece of media I see for BG3 seems to trigger a reflexive disinterest. There's something so self-consciously table-toppy about it that feels LARPy, for lack of a better word. Clearly some people love it for those reasons, but I must have read a dozen pieces about how 'amazing' BG3's narrator is ("Because it's just like having a DM, guys!"), and to me it just seems irritating and pointless. They understand that cRPGs don't need 'DMs', right? You're playing the game, why would you need it described to you?
DTulpa
2d ago
You are reminding me of a childhood where I toted around Blizzard game manuals in my school backpack so I could read them on the tram and show them off to friends. I also played through D1 recently after maybe 15+ years or so, and found the writing and atmosphere holds up superbly even without all the extra worldbuilding from the printed pages.
When people say D1/D2 are better written than the following sequels, there's often some pushback that wants to eagerly point out how little story and dialogue were in those first two games. To which I say "Yes, and how did Blizzard manage to fuck that up so much".
Were they overrepresented? I'm sure they were at various points in time, but I'm not sure how much of that was intentional versus the realities of working with the materials on hand.
There is an interesting question as to what exactly constitutes overrepresentation here. If the average USer is white, and I make products targeting that average, then that could entail making films with just white people and never black people. It would be fair to say black people are not represented under that dynamic, but I'm not quite covinced it's fair to say whites would therefore have too much representation. Not that I wouldn't wouldn't find this hypothetical phenomenon somewhat offputting and worth correcting for to some degree.
If I recall films from the 90s to the 10s, I think the average filmgoer saw representation in aggregate that was more proportional to their lived experience. Yes, a lot of movie leads were white. But you still saw occasional movies from Denzel, Sam Jackson, Will Smith, Snipes, and so on. Movies and performances that weren't really coded 'black' and were intended for average peoples' consumption. Depending on where you are, this pattern probably lines up everywhere from your childhood upbringing to your office personnel: mostly white, and a few black people. And while you weren't blind to their skin color, there was a sense that it was wrong to approach them in those terms.
So while you may not have gotten a complete balanced breakfast of diversity and inclusion in any one given film, you probably did get it through a dozen or more films throughout the year. Nobody's wires gets tripped because this pattern matches to more Americans' lives than not. People get cynical - rightly so, I'd argue - when the images they regularly see on their screen is consistently discrepant with their realities. And it's especially repellent when it is clearly being done as a kind of moral mandate. When so many current media products individually reflect this kind of template diversity, you start to wonder what's up.
DTulpa
3d ago
I've only ever seen consternation over black British actors playing black Americans, obviously because there's a weird protectionist sensibility over that turf. Nobody was ever giving Christian Bale or Benedict Cumberbatch shit for their American accents. At most, we chuckle a little bit when the accents slip at some of the corners (for some reason the hard pronunciation of 'are' is often a giveaway to me), but we just take it for granted that the British are born with thespian genetics.
DTulpa
6d ago
You're locked in, buddy. No sense fighting it or yourself now. Let us know when the kids arrive!
DTulpa
10d ago
Gaming communities by my experience were solidly anti-War on Drugs, anti-foreign intervention, anti-Bush (and the aspirant neocon world order he represented), anti-censorship, anti-gun, and pro-gay marriage. Of course there were stalwart holdouts who bucked those trends to various degrees, but there was no way to mistake the dogpiles and multi-page sniping they dealt with as a measure of high popularity.
On the question of socialism, it was a mixed bag. Hugo Chavez fans were mocked for their earnestness, but there was a general sentiment of "If only we were a bit more like Sweden". The second invasion of Iraq may have had some initial support, but it was clear people had largely soured on it within a few years. "Slut shaming" and similar things were topics with no clear consensus that percolated for a decade before spectacularly erupting. Trans wasn't really thought about at all. We 'knew' that drug laws were brought about because of racism, and we 'knew' that US black people were getting the Rodney King experience every week. Noam Chomsky was a thoughtful old dude, and Kent Hovind was lol.
I know you may quibble about what constitutes being 'on the Left', but the idea of leftists feeling pushed out of communities because of rightists is something I can't even conceive of over the last 20-30 years unless we're only talking about the those on what we used to call the fringe. Today's modern SJW may have indeed felt unwelcome back in those spaces, and they may have been aggrieved enough to see themselves as attacked from right-wing forces. Wouldn't make it true, any more than a Republican forum turning away Nazis would make said Republicans on the Left.
DTulpa
11d ago
The Pandora Radio option is there mostly for car trips with other people. I'm not really a George Michael or Prince fan and wouldn't acquire their albums. But 80s pop hits are the best pop hits, and they're definitely more palatable to others than, say, Autechre. I don't mind firing and forgetting a playlist there as long as we're having a good time.
I think what made me pull the trigger years ago on setting up my own media server and foregoing streaming was deciding one Thursday that I was going to watch David Lynch's 'The Elephant Man' that coming weekend. I saw it on Prime, noted its availability, played a little bit just to have it at the top of the queue, and made the plan. Friday night rolls around and it's gone; 'Unavailable in your region'.
15 minutes may seem like a lot to some folks these days. But that's all the time it took to download a blu-ray rip, fire it away, and put this nonsense behind me.
Synology NAS with a RAID setup for any media I regularly return to or like having on-hand. Music is the most regular use case, but I also use it for films and shows.
Is it worth the bother? It is for me, but I'm also a 'techy' that slightly gets off on this stuff. I'm also tinkering with Syncthing across multiple devices for accessing retro ROMs and save data no matter where I'm at - and I've maybe spent more time getting that together than consistently using it. I also daily drive with Linux for about half of the year for the sake of it. As I think is typical for my type - my PCs are far more organized than anything in my local meatspace.
I don't have any streaming subscriptions and my media pool is a little narrow. I hate ads, I hate things becoming suddenly unavailable due to corporate agreements expiring, and I don't get any benefit from the exploratory aspects of these platforms. I spent more time scrolling through Netflix/Prime for something to watch than actually watching anything, and I'm picky enough with music artists that 90% of the 'Artists who sound like X' recommendations don't pass muster to my ears.
Long-term, my plan is to backfill my digital copies with physical media when budget and interest permits. Even if I rip them once and never pull them out of their cases again, there's something to be said for a physical collection for reasons of aesthetics and conversation. But ultimately (and perhaps naively), I like the feeling of having control despite the risks. And since this all replaceable media, I won't feel too hard if an HDD ghosts.
I do still use free Pandora for 'radio' occasionally. There's a Skip limit, but I haven't heard an ad in years since using a VPN (not quite sure HOW that worked out, but I won't question it).
I don't necessarily think this framing is wrong, but this certainly isn't the kind of anodyne charity deployed in the wild.
It's all well and good to say that 90s liberalism would drift into a kind of conservatism as times change. What I see is progressives habitually claiming that this new strain of 'conservatism' is actually the latest genealogical strain of fascism and white supremacy that traces its lineage to Nazism or similar. You see the difference, and so you can surely understand why that tribe may balk at this "No no, you really are technically right-wing" insistence.
I agree that some of this is 'embarrassed conservatism' being expressed by people who probably identified as good liberals up until the 2010s give or take. But some of this is because there are consequences to being frankly conservative. Few are going to honestly embrace the conservative label if that immediately and unfairly typecasts them as villains.
DTulpa
14d ago
It's perfectly understandable in those contexts. The vibe shift in my lifetime is nominally non-political spaces taking these stances. I used to be part of several forums with off-topic 'Politics' sections, and despite being consistently lopsided towards the at-the-time Left, the Right was still represented. There were numerous conservative posters whose names I recall to this day after years of arguing with them. Now that type seems to be quickly run out or banished, should I see them at all. There's an autoimmune response where there used to be some tolerance.
I didn't consider /r/pcgaming a 'leftist space'. But make a glib remark in support of JK Rowling and at least the admins reveal it as such.
DTulpa
14d ago
This is entirely a dilemma of the Left's own making when they chucked liberal principles and meritocracy aside and left various flavors of the Right to make those appeals. I get that there are legit criticisms of those concepts, some of which resonate even with me. And yet I really thought "racial quotas in every field" was something that would have been rejected by my estwhile peers; a strawman from right-wing media to be scoffed at, not enthusiastically endorsed. And sure, some would argue that not all leftists would support those endeavors if they were truly aware of the extent of them, but they sure do have a habit of digging their heels in if the subject is brought up.
After prematurely evacuating that hill and leaving it to the savages, you're a little suspicious that 'classical liberalism' is being contamined by a bit of white identiarianism? With all due respect: I hope that's some really tough shit the Left has to chew on for a long time. I'm not a WN by any measure, but there's no way we were going to have this collectivist-tinted racialized 'discourse' without that appearing on the menu. They deserve their shot.
Maybe that meme contamination is what will ultimately kiill 'liberalism'. The ick factor. Or maybe one day people will get sick of the progressive rule of the day when it has nothing to show for its actions, and thing start snapping hard in some other direction.
That might be because proponents of it like the term well enough until it develops a stink, and then it goes through a cycle of rebranding and gaslighting of definitions. But their opponents won't let it go, or let them forget. They are done discussing CRT in dispassionate terms for the benefit of progressives, and have decided to weild it as a cudgel. See also 'DEI' and 'ESG', where these things are touted as super important and needed to be implemented yesterday, and then paradoxically there isn't ever a single case in the wild as a legit example of the practice.
CRT is being used as a shorthand for all the racial crap education is pushing, and the glove fits well enough. I don't even think I can say they're using it wrong.
Personally, I am not interested in barring drunkards or junkies from voting. Ditto for the mentally ill and unemployed. Lord knows I have my vices and deficiencies.
But if you're too drunk, strung out, depressed, or otherwise incapable of getting an ID - or moving your body to a polling station, or requesting a mail-in ballot by normal means - then I see no reason why anybody should be giving you an 'assist' or pretend that that your vote is of any value beyond a stocking stuffer for an R/D candidate. You aren't being restricted from the franchise, you're just too lazy or unintetested to partake in it.
It's a low bar, and it doesnt perfectly solve the problem of 'people voting wrong' (whatever one thinks that is), but simply showing up out of your own volition is enough for me. If you truly feel you have a stake in the system, then these are trivial hurdles to clear. But if you're just waiting around for a canvasser to help you fill out a ballot and take it to a drop box because you couldn't get your crap together in a 4-year period, I can only be suspicious of anybody trying to ply your vote.
Every election year we're inundated with narratives about how it's so hard to vote in the US, and I just don't ever see it. And I hate how the 'low voter engagement' phenomenon was interpreted as a clarion call to herd cattle into voting booths - as opposed to an indictment of our two leading parties and their general governance. I bristle even more when somebody suggests legally-required voting.
I saw the film probably in my late pre-teens before ever being aware of the conversation around it. It struck me immediately as parody and/or satire. The opening of the film has a grinning child soldier with that old-timey propaganda feel that even a middle schooler would detect as an intentional riff on grandpappy's jingoism. Then a minute later you're watching men scream as they're haplessly ripped apart. I even had the sense that everybody in the movie was too good looking to take seriously. And I remember feeling bad for the Brain Bug when it was getting that painful looking device shoved into it at the end, and I felt instinctually that this was intended, at least in an "oh that's awful..." morbid gag kind of way. My reception of it as satire was more visceral than intellectual.
If you're looking for something in the literal text of the script to show it's hand, I'm not sure how well that would fare. To me, there's just so much artificiality in the world and people who inhabit it that it's hard for me to see it as anything other than an extended pisstake.
DTulpa
1mo ago
Assume that people here are already familiar with Google, the 'Pence Rule', and have big bugbears about dishonest/malicious framings that double up as popular political sloganeering. If you've been here for a bit, this should require no imagination on your end. Then reconsider if this is the particular card you want to pull.
Next you'll tell us that Ron DeSantis made it literally illegal to say 'gay' on school premises! And we will be bowled over by a link drop, surely.
DTulpa
1mo ago
Some people have a political commitment to toe the party line on GG, regardless of the thin air it turned out to be.
I remember when the stock line was "Gamergate is driving women to suicide online". I don't recall any body counts materializing, or any posted receipts, but everybody moved on as if they hadn't proclaimed an utterly vacant falsehood. They memory holed that particular spike of hysteria, casually downgrading back to the ambiguous but exploitable terrain of 'harassment campaigns'.
If there is a single death I can even tangentially connect to the GG saga, it would have been the suicide of Zoe's ex-boyfriend after she marked him for a feeding frenzy. That there was a concerted effort to suppress the criminal, dead-fucking-obvious irony of this among journos and fellow indie developers showed me how strong the woke meme game is when it matters.
DTulpa
1mo ago
Right, but those are strong religious and traditional headwinds to be battling against, opening up multiple fronts of conflict when I am only interested in one in the here and now - eliminating nonsense about 'reversible puberty blockers' and the commonly accepted pseudoscience in that orbit. I'm not sure if badgering potential allies about circumcision helps towards that aim. Table it for later, I say.
If I could be convinced that banning the practice and any other 'cosmetic' surgery for minors was the silver bullet to my issues with gender transitioning, I'd sign off on it. Just doesn't seem feasible. And I don't think people are all that confused about circumcision and what it entails. That is less the case for 'dilating' your nether regions. I think a lot of passive support for minor transitioning would dry up if it were exposed to the reality of the practice without the safety of WPATH euphemisms. I don't think that dynamic is in play with circumcision.
DTulpa
1mo ago
Why let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I'm not sure if matters of consent are of the utmost primacy to me.
I have no interest in being hamstrung by the circumcision debate while more clear and obvious ethical violations are occuring in front of our eyes. Especially since nobody's going to harangue me for having incorrect opinions on circumcision.
I get why it may be logically consistent and principled to go after both circumcision and gender transitioning wrt to minors, but I think reality is screaming for some triage and focus here.
DTulpa
1mo ago
That speed at which that ugly pattern was adopted and incorporated was certainly something.
I really wish we could have these conversations without somebody dropping the "Have you considered that society changes?" chestnut as if this had never occured to their interlocutor. I don't believe in a moral arc of the universe, that this world owes me or anybody anything, or that I will be anything more than insignificant dust and long-forgotten memories long before our universe blinks out. The world is nakedly and unashamedly unfair, and good guys don't always win. I am fully aware of the consequences for participating or abstaining from the social games society expects people to play. I understand that my future position in this new world ranges between softly smiling while keeping my thoughts to myself or the Principal Skinner meme should this state of affairs be permanent. I know that it requires organization and coordination to fight against. Half of the problem with the 'woke resistance' is getting coordinated at all before they buckle under their own ridiculousness or get sabotaged by a hostile media!
Just assume I have thought about this, and that I realize my own predicament. I'm sure you can appreciate that your appeal means nothing to somebody who believes they have legitimate concerns with this forced, artificially imposed consensus while they have years left on this rock. It's certainly not going to stop them from sharing those thoughts on a pebble-sized forum dedicated to that very purpose.
I appreciate that formal and informal 'trans support' manifests through different mechanics and pathways vis a vis public and private actors, but your distinctions just illustrate to me the messy, tangled wholeness of the issue. That a company is just forced to comply with the 'bare minimum' of federal laws imposed by activists - or the increasing set of secondary yet nonetheless important rules alternatingly concocted by and imposed upon every major corporate and media entity that functionally comprise a second government - does not soothe my ire, but speaks to the totality of the whole problem. You recall what Father Merrin said.
So let me just try to clear the table a bit and assure you that I'm not too concerned about people marrying their dogs, daughters, or what have you. To the the extent I would draw a connection between gay marriage and our current tensions, it's more in the possibility space that was left in the wake of its victory. For a variety of reasons I find it to be extremely unlikely and just too plain viscerally disgusting for legalized pedophelia or beastiality to ever be digested by society at large. But whereas previously I would have reflexively scoffed at the suggestion, I've lately been reduced to a more meek-sounding "well, that just seems so unlikely" and that shift low-key disturbs me.
I'll accept that your trans friends are much happier now than they were before. The tension is if this has come at the expense of those not convinced of the efficacy of activist talking points applied broadly, those erroneously misdiagnosed at an early age, and social stability on the whole (deleterious as opposed to ruinous). There are always a small number of people that would have their lives radically improved if society rearranged towards their preferences. That still leaves everybody else. Prescribing puberty blockers (or any 'affirmation plan') to minors who show an inkling of gender dysphoria is quite unreasonable to me. Ditto for any reprimands or punishments meted out to people who misgender trans or NB people. Whatever merit the the current gender framework has, I would throw it all in the bin if those are baked-in unavoidable consequences of it. That's before we even get into scenarios like 'penised individuals' raping women in shelters, which - I am not really sure how to totally quantify as a loss on net. Feels like a pretty big loss of something to me! Like a reasonable expectation that nobody would allow such a scenario to be possible?
You say there's no path towards normalization of pedophilia or beastiality because there's a lack of basic impulse for it. While I agree on the general nature of man's sexual proclivites being at headwinds with such a development, I find it hard to reconcile this with the growing body of work that suggests people really can be influenced by their media (read: porn) consumptions, and the rabbit hole of extreme acts hardcore porn addicts find themselves watching, unable to cum to anything less. Clearly our minds are highly susceptible to suggestion, and we now live with a cornucopia of suggestions available at a whim. While I still don't think that's likely to breed a generation of 'pedos and furries' as some doomsayers get on about, I do think you can get some big swings on those margins, and that leaves the question of how we should regard them.
But even deeper than this - and the thing I'm struggling to communicate - is that the language games the Left has played on this terf has nuked a lot of patience, charity, and goodwill that can be generalized to anything else they say. If they are willing to demolish the classic and useful definitions of words like 'man' and 'woman', whilst replacing them with bloated concepts and jargon that are meaningless to the average person, then the sky is the limit. We can do the same thing with words like 'victim', or 'consent', or 'sexual desire', and I have noticed this is already in the water supply. If you want an extension of this principle, see the same dynamic play out with 'protest', 'riot', and 'insurrection'. I am worried that when my opponent says he wants 'peace' as I would understand it, and I reach out for a handshake, he may stab me because "Well, duh. Of course he meant 'peace at your expense' in his local parlance! You can't even say he lied!". When a trans activist or sympathetic ally makes me second-guess what it means to be a woman, it's natural to second-guess any other term they employ that's loaded with ambiguity you didn't realize was even possible a second ago.
It's been a slow trek here, and it's informed by personal experiences as well as the public/political sphere, but the last 15 years or so have gradually cemented for me that humans are a strange species, capable of a lot I had thought was unfathomable, at least in the west. There were a lot of metaphorical guardrails I had taken for granted that were totally banking on people being constrained by 'reasonable' but unspecified assumptions about the human condition. I think those boundaries have already been crossed several times in my mind, which then in turns leads me to believe those boundaries didn't actually exist outside of social conformity and enforcement. Rewind back to 2004 and I'm betting very low odds on people marrying pets by 2024. What odds would I have placed on gender transitioning for minors, had I even known that was going to end up on the table? Assurances that nobody's gonna fuck the dogs doesn't carry the same smackdown it used to.
DTulpa
1mo ago
You're correct that the specific predictions didn't pan out as stated in the 90s and 00s. To cut them a little slack, nobody really anticipated a hot debate about the definition of 'man' vs 'woman' or the 'gender spectrum' to enter the fray.
However, that the Left enabled that kind of blindsiding has shown me that they can't be trusted to not flip the board and mealmouth things that I find rather horrid, like puberty blockers. I have to say that my trust for the Left to stay within reasonable lines has done a complete 180 on this topic, and I wonder if the 'kink wing' of the party is just waiting for more favorable conditions to finally push through. And they could very well do so even if the vast majority of their compatriots don't like it. We have not slid to the specific point that moral conservativism predicted, but I don't want to be distracted from the fact that a slide did occur, even if indirectly.
My suspicion is you will ultimately be found correct. There won't be a mass normalization of beastiality and pedophilia. But that's predicated on my faith that surely people don't change that quickly, and I don't know how I justify that. So personally, I'm going to extend the deadline to 2040 and see where we stand after swimming in AI futa cocks for a decade or two.
If John Oliver is doing segments on you, you're in the mainstream even if you're not quite a household name.
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