JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
Some times Charlie was in the trees.
User ID: 4009
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
22m ago
One could argue that this is what already MAGA is, a coalition of the people who "interact with reality" on a daily basis rebelling against the laptop and email class and this is the driver of so many of complaints held by that class. The thing about interacting with reality is that you can just do things.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1d ago
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1d ago
If that's what he's doing, what's the problem?
Tolerating bad faith actors inevitably ends in an equilibrium where bad faith is the norm.
Counter point: as you yourself said...
A sane rational and moral person would have picked up on that and seen
The path of violence and self-destruction leading to violence and self-destruction? Who could've imagined?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1d ago
I haven't played Dishonoured but from reading the description and other people's comments here I get the impression that this is not "Ludonarrative Dissonance" as much as it is simply the narrative.
Like i said in the op, Jason Brody didn't kill those people, YOU killed those people and if you're complaining that the game is punishing you for playing like a murder-hobo maybe that says more about you than it does the game.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1d ago
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Spec Ops: The Line but I also agree with much of @RobertLiguori's critique of it and that is why i would argue that Far Cry 3 is the superior execution.
Yes a sane, rational, moral person should see the "bad end" coming from a mile away but niether Jason nor the player are sane, rational, or moral.
That's the point that I think people who complain about the ending are missing.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1d ago
I see 4 as the Empire Strikes Back to 3's Star Wars, it is in many respects the superior Film/Game but much of its impact comes from having the core ideas and themes established beforehand.
The crab rangoon really is fantastic.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2d ago
Did God not make us to be servants?
No, God made made us in his own image.
Like I said the first was a glorified tech demo, the second had strong ludic elements but weak narrative, and the third is where everything "clicked". 3, 4, and 5 are all excellent IMO and kind of form a trilogy in their own right, exploring the themes of choice, consequence, and how "He who fights monsters must be careful lest he become one...", but the latter two are really just alternative takes on 3 which is why I hold up 3 as the one to play.
As for 6, as fun as it is to watch Gus Fring chew the scenery, Hocking and a bunch of the other developers who'd been involved in 2 - 5 had either retired or moved on to other projects and I feel like it shows in the quality of both the writing and the gameplay.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2d ago
I enjoyed Spec Ops: The Line and have not played Dishonored
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2d ago
Consider the opening sample in this song.
That specific instance (from Apollo 17) was later determined to be the spent 3rd stage of their own Saturn Rocket
In my post on Halo from last month I mentioned that Clint Hocking's work on the Far Cry franchise probably deserved its own essay. In the process of researching that essay I discovered that another YouTuber had already beaten me to the scoop, covering much of the same ground that I had planned to.
I'm going to link his video below, but I still want to get this out because I find the franchise's central theme of choice, consequence, and the role that we as individuals often play in our own destruction/salvation, are highly relevant to conversations that have been happening elsewhere on this forum.
For the uninitiated Far Cry is a series of single player first person shooters produced by Ubisoft. The series follows an anthology format with each new game introducing a new setting and set of characters.
The first Far Cry game released in 2004 was essentially a glorified tech demo for Cervat Yerli's scalable dynamic rendering engine which he had developed in partnership with Nvidia and would later market under the CryEngine name. This technology enabled highly detailed and expansive exterior scenes with functionally infinite draw distances to be rendered on the hardware of the day without the need to rely on pre-baked lighting/shaders and forced perspective tricks the way contemporary 3D games like Half-Life 2 did.
If the first Far Cry was essentially a tech demo, Far Cry 2 released in 2008 was a gameplay demo. What narrative there is, is paper thin, but what Far Cry 2 did was codify the genre of the "3D open-world action game with crafting and collectibles". Blazing the trail that games like Skyrim, the Assassin's Creed series, Batman Arkham City, Ghosts of Tsushima, and Cyberpunk 2077, would all follow. It may be one of the most low-key influential video games of the last two decades.
The third game is where everything clicked. Far Cry 3 released in 2012 was the first Far Cry to have a proper narrative with fully realized characters who were more than stock archetypes like "Generic Action Hero Guy", "Mad Scientist", and "Femme Fatale". A lot of effort went into facial animation and voice acting to the point that it still holds up surprisingly well for a game that is over a decade old. Which brings us to the thesis of this essay.
If the measure of a piece of "literature" or "art" is the ability to tackle a complex or challenging ideas and make them accessible to the masses, Far Cry 3 deserve to be regarded as high art for how deftly it uses its own medium to convey and amplify the themes of the story it is trying to tell. Or as DJ Peach Cobbler puts it Far Cry 3 tells a story that only a video game could tell
You play as Jason Brody, a pampered rich douche-bro on vacation in Ersatz-Indonesia who, along with his friends, is kidnapped and held for ransom by pirates after they stray too far from the relative safety of their beachfront resort. Jason, with the assistance of his older brother Grant, manages free himself and escape into the jungle but Grant gets shot and killed during the escape, leaving Jason to face the Jungle alone and unprepared.
This is our first hint that the game might be operating on a deeper level than your conventional shoot-em-up. Grant is presented to us as the quintessential hero protagonist, handsome, charismatic, capable, brave, and he dies an ugly gurgling death bleeding out in the mud while his little brother panics. This all happens in the first 10 minutes of the game and the message is clear. You, the limp wristed trust-fund kid, are going to have to level up if you are to have any hope of surviving the jungle much less freeing your friends from captivity. And with that the game releases you into its world.
As you progress through the game, discovering landmarks, hunting animals, crafting equipment, and completing quests, you unlock new abilities, new weapons, better stats. You become more and more capable, and more and more of a killer till by the end John Rambo 'aint got nothing on Jason Brody.
This where things get interesting because without getting into spoilers it is made abundantly clear throughout the narrative that all this killing and "leveling up" is taking a toll on Jason's mind, that it is damaging his relationships with his friends, his family, society, morality, and ultimately reality. At the same time Jason isn't the one doing the killing, we are. YOU, the player, not Jason, are the one positioning the crosshairs and pulling the trigger. You, the player, are the one who made the decision to complete that extra side-quest so that you could unlock that sweet triple knife take-down, and having unlocked it, by God we're going to use it, because dopamine's a hell of a drug. By playing the game we have been manipulated into being willing and enthusiastic participants in Jason's descent into violence and madness. The daemon on his shoulder whispering "Yah, we got this" as we pursue our own destruction.
...and this is why I believe that that the infamous "bad ending" is the canonically correct ending for Jason's story, and that the people who complain about how the game "punishes the player" for making the thematic choice by wanting to keep playing are missing the forest for the trees. The fact that game gives you one last chance to reject the path of violence is what makes the ending so impactful.
I have set before you life and death, blessing and curses. Therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live.
- Deuteronomy 30:19
These themes of player agency and choice would be explored and expanded upon in Far Cry 4 and 5 (4's "Secret Ending" being a notable example of this) but if you are going to play just one of the Far Cry games please play Far Cry 3. It is worth your time.
The scenarios as I see them in order of likelihood.
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A: Someone testing the latest generation of classified tech fucked up and got caught, (think opening scene of Top Gun: Maverick)
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B: A Stargate type situation where the US government or possibly multiple governments have either developed or discovered something truly Sci-Fi and are trying to keep the metaphorical genie in the bottle.
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C: Angels, daemons, and egregores, are real.
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D: Predator and Predator 2, are real.
To be clear, I am reasonably certain that the A: is the true explanation and D: is unlikely in the extreme, but I threw it in there because I rewatched those movies recently, and I feel like the idea of the solution to the Fermi paradox being that Earth is essentially a national park/game preserve for Rastafarian Super-Klingons has potential for some really meaty sci-fi from both the human "prey" perspective, and from the perspective of the hunters who discover that the Antelope have invented crossbows and IEDs, since the last time they went on safari.
Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky all wrote at length about how "bonds of blood and affection" presented an obstacle to the revolution and would need to be at weakened if not eliminated in the name of social progress. They may have never literally uttered the precise words "abolish the family" but what they were advocating for was functionally indistinguishable from it. The bit in 1984 about schools teaching kids to rat on their parents and siblings was based on real world policies enacted by both the Third Reich and Soviet Union.
Furthermore, the position that children ultimately belong to the state and that parents are merely temporary custodians seems to remain a reasonably mainstream position amongst progressives to this day, and I would argue that this fundamental disagreement about who children belong to, their parents or the state, is the source of much of the vehemence and vitriol behind issues like school choice and whether schools should be allowed to keep secrets from parents.
Ironically, the presence of the scouring in Tolkien's work is a large part of why I roll my eye's at @OliveTapenade's claim that Jackson's adaptation is "too martial".
In the beginning of the story there is a suggestion that the people of the Shire may be able to bypass the question of good and evil by simply going along with whom or whatever, and I interpreted the scouring at the end of the story as a repudiation of this suggestion. The point that I understood Tolkien to be making with the scouring is that you can't escape evil by ignoring it or dismissing it as someone else's problem. Kolmogorov Complicity is still complicity.
The Ents, upon being made aware of the threat that evil posed, took up arms. The Hobbits (minus our protagonists) chose to go along to get a long and that is why they end up oppressed and in need of rescue.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
4d ago
I genuinely can't tell whether you are being sarcastic or not.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
5d ago
It's not unique to communism so much as a natural outcome of both the left's and the dissident right's embrace of collectivism. If you shift the focus of judgment from individual responsibility to the collective, the only practicable solution to the free-rider problem will be totalitarianism.
I agree that the absence of both Tom Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire makes Tolkien's commentary on the nature of good and evil much less explicit than it is in the books, and but I have to disagree with the allegations of miscasting or that they didnt capture the core themes of Tolkien's work.
My issue with the Hobbit trilogy is that it is abundantly clear that the studio wanted more LotR movies but the Hobbit is a very different work from Lord of the Rings in both tone and content.
I disagree that the films take out most of the moral worldview. I will grant that it is less obvious than it is in the books, but one of the reasons I think both the books and Jackson's adaptation was so successful was that they successfully capture the essence (or "vibe") of Tolkien's very traditional Catholic worldview and why it might appeal to someone without being "preachy" or in your face about it. Gandalf's conversations with Pippin, Théoden's speech at Helm's Deep, Aragorn at the Black Gates, and the entire character of Samwise Gamgee, are all faithfully represented and carry what I understood to be Tolkien's thesis well.
By rights we shouldn't even be here, but we are... Is a good speech in it's own right but hits even harder in context of having been written by a veteran of the Somme who was looking down the barrel of WWII.
The frustrating thing from my perspective as a history nerd is that, to me there seem to be clear and obvious reasons why the Nazis were evil/went down the path they did but we don't talk about those reasons because there are a lot would-be revolutionary socialists in Academia who would find themselves having to answer some difficult questions if we did.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
9d ago
Jenson is truly the best of all of us.
Are you endorsing @RandomRanger's claim that "There is no truth, only competing agendas" and that "There are no objective standards by which we can judge one culture better than another"?
If so, are you trying to argue that the position of absolute moral relativism seemingly being advocated here is "pro" rather than "anti" western? and If you do believe that, do you believe that CS Lewis, Adam Smith, St Augustine, and Marcus Aurelius would all share your belief?
My interpretation @dr_analog's comment that they want a "Costal Elite" but would be willing to settle for a good-looking guy with an honest job.
The "problem" is that selecting for men with honest jobs means selecting against men who hold luxury beliefs. They may as well be asking "why can't i find a handsome dark-triad bad-boy who wants to settle down with me?
The answer is that these are contradictory desires. Dark-triad bad-boys aren't interested in settling down. And well-adjusted men with honest jobs who are interested in settling down are not going to share their politics.
The future of the GoP is now.
The GoP is currently a center-right populist party with mercantilist tendencies, and I see no reason for that not to be an electorally viable platform going forward especially given the trajectory that the Democrats appear to be on which is increasingly anti-populist and anti tax-payer.
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