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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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There is no good reason to ever watch or read anything made after 2012 and doubly so after 2016. There's enough great material to last you a lifetime from before then.

Also true of music, but arguably not true of videogames. While most AAA games continue to be disappointing, dumbed-down, DEI-addled trash, there have been some spectacular successes in the last few years. BG3, Factorio, Disco Elysium, RDR2, Rimworld, Sekiro, Stellaris, Crusader Kings 2 & 3, Doom 2016 and Eternal, etc.. Nintendo also producing some of their best work on the Switch (Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, Mario Odyssey).

I generally agree with BurdensomeCount, but I don't think he's trying to say there is literally nothing made after 2012 or 2016 that is worth your time. It's just that so much of it isn't, that the juice isn't worth the squeeze attempting to sift through it. Especially when you can just pick virtually anything that was considered "good" prior to 2012 and not find it offensively ideological. Compared to today where even the "good" games are often full of marxist or gender ideological talking points in degrees from "I can roll my eyes at this and get on with my day" to "My Disappointment Is Immeasurable And My Day Is Ruined".

My intuition is that films and TV have dropped off a lot more in the last 8 years than videogames, with some incredibly vivid and memorable successes very recently. While the Sweetbaby stuff has definitely tainted a lot of AAA games, the kind of games most affected are those that were mass-market slop anyway. I can’t think of many titles where it’s true to say “this would be great were it not for the DEI nonsense”.

Well, like I said, depends what your threshold for bullshit is. I'm so fucking exhausted by it, I nope out the moment I see "Body Type" instead of male or female, or if a game lets you pick your pronouns. Is that petty? Perhaps. Am I missing out on otherwise good games? Once again, perhaps. I just fucking can't anymore. I'm tired. And yet those are increasingly standard features across AAA and indie games. Even a lot of those Switch games being held up as standout titles in a world of AAA slop are getting that nonsense.

I'll be frank, this does look like deliberately seeking to be offended by woke, given that phrasing "male/female" as "body type" is about one of the least intrusive things ever. Are you "exhausted", or are you hypersensitive?

This is just the "what does it matter to you that we support Basic Human Decency, seems like you're the problem" gaslighting trick everyone's seen a billion times. It's manipulative and vile, and weird to keep using on someone who's immune to it.

What do you have against basic human decency? What it looks like is exactly the same as wokes getting triggered by a nonmixed heterosexual family because it's a dogwhistle for fascist racism or something.

And if I were, in fact, aiming to manipulate, it's not like I would be cowed by you declaring that you're immune to my manipulations.

  • -21

Yes, that's the party line I'm talking about, thank you. It's an effective consensus enforcer, I'll give it that.

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