domain:vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com
TitaniumButterfly
7m ago
Crazy like a fox. 🦊
sodiummuffin
17m ago
And as we're seeing in the latter case with the crackdowns in Steam and itch.io, these tools are available to non-wokes too.
That seems to have been a response to an open-letter and phone campaign by Australian feminist nonprofit Collective Shout to payment processors a week before it happened.
Open letter to payment processors profiting from rape, incest + child abuse games on Steam
These games endorsing men’s sexualised abuse and torture of women and girls fly in the face of efforts to address violence against women. We do not see how facilitating payment transactions and deriving financial benefit from these violent and unethical games, is consistent with your corporate values and mission statements.
We request that you demonstrate corporate social responsibility and immediately cease processing payments on Steam and Itch.io and any other platforms hosting similar games.
Now, what makes this case unusual is that instead of their fellow SJWs rallying to support them the cascade went the other direction, with many of them insisting that Collective Shout are fake feminists or whatever. (Though the Online Hate Prevention Institute, having worked with them in the past, still sided with them and said their critics were the new Gamergate.) You can go to places like /r/GirlGamers, which previously was campaigning to get No Mercy banned by urging people to sign Collective Shout's petition and copy Collective Shout's email template, and now people think it's a "heavily conservative group...under the pretense of feminism". Factors that presumably contributed to this include that a co-founder of Collective Shout is pro-life, the censorship happened to get some bad press in left-wing spaces early on, and due to this there was rumors going around that "LGBT content" was being targeted. Also the fact that it was a big enough news story for a lot of more moderate SJW-positive people to hear about it, not just the hardcore.
Now that doesn't mean it can't lead to some changed opinions about censorship. Despite how frustrating the dishonest and self-serving narratives about it are, people's opinions on the subject are presumably generally sincere. But it does seem important that this is payment processors continuing to listen to the same sort of arguments they've been listening to for years as they censored various (mostly Japanese) storefronts, not suddenly listening to "non-wokes". Also it's hard to guess what percentage of people objecting are just going the way the winds are currently blowing in their ideological environment, and will flip back without acknowledging any contradiction if circumstances are a bit different. Hopefully it'll stick at least somewhat, among the less-ideological gamers if nothing else.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
20m ago
mocking
I mean that as non-confrontationally as possible, as good faith as possible: you might want examine your biases if you take my literal statement of (...) as laughing at anyone.
Take it easy, you seem to be taking is as much more charged than it actually was. You probably should have also probably quoted more than the word "mocking", because I think "mocking the idea of" makes it clear it's ideas, rather than people. Feel free to substitute it with "downplaying" or "dismissing". I honestly don't see how you can claim you're not doing it, when you literally say that there are problem, but none of them include neo-feudalism, or replacement, because your life is good.
I've spent time with real-life Maoists and they speak in exactly the same language. Their in-group communication where they don't have to justify their priors to each other looks remarkably similar....
Cool, but I can't imagine a less productive conversation. Just entertaining your framing means I already lost, because you get to paint me however you want with no effort, and I'm the one that has to convince you that maybe're wrong.
kky
27m ago
Here’s my take from a few bosses and couple upgrades in.
Overall, the game’s pretty fun and meaningfully more difficult than the first. I feel pretty confident saying this. I 100%ed (112%) the first game deathless, and it wasn’t that hard. I’ve gone back to it a couple of times and it’s been very easy to pick back up. On my first play through I even got several bosses on my first try. Silksong is not giving me trouble on the level of, say, Sekiro, but it’s not nearly so easy.
I think there are two elements driving this. First, the enemies all have truly obnoxious amounts of health. It feels like every fight takes about 1.5 to 2x what it would in the original. IMO this is a hard miss. The original had a challenge mode for forcing boss completion with perfect or near-perfect mechanics. Extending the time to complete a boss will force perfect mechanics but honestly gets quite boring. I’ve so far found it pretty straightforward to learn mechanics and perform for a few minutes, but it’s not the best experience.
The second part is that the movement in the game is way messier than the first. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The first game had exceptionally clean movement, which made it a tactile delight to play. Silksong’s movement is comparatively weird. My hands are well practiced in Hollow Knight movement, and I have a hard time adjusting to the different down attack movement. This is one change of many. So some of this challenge is just a learning curve. Back to Sekiro, I had to eat dirt at the first actual boss for something like an hour to get the main mechanics under control. That’s table stakes. I also suspect that using the non-basic attack options (“tools”) is much more important than in most games in the genre, but a serious miss here is that the degree of their importance is not obvious from menus… This means that the player is not quite encouraged to experiment. For all of these I expect that the game will shake out over time, and I do like the systems even if they do not come naturally.
Last thought. The areas of the game so far have been lackluster. Hollow Knight made it very clear how the pieces tied together into a unified whole. The starting area is literally a crossroads suggesting what was once present in that land. In Silksong you start in an iron foundry that is apparently still active. I don’t know what to make of that except that the devs wanted both a lava level and red ants, which I believe got cut from Hollow Knight. If this game is eight years in the making for cutting-room floor scraps from the original it leaves much to be desired. But I’ll wait on that judgment.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
55m ago
Why not? Speech is fundamental for political coordination under any system, but especially in a democracy. You can sneer and call it "not being able to say nigger", but you know it's not limited to it, and that the point is disenfranchisement.
SubstackNecron
1hr ago
Do you think not being able to say nigger or keep black people out of your dad's car dealership is equivalent to being a woman in the 1890s in terms of rights lost? I am going to be honest, I really don't think that you do.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
I agree with SSCReader. You had the Cass Review, the puberty blocker ban, and the "trans women aren't women" ruling. Sure, the British police is committed to be a dystopian nightmare no matter the subject, but the UK has outright led the way worldwide in poring a bucket of cold water on the trans thing. Plus like I said, in this case, I'm pretty sure the overreach is going to cost them.
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
1hr ago
Assuming Trump’s still alive and functional enough to exert the at least the same level of pressure on GOP Congress-critters that he can currently… I’d be willing to wager $100 (probably the limit on how much I’m willing to drop on this kind of bet) that either some kind of bill along those lines gets proposed, passes committee, and goes to a floor vote in at least one chamber… Or that SCOTUS effectively overturns the 22nd Amendment first, and makes it a moot point (I’m skeptical that’d be the first line of attack, but IDK).
———
[Granted, I’m predicating the above scenario on the assumption that the GOP will probably have a roughly similar narrow majority in Congress, so on the {IMO unlikely} chance they get utterly shellacked in the midterms, I guess that could affect the odds… But IDK in which direction, a rump GOP Congress might decide Trump’s past his expiration date and try to turn on him… Or they could double-down on supporting him and support the bill knowing it won’t pass so they can claim “they tried”. Hard to say.]
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
Liberia never colonized at all
Uh, Liberia was a settler colony.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
But, really, do you actually think, prosaically, that's what 1890 was like?
no, but he often gives the impression that he thinks that's what 1890 was like, and I don't trust him to actually moderate in the heat of the moment.
I think you are right about your assessment of dysphemisms. Sometimes one needs to accept a label to stop it from having leverage on one's thinking. On the other hand, the solution to being called a monster by progressives is not actually to become a monster.
ulyssessword
1hr ago
I've put dozens of hours into Noita, but I still don't know how to resolve the tension in its game design: It both requires and punishes experimentation. If you find a mystery late in a run (whatever "late" happens to be for you, personally), then you're faced with a choice: Test it, and have a 50/50 chance of dying or learning something, or leave it alone forever. I ended up installing a resurrection mod to deal with it.
ulyssessword
1hr ago
Latest Windows 11 insanity:
Windows locks the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. An application puts some UI buttons at the bottom of its window. The app automatically resizes its window to hide the buttons behind the taskbar if you try to make it full size.
I wouldn't mind using Windows 11 if they made it a feature-complete and reliable operating system. I don't think that'll happen before they kill Windows 10.
(Fun (unverified) Fact: If you pay extra, you can get delayed access to the latest Windows features, because being on the general upgrade path is a good way to crash your computer.)
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
1hr ago
All military is relative to the competency of the belligerents. You wouldn't say that Hannibal was a incompetent loser if he was bushwhacked by a time-travelling Marine Corp Expeditionary regiment. To bring up the Ukrainians and the Russians, either side would be completely annihilated by a modern western combined-arms military in a war of maneuver, but we wouldn't say that Slavs are incompetent at war.
So who counts as 'white'?
Can non-white countries adapt 'white' ways of war?
durdenhobbes
2hr ago
I thought XP was pretty much the pinnacle of personal computing, before I switched to OSX.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2hr ago
Just got it today. I don't normally buy games when they first come out because $60 is a lot and I want to wait until they go on sale, and get enough reviews to know if it'll be worth it. But $20 for a game I'm nearly guaranteed to enjoy given how good HK is? I'm in.
Preliminary opinions are similar to yours. It feels a bit more streamlined in a way that makes it more convenient, but kind of loses some of the mystique. Same with Hornet talking instead of being a silent protagonist: it makes sense lore-wise, and might allow more options for the story to deliver, but it gives a very different feel.
It's fun to play so far though. I hope it ends up even better than HK, but even if it's slightly less good it'll still be worth the time and money.
popocatepetl
2hr ago
Could you go from person to non-person?
This is a pretty annoying leftist framing of "rights". Are children not people? Are foreigners living within another country not people? Are the mentally disabled and elderly not people?
Would you be able to live a happy life having had rights and then having them taken away from you?
Of course. Here, the example of expats above is helpful. And indeed, in practice I did experience losing freedom of speech when I was a teenager, having learned things and come to opinions that are de facto illegal in my country. The Boomers lost freedom of association in the 1960s and they managed well enough. And voting? Please. Voting is a joke. The right to vote is the right to be ruled by whoever controls the media.
SubstackNecron
2hr ago
Ok I will rephrase. Would you be able to live a happy life having had rights and then having them taken away from you? Could you go from person to non-person?
do you actually think, prosaically, that's what 1890 was like?
Would you willingly live with the rights of an 1890s woman?
Sure. Obviously in this scenario I'm transformed fully into a woman (mentally and physically, with no one including myself remembering my being a man), and all other women would have to have the same rights.
I think the sexual revolution was terrible for society. It was also pretty bad for women themselves.
jkf
2hr ago
The current position is basically that trans-women are not women with all that entails for sports, bathrooms and laws, but also don't be a dick about it, because that is not the done thing and they're still a protected group.
"... oh, and don't forget that we'll arrest you for mean-posting about them on Twitter..."
Seems like a bit of a mixed bag tbh
philosoraptor
2hr ago
Non-wokes successfully built and/or bought their own websites. Wide-spread censorship thus became impossible because the US still has strong free speech norms, so extremely strong tools like direct government censorship / DOS provider bans / payment processor bans are only used in the most exceptional cases.
And as we're seeing in the latter case with the crackdowns in Steam and itch.io, these tools are available to non-wokes too. Hopefully this is making some people - if not wokes themselves, then relatively-neutral bystanders - realize they can be used against them as well as in support of causes they like (or at least don't mind), and people are waking up, no pun intended, to how dangerous some of the authoritarian precedents that have been set in the last few years actually are.
First they came for Kiwifarms, and I did not speak out, because fuck Kiwifarms...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
Good point, I forgot about Isandlwana. I said campaign-ending when I was really thinking 'war-ending' or at least something more decisive, like how the Singapore attack was a decisive blow against Britain in the Far East but not sufficient to knock them out of the war...
yestrusocialist
2hr ago
Ali is not uncommon in the US, and doesn't have any Islamic connotation Every single one I've met is a much less hot version of her:
SubstackNecron
2hr ago
You can only say "I want to reduce people to chattel I can rape at will and kill other people" for so many decades nonstop before I believe you. I am fairly certain he is serious in his political aims and objectives I have no reason to give him any charity at all as he has never given any other group any at all.
do you actually think, prosaically, that's what 1890 was like?
Would you willingly live with the rights of an 1890s woman?
Iamme
2hr ago
I’m playing and enjoying. My experience so far is that the game is hard, but not much harder than I remember HK being at first. I’m taking things slow, not letting myself get too worked up about setbacks (like repeatedly dying because of combat or platforming mistakes), and having a great time.
The death of woke has been claimed many times. I'm not convinced.
I'm still afraid to admit to being centrist, maybe slightly right thereof, in social settings and certainly in work ones. My close friends know, but I'd never casually admit to even a lack of antipathy for Trump in front of new people. And that's all as someone in many ways immune to censorship - I'm relatively old and well established, take me or leave me.
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