No game has ever affected me as much as Outer Wilds. Out of every life changing piece of art I've ever experienced, whether it be film, television, music, literature, or videogames, this is the first and only time I've ever gotten chills by the end.

The story isn't super deep and it isn't necessarily profound -- it's not really a belief-changer, outside of, perhaps, your idea of what a videogame is -- but the experience itself is beautiful and rewarding and I'm not sure it can be recaptured.

I got an OLED the other day and splurged hard during the summer sale.

I got Stray and Little Kitty, Big City to show off to my cat-loving GF, and for me I got Dave the Diver, Sifu, and Babu is You. Also picked up Hollow Knight for good measure, but have yet to start it. 9 Sols, Mullet Madjack, Warhammer Boltgun, Baldurs Gate 3, and Return of the Obra Dinn all on my wishlist.

I pointed out the two things a knew about Jill Stein and asked for elaboration, and you're making it out as if I knew several things about her and am just trying to incite a thrashing response.

I'm just trying to engage in regular conversation, there's no need for you to try to make me feel stupid -- I'm already coming from a place of ignorance. But hey, if it makes you feel better about yourself and your knowledgeable position, patronize away.

What does Jill Stein do?

I'm not sure, that's why I was asking the individual to elaborate. Thanks.

Booyeah, preciate it

Their campaigns are undeniably good for Trump, but I don't think that makes them Trump allies. Besides Jill Stein attending the same dinner as Putin, and accusing the west of encircling Russia, mind elaborating your view of her being a Russian asset?

Edit: Hey all you down voters, how do you expect to get your point across when actually curious people ask simple goddamn questions about your position and you act like they just slapped your mom

I discovered Mastodon the night the Wagner group started marching toward Moscow, and was seeing live updates. From telegram or something. That was crazy.

When are we going to protest. This is insanity.

Here is an excerpt from the dissent:

Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214, 246 (1944) (Jackson, J., dissenting). The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in ex- change for a pardon Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.

Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.

Thanks, I'll check out strange horticulture. I'm looking for arthouse games in a sense. Outer Wilds completely changed me, for example, and I want to try to recreate that feeling, but I don't want an Outer Wilds clone, like how Lords of the Fallen is to Dark Souls.

I want something that's going to destroy me and make me think, or just be ultra fun and different from anything else I've played.

Star Wars, DC, Marvel, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Jurassic whatever, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, Godzilla, Halo, Gears of War, Batman: Arkham and every other nostalgia-driven cinematic/televised/videogame franchise relies on shitgobblers. Shitgobblers just keep gobbling.

It took me a bunch of tries, too. It's not really a "fun" game, more like a visual and interactive novel. Once I got the hang of the dice rolls being the biggest part of the game, and knowing/remembering where to seek them out, and getting used to the map, it became easy to pick up and put back down. It's amazing, but not easy to get going.

My OLED is coming in today, so hyped. Will definitely help with the commute. First off is finishing up Disco Elysium, then maybe playing Edith Finch? Anyone have any other recs? Besides Hades 1, I guess.

True, but that just isn't a maintainable party platform. There may be denial and violence in the short term, but at that point I think the Trumpian wing of the Republican party is in its death throes and is doomed.

I'm not so sure. While I don't necessarily have a positive outlook on the future of American politics, I think the Democratic party is in a really good spot at the moment. The Republican party is completely beholden to one person right now. They are in a very, very bad spot re: extremism in their party. It's essentially their party platform. We're seeing the ramifications in the House, now. Their party is in disarray and is proving they can't manage to even govern themselves. Meanwhile, Democrats are capitalizing on that disarray by consolidating around abortion access, protecting democratic institutions, and willingness to actually get things done. We can see this in the immigration reform bill that Trump nuked -- that was set to be a huge policy win for conservatives and Democrats were willing to push it through.

If Trump loses this election, where does the Republican party have to go? They can't just conjure up another personality like Trump -- I think DeSantis proved that. They've alienated their moderate voters in favor of bigotry and disruption of the institutions they grew up with and helped maintain. Either they're going to have to revert to establishment, pre-Trump conservatism or double down on his insanity, further alienating the moderate Republicans. And where would those moderates go besides the Democratic party, which, while sure, is supportive of gender-affirming care (a knock for them), at least they are still willing to uphold capitalistic, business-centric values (or in other words, socialism for me, not for thee).

If Trump wins, then the Democratic party is still gonna be around and having a field day with all the issues he causes (see: Dobbs ruling). I dunno this may be a hot take but I could see the Republican party crumbling, and Democrats splitting into left and right camps. Maybe someone can check me, because the more I think about it the more I see Republicans as a fringe extremist group and Democrats as capitalists, and then me over here thinking to myself, "How could we seize collective ownership of Amazon and Google's computers?" lol

Glad he did an episode on this. People need an accessible and digestible way of understanding the threat of Project 2025.

Yeah, neoliberals are destroying the left, but I'll take them over an authoritarian theocracy.

I get what you're saying, but I'm not certain the Iranian drone attack would have even happened if Israel hadn't been engaged in the raising of Gaza with US backing.

I mean, Israel bombed an Iranian embassy two weeks before that occurred.

I'm in somewhat agreement with you. On the one hand, there are innocent Israelis who need to be protected (here, I don't necessarily buy the nuclear risk, tbh. Continued US protection is more about prevention of civilian casualties, to me ). On the other, our continued support further emboldens Israel to keep fucking shit up over there, so of course they're going to experience aggression from their neighbors.

Unfortunately this starts getting into a game of who-shot-first, which is a bad state to be in.

If anything, all this is a win-win for the "defense" industry.

Edit: also, for the record, and in the context of this thread, even though I'd argue against continued US military support of Israel, and that Biden hasn't been forceful enough on that issue, and that Democrats in general are too comfortable with the status quo regarding free market capitalism for individuals and socialism for the corporations, and that many of them serve their own interests or those of corporations, you still gotta vote for Biden this election, especially if you're in a swing state. The two parties are not the same, even if they do both suck. The degrees of suckage are not equal.

Guess I just don't see the flattening of Gaza and displacement of more than 1 million Palestinian civilians as Israel "fighting for it's survival," nor do I see an immediate cessation of sending US bombs to Israel as leaving them in the dust.

Are you saying that if the US stops sending Israel weapons, they will likely start a nuclear war? Bruh

The top comment on this thread contains a conversation (argument) about Chomsky's view on the term "genocide," as well as his verbiage discussing Serbian-run concentration camps.

I listened to Understanding Power fairly recently and it definitely changed my outlook and broke me out of the lull of neoliberal self-satisfaction, and helped introduce me to other leftist writers. So I'm a fan of Chomsky's, but it doesn't sound like he had that good of a take on the Bosnian genocide. He seems to only reserve the word genocide for the Holocaust so as to keep its significance, and despite supporting a UN fact-finding commission that did find Serbia was running concentration camps, he refers to said camps as "refugee camps," instead, and seems to infer people had the freedom to stay or leave as they please (even if this was technically true, I doubt it was practically true).

So, not a good look for him, even though he had other viewpoints that I've been strongly influenced by.

Have you happened to read the book? He has a chapter dedicated to his decision to call it technofeudalism rather than capitalism, hypercapitalism, technocapitalism, etc. Basically he's saying profits have been decoupled from a company's value, and that it's no longer about creating a product to exchange for profit (which, in his words, are beholden to market competition) but instead about extracting rent (which is not beholden to competition -- his example is while a landowner's neighbors increase the values of their properties, the landowner's property value also increases).

Anyways he describes Amazon, Apple store, Google Play, cloud service providers, as fiefdoms that collect rent from actual producers of products (physical goods, but also applications), and don't actually produce anything, themselves, besides access to customers, while also extracting value from users of their technologies through personal information. They're effectively leasing consumer attention in the same way landowners leased their lands to workers.

It sounds pretty accurate to me, but I haven't had much time to chew on it. What's your take on that idea?