axont [she/her, comrade/them]

I got faith

Of the heaaart

There need to be more educational videos games that are actually fun and educational

My dream for a Disco Elysium sequel would be set centuries in the future and the events in Revachol are only flavor text in a book somewhere. I like sequels that do stuff like that.

The Siren series has a mechanic where you see what the enemies are seeing. There’s also a section of Driver: San Francisco where you’re being chased and it’s from the perspective of the person chasing you. That’s the closest I’ve ever seen.

I probably wouldn’t want this game to actually exist, but it’s been stuck in my head for years so here goes. I described this one a while ago. A friend of mine was on mushrooms once and described a first person WW1 game where you’re an Austro-Hungarian courier running across battlefields. There would be parkour, time management, stealth, stuff like that. Sneaking through trenches and whatever. At first the missions go ok, easy enough. But then you’re given more complex missions that waste your time, or are foolishly planned.

Your character begins mumbling under their breath about how the generals are doing everything wrong, the war is lost. Your character becomes more deranged as the missions become more fruitless. Eventually your guy will start screaming deranged conspiracies and wild racist shit. There would be a mechanic where you start to need amphetamines to function.

Then in the last mission you catch sight of your reflection in a puddle and you’ve been playing as Hitler this whole time.

I prefer gender neutral terms, please. I’m nonbinary

Greatest day of my life

If I had a jack off hand motion emoji I would post it but you’ll have to settle for me simply saying you sound up your own ass

Do you live somewhere where voting for Democrats even matters?

This is something I’m needlessly pedantic about. Democracy and republic mean roughly the same thing under most definitions. Republic tends to mean a country that’s not a monarchy, and democracy tends to mean a place with public input. Nearly every country on Earth outside of absolute monarchies (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Eswatini,etc) is some kind of republic with some level of public input into policy. Everything’s a democratic republic.

American Republicans get all bent up about trying to explain how they’re structurally different than Democrats even though they’re largely two wings of the same bourgeois party

Yeah the world still operates on a capitalist framework and China buys and sells things on a global market. Unless China is carving borders, installing puppet leaders, making aggressive demands for how another nation’s government should operate, forcibly moving people in other nations, using agencies like the IMF or World Bank to squeeze money out of national funds, demanding austerity, or creating a vassal state, unless China is doing a single one of those things it’s entirely dramatic to say they’re colonizing. Buying and selling things for cheap is what commerce is. Is it unfair China has a lot of money to use for trade? Is having more money in a trade agreement itself an act of colonization or what?

It’s especially dramatic compared to the CIA, which has done multiple coups in Bolivia in the name of oil. You’re comparing a country buying lithium on terms set by Bolivia to a country funding a military revolt directed by Gulf Oil.

Yes destruction of natural resources is regrettable and hopefully we can reach a position where there’s no longer a need to get involved in a destructive global market. Honestly the market I’d criticize China the most for is how they never boycotted Israel, and in fact have sold guns/artillery to the IDF. They also sell guns to both sides of the Kashmir conflict. You’d have a much better case to claim China is colonizing Palestine than anywhere in Latin America.

Pretending to be communists for 3 years and thousands of comments as high concept performance art

In fact we’re so dedicated to this joke we read Marx and Engels and joined socialist organizations

China doing commerce in your country isn’t colonization, don’t be dramatic. I have no idea where you’re from, but I know a Bolivian person who also complains that China is conquering their country, which is absolutely ludicrous compared to what the CIA did to Bolivia.

Marx talks about most of what you just mentioned in the first chapter of Capital. Socially productive labor transforming nature is the source of value in any society. He also mentions rarity as a source of value, like I remember him specifically mentioning pearls as an example a few times.

He included machinery and technology as what he called “constant capital,” and the labor is the variable capital. To say Marx didn’t consider technology would suggest he was unaware of what a factory was and that he didn’t observe the industrial revolution as it was happening. He was born in 1818. He watched Germany in his childhood go from empty fields full of peasants to factories, railroads, and telegraph lines in his adulthood. You know what made that technology possible? Labor? And who operates that technology? Laborers. This is all cooked into his work.

I’d also like to point you over to the Grundrisse, the chapter called Fragment on Machines, where Marx even speculates on if machinery were all fully automated, saying laborers could move aside from production and just become just “watchmen.” This part is good:

“Capital itself is the moving contradiction, in that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as the sole measure and source of wealth […] On the one side […] it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature […] to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it […] On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created”

He’s saying capitalism would have a hard tike reducing labor time to zero through technological advancement, since it would defeat the concept of value itself. In simple terms, how would you even price anything if there was no labor cost involved? How would a capitalist sell their product or assign value to it? Who would they sell it to?

Sometimes yeah it’s frustrating reading it because some parts assume cultural familiarity with very ancient names or places. I think I remember in the book of Genesis an ancient military leader is named and it’s said he did some kind of trick to capture a town, but it doesn’t explain what he did or why.

Storytelling has gone through a lot of development over the centuries

I never had an easy time imagining a future for myself and I never had realistic goals. When I was a kid I wanted to be a Ghostbuster, then a power ranger. Then I think I disassociated for a long time, briefly got the idea to be a programmer in college, but that didn’t work out since I was no good at it. Then I randomly had the idea to study genetics, which also didn’t work out. I changed majors eight times in college.

Won’t say what I do now so I don’t get doxxed, but it’s not exciting and it’s a dead end job. I still don’t know what I want, but maybe that’s a good thing. I make music though so that’s kind of neat.

Others have said it already, but anti-intellectualism at its core is alienation. It’s a lack of trust in academic or professional authorities and substituting that trust for either ones own experiences or complete hallucinations. People will find alternative communities to trust, especially if they can find something that verifies their existing biases.

If you sense something’s wrong with the world, but lack an ability to pinpoint it, you’ll go to whoever seems most immediately relatable to you. Reactionaries like Qanon people ended up in that situation. They no longer trust authorities on information outside of cranks on Facebook.

So the question is how do you get more people to adopt a consensus of reality that’s based on expertise, professional research, investigation, etc? You have to convince more people they’re part of that process and that experts share their interests. America has had that before, but usually in times of conflict against a foreign enemy. The average American used to be really into space travel tech for instance.

There was also a period around the 1890s where the average American was really into electricity as a hobby, like making little circuits or trinkets. It was considered pretty normal back then to have an understanding of how simple circuits like a doorbell worked.

those games are amazing. Monolith was a really good studio before Warner Bros gutted them. Problem with the NOLF games getting a reboot/remake is the rights are split between Fox, Vivendi, and Activision. It’s a complete mess and I doubt it’ll ever happen sadly

There was a reboot attempted by Starbreeze in 2012 but it was a bog-standard FPS that wasn’t up to the quality they normally make. It’s been dead silence since.

There are some games you might enjoy that are similar to Syndicate. Tokyo 42, Satellite Reign, Brigador, and this cute little free indie game called DataJack.

Oni would be great, problem is the rights to it are split between like five different studios and it’s effectively abandoned. It’s why it’s not on GOG, Steam, etc.

It also wouldn’t surprise me if the source code has been completely lost, meaning there’s no chance of an HD upscale or anything.