Ugh, so true. The insidious nature of Steam is the fact that they’re basically a PC gaming business monopoly, but they’re benign compared to other corporations, so gamers tend to turn a blind eye to that fact, or find various grasping ways to convince themselves otherwise (there’s still Epic and GOG! etc). The fact that 80%+ of PC game sales are through Steam doesn’t seem to faze or disturb them, when it most definitely should. What happens when Steam drops the facade? I imagine it won’t be long before Steam turns into the badguy.

Do what? Remind me of the babe

In 2001, at 16 years old, I snagged a brand new Dreamcast with five or six games for dirt cheap from a local game store. The DC had already been discontinued at that point, the PS2 was about to launch or just did, and retailers were just offloading the Dreamcast merch. Shenmue was one of those games, and was the game I ended up spending the most time with. There really just wasn’t anything like it, it was this epic action story of loss and revenge with this sprawling open world with all kinds of sidequests, mini-games and interesting NPCs to explore. The most painful thing for me at the time was the damn cliffhanger at the end, and I never ended up getting a chance to play Shenmue 2 (I think it only made it’s way stateside on Xbox). It was definitely a memorable, once-in-a-lifetime experience. There were flaws, to be sure, but they were easily overlooked due to the expansive, ambitious nature of the game.

When big Tech, especially the biggest video platform in the world, does something lile this it is relevant to tech. The better question is, if you do support lgbtq+ people, why the public freakout about mentioning a far reaching tech policy, by one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) tech companies against them on a tech sub?

nazis and fascists, without ever knowing what those words even mean

I am Jack’s complete lack of self awareness

Sure, if your issue is that it’s okay for corporations to remove protections for hate speech towards marginalized groups, then yes, go get bent. This kind of false equivalence between normalizing hate and ostraciszing progressives for speaking out against oppression is EXACTLY what we’re fighting against. What in the hell is the ‘rhetoric’ do you disagree with? Have empathy for lgbtq+ people? Jesus. If so, this is definitely not the place for you.

Wow. There’s a huge disparity between the brows on those two. No matter how blurry the first pics are, the thickness of Luigi’s brows would be noticeable. The person in that camera footage definitely doesn’t have thick eyebrows like Luigi :/

That’s my point, you can break your own record, but the media and public will be desensitized to it after the first time, sadly most people will tune out after the novelty has passed.

I’m not disparaging him, as much as I am calling into question the timing of it. Any pushback at all is welcome, but it just seems to me to be poorly timed in terms of effectiveness.

I guess we’ll see what kind of effect this has afterwards and if it has a positive outcome.

I didn’t say one did preclude the other. My point is that if you’re going to do something historic that, by it’s unusual and uncommon nature, gets you more attention then usual, why wouldn’t you use that gesture to BOTH protest, and filibuster a bill that will put more attention on the bill because of the historic nature of the filibuster?

And yes, by all means, continue to filibuster and stymie the admin’s progress by filibustering whenever possible. However, the American public are notoriously short of attention, especially when something has already been done before, that subsequent filibusters won’t have the same impact as the original, especially when you have outlets like Fox that can just spin it towards being not worth notice because “same old shit by the dems”. People will eventually tune out, and the opportunity to really amp up the pressure on the Republicans will be lost.

But why not wait to filibuster an actual policy as both a protest against the admin itself, and to call attention to, and spark outcry, about the policy? It still seems like a waste to not time this type of once in a lifetime event with a particular action by the admin. I feel like if he’s going to do something like this, especially something historic which will get people paying attention, why not use all that attention to it’s maximum potential. The garbage is still going to be pushed through eventually, but if he were doing it at the moment that a garbage policy was being pushed through it would call much more attention to it and create more pushback from people.

I’d argue no. I’m kind of confused. I guess it’s a prolonged speech protesting the actions in of the admin in general? I somewhat applaud the push back by any member of congress, but I feel like it’s a wasted gesture if it isn’t specifically filibustering an important bill. This just seems like a publicity stunt rather than a meaningful action of resistance.

Kafka did, but after that I’ve had trouble getting over that default setting time and time again. I still have Sputnik from the library, so I might push ahead and see if it lures me in, but I’m still annoyed by the repetitive use of the same motifs.

I can understand the occasional reference, or encounter with a character who has those qualities. But almost every book with every main or supporting character gets to be ridiculous. “Meet Amami Tutsudo, she’s the owner of the local bakery known for her undying love for Chopin, her mind soars with his transcendent movements, which she plays while baking her acclaimed loaves of bread.”

Not surprising at all. He has the vibe of a 8 year old telling me,“by the way, did I ever tell you about how much I love MINECRAFT!,” over and over again. I suppose the thing that gets me is that I’ve never seen an author inject a personal interest in something in their work to this degree. I’ve read a few authors where you can kind of get a feel for certain things they like, but they usually aren’t so obvious and overt about putting those interests on blast. It’s just jarring to me.

I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that independent comic creators are spread out over multiple publishing companies and not just a few independent imprints. You have Drawn and Quarterly, Fantagraphics and a whole host of others that publish smaller, indie graphic novels. There are also a lot of traditional book publishers that publish graphic novels now too. There’s a lot out there, but it’s not under any one umbrella like it was back in the 80s/90s.

Oh, I didn’t realize they’d revisited the gag. Thanks for the head’s up.

It’s this rhetoric that plays perfectly into the class divide that the corporate asshats want everyone to fall for. “It’s your fault for not voting for the other corporate shill party!” Disregarding the fact that the main difference is one party is just mask off, and the other is mask on fascist. As many people rightly point out, the dems are controlled opposition. If they weren’t there would literally have been much more fight and pushback from them for the four years before Trump 2.0 (especially since they knew it was coming faaar in advance) rather then the milquetoast response we got from them, this was made quite obvious by the dems moving right in many policies and stumping with Cheney of all people. If these people really gave a shit about appealing to their constituents, they would’ve listened to the damn voters. This is all beside the point as modern American voting IS NOT determined by the voting public, but much more powerful interests. If you really believed your vote was effecting something in this, or any other election in the past 20+ years, I have a bridge to sell you in the Sahara.

That episode is commonly misunderstood. I too had always thought they were lampooning climate change deniers, but Matt and Trey were actually poking fun of Al Gore and An Inconvient Truth as alarmist. They’ve since apologized for the episode, but it’s wild that it’s so often confused for satirizing the very thing it was mocking. For me I just assumed that Matt and Trey wouldn’t be deniers so it never occured to me until I found out their true intention and now it’s pretty cringy to watch that episode since it’s a lot more obvious. Here’s an article about it:

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a25127458/south-park-climate-change-manbearpig-apology-season-22-episode-7/

Just finely crush about a half a bag of salt and vinegar chips and then toss 'em in

Interesting, however sitcoms in general really aren’t my cup of tea as well. It was mentioned in other places that Roseanne was one of the few shows to depict working class life somewhat accurately, and with some dignity. A lot of the time the working class is shown in a shallow, stereotypical depiction of what upper-class people imagine it’s like.

Yes! Kids shows are particularly egregious about this. All the kids shows are about rich kids and their rich parents. That’s not to say that kids shows need to explicitly put the problems of class society front and center (although, some small discussion of class and social relations would be nice) but consistently showing kids living out these hyper-capitalist consumerist fantasies is pretty cringe-worthy.

Exactly. The thing that repulses me the most is the fake-y, artificial looking life that is so often represented in entertainment, and then that is what is spun as “normal”. Which I imagine is why these upper-class people even in real life look like the shallow Stepford Wives aesthetic that the movies and tv depict them as, life depicting art it seems.

In my initial short searches I did earlier, Antonio Gramsci comes up as addressing the issue of “cultural hegemony”, where art and entertainment tends to represent the dominant bourgeois culture, which makes a lot of sense. I’ve heard of Gramsci in passing, but haven’t read anything by him yet. I think it’s a good place to begin regarding a critical analysis.

Although, even without a thorough critical analysis, it’s pretty straightforward to realize that the economic barrier for art, entertainment and creating media in general leads to an over-representation of the wealthy since they have the money and means to create and distribute media to the masses, which in turn consolidates their dominance of the popular narrative.

What’s particularly sad about this, is that people that grow up working-class are absorbing messages from media that marginalize their narrative, and cause them to internalize a narrative that leads them to being oblivious towards their class standing and even hostile towards it. The whole “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” concept that causes people to denigrate the poor and working class, even if they themselves are a part of it.