SM47

I still want a game that marries awesome open world space sim trading/mining/piracy/bounty hunting with a rock solid FPS component aboard ships/stations and down on planets. There's been significant steps taken toward that destination but we're not quite there.

He's using decommunization in reference to Lenin and the Bolsheviks creating Ukraine as an independent entity in 1917. He's therefore 'decommunizing' Ukraine by canceling the process of sovereignty he sees as being begun by the Bolsheviks, which he believes never should have happened as Ukraine belongs to Russia. Whether or not he's used the phrase 'denazification' is irrelevant to what I posted.

Er no, he used the phrase decommunization February last year, it's quoted in this article https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/22/putin-speech-analysis-ukraine-russia/

The videogame industry is riddled with all sorts of dodgy money from the military industrial complex, the Pentagon, you name it. So is global capitalism in general. The only way to address it is to destroy capitalism itself. Boycotting Atomic Heart is like sidestepping a pile of dog excrement only to leap headlong into an Olympic sized swimming pool of it. It's just performative liberalism. I find my enthusiasm for it ebbing away pretty quickly whenever I scrutinise it closely, maybe you feel different. That's ok

Watching bad shit just to dunk on it is one of the great joys of life. Second only to watching bad shit with people who like it just to dunk on it. Seeing their little faces contorted with rage. No Auntie Hilda, Happy Valley is absolute fucking dogshit.

Why, because he doesn't like it? People are allowed to not like stuff. Watching something you don't enjoy isn't necessarily time wasted, criticism of art exists and the world is a better place for it. I personally really enjoy reading different people's varying takes of tv shows on rllmuk.

Meh, much of that video is barrel scraping really. He hasn't played the game and he accuses it of glorifying the USSR and communism. If it's glorifying communism then Putin won't like it as he referred to the invasion of Ukraine as decommunisation, that Ukraine was essentially created due to the machinations of Lenin and the Bolsheviks and is therefore invalid. Maybe he's correct that it does glorify problematic qualities of the USSR, I haven't played it either. It doesn't look all that glorious with all the insane robots and people being brutally killed alongside Soviet iconography. It's like saying Bioshock idealises Neoliberalism because it's set in one fictional character's vision of a Laissez Faire utopia. Yeah but its full of mental people who have been driven murderously insane by superpower tonics. I don't remember that bit from the wikipedia synopsis of Atlas Shrugged I skimmed 20 years ago He's Ukranian so he'll obviously, arguably understandably, hate it, considering his country is currently at war with Russia causing much unnecessary suffering and death among the civilian population, likely affecting his daily life and the daily lives of his family and friends. He's like the Minister Of Culture who appealed to westerners to stop listening to Tchaikovsky a few months ago. It's regrettable that money we spend goes towards a class of people who actively engage in the perpetuation of human misery but that's not just Atomic Heart. That's consumption under capitalism. Only replacing capitalism with an economic system that doesn't revolve around private ownership of the means of production will stop this, not boycotting this individual videogame. I do think people are extremely eager to buy into the whole ethical consumption thing because they're so robbed of agency in other parts of their lives. Sadly I just think it's a case of the commodity contemplating itself, neoliberalism internalizing social conscience and protest until it becomes just another identity for sale on the market. He also seems to be labouring under the delusion that the developers of Disco Elysium are asserting that the Revacholian Revolution was "bad" because it depicts the partial ruination of Martinaise after the siege. Again, this is obviously a cultural reading of the situation rather than a literary one. The defeat of the Commune is treated with immense sadness in DE, the writer of that particular game is pretty obviously sympathetic to transformative social politics and revolutionism. That game is probably much more guilty of glorifying communism than anything I've seen so far in Atomic Heart's trailers

I love this show, finished off series 5 this week. The Walter Mosley-penned wedding episode was a stunner. So many good characters. Damson Idris is excellent as Franklin. I was blown away to discover he's from the UK, the accent is absolutely flawless. If not for somebody telling me, I would never have suspected. Can't wait until the final series starts next month, it's a shame it's never quite taken off on rllmuk, the forum doesn't seem to take to FX dramas as much. This, The Americans and Justified are three excellent FX dramas that never (to my limited knowledge) got the following they deserved on here. Sad shame. Never too late of course

Isn't it just people buying into the neoliberal myth of moral consumer agency and marrying it with twitter blue tick tedium in order to create a heady cocktail of extremely online performative cringe? American tax dollars go toward all kinds of nefarious shit that's every bit the moral equal of Putin's invasion. I read some previews of this that have dampened my enthusiasm anyway so will await reviews, but next you'll be telling me to smash up my large and formidable collection of SodaStreams because they're manufactured in Israel. Not gonna happen, my family's basic quality of life necessitates the round the clock availability of custom beverage carbonation

Another excellent episode Just give the Gilroys Star Wars. Let them do whatever they like with it.

This is so good.

This is currently free on the Epic Games Store

Hyped for the steam release, the new tileset looks absolutely amazing.

I bought it but have only given it an hour. It seems very interesting, definitely one that I'll likely keep restarting until I understand how to play. According to online chatter, it takes 7 or 8 hours of Earth shenanigans before you get to dick around in space. The political simulation of Earth and the different factions feels like a fun sandbox to mess around in though. Although still very early doors as I've yet to get particularly far.

DITWH is proto psychedelic in its own way, the protagonist having 4th dimensional visions and such. Hope they lean into that

I'm looking forward to this, I haven't really rated the last few things he's made too highly but still enjoy watching the films themselves. There's nobody quite like old AC is there. The fact he's not doing a voiceover for this makes me think he might be trying to shake things up a bit.

Anyone following this Egon thang? https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/news/mf-dooms-widow-says-rappers-rhyme-books-were-stolen-by-now-again-records-founder Surely DOOM had loads of rhyme books scattered about. Did Egon take all of them?

I would have liked to have seen a bit more of Gary Crabs. He seemed a bit underutilised. Maybe a bit of exposition about why he was so into crabs would have been cool

Someone else is bound to pick this up if they pass. Don't worry about it

Surely you can't describe 6 months as being a particularly long time. I'd rather they work out the bugs than have a Cyberpunk style release debacle on their hands.

Overwhelmingly positive reviews on schteam. Content seems a bit thin on ye olde ground RN though, I'll 100% be scooping it when it's got a bit more meat on its bones.

I didn't play it myself, but it was pretty popular. Just seems interesting to me that a decade ago people were willing to give a game the benefit of the doubt based on gameplay but today people are the opposite. Taking a look at the thread from 2009, there is a fair amount of discussion about Card's abhorrent views, and I spotted this spooky corker:

Didn't loads of people on here rate Shadow Complex, a Metroidvania based on the writings of Orson Scott Card, a bloke who makes JK Rowling look like a rational, well adjusted egalitarian by comparison?

Looks excellent

Did anyone else think, at first