eupraxia

what I've learned is that your average confident-looking gym rat can also still have no idea what they're doing with the equipment. Pretty much everyone needs someone to show em the ropes and get em started at least.

I could see it, yeah. I like Lemmy for a lot of reasons but it's still social media. Commenting here isn't activism and it doesn't represent the irl dynamics of leftist circles. Engagement via comments and votes are the only things shown here, there's no way to track the number of people that see a comment and think "you're maybe not wrong, but you're definitely splitting hairs..." and then move on. IRL, though, the dead air in the room would be deafening. (and could be a learning experience!)

My impression is this is primarily an issue in online spaces, without a clear goal in communication. When you meet leftists involved in a specific project, bigger-picture disagreements tend to fade away into focus and concern around a shared goal. It's a lot easier to stay focused on the things that are immediately relevant when the route to making a real impact is right in front of you.

One I haven't seen in this thread yet: the last playable bit of Bastion, if you choose to take Zulf with you. An early example of Supergiant's mastery of interactive storytelling, coming to a head with a recognition of humanity in the midst of apocalyptic war.

I won't overhype it, as others are saying it changes up a lot and there's a particular section near the end that a few people I know bounced off of. It will be a very different experience, built on the same bones, but trying to accomplish something different.

But holy shit, to me it's an improvement on an already phenomenal game, and builds on its narrative and mechanics in ways I thought were really clever. It feels like the other side of the coin from the main game and bolsters its themes from another perspective. Can't recommend it enough.

I gotta get around to the other games in the series sometime, To The Moon was incredible. It's been so long and I don't remember many specifics, but I do recall it being one of a few games that encouraged me to come to terms with mortality.

Same on both counts. TWD season 1 is absolutely masterful and got me to care for its cast incredibly quickly.

I genuinely can't believe the renegade interrupt that can happen during that scene in ME3 is in the game. I haven't gotten spoiler tags to work consistently across Lemmy so I won't say it but you know the one. One of those times where being given a choice to kneecap an incredible story moment felt really weird. Maybe other players didn't connect with him as much / had more desire to continue the genophage?

Outer Wilds got me too, for sure, and stayed in my thoughts long after I finished. The music from the slideshow at the end of the DLC still makes me well up a bit. Such an incredible game. I still think of "the universe is and we are" from one of Solanum's logs all the time.

I was raised around a lot of "patriotism" (closet nationalism) and have had to adapt the feeling now that I understand better what America actually is and has been. I found that trying to abandon the feeling altogether was making me feel cynical and alone. The parts of America that I love in fact tend to exist despite our government and dominant culture, which steals and appropriates the things I love about us and turns them into the things people know about us and dislike for good reason. I love the source materials, not the end result. As a white person born into privilege on stolen land, my existence is not entirely apart from this, but all's I can do with that is try to make something better of it.

There's a salt-of-the-earth working-class segment of this country that's getting screwed over, knows how and why they and others are getting screwed over, and has learned to survive together in spite of it. People that make families out of communities. Rail hoppers, union organizers, queer punks, the list goes on. That spirit is not unique to this country but there do exist uniquely American forms of it. I'm more proud of these people than words can express, and that's about as close to patriotic as I can feel these days.

Maybe I just like seeing our shitty protestant labor worship turned to something more productive. Maybe I just spent too much time in the mountains to not fall in love with the land itself. Or maybe I just love banjos.

for me I just... couldn't stand either of the main characters and thought the reviving-their-dead-marriage arc was really trite. I didn't believe these were people that "should" be together and around the time they dismembered that elephant (!!??) I was fully checked out.

The game was wonderful when we were actually playing, probably the most fun I've had in a coop puzzle game since Portal 2. I really wouldn't need much in the way of story to convince me to keep playing, but there were so many goddamn cutscenes! I'm glad others enjoyed it more than me, and did enjoy a lot of the gameplay, but the characters really soured me on the game eventually.

This was one of the more baffling experiences in coming out - seeing some of the most scientifically minded, media literate people I know suddenly shut off all of those instincts when they encountered "the trans debate." Like someone with a healthy amount of skepticism around statistics linking me bullshit "average number of sexual partners" figures from a conversion therapy lobbying group. Or someone with an active dislike of sports suddenly deciding that the sanctity of women's sports is more important than their relationship with their daughter.

The best explanation I've been able to come up with is that gender is regimented by complex trauma, often when we are children, and these are the types of cognitive distortions that occur when we're in fight-flight-freeze-fawn responses. Flashbacks are often thought of as vivid sensory experiences i.e. re-experiencing the traumatic event, but it's a spectrum of responses. Many are more subtle and feel extremely normal in the moment, while our ability to reason is actually overtaken by our need to feel safe in the face of a perceived threat.

I think this kind of statistics vomit can sometimes be a "flight" response to a perceived threat of someone being trans in proximity to them. Flight responses are characterized as attempting to avoid a threat by throwing oneself into action not to overcome, but escape the threat. Perhaps a wall of text with nuanced-and-reasoned set dressing and lots of links and numbers feels like a wall between them and "the problem."

Hi, this sentiment from non-americans pisses me off and it's okay, but I feel it's important to explain why so I'm copying another comment I made today.

Goodness knows some of us are trying our best. I mean keep in mind our country is a democracy in name but systemically props up white supremacists in excess of the real popular opinion. And a media disinformation machine keeps the working class divided against itself, with open support from the wealthiest and owners of the most popular social media platforms. Social media platforms that, let's be honest, are super recent inventions we are not yet capable of engaging with safely. It makes it an uphill battle to try to reach out to people whose necks aren't on the line. And the responsibility to do so falls upon the disenfranchised themselves, who are increasingly saddled with economic and health burdens that might just kill us someday.

I get the potshots at Americans, but frankly I don't plan on taking the blame if this goes tits up - many of us did a hell of a lot more than vote to resist fascism. Nothing happened here that isn't happening elsewhere. And I'll fight the notion that citizens at large are the problem. It's a cynical outlook that serves to individualize the responsibility for a systematic disaster. Our country was built to make this possible after all. And I sure as hell know I don't plan on giving up. Kind of morbidly curious about how much of an incompetent clusterfuck Project 2025's implementation will be.

Victory or no, fascists are paper tigers and I plan on sticking around to remind them of that fact however I can.