(Paris, 1908-1986) French thinker and novelist, representative of the atheist existentialist movement and an important figure in the vindication of women's rights. Originally from a bourgeois family, she stood out from an early age as a brilliant student. She studied at the Sorbonne and in 1929 she met Jean-Paul Sartre, who became her companion for the rest of her life.
He graduated in philosophy and until 1943 he devoted himself to teaching at the lycées of Marseilles, Rouen and Paris. His first work was the novel The Guest (1943), followed by The Blood of Others (1944) and the essay Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944). She participated intensely in the ideological debates of the time, harshly attacked the French right wing and assumed the role of a committed intellectual. In her literary texts she revised the concepts of history and character and incorporated, from an existentialist point of view, the themes of "freedom", "situation" and "commitment".
Together with Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others, she founded the magazine Tiempos Modernos, whose first issue was published on October 15, 1945 and became a political and cultural reference of French thought in the mid-twentieth century. Subsequently, he published the novel All Men Are Mortal (1946), and the essays For a Morality of Ambiguity (1947) and America a Day (1948).
Her book The Second Sex (1949) was a theoretical starting point for various feminist groups, and became a classic work of contemporary thought. In it she elaborated a history of the social condition of women and analyzed the different characteristics of male oppression. She asserted that by being excluded from the processes of production and confined to the home and reproductive functions, women lost all social ties and with them the possibility of being free. She analyzed the gender situation from the point of view of biology, psychoanalysis and Marxism; she destroyed feminine myths, and urged the search for authentic liberation. She argued that the struggle for the emancipation of women was distinct from and parallel to the class struggle, and that the main problem to be faced by the "weaker sex" was not ideological but economic.
Simone de Beauvoir founded with some feminists the League of Women's Rights, which set out to react firmly to any sexist discrimination, and prepared a special issue of Modern Times devoted to the discussion of the subject. She won the Prix Goncourt with The Mandarins (1954), in which she dealt with the difficulties of post-war intellectuals in assuming their social responsibility. In 1966 she participated in the Russell Tribunal, in May 1968 she showed solidarity with the students led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in 1972 she presided over the Choisir association, in charge of defending free contraception, and until her last days she was a tireless fighter for human rights.
Her abundant testimonial and autobiographical titles include Memoirs of a Formal Young Woman (1958), The Fullness of Life (1960), The Force of Things (1963), A Very Sweet Death (1964), Old Age (1968), The End of Accounts (1972) and The Farewell Ceremony (1981).
Megathreads and spaces to hang out:
- ❤️ Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
- 💖 Come talk in the New Weekly Queer thread
- 💛 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
Come talk in the New Weekly PoC thread- ⭐️ September Movie Nominations ⭐️
reminders:
- 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
- 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
- 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
- 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
- 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog
Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
Aid:
Theory:
I keep getting recommended clips of RDR2 on youtube, a game I've played before and enjoyed. The clips almost make me want to play it again. I like the story well enough, and the game is generally quite good at atmosphere and environments, and many of the strangers and side quests are pretty entertaining. I get tired of all the free roam stuff. Or at least I get tired of it if I've decided to try and get achievements, or some of the hoops you have to jump through to unlock outfits at the trapper just get... wearisome. But stopping the quests just to hunt, or fish, or steal a stagecoach, or do a treasure hunt is fun.
But I can't stand Rockstars approach to quest design, or whatever you'd call it, for most of the main story quests. I feel like every one is "Go to location A, get in an arcade shootout with like 20-30 guys who are all dead set on killing you. Get on horse. Engage is a running arcade shootout on horseback while you travel. Arrive at location B, get in another arcade shootout with either more or less guys than the first shoot out." Repeat ad infinitum.
I'm not sure what it is about this game that makes me hate that approach. Is it really any different from most of the other AAA single player games I love? Most of them probably boil down to "Go to a location, shoot a bunch of people." I think if it was less guys, maybe I'd like that more. Or if the whole enterprise felt less arcade-y. Not that I'm sure I could articulate what is even arcade-y about it in the first place.
Then I've got this issue, not sure if it's the same issue or a separate issue. Haven't thought about it too hard, may come out a little under-cooked. But, at least by AAA standards, the story of RDR2 is fairly intimate, personal. You get to know Arthur real well, and everybody in his crew. And I think I'm feeling some dissonance between that and the GTA levels of violence happening every single quest. In the real American West there were nine gunfighters at the OK Corral, and three men died, and no one's stopped talking about it for the 140 years since. Obviously a game doesn't have to reflect that. But a lot of old Western movies also just aren't that violent, even more modern deconstructions like Unforgiven, and then you've got RDR2 which is like if Quentin Tarantino had a psychotic break. And I'm not saying that the game should sanitize the Old West, or the actions of the Van Der Linde gang. But they kill a ridiculous amount of people. In one mission Arthur and Micah, alone, kill an entire town's worth of armed men.
I feel like someone could make the argument that the level of violence is an intentional choice made to satirize depictions of the Old West in other media. Obviously they built this formula on GTA games, and even RDR1, which it's fair to say are broadly satirical. But then RDR2 pivots hard into a much more serious story, such that the more explicit satirical elements sometimes feel out of place. And the level of violence just feels like a holdover from the Rockstar formula.
Or hell, maybe I'm just tired. Whatever they were doing, it didn't work well enough for me to do a replay of the game. Though I liked it well enough to complete the game once, so maybe I'm just complaining to complain.
TL:DR The violence in RDR2 is too frequent and too cartoony. Make it rarer, but make it hit harder and feel worse. Admittedly, they do have a game to sell, and if they did what I'm suggesting they run the risk of making the game too boring for gamers. Then again, Death Stranding exists, so counterpoint. And the parts of the game I see discussed most are either the open world activities or the story/characters. So hell, maybe it would be fine.
I think it's just easier to design action games around swarms of easy enemies. Uncharted series is even worse than the RDR games. I'm gonna guess bullet spunges and realistic damage against the player both tend to frustrate human players.
Very much this. I've been playing Ready or Not: Le Epic Cop Simulator. Most missions only have, at most, 1-6 "bad guys". They're extremely lethal; Your armor works but if you get hit anywhere else you're toast. But there's only a few of them and most of the gameplay comes from correctly sweeping and clearing buildings. It's extremely slow, very tense, and definitely doesn't appeal to the average COD player.
ARMA is very similar; It's extremely lethal because irl bullets kill people, and you're often shooting at guys you can barely see hundreds of meters away, or risking getting shredded in CQC. A lot of the game is walking around. Alot of the game is getting OHK'd by AI you never saw. A lot of the game is getting wiped out by artillery or air strikes you have no way of fighting back against.
Contrast to most FPS where you're a super hero ripping through hordes of baddies effortlessly, regenerating from any wound like Wolvervine.
I also thing FPS games are amongst the simplest gameplay loop to program and implement; Create a dude, make rays or particles emit from the dude (your guns), make mobs that move around and sometimes shoot rays back, add a bunch of them to the level. Conceptually it's all quite simple. No need to devise complex puzzles or write dialogue or come up with mind bending twist outcomes.
I've been taken out by the wind more time thans i can count. I wish RDR2 had the same effect, can't start getting stress sweats when i've wiped out half the town already.
It feels pretty goofy that like four gunslingers take down an entire army battalion every other mission. Arthur is also way too bullet spongy while every enemy will die in a few shots at most, so it feels like he can mow down the entire United states if he wanted to. I wonder if decreasing the amount of enemies, but making them a lot more lethal, would make the game better. It would probably mean using cover, stealth and deadeye a lot more instead of running around in the streets getting shot ten times. In my mind, that's more the cowboy fantasy than the ridiculous action in the game.
I'm trying to think of the missions I actually liked from a gameplay point, and there's barely any that felt unique. The only one that comes to mind is the one where you burn the fields with Shaun
I think, for RDR2, making the game more lethal would be frustrating because of how wonky the controls are. Hunt:Showdown is an PvPvE game that's very lethal - Every gun except two will kill you in two shots to the chest within it's ideal range, but they're all old timey cowboy guns so it slows down the pace of firefights a lot. But the game works because you're playing against other people who are smart, and a lot of the game is about teamwork, stealth, positioning, and listening very very carefully to figure out where your enemies are. All that extra sneaky-beaky stuff is what makes the gun fights thrilling and intense, even though you can be knocked out almost instantly.
I think the best way to do a good cowboy game would be the keep the actual combat to a minimum, and use something other than FPS for the combat. Idk what;' rhythm game, puzzles, speech challenges, whatever. But in most cowboy stories there's little actual fighting until the climax. Like the big, cool gun fight at the end of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly isn't even a gun fight, it's the three MCs eyeing each other, deciding where their loyalties lie and what they actually want. It's all about the tension and the characters, rather than the shooting.
I also really liked some aspects of RDR2, but like you I felt the shooting was too much, and often at odds with the story and Arthur as a character. A lot of the time I just felt like all the shooting was getting in the way of the story. I can't really remember many missions except hunting the bear with Dutch and Elijah, and the story parts of missions like collecting debts or helping and then stomping the old slave catcher. I remember a lot more of the riding around, meeting weird characters, stealing horses, things like that.
The gang is supposed to be this group of outcasts and misfits, but then they face off against a whole ass company of enemies like five times and (almost) no one dies or even gets shot. And like, the gunplay is so relatively trivial that the battles do not feel like you barely survive and have to leave the state. They feel like your group could conquer the country but choose to do petty crime instead.
A Wild West train heist extraction shooter with Tarkov values would rule
A wild west heist game would be a ton of fun.
You should check out Hunt:Showdown. It's a PvPvE sorta extraction shooter. It's really it's own thing. twelve rootin-tootin cowboys/wizards/cannibals/revenants/serial killers have been hired to collect a bounty. The bounty is a bizarre monster. In teams of 1-3 they enter the supernaturally infected Louisiana bayou where they have to fight zombies, monsters, and each other for the chance to bring down the boss monster, collect the bounty, and escape. All the guns are old timey cowboy guns. High-lethality, but you can't just put your machine gun at head level and laser people down. You have tons of tools and doohickeys to change the odds in your favor. There's a semi-permadeath system, where you have an account that levels up, but also a roster of cowboys who gain experience by surviving missions and, if killed, are dead for good. As they level up you can buy perks for them that change how they play in various ways. But, again, once that cowboy is dead they're gone.
It totally avoids Tarkov's gear fear bc every gun is viable and good within it's role. All guns except shotguns and the elephant gun are two hits to kill to the chest within their ideal range. melee is extremely lethal if you can close the gap. If you do die you can recruit a new kitted out hunter for cheap. Guns and gear are also cheap enough that if you win a game every now and then and aren't buying the super high end gucci stuff you're unlikely to run out of cash.
It's a really fun, unique game that totally changes up the battle royale and extraction shooter paradigm to make something unique and fun. The community is generally really friendly. The game has more players now than it did at release in 2018. It'll be getting a new map this year and an engine upgrade to Cryengine 5! There are routine events tied to the battle pass system, and each battle pass adds new free weapons and special missions with different conditions (the current one is a supernatural fog that rolls in and out, obscuring your vision. Players can join supernatural pacts that let them heal rapidly when drawing power from water, telefrag monsters, or go berserk to deal massive melee damage). it's a great game, one of my all time favs.
That’s awesome! I watched a YouTube video and the sound traps are very atmospheric grim. The chanting bayou magic vibes of the soundtrack is really cool too.
Good rec!
Yeah, the soundtrack is by the Port Sulphur Band, which afaik is made up of Crytek employees. Really good stuff, worth checking out on it's own.
And yeah, the game's sound, especially it's use of binaural sound to convey very accurate 3d positional sound using stereo, is unmatched in the history of gaming. Your ears are almost as important as your eyes.
You’ve sold me, my eyes suck and it gets me killed in shooters all the time.
Also, what’s with extraction shooters and in-house bands? Tarkov does that too
Sounds like you're a prime candidate for shotgun main and/or explosive crossbow. or just throwing dynamite at everyone.
The first couple of hours will be real rough while you're getting your sea legs. I suggest playing with a team of three, like join with randos, and tell them you're new and ask for help. The subreddit is also pretty friendly and should give you lots of advice, and there are a lot of good youtube tutes. The most important thing starting out is learning how to handle the AI, how the game flow works (clues - boss - banish - escape), and the mantra of "go as fast as you can as quietly as you can". The tutorial is worth doing, and be sure to take advantage of the shooting range to get a feel for how the guns work.
I’ll keep all that advice in mind. Thanks for putting it on my radar. And good shit, explosive crossbows are my favorite impractical yet cool af weapon
They're a lot of fun. You can blow people up, or blast open the door and set off all the traps they set. Ai investigate noises so you can train ai monsters on someone hiding in cover. The game has enough interactions between tools, ai, environment, and players that it feels like an interactive sim sometimes.
Interesting analysis. I started RDR2 like a year ago and finished the first mission and never played it again.