Broke: Concentrate on high-fidelity graphics and set pieces, constant emphasis on "realism", health regenerates when hiding behind cover like a coward, player commits fictionalized versions of real war crimes while the game tells you you're a hero

Woke: Shitty PSX graphics, constant high-octane organic set pieces as a result of the best mechanics ever, recharge health by literally bathing in the blood of your enemies, game makes it clear you are an omnicidal blood-fueled gay robot and 1000% the bad guy

There's a comedy script somewhere in here about a ghost realizing far too late that the young professional that just moved into the house its haunting is a lab assistant hungry for grant money whose response to seeing her furniture float is to start fantasizing about the Nobel prize she's about to win.

My biggest gripe of comically incompetent characters has already been well addressed elsewhere, so I'll go with my second least favorite trope: every single character being unlikable to the point where I have no investment in them.

There's this running undercurrent of horror films involving the worst people getting their comeuppance (which I'm cool with), but if every character in your movie is a serial abusive partner or a hyperaggressive asshole or the least charitable alpha cheerleader archetype or whatever I'm not going to feel any reason to care when they start getting offed by a ghost. It can be cathartic if there's one or two characters that fill this role, but if I can't make any connection with any of your characters then the film is just boring and painful to sit through.

Between these two tropes, there's not a lot of horror I actually do like.

Edit: One other thing that's not entirely on-topic, but relevant both to my general distaste for horror and the fact that someone mentioned Nope elsewhere: I think horror falls apart for me because it mostly only works if all your characters are useless. Nope is a fantastic film to me because the main characters are all competent, smart people who leverage their skills and strengths to overcome something much bigger and scarier than them, and outside of outright supernatural immortal slasher villains there's not a lot of horror antagonists that can't be felled that way, but it rarely happens. Nope is two hours of metaphorically watching neolithic humans take down a wooly mammoth because they bothered to use their brains, and it's awesome.

The bank's money is the capitalists' money; that's what they're loaning out to each other and investing into stocks. A mass bank run would run through Wall Street like a wildfire.

And the FDIC is the government bailing them out, that's the entire point of insuring money in bank accounts.

This is one of those things where I'm torn between "there's no way the cabal of competent capitalists running this entire circus would ever allow this because a bank run would destroy the mountain of fictitious capital that is their dragon's hoard" and "oh fuck, I'm not sure any of the cabal of capitalists that run this circus are competent anymore, they might actually do it."

My only critique is that they would not, contrary to propaganda, execute her via an anti-air gun and then send the bill for the ammo to her family afterwards.

I feel like the US is 5-10 years away from some mass hysteria movement, like a burgerfied Taiping Rebellion where someone declares themselves Jesus' third aunt and orders their legions of rabid followers to crucify every 5G tower in the country.

Unfortunately that budget was blown entirely on finding more ammo for their P90s. Totally worth it.

Hey Johnny, play that one about falling down the stairs!

Say what you will about Luigi's politics, but he's never actively funded genocide as a state actor as far as I'm aware.

I was going to say this doesn't cover every name since Lilith isn't on it, but they've got both Lily and Lilly there so it counts.

The tariffs are irrelevant *in the US since the DOT won't do safety testing on them, so they aren't road legal. I'm honestly not even sure what the point of slapping tariffs on them was other than signalling to automakers that they won't face any competition.

My slight-copium guess is that they're holding off to have it as a launch title for the PS6, but it's also possible they just lost all the original source code and would have to decompile the existing game to even build a starting point to remaster it.

All things that I don't personally like are capeshit slop, all things that I do like are unique artful masterpieces that can broach no criticism.

Anyway, this looks kinda cool, but I'm mostly just waiting for their mage-heavy game that they've had cooking in development for a few years. Or for Sony to get off their asses and port Bloodborne to PC so I have a panic attack against Father Gascoigne again, but this time in a crisp 144 FPS.

Until we have the courage to accept the risks inherent to trusting other people; flawed, imperfect people, and building a revolutionary movement, I don’t know what kind of future the western left has.

This has consistently been an issue of mine with a lot of the recent struggle sessions: you cannot build a mass movement among a population that often has reactionary views without being willing to educate and convert them. A cursory glance at any successful communist revolution in the past 200 years proves this time and time again. Tsarist Russia was not a bastion of progressive beliefs. Warlord-era China did not have the correct takes on feminism. Batista Cuba was dominated by traditionalist Catholics and all the cultural brainworms that go with it. That did not prevent vanguards from overthrowing the existing order and bringing about a worker's state, and it certainly did not prevent those worker's states from then correcting those beliefs over time.

That doesn't mean we should excuse reactionary beliefs. That doesn't mean we should ignore vitriol or abuse being hurled at marginalized comrades. That certainly doesn't mean we should lionize the shooter as an individual's random Twitter takes from 2022. But that does mean we should be quicker to educate good-faith commenters when they post something that can be taken as reactionary in nature rather than immediately shut them down with zero discussion and/or ban them, because that has a chilling effect on engagement and makes growing leftist outreach extremely difficult.

The overwhelming majority of people in the west have completely incoherent political and social beliefs driven by the miasma of ideological garbage they're subjected to the way a fish is subjected to water; the good news is that you can yank them out of it by presenting a coherent ideology that matches their lived experiences, and the bad news is that it's going to take some effort to yank them out because the counterpropaganda is literally all-encompassing. You're going to have to let them have some opportunities to find out what their particular brainworms are and have a chance to pull them out; if they make it abundantly clear they have no intention of ever doing so and are perfectly content to remain reactionaries then fuck 'em, but most people don't fall into that category.

If Lenin had concentrated this much on his coalition having All the Correct Opinions All the Time with No Exceptions Lest You Be Immediately Purged(tm) prior to going out and actually doing something, Russia would've likely spent the twentieth century as a reactionary hellhole that modern Russian far-right nationalists could only have wet dreams about.

It 100% would've happened anyway, but Harper's Ferry was the fire under the southern aristocracy's ass to go through with it because suddenly there was a very real example of a northerner actively instigating mass slave rebellions to destroy their way of life. Had it not happened, the civil war might not have occurred for another decade or two instead of within five years.

It was, but it kicked off the Civil War just a few years later. In terms of making people get off their asses and do the right thing* it's solidly in first place so far.

*Only after much kicking, screaming, denial, and eventual failure to deliver fully on the true end of slavery in the US.

It's pretty clear now that there is a portion of this site, including quite a few mods and admins, whose priority is having an ideologically pure reading group. There is a massive difference between tailism and accepting that real change requires alliances of convenience with people you greatly disagree with, because you're never going to find a critical mass of perfect comrades in the greater masses without recruiting and converting people who started with shitty opinions.

You'd think a site that agreed to stop fighting over whether veganism is a hard requirement of leftism would understand that by now.