This will be funny when it bankrupts my employer because they can't pay to import any of the components we need to make anything at a +30% markup.
I mean, they also banned a lot of that early "lifeboat" userbase, and also changed the entire name of the site specifically because they didn't want to be associated with the old subreddit; or the podcast anymore.
HB mods/admins have always been more interested in making the site their personal bonsai-tree project over anything else really.
You’re just supposed to accept that It Is A Video Game and you do Video Game Stuff in it
I kinda think that this a big reason why the "Traditional JRPG" is a more-or-less extinct genre outside of the Persona series, and whatever weird remake, or "narrative experience" experiment SquareEnix is working on right now.
Most JRPG's never really figured out how to actually get their game-worlds & their gameplay to interact with each other in ways that are actually compelling in any way; and consequently they ended up kind of just stagnating & getting overtaken by more dynamic games.
Like these things were invented to help portray Lord of the Rings or Conan the Barbarian-esque adventures in pen-and-paper game form in the 70s
Yes, but you see Conan is not a fucking nerd, and is the furthest possible kind of subject from a Neoliberal Optimization Gremlin; and so his perspective is not relatable, or salient to anybody watching, or working on contemporary fantasy anime.
As a consequence of this, the modern audiences & creators plunder the systems meant to simulate things he would do or encounter, and then interject their own existing neoliberal value-sets on top of it in order to treat those systems & simulations as the "Actually Real" part; and then write shitty spiritually dead characters designed to thrive within that framework.
It's possible that they did intend to separate out those things at some point in development, but never actually got around to doing it.
The scale-creep of Elden Ring makes it so that the game is, in a lot of ways, weirdly less "polished" than other Fromsoft "Souls-Borne" titles when you consider the significantly increased development resources available to it.
We're talking about Elden Ring, not Sekiro here. If Michael Zaki didn't want you to be able to represent yourself, or what you value in the game, he would've just given you John Eldenring to play as, and told you to go fuck yourself if you didn't like it.
So this is a legitimate question to ask.
I do like the sound of this rule change, and it is funny watching Gaben use his monopoly power as the sole functional digital storefront for PC games to fuck with publishers. This does make me wonder, though, if this wouldn't lead to a more concerted effort by AAA studios to back a different distributor, cause if there's anything that Capitalists despise, it's being told what to do with their Capital.
There are internally colonized peoples within the US who have been racialized as an inferior caste and there are whites that have benefited from that colonization and racialization, but have no actual historical or material understanding of their own place within settler-colonialism.
Unless a cracker is a direct agent or beneficiary of colonialism, a cop or some shit, they can actually be made to understand the colonial situation.
And it’s happening. Whites in the US are awakening to the colonial situation in Israel, and that’s not far removed from awakening to the colonial situation in the US.
Different person here, but I have my own issues with what you're arguing about here.
My main point of contention with this whole line of reasoning, is that I don't think that they United States actually properly qualifies as a Settler-Colony anymore. That isn't an argument against the existence of a racialized hierarchy within the US, but specifically what I'm getting at is that the material circumstances of Israel & America are not comparable in 2024.
The United States is the world financial-capital hegemon, it is a wholly independent & (potentially) self-sufficient nation-state. It does not have a Metropole that it relies on to guarantee it's security, or that it has to funnel imperial super-profits to, in 2024 the United States is THE Metropole. It also does not have the national composition of the kinds of countries in which Fanonist Anti-Colonial struggles were applicable & successful; but which does exist in Israel.
In the United States the people who make up the descendants of Settlers comprises the absolute majority of the population, and likely also the majority of the proletariat (if only narrowly) as a consequence. Of those people who are not the descendants of Settlers, they are also themselves, for the most-part, not indigenous to the territory either. They do not have pre-extant social structures, or a genuinely solid national identity independent of the existing Settler state to draw from when trying to resist it.
The single largest non-white ethnic group in the country are African-Americans/ADOS people; who are both a highly dispersed diaspora population that do not make up a majority of most of the places that they live in, and who's identity while hostile to the current US State (for very good reason) doesn't generally have a strong articulation towards forming any kind of alternate independent State. Most of the other remaining "Non-Settler" Americans are primarily immigrants of one-form-or-another who are not actually here to try to supplant the existing American State or nation. They would be broadly willing to integrate into the US as it currently exists if they were actually allowed to. Of the remaining actually indigenous population of the country, they consist of somewhere between 1-2% of the population of the entire country, and they struggle to retain even a semblance of autonomy on the insultingly limited reservation land that they have been granted.
Ultimately what I'm getting at here is that there is no real evidence that the strategies of Fanonist Anti-Colonial resistance have any actual material applicability to the United States in the way that they do for Israel; regardless of their ostensible common origin as Settler-Colonies, largely because the modern US has developed past the point that it can even be described as a Colony in the first place.
Question is do the Liberals get to take credit for it? If they do, then things get fucky again.