NarrativeMaterialism [comrade/them]

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  • 18 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2021

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  • Hey I don't think this a very productive way to talk, seems very reddit-brained to answer that to someone who's done actual work and just got burned-out. It's very common.

    Interacting with people like they are actual people is probably a better approach.



  • As wark herself explains in the book, I think the vectoralism thing is interesting wether or not it is correct, because it forces you to reevaluate the terminology and look at how capitalism has changed.

    I personally could see those as internal capitalist factions (industrialists vs finance capital, vectoralism could fit in there to me), but Wark's book was still interesting and I recommend it.

    The choice of word for "hacker" is a pretty bad one because not many people are going to intuitively get what she means by it, but the analysis of the upper layers of capitalism through a new layer of property relations, that of intellectual property, property of the knowledge and information that now lays on top of the means of production, is still interesting.





  • I mean yea, sure! I'm not certain what this would look like, but i'm interested.

    It's going to be pretty split depending on which systems people use. I like micro/one-page rules, but for actual systems I don't have much time or energy to dive into new systems (let alone master them enough to write/homebrew stuff in them), so I do stuff on PF2e and that's it.

    Sharing and playtesting ideas could be nice, working on the more "system-agnostic" parts like writing/world-building could be cool too.


  • Ive thought about this too and basically I think your best best is to self publish somewhere, hard to know which places are actually good in the long term. Plenty of interesting people and publications but hard to know which might have some unaddressed reactionary thoughts, some problems or some sort of coopting. I guess a thing like a substack or medium can be a nice start. I have a few really good publications I follow on substack, a lot about China.

    Maybe something could be organised on hexbear, but it would have to be like red sails in that basically everything in every style is allowed as long as it is communism-related and interesting, BUT it would also need some kind of vetting or editorial oversight or you re going to have bad shit posted there really quickly.

    If you do figure something out let me know! I wrote a bit on communism-adjacent stuff the past couple years and have had trouble finding motivation recently. I like to write about reimagining a communist ideology in media, in fantasy especially, because my outlet for creativity and writing has always been tabletop stuff. I've been having fun transforming a fantasy setting into something with dialectical materialism at its core, I need to find the energy to put more of it on my substack because most of it is still just notes on my computer.


  • Yes, for sure. They are a great contrast to the Nomai.

    spoiler

    But given what happens to them, it's pretty clear the game's intent is that their "doomsday device" was not that, and was simply an enormous representation of change, on a cosmic scale. They refused changed, they feared it, and they reacted to it. Their reactionarism bound them in eternal grief, impotent nostalgia, and ultimately a wasted existence. The only one who understood was tortured for it, in eternal solitary confinement.

    The end of that DLC, the incredible animated scene showing the prisoner that the little meaningless act he did cascaded into huge storms and led to the universe being able to reboot, is fantastic. If not for the Nomai, and for you, the universe would have ended as a slow and mournful death such as the owlelks suffered.


  • I would tend to agree, sci-fi has a tendency to distance itself from "human level" things. But in the case of Outer Wilds, you have some emotional arcs but they are to the Nomai themselves which is quite hard to do in writing, they having died millions of years before and all that.

    It worked for me, and in a way made it pretty powerful because of the fact it wasn't your typical emotional story. Everything felt very dry and focused on the wonder of discovery, but before I realised I knew most of the Nomai's names and could reconstruct their timelines and their lives, seeing them grow up, age and die.

    spoiler

    Seeing the Grave of the Nomai in Dark Bramble broke me. The corpses holding eachother, their focus on understanding and possibly helping others in their last moments even if to just help a little bit beyond the grave...

    And compared to those lows, the highs of finding a living Nomai of understanding the sheer enormity of their task, their passion for finding the eye their commitment to this grand objective, and how actually close they got to do it. The reveal of what their plan was, how ridiculous it would seem if you hadn't slowly learned about every little step, and the fact that it all worked and they were so so close to it.

    And the incredible feeling of finishing their work, of carrying a whole people's hopes and legacy with you, a celebration of life, of the universe and everything within, wholesale, ups and downs, despite the fact that it all ends. No, BECAUSE it all ends, because that's just how it is, both incredibly grandiose and ridiculously small and mundane. It was all worth it, simply for existing and experiencing it, witnessing it, even if it was for such a short amount of time. And as your final act, you no longer just witness and follow the past, you give everything you have to a new future.

    You're not bitter, or angry, or desperate when standing at the ending of endings, you're happy with what you had the time to do, and you gladly give what little you have to guarantee others can enjoy it too, in some other universe.

    The DLC hammered that home even more. It balances the personalities of the Nomai with a much more somber, grieving people, which really helps to process your own grief.

    spoiler

    That scene in the ending where you blow the candles of your own people on Timber Hearth was pretty grim, and a little on the nose, but it's so good.

    Was not expecting to write all of this. It truly is one of the greatest games, I was not completely the same after I'd ended it.







  • That was great. Quite haunting.

    Having had depression for a long time, this speaks to me a lot. The flat, unemotional tone of narration. The loss of time. The constant dark presence, not necessarily a negative one, not aggressive, but always there. Sometimes it goes away and the sky is bright, and then suddenly it's back like an old friend. You learn to live with it, it becomes part of the landscape.

    Thank you for sharing this, as you said I'm glad I hang out on places like these because I would've never seen this otherwise!





  • yeaaaa that's a big obstacle. I like having my Pi for local network stuff, and for foundry it's decent since I use it mostly for myself and stream the screen from an observer profile (the equivalent of using foundry on a big screen for an IRL session), but I think if you want it to be stable and fast enough connectivity-wise, you're gonna need to spend money on hosting solutions like the forge :(

    I have an amazing internet connection, but that's honestly sheer luck.




  • Yea I've got a bunch of notes and ideas, but actually taking the time to write into something useful and polished used by others and not just for my groups takes more effort, so I've only managed to write on specific stuff that's been used in the campaign and that I can write a little story about, it's more fun that way.

    I run a vtt server (foundry) on a raspberry pi, works very well for my needs. Then again some of my players have really shitty connection so i've only used the foundry server as a GM, I open the game on an "observer" profile and stream that screen on discord :p



  • I'm getting back some motivation to write some tabletop stuff :duck-dance: My campaign is resuming so I can test my stuff on my players and it gives me inspiration for new things.

    I made a new account to post my Pathfinder 2e homebrew stuff here. I had a few people who liked them and commented and I was happy for the feedback, but I'd rather have a specific account for it and avoid crossing info since the substack might have IRL info. If you remember those posts, don't mention the previous account/name since I want to split the two :)