The Snark Urge

They want me to binge it for their metrics? Fuck, sold

Kershaw Shun classic 4" paring knife, Damascus cladding. At least, ostensibly…

Could a machine eat an av-

…oh no

It’s getting to the point that if an internet comment isn’t on-point, up to date, original, and coming off sounding exasperated and a little unhinged, you’d do best to assume it’s a bot.

Rare as fuck to see an actually funny one on this !c of course it goes unnoticed

Oh hush, Labour is hardly that disappointing.

We must be the good kind of awkward. My kid got an unreasonable amount of candy knocking on doors.

I honestly don’t think so, bestie. Monkey’s not gonna press the keys randomly at all. Somewhere in the recesses of his monkey neurons he’ll have made implicit connections between letters and letter combinations. This is the infinite typewriter monkey, not some two-bit organ grinder’s bitch. This monkey has been places, probably been through hell getting to this position in life. Seen wars, been across the globe, and now he’s the star of a famous thought experiment. He loves lowercase t because he’s a devout Christian after having been rescued by that missionary, and being a monkey he doesn’t quite grasp the distinction. Wanna see what he wrote? tttt hhdfyb my ik t tkkoptt aa aaaa Bernardo : Who’s there? tt ttt eeertyuhjk t

You call that random?

I don’t think it works honestly. You’d need a monkey with a lasting and dutiful commitment to true randomness to ever get anything but a finite number of button mashing variations. Monkeys like that don’t come cheaply.

I don’t play fortnite and I tend to like experimental media. The article has once reviewer calling the map “more thoughtful than expected”, and I’m also getting the sense that no-gun maps aren’t anything new.

I still think it’s not as weird and terrible as the click-hungry legacy media has been inviting us to find it. It’s a genuine seeming effort to reach younger people less likely to vote or read about policy ideas. It’s just a shame it didn’t catch on much.

If they’re not too busy being an upstart deity, they have my vote

Every carefully crafted game has a deliberately narrowed scope in service of a vision. The saving grace of such deliberate textual framing is that when it’s done well you might notice it, but it gives you a shared point of reference with others in conversation. Instead of e.g. discussing racism in abstract, we can talk about how Measurehead, despite being everything his worldview espouses, is still ultimately a tiresome pawn.

I totally cede the point about framing, but not the one about DE being effective propaganda. To me it reads more like the author had a lot of complex feelings about communism’s promise and its shortcomings.

It’s certainly novel, but there aren’t many voters who will object to being reached out to on their own terms. The election will be the one to decide whether it’s stupid or not. It’d be far from the weirdest aspect of American culture, at any rate.

Games do feel like an oddity as political outreach, but the more I think about the idea the more I think it has capabilities (as Lancelot Brown might have put it). With legacy media like papers, books, art, film, recorded music and all, you are a passive consumer of the media. With video games as art, you are an active participant and your choices define your experience with the work. Games like Planescape: Torment, Tyranny, and Disco Elysium are great examples where you’re expected to engage with political or moral ideas as a participant. You aren’t being treated as a receiver of propaganda per se, but as someone who can develop understanding and agency in the context of certain ideas, which seems like an improvement over propaganda in legacy media, don’t you think?

Damn, that’s crazy

I heard there have been concerts in Minecraft that were popular. Anything beats doing it in Zuckerberg’s whatever thing, imo. Virtual concerts seem lame certainly, but some enjoy it.

As for election propaganda, video games are big media. Bigger than Hollywood. Whatever my preferences, it would be absurd to expect it to be some kind of ideological dead zone.

Like I said I feel pretty disinterested, but more on grounds of taste than any firm feelings of social norms.

I’m not sure how to have a conversation about this if weirdness has a secret definition. What is normal but the weird stuff you’re used to in life?

This isn’t weird, you just don’t like fortnite.

I don’t either, but I’m not exactly holding out for them to put a political ad scroll in noita.

Bargain.

I think I just found out I can reverse my entire life’s footprint if I can manage to blow smoke in one billionaire’s face.