hauntingspectre [he/him]

Neil Gaiman wrote this years ago, and it’s something I try to remember when these conversations come up:

"I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’. That’s just treating other people with respect.”

Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile.

You should try it. It’s peculiarly enlightening.

I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!”

Literally costs you nothing to treat someone with respect by using their chosen pronouns.

I grew up playing on a Tandy 1000, whose most notable feature was the huge amount of games that said “640k RAM required (Tandy: 768K)”.

I still remember a few DOS commands, even.

That, to me, is why it’s accessible for more people: for $400 you get a machine that will get you 5-8 years worth of useful life. It’s a walled garden, but it’s a damn big walled garden. And you don’t have to worry about checking specifications, you don’t have to worry about shady sites for pirating your games, you don’t have to be annoyed by needing to upgrade one item to run a game. For an additional $60 you get a AAA title that should, in theory, work, plus you can pay for access to a huge backlog.

Now, that costs more than PC can for games, but in return you get convenience. For many people, that’s a good trade.

Oh, the PCMR types are definitely a minority of people who play on PC. PC is definitely my preferred platform for strategy games, but anything besides that I play on console. Sitting in front of a TV with a controller in hand just feels like how I’m supposed to play shooters or RPGs.

And I think modding is really an amazing scene. Sure, there’s bad mods, but in general mods as a concept, and often as an execution, are fantastic. Beyond the obvious political aspects of “who would work voluntarily under gommunism?!”, they democratize the gaming experience and can make it much more cooperative between developer and players.

At the same time though, in terms of mass accessibility consoles are an achievement. They’re the iphone of the gaming world - they just (usually) work. No need to download a mod manager and queue up your mods so that dragons don’t spawn in your house or whatever. That’s part of why Cyberpunk was such a failure: you assume a base level of playability with a game released for your console. That peace of mind was shattered.

I think that’s true for a significant chunk of male gamers. There’s a lot more concern about AAA titles and FOMO/FOTM, it seems. Plus there’s the whole PC master race of “gotta have the latest graphics card, also please look at my $10000 ‘battlestation’ and validate my life choices”, etc.

It seems almost perfectly designed to make toxic people more toxic.

No, if it’s coordinated then no one has to worry about being dimed out to the judge :) but, it’s very risky to bring it up openly, so someone has to do it, and it can’t be you, since you know you’ll vote not guilty. Prisoners dilemma type problem.

I mean, historically used, often everyone agreed “killing that gamer-word was cool and good”. That’s why there were lots of Federal civil rights trials after local juries refused to convict.

Now, it’s more likely that you’ll hang a jury rather than get 12 to agree with you, since nullification was cracked down on after all that.

Completely correct.

They typically won’t ask if you support or have heard of jury nullification during voir dire. They will leave that to the “is there any reason you feel you can’t bring a verdict in accordance with the law and judge’s instructions?” question.

Jury nullification isn’t itself illegal, so you can honestly answer “No”.

Things the judge doesn’t like, yes. Basically while you have a right to nullify a jury, you don’t have the right to SAY you’re nullifying the jury.

You’re not. If you advance jury nullification ideas within the jury room, you’ll be replaced by an alternate (if available, obviously the size of the trial will impact that). Now, there might be different laws in different states on the matter, but the ones I’m familiar with allow removal.

Best thing to do is vote not guilty (assuming the case and charge allow it), and just say you’re not convinced past a reasonable doubt.

Because making cogent, coherent, and interesting long form video essays is a significantly different skill than dunking on people in a microscopic internet forum.

People radicalize at their own pace. I think for Duncan what did it was seeing the same patterns throughout history (elites doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome), but he hasn’t yet connected that to the immortal science.

I’ll be interested to see his takes once we get to the actual revolution, particularly since he’s taken a long break during Covid.

Yes, Mike is a lib who’s been radicalizing with every season. It’s pretty cool.

Right now he posts mostly comparisons between the French Revolution and current US domestic politics 🤔 :thinkin-lenin:

I was taught “Asian people are good at assembling computers because they’re used to using chopsticks”

Yeah, the process of detangling a life is rough. You’ll find out things, good and bad, to help fill in the full picture of he who was as a man. There will be some good times in the process too.

Take care of yourself and those around you like he would have wanted you too!

Seriously, she and Notch are basically the same at this point: billionaires who’ve spent their “post getting wealth” lives punching down.

Imagine being able to do anything you want, and you choose to spend it being cruel to those beneath you.

You can’t just say “Watch Black Sails” without saying you have to give that show time to come into its own. The first season is setup, the following seasons are much better.

Yeah, I honestly thought my friend was going to wind up dead (multiple car wrecks while nodding, at least one OD), but it’s been one of the great pleasures of my life to see her get clean.

I’m glad it worked for you too!

For anybody looking to get off opioids, kratom can definitely help the withdrawal symptoms. It’s the only thing I’ve seen help a friend of mine who tried several times.

There’s a lot of kratom types and brands, apparently, so do some research first!

Edit: I ran this by her, she said to also research delivery methods (powder, cap, or disk(?)), and dosage, before starting.