Orcocracy [comrade/them]

Yes, it is certainly fair to take the reading that the point is to play the game by continually resisting the fascist options that are provided. However, I’m not sure if the “was it worth it” hollow victory screen at the very end forgives the many hours of fascist “hard times make strong men” scenarios that precede it. If anything, the “was it worth it” further underlines the “hardness” of those “hard choices” and therefore does not contest or critique the fascist frame. The fascist would proudly answer “yes” and the game would appear perfectly coherent to them.

It’s not that one needs to take a fascist reading of the game, but to borrow from Stuart Hall, the dominant reading of this game is clearly a fascist one. Yes, an antifascist reading is possible, but that reading is one built through a very careful process of negotiation with the text.

It’s a game that constantly gives you overwrought “tough choices” where the two options are either a) fascism or b) you are soft and naive and everyone will die.

Just for fun I’m going to attempt to combine this with Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura (probably not my best work): It’s not the act of farming or being called a ‘farmer’ that that dispels the aura, but the act of creating something that is designed to be posted. Nothing on social media truly has any aura to it in Benjamin’s sense, given the way social media is massively commodified by the corporations that run it, the influencers and advertisers that populate it, and by capitalist society in general. There is only the appeal to the concept of a nonexistent non-commodified authenticity, the “false spell of the commodity”. Calls of ‘aura’ on social media crave for that impossible authenticity that social media can’t possibly provide, and calls of ‘aura farming’ merely point out the posts that stray too far from the “false spell”.

Oh Nintendo already does make exploitative freemium games, but they (mostly) put that stuff on phones and not on Nintendo devices.

Yes, and the Hollywood directors who depicted white-military-hero-man walking away from an explosion without looking at it weren’t card-carrying members of the Nazi party either. But that doesn’t mean that reading this stuff as having some relationship with the aesthetics of fascism is incorrect.

If it’s often used in the form of an ironic critique to undermine the proud macho posturing of the ‘aura farmer’ then that is promising, but so often that layer of critique is quickly lost (for example in the online hero-worshipping of Patrick Bateman and Don Draper).

Oh so it’s like Evola, the Italian fascist who glorified war and violence so much that he went on contemplative walks during air raids. Unfortunately he wasn’t killed by this nonsense, only wounded. Now fascists on the internet share this picture to fucking honour this vile man:

I wonder if this also ties in with the origin of the Hollywood trope about the hero walking away from the explosion while not looking at it. There’s definitely a lot to be said about aesthetics of fascism with respect to Hollywood, especially in its love of militaristic heroic ‘justice’.

It’s also quite depressing how much contemporary slang in the English language can be traced back to the fascist parts of the internet (eg chad, alpha, based, incel, looks-maxing, possibly aura farming too). This doesn’t bode well for the future if that is what is influencing the way we speak to one another.

The original Game Boy weighs 220g (I’m not sure if that includes batteries or not), but the Switch Lite isn’t much more. It’s 275g with the battery included.

However, the original Switch is quite a bit heavier at 398g, the Switch 2 is 534g, and the Steam Deck is a whopping 640g. The new Xbox handheld looks like it will be quite a bit bigger than the Steam Deck and will probably be even worse to carry around. These devices simply aren’t suitable for kids, and some of them aren’t that easy to hold for adults either. This is a real shame and pushes kids further towards using phones that are filled with exploitative freemium games and social media slop.

A restaurant that serves dinner closing by 8pm is some extremely Anglo shit that would not pass as reasonable in much of the world.

Yeah the internet is a pile of shit and should probably be switched off, but the reason for keeping kids off it being “because minors lack the legal capacity to contract” makes whatever these assholes want sound even worse.

Americans think goon is a weird slang for wine, but also think Dick and Randy are just ordinary first names.

Oh, “it’s giving” is just another way of saying “it’s like” or “it’s akin to” or “this is reminiscent of”. This seems very rad. Sorry, it’s giving very rad.

In a capitalist society we are constantly judging and being judged as having moral character based on our consumption. Pierre Bourdieu called this “distinction” and argued that the objects we buy and surround ourselves with represent “taste” that demonstrates and furthers class positioning in a capitalist society. Under capitalism, these objects carry great meaning and a person can communicate complex ideas and social information simply by how they hold a specific consumer good in their hand. Bourdieu argued that class struggle is also a “classification struggle”.

A bad one, and what it more broadly represents, can severely limit your freedom of movement.

What do you need a wall for when you have bad credit scores and drug possession charges?

Yet that’s generally what needs to be done. You couldn’t borrow one of William Randolph Hurst’s printing presses to print your commie newspaper back in 1902. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect a commie chat show to ‘win’ the YouTube algorithm and beat all of the fascist and reactionary chat shows that have dominated political discourses on the platform.

Doom is pretty retro for that setup. It could easily manage Half Life and Unreal, maybe even Quake 3.

The whole platform. It’s the 21st century’s reinvention of trash tv, but worse. At least in the days of broadcast tv everyone watched the same shitty broadcast so led to a sense of a collective experience and the slop was made by tv production workers in a union.

And if they give vague non-answers like that you press them for details. What was so cool about it, what were some of the things you learnt, etc.

Any form of assessment has this issue regarding whichever medium happens to be employed. That why you generally need a few different types of assessments and not just one big one.