me: I have GOT to get weirder!
also me when I do get weirder: *visibly shaking* I'm going to be killed with hammers by everyone for being a freak.
not only would he wear the "I <3 DILFS" shirt, he would also get like +1 electrochemistry and +1 interfacing from it
i think the appeal of harry du bois is that he’s a character you can draw wearing those funny t shirts we all like to draw our favorite characters in, except he would definitely actually wear them. i can easily imagine harry du bois in a “I <3 DILFS” shirt and booty shorts. it’s harry du bois, of course he’s wearing that
yeah elon definitely did sex selective ivf for his kids thats so crazzy
to be honest, to me starting at the top seemed easy. the way i learned was basically a sequence of "this is how x really works under the hood"-type revelations, which suited my learning style reasonably well. im sure i could have gone the other way around too, though i feel like you might have lost me starting at assembly because a high level language was relevant to my other interests then in a way assembly wouldnt be
half of the mystique around "tech stuff" that most people experience is mostly just because they don't know the difference between a "tech enthusiast" as constructed by Apple et al's marketing team and "people who know computers work" and how there's very little actual overlap between these two categories. the only actually good programmers are the ones who want to fuck the computers or perchance have undergone some other technopsychosocial adaptation, which does not correlate with knowing how many dozen cameras the latest iphone has or being able to get along well with the business major interviewer at a startup called Zyergote who drives a tesla
VRML
i wish these replies a very die
not to promote misogyny but i think this should happen i think it would be really funny
to me the deserter seemed personally important because as an eastern european, i have met this guy irl. he is intensely familiar, down to the phrasing, sometimes (the whole "a liberal and a pederast" bit, oof) and DE acknowledges this literal old communist on an uninhabited island, acknowledges the reasons why he is the way that he is, and just straight up tells you "you cannot be this way. you have to find a way to become something else". that last bit is the difficult part, of course
playing disco elysium for the first time felt so familiar because it was made by communists. i kept getting the feeling of - i see you! i know you! every time i came across encyclopedia worldbuilding checks and recognized the tools of historical materialism brilliantly used. i wince when i see people describe DE as just being ironic about communism or whatever - no! this is the most communist game ive ever played!
sometimes i see people point to the deserter's character as evidence that DE isn't truly a communist work, but i don't think the deserter is meant to be a paragon of communism in the game. he's a revolutionary stuck in the past and that is his grave error. "The material base for an uprising has ended," "The historical condition for a revolutionary opportunity has passed. It will not come back anymore. However hard I try, whatever I do." but everything you've seen the game proves his statement wrong. DE's world still has the objective conditions for revolution because the working masses are sick of all the ruling order's shit, and there are plentiful opportunities to develop the subjective forces as we see in the communist quest that young people are willing to continue the communist struggle. but the deserter cant see that from his position and his trauma - ultimately this is what makes him fail as a communist because he has let go of the basic principles: that world is always changing; that change is made by people, through class struggle; that a communist must always be grounded and alert of their own material context.
the scene in the communist quest where you get through to steban and it tells you that "you're witnessing his ironic armor melt before you" - i think that was the devs taking their ironic mask off, too. i believe that because steban's reasons for his communism are the same as mine. we have to struggle even if it's hard and even if they kill us because this is what keeps us human. to struggle for freedom is the next best thing to actually being free. to fight for communism is to fight for the future. it is not about being imprisoned by failures of the past. in fact it IS about failure - because the movement is the working class's school in the struggle for power and we need to learn from each failure and move forward.
i just know that if my comrades and i were somehow in a room with the devs and we had to sing the internationale, we would all know the words. in different languages, but we'll sing the same melody and when we get to the part, the word "international" will be sung in unison. do you get me? i think disco elysium is to some young game-savvy communists of the world today as "what is to be done" was to lenin's generation. something something international communist solidarity...
wretchedly perish then said cicero wednesday
and to think that you havent gotten to the doomed revolutionary femdom mmf bit yet
50 pages into If On A Winter's Night A Traveler and, yeah, sometimes the timeless classics people name drop to sound cultured and which seem to be at least 50% an elaborate joke on the reader and/or chance for the author to show off really are as good as everyone says.
"does a story need to mean something" i think i know what people are trying to get at here but it is also worth reiterating that 1) stories or narratives always convey meaning, question of 'need' irrelevant 2) that meaning is not necessarily or solely determined by authorial intent and it's not a property that the story in itself possesses transcendentally but comes about also as the result of an interpretive act occurring within a given set of social relations and circumstances. the iliad probably did not mean to homer exactly what it does to me. a generative language model can't imbue its output with its own 'intent' and yet if i read that output and interpret it, i'm engaging with it in a way that creates meaning, structured by the particular narratological frameworks or schemata i've learned. a story might 'mean' something internally, and 'mean' something quite different when that internal meaning is contextualised in its social and historical circumstances. etc.
let us hypothesize a trans woman who possesses every cool property. as it is known, for every possible trans woman, there is one that is even cooler. the only way to be cooler than the possible trans woman that has every cool property is to also have the property of existence. therefore, she must exist.
there are more cool trans women than you will ever be able to conceptualize