Seven's recent activity

  1. Comment on Contra Chrome in ~tech

    Seven
    Link Parent
    I think this is a pretty clear parody. It's not "literally putting words in his mouth"

    I think this is a pretty clear parody. It's not "literally putting words in his mouth"

    2 votes

  2. Comment on Daily megathread for news/updates/discussion of Russian invasion of Ukraine - February 28 in ~news

    Seven
    Link Parent
    Yeah, you're definitely right that tankies are not really left-wing at all—as long as your definition of left-wing includes opposition to unjust hierarchies, which is in my opinion the most...

    Yeah, you're definitely right that tankies are not really left-wing at all—as long as your definition of left-wing includes opposition to unjust hierarchies, which is in my opinion the most crucial aspect of leftist ideology.

    I mean, beyond the aesthetic, I wouldn't know how to differentiate such a tankie from a fascist.

    There are some ideological differences between the two, but I agree that it is hard to differentiate the two sometimes. I do often like to make the distinction between tankies—communists who think an authoritarian state is needed to gain economic equality—and nazbols, who are fascists who use Soviet Russia as their mythological past they wish to reclaim. There is a lot of overlap between these two groups, but they are at least theoretically ideologically distinct.

    5 votes

  3. Comment on Daily megathread for news/updates/discussion of Russian invasion of Ukraine - February 28 in ~news

    Seven
    Link Parent
    Just wanted to comment on this that it's only really authoritarian communists who are supporting Putin's war. Mostly Marxist-Leninists, or "tankies" as they're sometimes derogatorily called, are...

    Seemingly only the extreme left and right are left supporting Putin's war.

    Just wanted to comment on this that it's only really authoritarian communists who are supporting Putin's war. Mostly Marxist-Leninists, or "tankies" as they're sometimes derogatorily called, are the ones defending Russia here. The other areas of the extreme left such as anarchists and anarcho-communists are either in support of Ukraine or anti-war altogether.

    7 votes

  4. Comment on Steam Deck launch day megathread in ~games

    Seven
    Link Parent
    One of my friends uses SteamVR on Linux and it's usually fine. I don't expect SteamOS to work any differently than any other version of Linux

    One of my friends uses SteamVR on Linux and it's usually fine. I don't expect SteamOS to work any differently than any other version of Linux

    1 vote

  5. Comment on Steam Deck launch day megathread in ~games

    Seven
    Link Parent
    Rock Paper Shotgun said that the battery lasted over nine hours playing Super Meat Boy.

    Rock Paper Shotgun said that the battery lasted over nine hours playing Super Meat Boy.

    3 votes

  6. Comment on Steam Deck launch day megathread in ~games

    Seven
    Link Parent
    It's the former. People have attempted to play VR games with the Deck before and it does work, just not super well obviously.

    It's the former. People have attempted to play VR games with the Deck before and it does work, just not super well obviously.

    6 votes

  7. Comment on The JFK QAnon Cult in Dallas is somehow getting weirder in ~life

    Seven
    Link
    It's interesting here to see how Protzman seems to be one of the few solid leaders of QAnon sects who seems to know he's a leader. Most of QAnon chooses their leaders stochastically, where their...

    It's interesting here to see how Protzman seems to be one of the few solid leaders of QAnon sects who seems to know he's a leader. Most of QAnon chooses their leaders stochastically, where their leaders--like Trump--aren't really trying to be cult leaders, but are rather are chosen by group consensus. Protzman here seems to be a much more traditional cult leader, exercising direct control over his followers and manipulating them to benefit himself. Because of this more direct control, I feel like it will be much easier for law enforcement to be able to target Protzman legally if and when his cult does something illegal. There's less plausible deniability for him.

    8 votes

  8. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tv

    Seven
    Link Parent
    It seems like I hit a nerve, so I apologize if I offended you. I'm not sure why you're being so aggressive now, but I do not appreciate your harsh tone. Let's try to be civil. I was mostly...

    It seems like I hit a nerve, so I apologize if I offended you. I'm not sure why you're being so aggressive now, but I do not appreciate your harsh tone. Let's try to be civil.

    I was mostly responding to your comments here:

    They do not need to insert commentary about today's social issues into Lord of the Rings. They did not need to insert it into Star Wars, or into Star Trek, or into any other decades-old franchise. But they did.

    I'm not sure what kind of social commentary you're talking about if you're not talking about social issues like BIPOC representation and LGBTQ issues. Since those are the politics that most people seem to take issue with in the franchises you mentioned, I assumed that's what you were talking about.

    I'm not at all surprised this is all you have seen, since you seem to be looking so hard for it.

    If you go on the Lord of the Rings subreddits or any comment section of a YouTube video, the presence of a black actor playing an elf is a highly discussed topic. Even in this very thread, there is lots of conversation about it.

    3 votes

  9. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tv

    Seven
    Link Parent
    The problem is that your criticism here isn't actually about any quality of the show itself. It's not about the story, or the visual design, or the overall corporatization of media, but solely...
    • Exemplary

    The problem is that your criticism here isn't actually about any quality of the show itself. It's not about the story, or the visual design, or the overall corporatization of media, but solely about casting decisions and "politics" in media. Think about the dissonance between how we react to a black person being cast for a role versus a white person being cast for the same role. Why is a black person's presence "commentary about today's social issues," while casting a white person is not? It's a consequence of our white supremacist society that whiteness is not thought of as race at all. It's the ever-present thought that "white" is default, and all other races are deviations from that. In our society, a black person existing in media is political but a white person existing in media is apolitical. We need to consciously reject this casual racism and actually think about race; we need to be actively antiracist.

    Also, as a big fan of Star Trek, I just want to say that your critiques of Star Trek including modern social commentary is completely antithetical to the themes of the show. From the beginning, the current politics the show is exploring with LGBTQ rights have always been on the table. Gene Roddenberry wanted to talk about gay rights in The Original Series, and writers of the 90s shows wanted to talk about gay and trans issues as well. It is absolutely in the spirit of the show to talk about modern social commentary into Star Trek.

    And why must we disallow modern social issues from being presented in older media franchises? It would be really boring to have to continue rehashing the same themes over and over again. You say that "inserting new commentary about the issues we face in the 21st century is jarring and inappropriate," but how is that any more inappropriate than inserting commentary about 20th century issues into a fantasy setting? And since when does the existence of black people in a piece of media count as "commentary"? At what point does a media franchise have to cement its political themes? Is Star Trek The Next Generation wrong for including more commentary about gender discrimination than The Original Series? Why is everyone just concerned about the modern stuff? Again, it's really hard to take this as legitimate criticism when the only criticisms I've seen boil down to "I don't like that there are black people in my fantasy show."

    12 votes

  10. Comment on Google search is dying: Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit, who can’t be bothered to build a decent search interface. in ~tech

    Seven
    Link
    Any time I need to make a big purchase, I always search Reddit in this way. It's really the only way to get actual humans' opinions on something.

    Any time I need to make a big purchase, I always search Reddit in this way. It's really the only way to get actual humans' opinions on something.

    6 votes

  11. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tv

    Seven
    Link Parent
    Honestly all the talk about black people getting roles in this show just seems like more of the "anti-SJW" rhetoric that has been infesting majority male fandoms for years now. I really don't see...

    Honestly all the talk about black people getting roles in this show just seems like more of the "anti-SJW" rhetoric that has been infesting majority male fandoms for years now. I really don't see how having a more diverse cast shows a lack of regard for the original content.

    11 votes

  12. Comment on Tildes' 2022 Backlog Burner: Week 1 Discussion Thread in ~games

    Seven
    Link
    I played 3 games in my backlog, those being Return of the Obra Dinn, Move or Die, and Carrion. I was really interested in Return of the Obra Dinn for its incredibly unique artstyle. From the hour...
    • Exemplary

    I played 3 games in my backlog, those being Return of the Obra Dinn, Move or Die, and Carrion.

    • I was really interested in Return of the Obra Dinn for its incredibly unique artstyle. From the hour I played of it, the investigation aspect of going back in time and seeing the moment of someone's death was really cool, and the voice acting beforehand was top-notch. I don't have too much to say about it that hasn't already been said by others, but the one problem I did have with it was that it was kind of stressful for me to try to not miss any important clues. The notetaking system seemed really well thought out to properly organize your clues, but it was also pretty complex, and I feel like I still don't really know how it works entirely. I'll probably go back to this game at some point, but at the moment it doesn't really seem like something I want to invest a bunch of time in.

    • I finally got some friends together to play Move or Die, a multiplayer party game similar to Duck Game, Mario Party minigames, or WarioWare microgames. I first heard about this game in a YouTube video about video game marketing at cons, so I was excited to try it. I liked the concept and the first couple minutes of playing, but my friends and I soon learned that all the other minigames were locked behind a progression and shop system. We ended up having to play the same handful of games over and over again, and these simplistic ones got old rather fast. The game has mutators to spice up the gameplay, but again, the basegame ones are all pretty boring. After we finished playing the first day, we learned that all games and mutators are unlocked when you do local play. So the next day, we fired up Steam Remote Play Together and played a few local games. The unlockable games were far more fun and interesting than the default ones, and the mutators were much more extreme. It was fun for a while! But ultimately, this game's experience was ruined for us because there were just so many weird and bad design decisions that really made the experience unenjoyable. Some of these included:

      • You can't kick players from an online lobby
      • All the jumps to other platforms were extremely precise. Most of the time we were all on the bottom of each stage because it took us so long to try to get up to higher platforms, and whenever you're jumping, you're losing health, so you only have a handful of attempts at jumping until you die. It was not an uncommon occurrence for us all to die independently of each other because we struggled to navigate some stages.
      • The game was overall very visually confusing, especially with certain modes like Mind Control, where it was extremely hard to tell if you were controlling someone else's character or not.
      • Most of the higher-level mutators made the game impossible to play to the point where the objective of the minigame didn't even matter, you were just trying to survive the mutator. For example, the accelerate mutator where you started out moving slowly but soon came to move extremely quickly was so extreme that it was basically impossible to actually do anything other than move back and forth across the bottom of the stage. Another mutator that was frustrating was the "What the Golf" mutator where you have to golf your character to where you want to go like in the game What the Golf. Now, I absolutely love that game, but for some reason, the designers of this game designed the mutator such that the arrow designating your jump direction moved by itself back and forth, and if you triggered the shot, it then took a weirdly long amount of time for the arrow to continue moving again, and after the acceleration period it was going far too quickly to actually aim. So, in a game where you have to constantly keep moving, you had to basically keep hitting in the same direction over and over again or you die. We never completed any of the objectives while this mutator was active. It was just a struggle to not die due to the mutator.

      So overall I would not recommend this game, and I will not be going back to it. It has a good base as a party game, but due to a series of frustrating design decisions, the game isn't really very much fun. I now understand why I saw this game in a video about game marketing and not game design. It's clear that this game is more focused on keeping its playerbase through an endless progression system, various unlockable cosmetics, and tie-ins with other games, Twitch streamers, and TV shows. It honestly reminds me a bit of Deep Rock Galactic in how the developers are very generous with giving new content updates constantly, but don't really fix the existing problems with the game.

    • Finally, I played Carrion, which was by far my favorite of the games I played. A metroidvania game in the style of a horror game where you are the monster, everything about this game is perfect. The art is great and works perfectly for the collection of teeth, gore, and tendrils that you control in such a fluid way it is honestly really satisfying. The unlockable abilities seem really cool so far, with you sometimes needing to reduce your size (and health) to be able to use previous abilities. And I've heard that later on there's an ability that allows you to possess humans, which I can't wait to experience. The game strikes a great tone of horror movies like The Thing while also being a fun metroidvania. I highly suggest this one, it's a fun time all around. Will definitely be spending more time with it.

    6 votes

  13. Comment on Bored Ape Yacht Club is racist and started by Neo-Nazi trolls in ~tech

    Seven
    Link Parent
    I'm not sure if I can trust a website called "World NFT News" to report neutrally on the creators of one of the biggest NFT projects that exist.

    I'm not sure if I can trust a website called "World NFT News" to report neutrally on the creators of one of the biggest NFT projects that exist.

    6 votes

  14. Comment on Bored Ape Yacht Club is racist and started by Neo-Nazi trolls in ~tech

    Seven
    Link Parent
    The alt-right loves using coded languages and numbers to belie their true intentions. The biggest example I can think of is when the Trump campaign ran 88 ads whose first sentence each had 14...

    The alt-right loves using coded languages and numbers to belie their true intentions. The biggest example I can think of is when the Trump campaign ran 88 ads whose first sentence each had 14 words, "88" being code for the 8th letter of the alphabet, "H", with "HH" meaning "Heil Hitler", and "14" being code for the number of words in the white supremacist slogan "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." Neo-nazis absolutely love this stuff, and it's a very effective dogwhistle against those who aren't aware of it.

    9 votes

  15. Comment on Bored Ape Yacht Club is racist and started by Neo-Nazi trolls in ~tech

    Seven
    Link Parent
    The logo is definitely the most blatant out of everything, but the other stuff is worth bringing up to cement the case imo

    The logo is definitely the most blatant out of everything, but the other stuff is worth bringing up to cement the case imo

    5 votes

  16. Comment on Bored Ape Yacht Club is racist and started by Neo-Nazi trolls in ~tech

    Seven
    Link
    The author does some pretty comprehensive research into not just the surface-level racism of the ape NFTs, but discovers a lot of neo-nazi imagery and antisemitism throughout the project. Some...

    At first glance, the apes in Bored Ape Yacht Club might seem innocent, but there are several traits that indicate that they are intended to represent Black people and Asian people, such as the gold chains trait called "hip hop," the gold/diamond grills trait or the Kamikaze headband from fascist Imperial Japan, offensively labeled "sushi chef headband".

    Myself and many others have noticed the issues with the images, it is clearly simianization. If you run a Twitter search you can find people have been talking about this since the project started.

    Knowing the history of alt-right/4chan types in crypto I started looking into it. I found what I believe to be definitive evidence that the group behind the creation of these images are neo-nazis, or neo-nazi trolls.

    The author does some pretty comprehensive research into not just the surface-level racism of the ape NFTs, but discovers a lot of neo-nazi imagery and antisemitism throughout the project. Some concerning stuff considering how many celebrities are now getting involved with BAYC and how much notoriety it's getting.

    9 votes

  18. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~news

    Seven
    Link Parent
    I think the difference is that doxxing is not always wrong. Is this doxxing? Maybe. But is it wrong? I say no, regardless of whether it is actually doxxing or not.

    I think the difference is that doxxing is not always wrong. Is this doxxing? Maybe. But is it wrong? I say no, regardless of whether it is actually doxxing or not.

    3 votes

  19. Comment on Announcing the Tildes Backlog Burner event for 2022: Shrink your unplayed games list this February! in ~games

    Seven
    Link
    I'm so excited that this is starting! I'm definitely excited to see how much I can look at throughout all of next month.

    I'm so excited that this is starting! I'm definitely excited to see how much I can look at throughout all of next month.

    4 votes

  20. Comment on Popular subreddit r/antiwork goes private after Fox interview in ~tech

    Seven
    Link Parent
    Look into the concept of "food deserts." Sometimes there aren't hundreds of other places to eat, and McDonalds is by far the cheapest option. Just like work, it's not always voluntary.

    Look into the concept of "food deserts." Sometimes there aren't hundreds of other places to eat, and McDonalds is by far the cheapest option. Just like work, it's not always voluntary.

    3 votes