I love that we’re in the IG Farben & Monsanto have teamed up to invent to invent fun new types of cancer timeline.

If you were to write a book where the company that used concentration camp slave labor and manufactured zyklon b for the holocaust bought out the company that made agent orange and roundup people would think its and over the top gag.

He probably told reporters this with the same smug, shit-eating smirk on his face as when he was blatantly lying about it.

I’d be hard pressed to conjure up a more punchable face than his.

Crack’er barrel?! I barrely know her!

I’ve started calling it Time Compression. It feels like it did in 2020 just after the pandemic kicked into high gear. Every day feels like a week and a week feels like a day. It feels like you’re unstuck from reality and everything takes this absurdist tint and everyone is holding their breath including you. Like just existing is causing mild dissociation. The streets are empty and cold even though they’re filled with people and the summer heat is strangling you. Past memories of how things “should” have been or could have been merge and overlap with the here and now. Hauntology in waking life.

I’m not necessarily a believer in any kind of literal collective unconscious, but it feels like it did exist and someone unplugged it again.

Anyways, I felt it start to settle in at the beginning of the year and it hasn’t let up much yet.

In reality though I’m probably just getting old, read too much news, and don’t have enough friends.

I’m not hoping for anything other than marginally increasing class consciousness in a handful of people. Electoralism won’t accomplish anything, but if he can shift the Overton Window just a smidge to make Socialism be a bit less scary to some people while at the same time showing how the “lesser evil” democrats will fucking annihilate anything to the left of Bush Jr. then he’ll have done his job.

I just hope that leftist groups in the US, particularly New York, see this as an opportunity to stuff some actual theory down the gullets of all the baby birdies lined up gawking at Zohran and what the democrats are gonna do to him between now and November.

The Expanse is a wonderful show. It’s a slow burn with how they rearranged some things, but seasons 3 & 5 in particular are some of the best stuff I’ve ever seen. They take the great premise but questionable execution of the books and turn it into something truly amazing. It also has a hard sci-fi foundation that is quite rare and follows it pretty faithfully.

Battlestar Galactica is another I’ll always recommend. It has plenty of issues, but despite those flaws it manages to achieve incredible heights. You can still see its influence on sci-fi today. People love or hate the ending and last season and what they did with some characters and blah, blah, blah. There is a reason people still argue about this show nearly 20 years later. It’s worth arguing about.

Completely agree. It’s a slow burn, but genuinely one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.

Not surprised, there had been a lot of shitty memes flooding the sub the past week or so that were shitting on AES countries. Makes sense now that the mods were MIA and not filtering out the fed bait anymore.

Not necessarily. Keeping them illegal allows the state to eat their cake and have it too. It gives them leverage over those using it illegally, access to black markets, and the ability to use it as justification to arrest and commit violence.

Demonize it enough, like the US has, and your stormtroopers have carte blanche to crack skulls and step on necks of whomever is needed to solve the “drug problem”. That demonization is waning from its 90s highs, but it’s still a very useful tool for the state.

With drugs illegal and popular in counter-culture movements you can use it to weed out the population. White kid with an ounce of weed? Slap on the wrist. Brown kid with an ounce of weed? 5 years of slavery. Just casually reinforcing racism and oppressing minorities.

If they catch someone the state really doesn’t like then they have leverage. Rat out your friends, become an informant, or face prison.

I’m not necessarily against chemical exploration, but the capitalist police state will weaponize it by supplying the black market with cheap drugs, encouraging their use in revolutionary, counter-culture, and minority communities (among others), then scraping up anyone they don’t like. The damage left in its wake is inconsequential.

Event Horizon. The trailers made it seem like just another 90s sci-fi horror flick trying to ride the Alien high, but it ended up being such a good movie with a tight script, beautiful set design, actually smart characters, and great acting.

The chemistry between Kevin Costner and William Hurt was so perfect. This is one of those hidden gems that I like to recommend people to surprise them with just how good it is.

Glad to know his life ends like his comics did, eliciting a brief eye roll and a faint chuckle.

For sure a Marxist. In the past I’ve seen him distance himself from revolutionary language, but recently he’s been speaking more openly about the need for revolution over reform like this video.

All in all he’s a good educator, I’d recommend his work to other comrades.

They doing beanie babies yet? I have a vintage Beanis the Hog that I’m hoping will pay off the mortgage on my retirement cardboard box.

I kinda like it. Stalin looks kinda sad and disappointed, as if he’s looking into post-war Europe and seeing that all hope of revolution is being extinguished.

It’s probably the exact face he would make if he got to listen in on the French Communist Party meetings at the time.

There have been some newer CRPGs that do this. Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera were part of a revival of the genre that used pre-rendered backgrounds to great effect. There is also a mod for Pillars of Eternity 1 that enhances the pre-rendered backgrounds too as the originals are starting to show their age a bit because of the compression they used.

Disco Elysium also takes a lot of inspiration from the genre, including the gorgeous pre-rendered backgrounds.

I can’t recommend all 4 games highly enough. Disco Elysium may be the clear winner, but Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera are very good games too. Pillars in particular has some very wonderful characters in both games that have since gone on to live rent free in my head alongside greats like Garrus and Kreia. Which if you’re familiar with Obsidian and Chris Avellone’s work he wrote two characters in Pillars 1 specifically, Durance and Grieving Mother that are absolutely amazing and deeply compelling characters.

Bit of a rant, but I love these games and would highly recommend them to anyone who likes narrative heavy RPGs. Although Pillars 1 & 2 have some really crunchy combat they also have story modes that make it easy if you’re more into the narrative than combat.

That isn’t to say that the show has any kind of extra-personal analysis, it doesn’t. The show is rooted in and based on liberal vibes based non-analysis. It understands that there is something wrong in the American culture that produces people like Walter White, filled with cowardice, impotent rage, greed, and pride, but never thinks about analyzing how, why, or what is wrong with American culture. So the show falls back on intra and inter-personal analysis. How Americans abuse each other because they can’t address their actual issues because of pride and cowardice.

The Wire does a much better job of analyzing the larger picture, even if it is also a fundamentally liberal analysis. But as much as I love The Wire it doesn’t foment the white-knuckle tension and rage as well as Breaking Bad does. But that mostly comes down to storytelling style I think. The Wire plays out very realistic while Breaking Bad uses Tarantino-esque hyper-reality as dramatic flair to heighten the narrative.

Anyways this is just rambling now. I like the show a lot, for a lot of reasons but mostly for the drama and cinematic flair of it all, not because of its biting criticism.

That all said I did have issues watching it the first time. I had to stop in the middle of season two because I hated Walter White so much. But when I went back into it with the understanding that Walter was the antagonist and Jessie was the protagonist I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I’d have to disagree. The whole show is about how Walter allows his pride devour his life. He’s too prideful to accept the handout from his former business partners. He gets a taste of being powerful and good at something, something he felt was stolen from him by said former business partners, and his pride feeds on it.

The show only wants you to root for him in the first season. By the second season Walter is the antagonist and Jessie is the protagonist.

As Walter’s ambitions become more grand and his pride grows and grows he eventually gets got, all his mistakes and failures finally ruin him.

Walter White is a man only to be pitied and reviled. Chuds look up to him because of course they do, they can’t understand that the show is mocking them and showing them that their own arrogance and pride destroys everything around them. Almost every time Walter is “badass” is when he’s abusing others or he’s lying. He’s the definition of a coward and paper tiger.

You’re supposed to hate him, not love him.

There is no angle, no logic, just excuses to express their rabid misogyny and racism. They’ll use anything as an excuse to spew hate as long as it gets them more eyeballs and clicks than the last thing they tried.

Just working. All of my family is quite a ways away from me so I’ll get a nice paycheck out of the deal. Thankfully I work from home and have a job where unless something explodes I can screw off all day, so I got to call my family and play video games all day.