I was raised around a lot of “patriotism” (closet nationalism) and have had to adapt the feeling now that I understand better what America actually is and has been. I found that trying to abandon the feeling altogether was making me feel cynical and alone. The parts of America that I love in fact tend to exist despite our government and dominant culture, which steals and appropriates the things I love about us and turns them into the things people know about us and dislike for good reason. I love the source materials, not the end result. As a white person born into privilege on stolen land, my existence is not entirely apart from this, but all’s I can do with that is try to make something better of it.

There’s a salt-of-the-earth working-class segment of this country that’s getting screwed over, knows how and why they and others are getting screwed over, and has learned to survive together in spite of it. People that make families out of communities. Rail hoppers, union organizers, queer punks, the list goes on. That spirit is not unique to this country but there do exist uniquely American forms of it. I’m more proud of these people than words can express, and that’s about as close to patriotic as I can feel these days.

Maybe I just like seeing our shitty protestant labor worship turned to something more productive. Maybe I just spent too much time in the mountains to not fall in love with the land itself. Or maybe I just love banjos.

MESSSAAAA!! :D :D The Spin is awesome, was just coming here to post The Dress (still might tbh) really enjoying the Model/Actriz album too.

my favorites released this year so far, in no particular order:

• Messa - The Spin

• Model/Actriz - Pirouette

• McKinley Dixon - Magic Alive!

• key vs. locket - i felt like a sketch

• Viagra Boys - viagr aboys

• Honningbarna - Soft Spot

• Aesop Rock - Black Hole Superette

• Los Thuthanaka - Los Thuthanaka

• Nuvolascura - How This All Ends

• Rival Consoles - Landscape from Memory

• Bleed - Bleed

other albums I’ve fallen in love with this year:

• Gallows Bound - Rotting Oak

• Holy Locust - Beneath the Turning Wheel

• Chelsea Wolfe - She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She

• Elder - Innate Passage

• James McMurtry - The Horses and the Hounds

I crunched like hell in my mid 20s on a live service game that I enjoyed playing, was well loved and consistently played by a few fans, and had a few unique ideas in its niche. I gave up a lot of life for that game to see the light of day, under extremely tight timelines and wavering support from a flakey publisher.

It lasted less than a year in release because of a few mistakes in early access and it inhabited a saturated market that seems near impossible to penetrate now. The console ports that caused the worst months of the crunch never even saw a release.

Me and the rest of the devs would love to just play the game again, but the game’s kinda just rotting somewhere in storage of a publisher that long ago tried to pivot toward NFT/metaverse bullshit, to predictable results. Outside of a few early playtest builds a few people have (and definitely aren’t supposed to) we have basically no way of playing it ourselves, much less letting others play it. We couldn’t even get much approved to show in a portfolio once the studio closed and the assets went to the publisher. It makes me really sad and I’m no longer in game dev / tech at large professionally for that reason. This story is not unique, this is pretty much just how the industry works and devs near-universally feel screwed over by it.

In the age of early access viral hits, optimization is just something no publisher wants to put resources into before they know the game’s a success or not.

True story, a game I worked on at my last job shipped on Xbox One and PS4, the PS4 version was not even built until a month before shipping.

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for me I just… couldn’t stand either of the main characters and thought the reviving-their-dead-marriage arc was really trite. I didn’t believe these were people that “should” be together and around the time they dismembered that elephant (???) I was fully checked out.

The game was wonderful when we were actually playing, probably the most fun I’ve had in a coop puzzle game since Portal 2. I really wouldn’t need much in the way of story to convince me to keep playing, but there were so many goddamn cutscenes! I’m glad others enjoyed it more than me, and did enjoy a lot of the gameplay, but the characters really soured me on the game eventually.

and for anyone who’s played the base game - make sure to check out the DLC, it’s essentially a sequel! and I found it even more fascinating and affecting. an improvement on all fronts to an already very special game.

Goodness knows some of us are trying our best. I mean keep in mind our country is a democracy in name but systemically props up white supremacists in excess of the real popular opinion. And a media disinformation machine keeps the working class divided against itself, with open support from the wealthiest and owners of the most popular social media platforms. Social media platforms that, let’s be honest, are super recent inventions we are not yet capable of engaging with safely. It makes it an uphill battle to try to reach out to people whose necks aren’t on the line. And the responsibility to do so falls upon the disenfranchised themselves, who are increasingly saddled with economic and health burdens that might just kill us someday.

I get the potshots at Americans, but frankly I don’t plan on taking the blame if this goes tits up - many of us did a hell of a lot more than vote to resist fascism. And I’ll fight the notion that citizens at large are the problem. It’s a cynical outlook that serves to individualize the responsibility for a systematic disaster. Our country was built to make this possible after all. And I sure as hell know I don’t plan on giving up if Trump clinches the presidency. Kind of morbidly curious about how much of an incompetent clusterfuck Project 2025’s implementation would be.

Victory or no, fascists are paper tigers and I plan on sticking around to remind them of that fact however I can.

Ballots aren’t where effective political action happens. Demanding better means organizing outside of election years, maintaining strong communities, and showing up to participate in political action that isn’t just ticking one of a few allowable boxes. Demanding better sometimes means just doing better, regardless of the state’s involvement. That isn’t directly applicable to, say, genocide, but it does help build a real base of support that allows people to work outside the system to further that progress between elections.

I’m voting for Harris because I would much rather organize under her administration than Trump’s. It’s a dead simple choice imo, because demanding better means doing the work every other day than Election Day.

and definitely pay more attention to your local elections, those will more directly impact you and the people around you.

Can also recommend looking into local HEMA clubs as a step in that direction depending on your goals. Generally they tend to be queer friendly (if not queer themselves) and can help you learn some melee combat basics, which may be more relevant depending on your environment. I learned a lot from axe-and-shield fighting, even though it’s not directly applicable in most real world situations. But the silly Viking shit was fun enough to make me really love showing up and practicing, and it helped me get confident using an axe. So now I feel comfortable open carrying a utility axe for self-defense with a lot of plausible deniability. Also taught me how to deal with a riot shield :3

For some reason most of my partners have ended up being Cincinnati refugees. So I think I can second this. “it’s a good place to be from” is a common refrain.

as a Colorado native I’ve disliked most every other person I’ve met from the state elsewhere, no particular reason outside luck of the draw I think

yeah I heard this album, it’s ok but personally I just think CD Laser Lens Cleaner has elevated the genre further

https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/cd-laser-lens-cleaner/cd-laser-lens-cleaner/

[Outer Wilds cycle end music intensifies]

While this is true to an extent, from experience this line of thinking has its limits and is very easy to misapply. On the one hand, yes you can tell people their ideas do not gel with the vision of the project, and sometimes that’s the right call. And sometimes doing this a lot is best for the project.

On the other hand, even if a majority of the work is coming from one person, not only does your community learn your project, they also spend time contributing to it, fixing bugs, and helping other people. I feel it’s only to a project’s benefit to honor them and take difficult suggestions seriously, and get to the root of why those suggestions are coming up. Otherwise you risk pissing off your contributors, who I feel have the right to be annoyed at you and maybe post evangelion themed vent blog posts if you consistently shut down contributors’ needs and fail to adapt to what your users actually want out of your software. And forking, while freeing and playing to the idea of freedom of choice, also splits your userbase and contributors and makes both parties worse off. It really depends on the project, but it pays to maintain buy-in and trust from people who care enough to meaningfully contribute to your project.

While I do broadly agree, I feel it’s important to note generational trauma is a real and separate concept. It just refers to the idea that trauma can be passed down from parents to children by repeating the same behavior or perpetuating the same ideas that traumatized them. This can be especially apparent in children of immigrants, religious extremists, or survivors of abuse, all for completely different reasons. It’s very common and worth talking about.

I’ve heard this as a sticking point for some people, and I think it’s fair. Some don’t enjoy putting themselves in the shoes of a complete fuckup main character who’s already made a ton of terrible decisions before the game’s even started and will continue to do so despite your best efforts.

But, worth noting this is part of the appeal for a lot of other folks, and the game is going somewhere really special with it. It’s not bad writing, it’s a necessary component of the story being told.

Outer Wilds, to my estranged family. I think they could use a new religion and that game’s probably a better place to start.

god, what a cool game. Never got around to playing the dlc though

Seems to me like a bearded axe does many of the same things while being easier to control and being more effective as a striking weapon, no?

My GF loves One Piece, she started me at just one episode quite a ways in - the one with Bink’s Sake - basically just to say “hey look, this story is actually going somewhere”. Then we started at like episode 60 or so and kept watching from there - it’s definitely a lot rougher, but I’m hooked enough now to watch it with her!