…but there is now a clarity across Europe, and not just in Paris, that regardless of Vance’s reassurance, Europe has to have the capability to operate autonomously of the US. Trump is self-evidently not reliable, and his benign assessment of Putin’s intentions is not shared.

Planning for a European reassurance force in Ukraine is under way, as is planning for a potential Russian attack on Europe. Since February, France and the UK, through a combined joint expeditionary force, have formed the nucleus of that planning, but this has broadened, with new political leadership increasingly coming from four members of the Weimar+ group: Poland, France, Germany and the UK.

Honestly, I think Europe’s disillusionment with us will be better for them in the long run. The fact that they were waiting on Biden to take the lead in Ukraine, whose fecklessness over lending credence to Russia’s prima facie bogus claim of the war being US vs Russia made him hold back many strategic options from Ukraine, meant that they were also not thinking about what Russia’s aggression meant for them, and reacting accordingly.

I think the original purpose of Article 5 (in terms of US intervening vs Russia) has probably been dead for a couple decades now, and it’s good that Europe won’t be finding that out when Russian troops are rolling in, and the US backs off.

For anyone wondering:

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, Minecraft and Forza Horizon 5

Look at that complete lack-of-an-Oxford-comma just sitting there, mocking us.

R* sucks. Their asshole-simulator games-turned-live-service-cashgrabs have never represented anything but the worst of the games industry. GTA6 getting canceled would be an excellent opportunity for millions of people who would’ve bought it to spend their time playing something better.

Fight me.

I’m a huge open world and/or sandbox nut. Non-linearity is my jam. Kenshi, Rimworld, AssOdyssey/Shadows, Project Zomboid, Witcher 3, X4…

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good story, but story takes many shapes, and not all stories are pre-written; plenty are emergent. I grew up playing with Legos (and still do), and me making whatever story I wanted (or that emerged along the way) was part of the appeal.

Honestly, apart from FF8 and TW3, and now Expedition 33, I haven’t found many games with written stories that grabbed me. I read books when I want that fulfillingly-crafted linearity.

“It’s been 3 months since we cut off all food and medicine to the civilians in your territory. Next we’re going to fully occupy your territory, and kill you and anyone we assert is part of you. Hey wait, what do you mean you won’t negotiate with us?”

Yes and no. Most of the cost-reductions in hardware manufacturing lifecycles come from minimizing materials loss and optimizing design efficiency. The components don’t actually just get cheaper to produce over time on their own, from a material perspective. That means that material shortages are much more likely to have a big impact on cost (up or down) than new manufacturing technology, for the same chip.

I don’t think they’ll do that for already-released games, but I wouldn’t put the big 3 (Sony, MS, Nintendon’t) from doing the barest ‘remasters’, and replacing their digital versions of those games with the ‘remasters’.

Oh man, 2011… I’m a millennial, and even I was already out of college in 2011. My ‘kid’ games were $80 USD in the 90s. Here’s an article from 2014 that someone made about how insane N64 game prices were.

Star Fox 64 – $79.95 (Source: GamePro #106) - 1997

GoldenEye 007 – $69.95 (Source: GamePro #108) - 1997

Super Mario 64 – $66.99 (Source: GamePro #97) - 1996

According to the CPI Inflation Calculator, $80 USD in 1997 is $160 today.

I am surprised, and happy.

Obviously. The list you rattled off looks like you did a Google or YouTube search on “gaming influencer” and picked a few random names.

I didn’t Google for those, they were, as I said, the ones I do know.

Don’t spout off uneducated opinions about subjects you don’t know anything about.

I know quite a lot about the gaming space. That doesn’t require me to go look up every middling alt-right YTer or streamer.

If you have an actual take on what I posted, apart from my rw examples being too well-known or something, feel free to post it.

I think you’ve mixed up the timeline in my comment.

• Pre-gamergate era (2010-2014): channer-esque misogynists like JonTron are heavily popular on YT, but there is no political pipeline established. They are just voicing their own shitty thoughts, and their audience is almost exclusively young white males.
• Gamergate (2015): Right-wing politicians and shock pundits like Shapiro take notice of the large amount of misogynistic content that a lot of gaming YTers are spouting as GG gets national attentions, and think, “hey, those sound like people I can capture”.
• Early Alt-right pipeline (2015-2019): figures like Shapiro and Yiannopoulos start making content intended to target gamers, usually ‘shock’ videos with gamer-derived terms like “own” (the libs), and/or are interviewing right-wing-aligned gamer influencers, and the gamer->conservative voter pipeline is developing.
• Late Alt-right pipeline (2020-onwards): there are tons of right wing YTers, streamers, and talk-shows that target young white males, especially gamers, telling them that everything they dislike is due to ‘wokeism’, ‘DEI’, etc… you know the rest.

Even before that, there was this whole corporate wokeness marketing trope that really drove the concept into the ground

You’re using ‘woke’ unironically, in the way that the Right does. Neither of those things you posted are Woke, they’re just pandering. Woke means aware of the systemic biases in our social institutions. Your examples aren’t “wokeness”, they’re Feminist Capitalism (and Rainbow Capitalism also gets called ‘woke’ by the Right).

It’s like kids all running with this popular meme, only for parents to sudden adopt it and it’s not cool any more. So, right-wing spheres to pick it off of the ground, dust it off, and just carry that energy forward, which is unfortunately what they are good at.

No, that was never what wokeness was (and none of those companies ever called themselves that), it’s just that right-wingers started calling anything they didn’t like “woke”, despite their examples having nothing to do with wokeness.

Leftists are shit at messaging. Like, really really shit at messaging.

Leftists have great messaging. If you think messaging is a Leftist problem, I think you’ve confused Liberal, Progressive, and Leftist.

Who are they as a group, or who are they as in, list their names?

Even in Trump’s first term, I heard liberals (often older, homeowners/ wealthier) saying things like, “He’s not good, but the border is a problem. It’s impossible for people to find a job nowadays.”, or claiming that Biden and Harris (the Border Czar, dontchaknow) were letting people ‘flood in’.

This past election cycle, anti-immigrant rhetoric popped up across liberal media takes on what Democrats needed to do differently to appeal to more voters, insisting that Dems actually want to lock down the border.

I’ve already heard one Dem-voting person say that Trump’s “already fixed the border”. They won’t vote for him, but they also won’t brook discussion of any real resistance to him, either. And they are actively hostile to reforms Leftwards, because honestly I think many of them secretly want him to succeed in creating a white ethnostate that benefits them, without them having to endorse it themselves.

How do we identify them?

Talking to people. Discussing current events. Discuss Trump. I’ve seen it most among upper-middle class Boomers, but I am sure there are plenty more across other demos.

If and when we finally escape from Trump and his ilk, we need to have a real discussion and plan for reparations for everyone he’s deporting and detaining (assuming that hopefully they are still alive), and constitutional reforms to limit executive power.

There are too many white liberals quietly supporting Trump’s actions, even if they’d never say it, and we can’t allow the Right to become the “useful authoritarians” for Center-White America to unleash on minorities every couple decades.

they saw “woke” as a reason for why games or movies turned out bad

This only became a thing after the pipeline was established. This rhetoric is what the pipeline feeds them.

I remember seeing JonTron videos back in 2011, well before the 2015 gamergate era. Even back then he’d make offhand remarks about how tough it was being White, how badly women treat men, etc. Gamergate in 2015 largely caught the notice of the Right’s political apparatus, and they saw the opportunity to convert the casual misogyny and racism into feeders for their political machine. “Woke” didn’t really become a right-wing attack in the gaming and movie spheres until pretty recently.

It’s so frustrating to see so many comments doing exactly what the post is pointing out, either deriding games as a medium, or “gamers” as some monolithic group of disaffected young men.

Games are a medium, same as books, movies, or tv. They can convey any message, and yes, many games do have Progressive (or even Leftist, see Disco Elysium) themes. But unlike TV, books, and movies, where there is a constant stream of political interaction from both Left and Right wings’ political apparatuses, there aren’t really a lot of Leftist political entities attempting to reach young men via videogames.

Name one Left-wing gaming influencer apart from Hasanbi (who it should be pointed out, many Democrats tend to hate on). I can list off at least 3 different right-wing ones off the top of my head (JonTron, Asmongold, Dr Disrespect), and I don’t inhabit those spaces, so I’m only going off the biggest names. And that’s not even beginning to get into the gaming-adjacent Rightwing influencers who those gaming influencers direct their fans to.

It’s a pipeline, and we don’t have one on the Left.

I remember the first time AOC played Among Us, and it was a huge deal for us on the Left, because it was possibly the very first time we’d seen a Democratic politician actually engage with games publicly.

Gaming is literally the largest entertainment medium now by a large margin (yes, larger than movies and tv), but we don’t see politicians putting out lists of games to play like they do books or movies. Instead, most times we see an article about a Democratic politician somewhere like Kotaku, it’s often because they’re trying to blame video games for something.

So instead we have largely ceded the gaming sphere (not the games themselves, but the areas of discussion around gaming) to the Right. They pull in disaffected young men, tell them women and ‘wokies’ are the reason for their problems, and then hand them off to overtly political folks who transform that general disaffection into right-wing political capital.

I think you’re misunderstanding what “taking games seriously” means in this instance.

The Right takes the political power of games seriously. They understand that games can be tactically used as an access route to young men, to influence their politics. They know that it is just another medium like TV or movies or books, and don’t eschew interacting with them for political purposes like Democrats traditionally have.

That’s why it was such a big deal when AOC played Among Us (and later, her and Walz streaming various games). It was a politician on the Left actually ‘deigning’ to interact with young people in a platform that they inhabit, and not belittling it.

The closest equivalent person we have on the Left to people like JonTron or other YTers who mix Right-wing talking points with games to draw young men into their pipeline, is Hasan, and Democrats treat him like he’s practically Ted Kaczynski in waiting.

the repetitive tasks that turn any job into a grind are prime candidates

The problem is, this varies from person to person. My team divvies (or did, I quit not too long ago) up tasks based on what different people enjoy doing more, and no executive would have any clue which repeating tasks are repetitive (in a derogatory way), and which ones are just us doing our job. I like doing network traffic analysis. My coworker likes container hardening. Both of those could be automated, but that would remove something we enjoy from each of our respective jobs.

A big move in recent AI company rhetoric is that AI will “do analyses”, and people will “make decisions”, but how on earth are you going to keep up the technical understanding needed to make a decision, without doing the analyses?

An AI saying, “I think this is malicious, what do you want to do?” isn’t a real decision if the person answering can’t verify or repudiate the analysis.

From the title, I thought the article was about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars series, aka Barsoom (1911 onwards). Calling those “kids’ stuff” or implying that’s how they were viewed feels pretty elitist all on its own; they were pulpy, sure, but still considered reading for adults. It feels kind of like the author wanted to concoct a reason to discount the much earlier sci-fi work(s) from having been “serious”, so any consideration it was given (which at the time, was pretty significant) could be ignored in favor of handing Bradbury the credit.

But The Martian Chronicles subverted all that, addressing a range of vital, vexing, timeless societal themes in the midst of McCarthy era America: nuclear war, genocide, environmental destruction, the rise of technology, corporatization, censorship, and racism.

Books are not required to address one’s personal list of important themes to qualify as “serious”.

he had created literary science fiction, and the intelligentsia quickly took notice.

No, he had continued in the footsteps of Burroughs and even moreso Wells. If you don’t measure your own interests by the level of recognition that “intelligentsia” (i.e. critics who deride anything but the stuffiest non-scifi, non-fantasy fiction as “kids’ stuff”) give it, you’ll have a much better reading experience.

but he was the first science fiction writer to elevate the planetary tale beyond the marginalized gutter of “genre fiction,”

Yawn. This genre gatekeeping is neither useful nor enlightening. There are still plenty of stuffy, self-important critics today who dismiss sci-fi and fantasy as “kids’ stuff”, so it’s not like Bradbury put those bad opinions to rest for sci-fi, just as Tolkien did not for fantasy. Chasing the approval of people who otherwise despise a genre should not be the goal for works of that genre.

Its not an empty panic if you actually have real reasons why its harmful.

Every panic has ‘reasons’ why something is harmful. Whether they are valid reasons, proportional reasons, or reasons that matter, is up for interpretation.

First you’d need laws in place that determine how the social media algorithms should work, then we can talk.

Yes, then we can talk about banning systems that remain harmful despite corporate influence being removed. You’re still just arguing (by analogy) to ban kids from places where smoking adverts are until we fix the adverts.

companies ARE making it harmful, so it IS harmful

No, companies didn’t make social media harmful, they made specific aspects of social media harmful. You need to actually approach this with nuance and precision if you want to fix the root cause.

That, and there are various other reasons why its harmful

Every reason that’s been cited in studies for social media being harmful to kids (algorithmic steering towards harmful content, influencer impact on self-image in kids, etc) is a result of companies seeking profits by targeting kids. There are other harms as well, such as astroturfing campaigns, but those are non-unique to social media, and can’t be protected against by banning it.

Let me ask you upfront, do you believe that children ideally should not have access to the internet apart from school purposes (even if you would not mandate a ban)?

This is the newest ‘think of the children’ panic.

Yes, social media is harmful because companies are making it harmful. It’s not social media that’s the root cause, and wherever kids go next those companies will follow and pollute unless stopped. Social Isolation is not “safety”, it’s damaging as well, and social media is one of the last, freely-accessible social spaces kids have.

We didn’t solve smoking adverts for kids by banning kids from going places where the adverts were, we banned the adverts and penalized the companies doing them.