Back in high school we played a game of this on the occasional Thursday night, as well as one long term game that took months and had its own dedicated wiki. It got pretty surreal pretty quick. The one set day a month you got penalized for each time you used a foreign loanword was brutal.

the peak of your civilization

I really hoped we would get a PS6 with a built-in stern cartoon Xi blocking the buy button in the PS store, pointing his finger and shouting “No! Finish your backlog first!” but I guess you can’t have everything in life

The only outcome I can imagine is the brigade closing this write-up as a duplicate and dragging off the author kicking and screaming, never to be seen again, like what happens to the vtuber protagonist in The Waldo Moment. The idea has grown too powerful for even him to contain it anymore.

Even the bluest and whitest Israeli apologist, convinced that the Israelis are the good guys in this conflict will – if they’re being honest – tell you: “Hamas started a war and is hiding behind these civilians as human shields, so this is what happens, do not expect us to stay our hand to prevent it, or to take responsibility for it, what if it was your country in this position, you would change your tune real quick”, etc etc etc. In essence, welcome to the real world, where this sort of thing can just happen and we do not have the ethical tools or framework to make it not happen. This is depressing as fuck.

A lot of Israelis imagine that in the aftermath of all of this Gaza will lose the capacity to launch another 7/10 and ‘learn its lesson’ which in itself will magically lead to a bright and peaceful future for the region. Somehow I am not so optimistic. Pragmatically speaking the Israelis themselves are in no position to say “now that we’ve bombed you, let us uplift you” but egads, someone should do something. The knowledge that even after Israel decides it has done enough and winds down its Gaza operation apparently no sane governing body wants to take responsibility for Gaza saddens me to no end. These people just deserved better, I don’t care how much they cheered for 7/10 or whatever. There can be no justice or peace without compassion

Add a “refuse” button that pops up a short text box detailing the consequences. The End, credits roll. Problem solved, now they can all go explain to everyone on the forums why this is the best ending

Now of course one could make some damning argument about the state of the tech industry in practice, resulting in one of those bell curve memes with “using SQLalchemy is a sin” on both far sides and “noooo it’s just a name it’s fine there’s no fraud involved” in the middle

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The beautiful modern internet! Where one can in one breath complain about the post-truth era, then proceed to get 30 upvotes for making the absurd, maximalist claim that no one excused the Oct 7 terrorist acts – when Iran called those attacks Palestinian self-defence and Students for Justice in Palestine called it “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” (those are Reuters links, hopefully we can agree they don’t invent news wholecloth). So what now, are we going to move the goal posts and say that calling something “a win” and “self-defense” is not excusing it?

There are enough valid pro-Palestinian arguments: denying water to a civilian population of nearly two million is a war crime, that’s certainly a valid argument. These attacks didn’t happen in a vacuum, and need to be seen in the context of the impossible conditions in the Gaza strip: also certainly a valid argumnent. But this stuff, this blatant misrepresentation of reality, is what makes it to the top of the comment section instead.

Propaganda is not there to make you agree with it, it is there to tell you that you are powerless against it

That is a perfectly coherent take for 1994 and even for 2015, but these last years Israel has been aligning itself more and more with the anti-US axis in its spirit and rhetoric. The US says “we approve of this, we disapprove of that” and the Israeli elected government responds “who are you to criticize us after what you did in Iraq and Afghanistan?”, like if Putin were there in the flesh he could not have been more on-brand. Geopolitically right now Israel wants to be Hungary, and the only thing preventing that is the historical accident of spending all those years as a US proxy state, and all the strings that came attached to that. And some people waving flags and whining “we liked it as a US proxy state” but clearly no one cares about them.

I am not saying you can’t make an argument for that succinct manifesto above, just that it used to be self-explanatory how one part is exactly aligned with the other, and nowadays it’s much less self-explanatory than it used to be, and that’s a point of interest.

Red Ed Redemption 2

After Liz Truss’ 50-day tenure I truly believe anything is possible

These concerns sound exaggerated. There is no way that simply being infected with microplastics can force a change in behavior like that. In fact, it is my personal opinion that we should manufacture as many microplastics as possible, and disseminate them to the environment where they can reach more biological systems and provide their many medical benefits to as many people as possible. helphelphelphelphelp This title is simply fear mongering.

The intellectual obsession with logical fallacies was a mistake, and you are a living proof why. People are not perfectly objective robots with infinite capacity for information processing, attention and critical thought. Caring about bad actors, and taking everything they post in the context of them being bad actors, is not an intellectual deficiency. It is a precondition for sanity.

Just because I’m calling it “hype” doesn’t mean I’m bashing the game,

Motte and bailey

How are we even having this discussion in a world where Cosmic Star Heroine exists…

We also had backseat modding and obnoxious rhetorical questions back on reddit, if you really insist we have this discussion

underrated comment

Have you seen Mystic pop up bar? Or tomorrow? Both are about the after life.

Welp. Out with it, I guess: I have extreme fatigue with the urban fantasy “myth and legend is TRUE but in an ordinary and relatable way! What if Zeus was one of us, just a slob like one of us…” concept. I don’t know who to blame / give credit for kick-starting this ubiquitous trend; Probably the origin fission event was the early 2000s releases of Gaiman’s American Gods and Square / Disney’s Kingdom Hearts video game, and the critical threshold was crossed with Once Upon a Time. Back then the idea floored me and I couldn’t get enough of it, now I feel I’ve drunk my fill of it for a lifetime. Whatever remaining capacity for this stuff I had – “but what if it’s really funny and really clever and really profound and everything you like in a show, huh, what then?” – was taken care of by The Good Place. So, I’m sure those are very good shows, I’m just the worst person you could ask to appreciate them.

My wife is the real Kdrama nut, I think she’s on her way to the point where she’s literally watched everything. I’m more picky and join her when something catches my interest. And it’s turned out to be a Netflix original nearly every time, so I am, through no fault of my own, a corporate shill.

Cheesy romance wise, I probably best liked Crash Landing on You. First of all the sheer production value pulling off the concept, and second of all the drama doesn’t spend its entire run in the comfort zone of “will they? won’t they? can they? can’t they?” that 90% of dramas seem to wander around endlessly up to episode 15.9. At some point the ML and FL just… get together and do couple stuff while the crazy plot goes on around them, I say that’s a seriously underrated feature. The show’s weak point was the villain who at every point was exactly as menacing and resourceful as he needed to be: one moment he can teleport anywhere, follow anyone and summon infinite henchmen, the other moment he fumbles all his advantages and comes inches from death. It’s clear the action and intrigue weren’t the main focus for this show, and were used more as enablers for the star-crossed lovers to act out their story. Also I will never get over how the filming for this show involved two actors who were totally into each other and trying to hide it, playing two characters who were totally into each other and trying to hide it. I can just imagine the crew sitting there and thinking “wow! This is really believable acting!”

Intrigue wise – I’m tempted to say “Defendant” just because of the insane opening theme and the ML’s memetic rage (“CHA MIN-HOOOO!!!”) but the one that comes to mind is the recently-released “The Glory”. It is basically a sprawling and visceral revenge plot; a bunch of assholes being set up to destroy one another by the person who they wronged, where the lead asshole puts up a fight and you always have this suspense of “who thought X+1 steps ahead this episode”. In that respect it’s similar to the non-Korean Revenge (2015) starring Emily VanCamp (but thankfully avoids that show’s profound seasonal rot, which culminated in a final season built on the premise that the one character whose death set the entire show in motion was actually alive after all – I feel no shame in spoiling that). A similar and even grittier experience is “My Name”, also a brutal revenge story that invites you to guess the twist between one gut punch and the next.

WTF-wise I recently watched “The Interest of Love” and could not look away from it, like a terrible car accident. I don’t even know what to call it, the negative inverse of a love story maybe. When I grow old and forget every other kdrama I will still remember the FL from “The Interest of Love” and her pithy, soul-destroying one-liners. At some points I remember clapping and cheering at the particularly cruel ones as a defense mechanism. I don’t have the words to articulate the gaping hole at the core of this drama where a heart should be; maybe I can say the big emotional idea is kind of like the Basic Instinct movies – deep down the ML knows he is being slowly eaten alive but he won’t walk away, he can’t walk away, deep down in a perverse way he wants this and needs this, and so do the writers, the lord have mercy on their souls. It was certainly an experience, a piece of impossibly sour candy.

Sci-Fi wise I fondly remember “Sisyphus”. It’s the mirror image of “Crash Landing”: The love story is nothing to write home about, but the surrounding plot, wew lad. There’s time travel and an evil future at war with the present, basically like a more intelligible version of Nolan’s TENET. I can barely remember any of it now but at the time I remember being decently impressed with it, and that’s after reaching a point where I felt I’ve already seen every kind of sci-fi bullshit and nothing could impress me anymore. I particularly liked how they skirted around the whole issue of “how do the people with time travel not just stomp over all the obstacles in their path”, which to my taste was disastrously handled in e.g. “Signal”.