holygon [he/him, comrade/them]
If you’re interested in something fun, there’s an old blog post about how terrible the Thieves Guild questline is:
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=14422
It’s a bit long, but I think it’s very entertaining. Deep dive into every single plot hole, and nonsensical story beat.
I mean, what is competition? The entire point of a competition is that someone wins, and someone loses. When the entire structure is a competition, then if enough time passes most participants will have lost, and only one will stand victorious. The concept of free market competition will always end in monopoly, and every anti-trust mechanism is just a way to slow this down, not an actual solution. Capitalism will never create a solution to this either, as monopoly is the logical goal of capitalism. When monopoly exists, the capitalists have the most power. Of course capitalism will benefit the capitalists. It would be weird if it didn’t.
Yeah I agree. I don’t think he’s fully had a change of heart or anything, but the potential shame that he undoubtedly feels right now, might eat at him enough to eventually actually have a change of heart.
An example - that is of course much much much less serious than this - is when I was a teenager, and acted like a smug prick towards some friends, and acted like I was much smarter than them. They (rightfully) called me out, and while I was initially defensive, the shame of it made me realize that I had in fact been wrong, and when I made my second apology to my friends, I actually truly meant it. They accepted it, and I no longer behaved that way. Shame is a tool, and it can work wonders. However, if I had just apologized, and then continued to act this way, they should of course not have accepted it.
My point is just that shame can actually make people change, and if the person in question actually does change in their words, and their actions, then it is a good thing to, maybe not accept, but to acknowledge the apology. Reason I say acknowledge is that no one is required to just “accept” a person that has slighted them, I just mean in the societal sense, it’s good that people are afforded the opportunity to change.
The detached vibe is just a personality trait that he actually kinda has a hard time with himself. He’s said in multiple podcasts that people often find him rude the first time he meets someone, and his friends has to clarify that he’s really nice to the people he just met. He just has a hard time focusing on being actively engaged due to the way his ADHD manifests. Watch him on Sad Boyz with Jarvis Johnson and Jordan Adika if you’re interested.
Early piracy was just so fun. Like I’m glad that it’s more simple, and accessible now, and that you are less likely to use your dial-up internet to download a virus over 3 days… But, it was so exciting lmao. Like it felt like you were stepping into some underground club that no one knew about - even though you were a 12 year old nerd with no prospects of a girlfriend in the near future hahahaha. But it was really fun, and it helped me learn to like problem-solving, and the idea of piracy, and open-source software def also helped me develop some ideas about the world around sharing, and stuff.
Anyway I think that’s enough gushing about that hahaha, just wanted to indulge in my nostalgia for a minute.
I kinda miss the days of pirating a movie, burning it to a disk, and then popping it into a DVD player. Like it’s objectively more convenient now, with Jellyfin/Emby/Plex media servers that can stream to any device in your home, but it has lost some of the analogue charm of feeling like a hackerman dressed like Neo when you gave a friend or a family member a DVD with sharpie writing on it, and them thinking you were some tech genius lmao.
I remember some software where you could include like a custom DVD menu, where you could press chapters and subtitles and stuff before starting the film, and thinking I was the coolest person in the world when I showed my friends hahahha. Ah good times. Thanks for the nostalgia trip.
You are right that he wrote about it, but it was in his book To Kill A Nation, and not Against Empire. Here is the direct quote from the book:
As the war dragged on and NATO officials saw press attention drifting toward the contrary story—namely that the bombing was killing civilians—“NATO stepped up its claims about Serb ‘killing fields,’” notes the Wall Street Journal.2 Widely varying but horrendous figures from official sources went largely unchallenged by the media. Support for the bombings remained firm among Clinton supporters in Congress (including the one professed “socialist,” Bernard Sanders [Ind.-Vt.]), and among self-described humanitarian groups such as Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, and Concern Worldwide, along with “peace” groups, and various NGOs—many of whom seem to have convinced themselves that NATO was defending Kosovo from a holocaust.
Just searched through my copy of both Against Empire and To Kill A Nation to make sure