it definitely helps me with anxiety and executive dysfunction. it helps me to be more in control of my emotions. it helps me to not focus on compulsive thoughts and depressive internal monologue. not a cure, but a treatment with positives and negatives and that might not be for anyone, like literally any other medicine used to treat mental health issues. i also know people with psychosis that have had horrible times (constantly felt like they were dreaming, constant false awakenings, memory problems/lapses, etc.) on prescription drugs and now just use weed with much better outcomes. i know people with ADHD that tried prescription drugs that made their dick stop working. weed just gives me dry mouth personally (and an increased risk of cancer down the line if i don't switch to purely vaping/edibles).

well there is this plan which was apparently intentional disinformation (idk enough to say whether the 'intentional disinformation' angle is american copium or not, i read somewhere on one of these articles that 'truman was shocked at the lack of nuclear arms stocks' for some of these plans):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Totality

there is also Operation Dropshot which was considered and then abandoned:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dropshot

another article about Dropshot, that also mentions Churchill's Operation Unthinkable:

https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/from-1945-49-the-us-and-uk-planned-to-bomb-russia-into-the-stone-age

also check out this page, especially War Plan Broiler:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_plans_(1945%E2%80%931950)

one hundred million october 7s upon all settler scum

here's the quick unsourced version: the US was developing the atom bomb, and planned (sometimes for real, others as disinfo) to build enough of them to carpet-nuke (this was before long range missiles and rockets) the entire Soviet Union, a plan that if completed would have been (one of?) the greatest genocide(s) in world history. several US atomic scientists, sought out contact with the USSR (independently, many unaware of the others) so that they could give them the information necessary to prevent this planned nuclear holocaust before America could build enough bombs.

depends on the violence and depends on the game, blanket statements about 'what subjects belongs in media' are ill-considered. for example, i would say that call of duty is 'worse' than something like Halo, since it is more engaged with the american cultural context of imperialism and glorification of imperialist militaries, whereas halo is essentially the same aesthetically as a child banging plastic sci fi aliens and spacemen together going 'pew pew', even if it does have an element of jingoistic NATO realism in its plot.

Games are also at a weird intersection of Fiction and Sport and Technology, the story in Halo is essentially filler to justify the Fun Jumping and Shooting, the fun jumping and shooting is only there to justify the Xbox Hardware, and the contrivance of it even being a Shooting game is a result of the common control surfaces in gaming (another poster mentioned FPS as a solution to camera control), and the fact that doing 'sports' on a screen is necessarily less engaging than real life, necessitating some kind of narrative 'stakes' that make the on-screen activities seem Important and Momentous and Meaningful - and yanking the in-game stakes up to (virtual) Life or Death instead of just 'Win or Lose A Game' is a convenient way to accomplish this.

definitely agree that a major game corporation forcing employees to look at gore as a condition of employment is fucked up, but at the same time i don't think like, a solo indie dev that chooses to do that to themselves while making a free game should be criticized or penalized in the same way.

also in general we should base decisions like this on like, tangible empirical material studies, instead of trying to derive media policy from first principles. for example its possible that 'violent games made under western neoliberal capitalism' are bad, and that 'violent games made under worldwide communism' are not bad, due to all kinds of hard to quantify cultural factors, there are far too many variables to isolate to flat out say 'all violence in video games makes you a worse person', based purely on one's personal anecdotes, that is an absolutely unhinged take

descriptivism is linguistic tailism, humans have the ability and responsibility to shape their shared language for the benefit of all instead of letting anything and everything happen with no consequence as if entropy and random chance and any kind of capitalist or fascist modifications of language are holy and beyond reproach. as a niche leftist community there is not much we can do for the moment but analyze, however a strong centrally organized revolutionary communist party of some kind should absolutely 'prescribe' how language is used to shape society for the better.

westoids when china censors racism: this is literally 1984 animal farm totalitarian authoritarian mass genocide

westoids when AlgoCensor by Google (powered by amazon web services) censors words that would make their advertising partners less money: this is true innovation, the market is solving all of society's problems in the most efficient way possible, take all of my investment money

just guys being dudes

when it comes to mass media, 90% of everything is shit. across all genres and forms of media. i love post-punk psychedelic rock type stuff but a lot of it is also about how great it is to be an alcoholic womanizer. i like a lot of electronic music of various kinds but i cringe whenever i hear an anime girl infant voice. i like a lot of rap and hip hop type stuff but a lot of it is just glorifying wealth and full of toxic patriarchal platitudes about dominating and winning. I absolutely adore a lot of jazz but at least half of the songs with lyrics are overly horny and sappy and slow for my taste. i almost exclusively hate classic rock but there are a handful of songs and bands i like, i somehow enjoy the Horse With No Name song and some songs by The Doors for example.

i thought i was just a pathetic loser incel but it turns out not being able to trust others and form relationships is one of the symptoms of PTSD, so i'm actually a mentally ill pathetic loser incel

socially isolated by mental health gang gang i have not talked in person to someone i don't live with/am not related to in several months

'avatar' calls to mind customized 3d character models like in an MMO videogame or nintendo's 'mii' feature, personally.

these same people will become the crying soyjak if you mention the soviets liberation of berlin. pure racism on display, to these people nonwhites are too stupid to reason with and must be exterminated en masse like vermin, but when whites are killed as collateral damage to stop the world's biggest genocide its 'too far' and 'just as bad as the nazis'