you absolutely can and will live right next to paralllel selves.
one of these lives you're gonna reach enlightenment and realize 60% of the time your mom was yourself
in between the release of Red Alert 1 and Tiberian Sun, frank klepacki took video games music to its height and it has been downhill since.
Hellmarch and Pharaotek are basically the high water mark, and they are turning 30 soon. Sad.
it pays and the kinds of people who get to do this spend their entire lives being gassed up and told that their place is one of merit and auspice so they act the part even when they're a braindead moron drooling t hemselves out on the floor while enabling horrific things domestically and abroad, they absolutely see themselves the enlightened protagonist and it's fucking infuriating.
you know how nursing homes smell? exactly like that.
it depends on when in time you'd have asked me. When I first started having issues that demanded something like breathing exercises to manage - going from erratic breathing from overstimulation or panic attacks or anxiety attacks or whathave felt awful. My chest would feel wrong, my racing heart would be like HEY I WANNA SET THE TONE HERE and so there would be a physically uncomfortable clash
But i meditate and follow my breathing for mindfulness now, and i can say I have gotten used to how it feels to take control here. The discomfort will fade with use and practice, fyi - to me it ended up being like any other workout - initial discomfort followed by greater ease of action with repreated use.
if the act itself helps i have to recommend learning how to get used to it, and because of how brains work that's mostly repetition.
a mafia style open world game setting up protection rackets, extorting the wealthy, robbing banks, etc. for the cause.
When I was in highschool i got really obsessed with the concept of conditioning as taught by my psych class - operant conditioning and stuff being described in the simplest terms possible - and that led to weird places later in life. You can read between the lines if you want, but that's not why I'm here. I only wish to convey the start of a lifelong journey of deliberate self conditioning, taking the reigns of how I think and do in a way a lot of people surrender to their environment, chance, and genetic factors, i chose to control as much as one can.
This is hard work, it comes easier to some than others, but it gives me an understanding of how our inputs inform our outputs.
The major behavioral changes I really invested myself in were shedding 'male' coded thought pattern and behavior in favor of the feminine, but from the moment I undertook that work, I found that my inputs, largely dictated by circumstance and male socialization in the past, were informing my own plasticity - the flexibility of who i could be, because in some level the inputs - the media, the conversations i had - the people i surrounded myself with - all contributed to a reinforcement of what was already there, and continued development along axes i no longer found personally fulfilling.
so... i cut myself off from a lot of media. I was busy already, the free time I had no longer made sense as something i would waste on passive entertainment and matters that didn't improve myself somehow - video games became very unimportant to me, between hormonal changes and a dissatisfaction with my own mental treadmill - and especially violent games, violent media, pornography, etc.
My behavior changed. Say nothing of the hormones - the constant exposure of these elements normalized and reinforced toxic tendencies, and de-sensitized me to real human suffering that, within some months of re-ordering the inputs in my life, began to fade away and give way to a much more genuine expression of self.
I believe violent video games worsen us as humans. I believe the media we consume is largely tailored to reinforce worldviews that, even if only grudgingly, accept casual cruelty and violence at every level of society, and especially convey a sense that this is how it needs to be - and this is how American capital has largely captured the hearts and minds of its citizenry - even those of us unwilling to actually cooperate find ourselves pulled and forcibly immersed in this context that's reinforced by this kind of media.
So to me, no - the communist utopia of the unwritten future has none of this fucking shit in it - because this shit makes us worse people.
That's hard to square. I know. This garbage is the easiest dopamine pump we have, and at this point your treats are load bearing things - you would actually wanna do something stupid to remediate your material conditions if you didn't have them - and that's the point - this is the shit that makes you sleep. This is the shit Nada comprehends in black and white plain text when he puts his glasses on. You have to step away and refuse it to break out and perceive the tomorrow you yearn for with the religiosity of a devout Catholic seeking divine union.
lecture random people they should be grateful for the soviet union's occupation
Another great character thing is that he loves his wife. Like, this shouldn't be a huge thing, but look at every. single. cop. show. it's wife hate and marital strife. Look at basically every comedic thing a boomer or gen xer ever touched, it's a load bearing amount of "hate my wife" jokes.
Columbo out here just, clearly adoring his spouse and it's just... i dunno i love it.
He's completely wholesome, but a chameleon gremlin with the prescience of like, Paul Atreides and a disposition to ruining the untouchable class.
one of the best episodes is one where he goes after a guy who runs a private intelligence outfit and even tries to buy him out with a gigantic ass salary
My favorite thing about the show is that while often times maybe you're not gonna catch everything columbo catches, and some stuff can be contrived, the show is still begging you to pay attention. If you were impressionable and going to model whatever came on your TV, being observant and thoughtful would be the outcome for watching this. Columbo always notices details that are amiss - the idea that if something like a murder has taken place, but has been staged to seem accidental or otherwise non-criminal, there are tells. there are signs. there are disturbances. inconsistencies between people, alibies, and the truth of an event - and i think i love that. It's a good moral to try and impart, but i think it might be lost on decades of boomers, gen xers, millenials, and zoomers memeing too hard, but i also think it's right there to pick up on if you're willing
i bet vance lets his cheese curdle before it sloughs off in the couch whereas i bet daddy timmy washes thoroughly
nah too gross
I've had a love of history generally, and I know a bit more than most about the Roman empire, and that's kind of a red flag i guess, but I genuinely think they're one of the worst things to ever happen to the world, much as i find the endless stream of civil wars and coups to be very fun to read, the brutality of their empire wouldn't be surpassed until England somehow went from a backwater to a globe spanning empire and to be quite honest i'm not a fan of them except as a gateway to knowing what some of my ancestors got up to.
Weird Ass Rome Guys are why the American feds are the way they are, it's obvious there is something deeply wrong with how Rome gets portrayed in popular media and stuff that makes this a seemingly wide-spread phenomenon, but honestly what's with the glorification of Rome? is it downstream of American Nationalism? No, that can't be, because Rome Guys go back so far we have popes making fake roman states and tsars and sultans trying to prove their dick is the most Roman. It's hard to miss a lot of Rome Guys are pretty regressive people. Like, you don't ever think something like "Augustus was a role model" unless you've got some twisted bullshit shit going on in your heart.
It makes me uncomfortable to engage with the history sometimes, because Rome Guys are always listening and ready to project their noble fantasy of them and the idiot narratives of Rome's decline as a sickness caused by foreign invaders sure does sound like deeply right wing revisionist history to me, but I've never really thought through the how and why of these guys, i wanted to solicit Hexbear's thoughts.
a caveat that maybe state and municipal government is still somewhat democratically functional, like at that low level enough of the day to day of administering people's lives is delegated to actual democratic authority maybe
but then i look at stuff like the debate (i didn't actually watch the debate i respect myself too much) and i look at how stuff happens and how it like doesn't seem to matter at all who is in power for the average person. Like it's pretty obvious that there is corporate and wealth buy-in for domestic policy, and think tanks and stuff that set a social agenda to some degree, and I guess the democratic apparatus serves to enable that buy-in, but on the federal level it really feels like voting happens at all merely to provide a democratic legitimacy to stuff that's actually decided entirely by unelected bureaucrats and moneyed interests that are either employed by the state or privately, right?
everything connected to voting is there to give social consent right? if you vote you assent to the legitimacy of the government - and this is like, its sole function? because if not enough people did that, and people actually didn't believe in the legitimacy of the government, there might actually be a problem I guess?
Like how can we think it actually matters which of these guys [the goo brain prez candidates] ends up elected from the pov of an average person? womens and queer rights are dissolving before our eyes regardless in most places, labor rights movements get stomped the fuck out the second they start to do anything interesting, and the few state bastions of safety come from the fact that local governments still sometimes represent citizen priority in some limited sense.
like foreign policy is gonna be the exact same in most cases, like there's no voting mechanism that will end the genocide in gaza - there's no mechanism to get the MIC to stop bombing random places and sending demonic spec ops raids wherever, nor will the steady stream of funds that go into toppling any government that so much as hesitates in its fealty to the us - so ideas that democracy is the answer is meaningfuly deluded, right?
federal politics feels like a really boring kind of WWE thing where the stage are national elections and their personalities and horse races, the kayfabe is the idea that a vote translates into anything meaningful other than the governed consenting to the process, whereas WWE's actual function as entertainment and a RNC pipeline is somewhat obvious, liberals are an entire class of people who actually stake their identity on its sincere legitimacy.
I know this post is long and probably sucks, but this all reeks to me and I'm so tired of seeing people care when the actual options for positive change are narrow, unpleasant, and sometimes illegal to voice.
I want people to disengage, start building parallel structures and outright refusing to live as if this farce is legitimate and even if i'm wrong about the particulars, that feels unreproachably noble and needed.
business consolidation especially in tech, food, and entertainment tells me there's just some really awful shit on the horizon - we like to act like these things are purely greed driven things, and while that's a huge element of why this shit happens, it also feels like... frankly, a more direct consolidation of power in anticipation of precipitous decline in material conditions for the folks without investiture in these rapidly consolidating and monopolized industries.