this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

That comic also represents 100% of all survival crafting games, plus Factorio

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

It's true, but when I play games like Terraria, I try to preserve beautiful features of the map and even incorporate them into my builds. Like those surface cave things where it's basically floating dirt/rock with grass and trees growing on them. I often make those into the entrances of underground homes. Same with the deserts. When you get the actuators, you can make sand entrances. I also enjoy making houses in the leaves of the living trees.

[–] [email protected] 92 points 4 days ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 47 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Factorio.

The factory must grow.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 days ago (7 children)

I like to describe the aliens that attack you in factorio as environmentalists.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 days ago

The factory must grow

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I feel so bad cutting trees and draining lakes 😔

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (3 children)

But your corporate overlords demand it, sadness isn't efficient, get back to work!

But really they did a great job with commentary. People still say "why can't we get green energy in the game?". Because that's not the point. This is raw capitalism. You're dropped on a pristine planet, destroy the environment, clear it of all natural resources. It's &meant_ to make you feel guilty. Maybe look around outside

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Yeah man, we all understood that the first time around when it was called Fern Gully.

Like Avatar if you want but like.... it is not a deep piece of media with hard-to-discern messaging. Shit is pretty clear.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Fucking Tarzan was fighting evil white exploiters of pristine Africa in books back in the early 1900s.

A good white saviour from the evil white people, because the indigenous can't do it for themselves. Just like in Ferngully and Avatar.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

I can't decide if I should post the "wait, it's all the failures of capitalism?" or "wait, it's all systemic racism?" meme, cuz it's wait it's all both (always has been).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Are there even any indigenous people in Tarzan? I haven't read the book, but from the movie I only remember his gorilla buddy and the little elephant. I think Tarzan is more about rebelling against civilization in general, instead of colonization in specific (which James Cameron's Avatar is). It's very post-industrialization in that sense.

Edit: Whoops, just read the synopsis on Wikipedia. I don't think Tarzan is the white saviour you're looking for...

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 days ago (1 children)

One time I unmatched someone from a dating app because the second avatar movie was coming out and they said that it was weird of me to say that the alien people were supposed to represent Native Americans because "they're just blue aliens why would you compare them to real life?"

Apparently media literacy makes you a weirdo?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

Yes it definitely makes you weird. Turn the brain off and consume the media like a good little sheep (/s if it wasn't obvious)

[–] [email protected] 78 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago (2 children)

That’s just Evil, if we build an industrial park there where will the ~~slaves~~ ~~forced labor~~ ~~work bit*hes~~

*Due to recent very public events our Public relations officer has been sent on leave with pay instead Nataly will complete this statement.

That’s just Evil, if we build an industrial park there where will the (Checks Notes) Employees park there cars?

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 4 days ago (7 children)

Avatr is about capitalism

That wasn't glaringly obvious to everyone?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Like, to absolutely everyone? This ranks up there with "breathing is good."

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

you forget the kind of people who complain that wolfenstein games or the x-men animated series "became" political

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 days ago

I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it.

- Jack Handey

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Avatar is just recycled CGI Fern Gully anyway

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

It's a motif as old as time. Foreign invader getting Stockholm Syndrome with the natives. Another famous example is Dances With Wolves. That film called The Great Wall as well. Some versions of Robin Hood has it. Anthropologists call it Going Native, which is what Carlos Castañeda did.

But they're not all about economic expansionism

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 days ago

Explore, exploit, exterminate.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago

I saw the film in a theater with someone who wanted to impress upon me that someone pointed out to her how alike it was to what happened to indigenous peoples in the Americas (someone else had pointed that out to her, so she assumed I wouldn't get it on my own). I was like, if you think that's a novel observation, you really need to be hit in the face with concepts to understand things. It couldn't have been more obvious.

But maybe that highlights how much some people just aren't observant or introspective or whatever else. It would explain a lot.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Satisfactory music starts playing

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Holy shit! Avatar is about capitalism? How did I miss that?! I better rewatch it and see if it's a recurring theme.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Wait until you learn about its subtle ecological message!

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I'm torn, because there's an idea that industrial capital only knows how to consume and destroy what it touches. And there's ample evidence to that effect.

But there's this other more naive notion that life never changes, species don't compete for habitat, and doing anything to alter the local ecology is this unforgivable sin. This, despite the fact that everything in the area is itself a product of eons of speciation and evolution and carnivorization.

The impulse to preserve has to be balanced with the expectation for change. The goal should be symbiosis, not stasis.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago

The issue is that you're changing the ecosystems and environments so much that all those eons of evolution are simply lost. The only other times this happens is during natural catastrophes. Sure, in the long run this allows new life forms to take the old ones places, but it's still a massive loss of diversity and evolutionary knowledge - and unnecessary suffering for millions of living beings.

When species compete for a habitat, they rarely destroy it - and those species that do either don't survive for long, or they wipe out large swaths. We're actively killing almost anything in our habitats, and destroying them for almost all previous species.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (7 children)

So... We manage to master space travel. We manage to master interstellar travel. We eventually find a planet with suitable environment for sustaining our species. And we just overlook it.

Can someone explain me the reasoning behind this?

Sci-fi to the side, there are more minerals available - readily - on asteroids and barren planets than anywhere else. Why go hopping around looking for habitable planets, to the reason of 1 out of who knows how many, to then strip mine it?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago (32 children)

The resource being extracted on the avatar planet was unobtanium.

It was only available on that planet, precisely so intelligent people like you can’t say “why not mine barren rocks instead”?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This annoyed me also.

If the Avatar universe has physics like ours, which it looks like it does from the way things move etc..

The protoplanetry disk that the planet formed from, must have had the unobtanium, since it is so evenly spread around the later formed planet.

Yes, there are higher concentrations in various places, which could have come from impact events in the past; if this is the case the impactors are likely from the local asteroid belt or equivalent.

The unobtanium must be available, in a much easier to extract form, in asteroids in the soloar system or the moons of Pandora.

Either way, a mineral is a terrible maguffin for a space faring civilization.

In the second movie, the whale brain juice is a much better maguffin, but still kinda stupid for a technologically advanced species.

Assume that to get interstellar travel, with the suspended animation and brain beaming tech we are shown, humans are a good 200 years ahead of where we are now....given that they can also make fully functional alien bodies from scratch, that can breed and pass on genetic material to what look like viable offspring. The level of synthetic biology expertise must be insane, and they can't make this brain juice....it is just stupid.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

There could be many reasons:

  • The thing you are mining is actually very rare, and although it could be elsewhere, it's the only place you found it. This is the case in Avatar. The Unobtanium they are mining is not found anywhere else.
  • It's easier to mine on a habitable planet. You don't have all the extreme difficulty of operating in space or a planet/moon with no atmosphere. In Avatar workers can freely operate without any special equipment, using just a gas mask, and don't need to be astronauts.
  • You are assuming they found Pandora to mine on it. They probably found it through scientific research, and the mining angle only appeared later when the resource was found.

Another important detail is that in Avatar they don't have any faster than light tech. Pandora is in the Alpha Centauri system, the closest star to the Sun, and it takes years to get there anyway. Sure, there might be lots of better places to choose, but it's literally the only habitable body in reachable distance from Earth unless you want to spend decades flying in one direction.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

That was not a subtle theme...

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Does this imply communism wouldn't extract resources?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (4 children)

That's what I was wondering. Capitalists didn't invent exploitation of nature, it just so happened that its worldwide adoption coincided with unprecedented technological advances. There's quite a few examples of historical societies that exploited nature as much as they could and suffered for it.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago

Don’t forget about the part from the intro (might have been cut from the theatrical release):

They can fix a spine, if you have the money. But not from a VA check. Add $5 and you get yourself a cup of coffee.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Oh, they got whales? Let’s take their brain oil for eternal life!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (2 children)

It is also about settler colonialism. There are natural gas fields off the coast of Gaza.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

There’s a lovely coast and trillions to be made.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

Literally Satisfactory

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago (2 children)

The realization that we probably wouldn't change how we are make me a bit glad we missed the chance to be a spacefaring civilization and are screwed here. The universe didn't need that, one planet ruined is enough.

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