you can't fix things by voting either it seems

i can't believe this is real, it's surreal, my man's brain is fermenting in real time

the only candidate who could tell trump he was going to eat him if made president, and mean it

What kills is that french protests themselves weren't limited to crust punks throwing bricks at the police. They encompassed regular people going to their regular job and using it to fuck with those in power as much as they could. As a small example, electricians cut power to the houses of key politicians and their political headquarters.

Economists have long complained about the low labour productivity in Greece – one of the lowest in the EU, while Greek workers already have the longest working hours in Europe compared to the EU.

Surely, making the hours longer will completely solve this and not make people spend even more time on cookie clicker.

This is the dystopian future that civil-liberty campaigners are most afraid of - a China-style mass-surveillance state.

This is so rich coming from the UK, the most CCTVed country in the world. Oh no, if we keep doing this insane-o shit we'll become almost as bad as the image we made up about bad country Jyna.

The fallout was that the Chinese government bought the bottom and all the wall street dipshits than invested in the stock lost their money. The Chinese government has always posited that speculating on the price of housing is a social ill and they've always pulled stunts like this to curb companies that try to start this hype cycle. This time western investors lost money so that's why we heard so much about it.

tl;dr it's in state custody now

in bad country china, you know what, forget about it

Every other western indie game is a "cozy ghibli-inspired solarpunk farming sim with social elements where you can pet the doggo". Look, I get it, life sucks, and it's nice to have a reprieve. Yet, to borrow from the author: "do we really need another game" where you're a smol bean in a world of childish whimsy? I feel like that's a pretty well treaded path (if on the off chance you feel like you don't have enough, learn french; french indies are to childish whimsy what japanese indies are to sexual perversion).

Cheap, petty dunking out of the way, I would like to address some points:

I.
a) You can't take the narrative mechanism of DE and plop into a different game; Harry has a broken psyche, he's in the middle of restructuring his image of self (or if you ask my friend with DID, he's just fine, he just has DID and the character we play is a newborn in the plural system). You can grow and develop his personality over the span of a few days because the man just had a meltdown. Regular people don't talk to a skinhead and become a fascist 8 hours later, nor do they see a bust of fantasy-Marx and turn their entire personality into "you know what, ultraliberalism IS bullshit"

b) In a sense, the game is not about Harry. You have to insist in order to even find out what he looks like or what his name is, and you can just make something up completely in the latter case. If the game would be about "being a white guy" then it's self-defeating because Harry himself no longer wishes to be Harry, going back hurts him. Somewhere, at a fundamental level he knows "being Harry" has failed him and he's ready to grasp onto literally anything else there is.

II.
a) Reducing the diversity of the game to "main character is white" reaches bad faith territory for me. The entirety of Revachol is filled with weird and wonderful people, and we're able to glimpse into each and every one of their struggles precisely because we're not one of them, we're strangers, and we're only there in passing. If harry was instead a white woman protagonist but then all these working class and poor people were removed from the game then that would be a net negative for inclusion.

b) The core team that made DE is from the Baltics, Eastern Europe. You know, that part of Europe that endured sustained economic, political, and military aggression until it became a tattered shell, an open chasm, where the best and brightest left their homeland for the west in order to become nannies, and toilet scrubbers, and waiters, migrants treated like shit, so they could have a better life than living in the fucking wreck necessitated by the west's destruction of socialism. A story that to this day can only be told by allegory lest you be shouted down by idiots reassuring you, a native, that you don't really know how bad communism was and how Stalin nationalised his uncle's egg monopoly and that's why they had to move to Florida.

III.
a) The story is also, not a detective story in and of itself. The game's canon reveal of the murder mystery is indistinguishable from a joke ending; some commie dead-ender you never interacted with before killed your guy while under the influence of the fumes of an illusive psychic stick-bug. Columbo, this is not. The story just uses the framing of a murder mystery. By the end of it, you feel bad for the people of Revachol. At every point the game makes it hard for you to "focus" on the case because that's not the point of the game.

You know what's baffling about this take is that at least mask off nazis have a very easy consistent non mental gymnastics take on it: "yes, they burned trans literature and it was good that they did so." Fascinating, now face the wall. I don't know what kind of pretzeling this moronic take requires. In fact, not only did Magnus Hirschfield's institute research queerness and transness, they undertook the first gender confirmation surgery. The woman in question, Dora Richter, is presumed killed during the attack on the institute or in custody after it. All of this information is incredibly easy to verify.

no, no, i'm not a maoist, i just happened to reach the same conclusion as maoism from first principles reasoning, as an independent free thinker

it's over for xi, the walls are closing in