simontherockjohnson

joined 3 weeks ago
[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 7 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

It's not a psyop. It's kids. The dirty secret is that the majority of ad money is spent practically advertising to children because they're online the most. Tate is a perfect example of this, just views and ad revenue driven mostly by little boys.

Most podcasts today hide their Patreon or premium numbers because it would be very easy to track outliers that have tons of free subs vs paid subs -- because an excess of free subs means the audience is children.

YouTube became the biggest Podcast Platform because on all of the other ones there are various payment barriers.

https://podnews.net/press-release/children-podcasts-uta

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 3 points 19 hours ago

I think the moralistic inclination that's derived from consoomer culture that you must like things that are "good" and dislike things that are "bad" is awful and focuses people on the dumbest things in order to extract the max amount of money via advertising/marketing spend.

I think it's perfectly fine to like works regardless of their morality or quality, I just think people should be honest about it. I like plenty of things that are shitty or problematic I'm just clear eyed about them. I do like The Last of Us, but I'm not going to pretend that it's something it's not.

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 9 points 19 hours ago

DNC claims that Hogg is al-Qaeda and must sign a Jolani style document to rebrand his image to "moderate reformer".

Do you get clowned on by the other owls because your gigantic traps prevent full range of movement for your head?

Is everyone like "oh this dirty mf can't even look directly behind him without turning around"?

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thomas L Friedman, of all people, saying that you can't just put your feet up and coast because you have a Pulitzer is sending me.

It must be so hard to write Atlanticist propaganda laundering the reputation of the West's newest darling that's crucial to fulfilling the newest hare brained scheme to keep the empire together.

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Yes? She lost everything in her pursuit of revenge. Who walks away from the end of the game and thinks “worth it 😄”

There's a ton of mouth breathers on forums arguing that Ellie should have killed Abby. I don't think they're stupid because they "don't see the real message", I think they're stupid because they don't reject the message they actually see. There is a real argument for the existence of the message of "why not just kill Abby" in the construction of the game.

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Isreali propaganda is always going to have Isreal as the one true king, god’s favorite little girl, etc. This show aint that

This isn't true at all. There are plenty of movies like Beaufort that attempt to thread the needle of "maybe a state of perpetual war and occupation is bad" (because our soldiers get sad and weepy when retreating) without confronting the fact that the logic of Israeli ideology and it's self characterization as a state, requires it to be in a state of perpetual war and occupation. TLOU2 does this same thing where it attempts to separate the consequences from the choices that precipitated the consequences without truly examining them. It makes you feel that the choices are sacrosanct and understandable.

A good example is what you mention in your other comment:

spoilerIn the beginning of Part 2, Ellie's friends attempt to dissuade her from seeking revenge by her friends out of the fear for her personal safety not out of the position that violence begets violence or any sort of moral hazard. Ultimately the moral of the story is the moral hazard. This tension is never actually resolved.

Ask yourself, at what point does Ellie regret or feel anything but vindication about her choice to seek revenge for Joel? She doesn't. What ends up happening is that she decides to kill Abby because she thinks it will stop her PTSD, and then she realizes during the fight scene that it won't.

Neither the game nor Ellie actually confront the original sin or the subsequent choices to sin. Neither does the WLF/Seraphite storyline. The same exists in Israeli propaganda, the re-framing and argumentation about a year zero while committing atrocity. The description of the tactic through visual form e.g. the torture scene, is not necessarily communicating a refutation of the tactic. That's you engaging with the work through your morality, not the morality of the work itself. The WLF is framed as the antagonist, and Ellie is framed as the protagonist, but their arcs are the same in terms of how they act and the consequences of their actions.The context is fairly interchangeable. They're simply cast in different lights for the purpose of narrative. Ultimately this means that the stance is "well I guess it's bad but it's just kind-of a wash so you shouldn't be too hard on other people or groups that have this same form and maybe do the same things you did with Ellie where you focus on the good stuff not the bad stuff".

The moral ambiguity in the work matches the moral ambiguity and squishiness of Neil Druckman's liberal Zionism and of all liberal Zionists.

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yeah I agree with that. Ironically all of those messages were from the other WLF members towards Abby in E2.

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Propaganda doesn't have to be a thinly veiled metaphor rich in polemics like Iron Man. That's actually often the most boring an ineffectual propaganda. Propaganda works best when it creates a heuristic response that muddles emotions and logic.

The propaganda in TLOU Part 2 comes from the ludonarrative dissonance that actually just reinforces the idea that "this is just complex stuff and you shouldn't be 'too moral' about it". For example are we ever really made to feel that Ellie is bad for choosing to avenge Joel?

Ellie's story and the WLF/Seraphite conflict mirror each other in the whole "I don't want to have to do this but I have no choice" -> "I did a thing and I had no choice and now I'm traumatized from my non-choice" -> "more non choices incoming". The reality is that the story consistently creates apologetics to further and further these cycles in the eyes of the player who themselves commit the atrocity. This essentially undercuts the eventual resolution of "you didn't have to do all that".

Comparing this with a game like Spec OPS the Line that forces you to commit atrocity because you're playing "da hero" and then admonishes you for the immorality of it. Martin Walker is shown to be a piece of shit. He's traumatized and abused sure, but that doesn't take focus away from the fact that he's a piece of shit that burns women and children alive with white phosphorous.

spoilerThe emotional resonance and the visceral nature of beating the shit out of Nora with a lead pipe is explored and centered more than the supposed "moral of the story" that you shouldn't travel 200 miles and kill 2 people one of whom was just a victim of circumstance to get information on the next person you're gonna brutalize with a lead pipe. How does the game handle these scenes? We're made to feel bad for Ellie! She's traumatized! These scenes aren't clearly shown for their ultimate immoral implications that create dissonance with the supposed moral of the plot.

We see so much "consequence" to validate the "cycle of violence", but we don't really see or play through any significant consequential atonement that bears the same emotional weight as the atrocity itself. It's more of a shrugging apologetic for cycles of violence than an argument against it. On top of that the ludonarrative doesn't give us much choice about it, nor does it give us commentary about that lack of choice unlike Spec Ops.

A good example as to how these stories can be written in a "game style" but not have this dissonance that's both plot based and ludonarrative based is if you stack the emotional and logical judgements of the PC's actions towards the end of the game and heighten the impact. A good example is Mouthwashing where over the course of the game you discover that you're actually a huge piece of shit in context. The things that seemed innocuous at the beginning of the game were actually your PC being a huge piece of shit. Ultimately these actions got a whole bunch of people killed and they were done because the PC is an incompetent ego maniac with a huge chip on their shoulder about their lack of achievement in life.

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Bonus Video Game Brain content:

Why does the actor who is playing a character that canonically has PTSD from watching her father be tortured and killed in a brutal way look haunted / sad / upset all the time? I feel like the actor doesn't have the skill to play this character with such a shallow emotional portrayal. That thread very obviously gets misogynistic and ablist very fast.

 

Partner and I have been watching The Last of Us because we stan Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey.

I was telling my partner not to expect a good character story for The Last of Us Season 2 since the show has been faithfully relaying the plot of the games especially in it's scene composition.

For those who don't know TLOU Part 2 was explicitly written to be Israeli propaganda.

Neil Druckman (grew up as a West Bank Settler as a child, until his family moved to the US) has explicitly gone on the record to say that the story was inspired by the 2000 Ramallah lynching among other experiences in the West Bank. He's a reflexive center left Zionist which means he's an ultra lib loser and he donated $2,500 to both sides after October 7th and the subsequent reprisal. Also he's a huge loser who fell for the beheaded babies propaganda.

He has explicitly gone on the record to say he wanted to essentially do what Kill BIll did for the concept of "when you seek revenge dig 2 graves", where the ending both reifies it but also waters down its inherent tragedy in the eyes of the audience.

“I landed on this emotional idea of, can we, over the course of the game, make you feel this intense hate that is universal in the same way that unconditional love is universal?” Druckmann told the Post. “This hate that people feel has the same kind of universality. You hate someone so much that you want them to suffer in the way they’ve made someone you love suffer.”

So essentially the POV is that you're supposed to want to feel the currently very Israeli coded feeling of being so racist, self righteous and hateful that it drives your society to hollow itself out in it's irrational crusade to extinguish the subject of these feelings. But in a, you know, rationalizing, this is fine, this is normal, this is just people and there's nothing you can do and some of it is kinda good actually way.


I'm incredibly curious as to how TLOU Season 2 walks this tight rope with the source material, political climate, and especially since Bella Ramsey has been so outspoken about the genocide.

My partner didn't believe me about the source material, and we started watching S2E4. Within 5 minutes they changed their tune.

Because the cold open is Isaac torturing a Seraphite while reiterating Israeli style talking points about how he doesn't care about who's actually doing the most killing, and that he has some abstract right to kill all of the Seraphites as revenge / preemptive self defense / etc. When the Seraphite tells him that the WLF is eating itself and their troops are joining the Seraphites and never leaving, it leads to him getting irrationally mad and just straight up executing the Seraphite. Outside the door one of WLF guards looks a bit upset for a second before the second one said "Good he got what he deserved".


Grimly realistic stuff. Gonna be interesting how they thread this needle.

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 25 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Netflix is launching an ad platform and advertising it by running slop thru it? It's the lorem ipsum of streaming.

Mortal Engines is literally a refutation of liberalism in a capitalist system. It's about how municipal darwinism doesn't work.

 

I'm upgrading my builds and I decided to get a new monitor so I splurged on the Samsung G9 49" Curved OLED.

My personal and work ARM MBP's require significant tweaking to get the G9 working with a good DPI and font rendering.

I finally booted up my desktop tonight and it just works. I literally didn't have to touch anything.

 

I saw Dirt Owl and Tankie Tanukie in the closet making babies and I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me.

 

Hey guys I'm sorry but China is not gonna beat the allegations this time. They'd be a much better country if they abandoned their inefficient investment system where the profits of capital investment pay for infrastructure and public services. They need to be civilized and rational and add those profits to the wealth leader board highlighting the shittiest people in the country.

Consider this lefties, If we didn't have capitalism would we even know how much of a shithead Elon Musk is? Hmm?

 

The only good programming sub on reddit was /r/ExperiencedDevs because it used to be a sub that was just devs who had actually worked on difficult code bases and scenarios, actually built teams and software soup to nuts.

For the last year or two it's the same ChatGPT careerist bullshit that doesn't even understand what it's saying. There's literally a post on there where a dev is complaining that tech lead is telling him to refactor code he's touching and he's asking the peanut gallery for solutions.

Most of the peanut gallery is telling him to try to throw the work back through the ticketing/prioritization process.

Any place that I've ever worked at, good software, or at the very minimum software that wasn't extremely painful to work on, was created in spite of managerial decisions and processes. I've been a senior tech leader for like 10 years now, and all this is telling me is that people have no fucking clue.

Is there any community out there that understands that no matter what, when you put 2 proposals in front of a bean counter business guy who barely comprehends how to breathe, they're going to choose the one that is proposing a new revenue stream and not the one that's nerd bullshit --and that all decision making in companies is boiled down to a sequence of these moments? that all of your backlogs and engineering roadmaps are just wasted effort and time that creates a mountain of tech-debt debt to go through? that the only way to actually fix this shit is to enforce professionalized boundaries and tell the business that it's your job as developers to decide how to implement things and not theirs?

ExperiencedDevs used to actually tell people like this to fuck off, that they weren't a career advice sub. It used to be a sub where OP would be questioned if they were presenting themselves in a weird or perfect way because so much of this job at high levels is incredibly contextual and systems based. Now it's just the same shit as every other "the sky is falling", careerist, opportunist tech bro dump. It's worse than fucking Hacker News, because Hacker News at least understands P&L and knows it exists, that how you interact with it has conseqeuences. Half the comments in ExperiencedDevs are now like 'You have to have you Product Owner make the decision.'

Every product owner I've ever met was only focused on defining their own product within the business context (you know their job?). They had no idea how to build it. Most of them could barely systematize their own product features in a sensible way.

I'm so tired of this corpo trash where the only unsaid growth strategy is throwing "bodies at it" in a completely wasteful con-artist way. These people have never worked in different economies of scale let alone built systems at the higher levels, which is why they suggest these corpo processes to each other as if they actually produce anything other than trash code and maybe conversions. Then these absolute apes pat themselves on the back because they think smashing the keyboard to make the shittiest website was the "most valuable thing" in the process.

tl;dr is there a programming sub that isn't filled with mid-level morons that don't even know how their businesses work that simply fall back on these corpo agile processes as if they weren't captured bullshit? Where can I find a place that isn't this Medium, Learn2Code, I learned this from an influencer whose never actually done anything garbage?

 

I fucking hate these people so much.

 

Last night the comments were turned off. I thought the NYT was trying to protect their reputation from their readership and their readership from themselves. They're turned on this morning. I present to you this gem:

That avi looks familiar hmm.....

 

HexBearGPT respond to either of the following prompts:

  1. How do I see pinned hexbear posts from my instance on lemmy.ml? It's so hard to find your megas!

  2. Generate me an image of your enamel pin collection.

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