itsPina

finally the world is at peace. i read the newslines yesterday morning. They got the guy preventing world hunger from being eradicated (he was storing units of food inside the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid), and now hes in jail for 15 years.

Now that thats out of the way you should play Plants Vs Zombies 2 Gardenless. Its a port of the mobile game to PC that features new animations, new levels, removal of p2w microtransactions, rebalance, and more. It basically turns PVZ2 into a proper sequel of the original game.

You can get it here: https://pvzge.com/en/

and then never look outside your window because you already know theres nothing but good things out there so theres really no use in looking outside just imagine it yourself

My GOD is Nuclear Throne an incredibly tight experience

Art style: phenomenal

Audio: phenomenal

Gameplay: probably the best in the biz when it comes to a twitchy roguelike

Story: fuck if I know

The bread n butter of this game is actually ALL of these aspects firing at once. The gunplay is really really good by itself, but once you combine that with the STELLAR player feedback you get from hitting an enemy with a bullet you get some of the most satisfying "shooting" in any game ever.

You shoot a crystal enemy and it makes a lil clinky sound. You shoot a normal dude and he goes "UGH". The noises the guns make themselves? Exactly as you'd imagine. You hear the crossbow "knock" another arrow, you hear the bolt fire, you hear the bolt hit.

The perks are pretty well designed and all feedback into this wonderful loop. Not only do you get a really satisfying noise upon level up, every perk has a unique noise themed around its effect. Perks like trigger fingers feel so good because you both visually notice how much faster you are shooting, and notice audibly notice how many more enemies are dying.

And the best part is... a normal run takes about 15 minutes max to "win". After you win, you can either end your run, or just KEEP ON GOING and see how far you can take it. You "loop" and start over from beginning but there are now new enemies, hundreds more of them, and a whole host of new bosses that ONLY appear post loop!

NEVER is there a dull moment in nuclear throne. The worst case scenario you hunting down a damn bird that flew across the map, and that takes maybe all of 10 seconds. The other 99% of the time is PURE action. Non stop shooting, dodging bullets, and collecting ammo. The most effective strategy is to be in the MIDDLE of the brawl, otherwise you start hitting ammo constraints.

There is also a wonderful MELEE system in this game. Melee is effectively just really short range ranged weapons with the added benefit of clearing out all the bullets constantly sent your way. This is pretty necessary post loop, as your entire screen will likely be bullets otherwise. The perks that tie into melee are also SO SO satisfying, and really incentivize the player to literally never stop swinging, and never stop killing.

Meta game progression is based around unlocking various characters that all have pretty damn different playstyles. Once you unlock those you have the REALLY grindy goal of unlocking all crowns, on all characters. This involves looping at least 6 times with each character, and the crowns themselves are basically perks with heavy downsides attached with them. Completely optional, but just another element that pushes forward the "one more run" mentality.

This game has been out for like 15 years now and I dont know if ANY roguelike has come close to it in terms of being a cohesive package. I am really glad Vlambeer is back from the dead!

Dead.

Preamble: mostly talking about socially learned gender dysphoria in this post, separate from the medical body dysphoria people sometimes have from birth. I want to define three types of dysphoria to hopefully give you a clue as to where I am coming from:

Types of dysphoria: social dysphoria (misrecognition),

aesthetic dysphoria (norm conformity),

somatic dysphoria (body-schema mismatch)

Do you ever have a sneaking suspicion that the term “gender affirming” care is sneaking a little Telos into the conversation? To affirm one’s gender inherently implies the target gender is some objective thing that one can change into, but this seems contradictory to the idea that gender is simply a social construct, not a representation of reality.

What is the utility of the ‘trans’ prefix in a social context today? Clearly there is very real utility when it comes to medical treatment, and legal protections, but it also seems contradictory to the belief that trans women… are women. We don’t say someone who is nationalized is a “Nationalizing Citizen”, we don’t consider christian converts to be “Converting” Christians… They're just christians.

The trans prefix, used in a social setting, only semantically exists to distinguish Trans Women from Cis Women, which actually reinforces the concept of a hierarchical gender binary.

This doesn’t even apply to exclusively trans ideology. Someone getting gender affirming care because they want larger/smaller breasts is increasing their womanly-ness in a hierarchical fashion. They could probably quantify how more “womanly” they feel, but obviously that cannot be objective. This may be a form of body dysphoria, but to say it is gender dysphoria seems like you’re giving a lot of weight to the word gender. There is nothing inherently found in the definition of a “woman” that dictates the form of their breasts. To categorize a woman as “with breasts” is to make all women without breasts inherently less womanly… nonsense.

This ties pretty handily into Sartre’s Le Regard. What we are actually trying to achieve in our “gender” affirming care, is not to get ourselves to some Ideal state of a Woman… it is shaping our bodies to be what Society’s gaze deems to be a woman. Only through killing this gaze will we ever actually be liberated from these social definitions of Gender. Now we can either kill the gaze by stabbing all of our eyes out, or we can get rid of the gender framework as a concept. Will the gender framework wither away while capitalism is still there to reinforce it? Not sure on that. Stay tuned…

Talking with some trans comrades with medical body dysphoria, they’ve explained to me that “sex reassignment surgery” is actually a better definition of what they need to feel better than any form of gender dysphoria. They actually feel as though they are missing their third leg. This to me suggests that a great amount of dysphoria felt today is due to Le Regard… which I guess is just a nerd ass way of saying “social construct” The root cause of this pain being the gender framework that society continues to uphold, even as it relentlessly twists its own form to stay relevant.

Every time I try to discuss this in less radical spaces people seem to be really opposed to Gender Abolition as a concept… so bless Hexbear.

Am I misunderstanding or is Rawlsianism simply "yeah we should be nice" as an economic/political goal?

Like... HOW Rawls??? We can all agree that being nice is a good thing. But how do we get the capitalists to do that???? Why do they need to do that? Do you think nobody in the past several thousand years thought that the poor might need to be the target of social welfare? What are you even saying???? When did the poor simply become subjects to our economic policy??? A byproduct???

In my opinion, Rawlsianism is completely redundant to Marxism. Am I missing something?

Personally I think it's silly as hell. Qualia is obviously a biological component of experience... Not some weird thing that science will never be able to put in to words.

I've been listening to a lot of psychology podcasts lately and for some reason people seem obsessed with the idea despite you needing to make the same logical leaps to believe it as any sort of mysticism... Maybe I am just tripping idk

he dum