I respect the sentiment, but I recently read “Exiting the Vampire Castle” by Mark Fisher and he makes some good points for why callout culture is, shall we say, “less than productive” in some situations.

I mean, this entire discussion hinges on the definition of “trivial,” so…cool.

Not the person you initially asked, but a good one is Eli Whitney’s cotton gin that made separating the cotton fiber from the seeds much easier. It had traditionally been done by hand, which is very time consuming. Whitney’s invention greatly simplified the process and made cotton farming much more economically viable as an industry, ultimately leading to an extreme expansion in chattel slavery in the Southern United States and serving to solidify a planter aristocracy that would eventually seek to split with the United States in order to create its own slaveholding empire, triggering a Civil War that would decimate a large chunk of the country and kill three quarters of a million people.

Don’t Bother Reading

It’s an interesting idea, though, that one’s preference for a particular design or aesthetic, especially when that design or aesthetic is emblematic of a particular historical or cultural moment, is never wholly isolated to its visual or material components, but also innately tied to our memory and understanding of that moment. I personally don’t think you can extricate a particular aesthetic from the psychic background noise surrounding it. Our minds don’t work that way. It’s always forming these subconscious or unconscious connections, binding events and memory to abstract signifiers.

We don’t like the 90s aesthetic because it’s “better” or even attractive. I mean, nobody has wallpaper in their home with those pastel and neon triangles. Many of us like it because it reminds us of childhood, of not having responsibilities other than waking up early enough on Saturday to catch all your cartoons and of not complaining too much when you have to go visit your grandparents who can never remember your birthday and who always ask you how old you are this year, of finishing Super Mario on the SNES before your friend does so you can brag about being better at video games than him. It’s of a simpler time and place, because we were simpler. And it was, in retrospect, of an America briefly sandwiched between the end of the original “Forever War” that was the Cold War, and the beginning of the 20th Century’s new “Forever War,” that is the War on Terror.

Great thing is that since it’s open source someone can just fork the project and continue development in a different direction.

On reddit, there’s a subreddit called r/lrcast, which is the dedicated subreddit for the Limited Resources podcast. The primary purpose of the subreddit, however, is not to discuss the podcast, but to discuss the “limited” format of Magic: the Gathering, which constitutes draft and sealed. It’s a very difficult, very expensive format of Magic to play and is a niche subsection of an already fairly niche hobby.

Extrapolating from this, we can say that Youtube hosts around 2.5 to 3 exabytes (2.5 to 3 million terabytes) of data. Interestingly, the total volume of data on the internet is, as of the end of 2023, around 120 zettabytes, so Youtube only makes up around 0.0025% of the total volume of all that data.

XBox has always been a weird console. It never really competes with Nintendo because NIntendo always does its own general thing and also slides neatly into the kids and family market. So it competes with Playstation by default. Except Playstation actually has contracts with good studios to make exclusive games. What’s a non-Halo exclusive for the XBox? Back in the day, you’d play games like Gears of War, Halo (obviously), Fallout 3, Psychonauts, KOTOR, COD, etc. I can’t think of a single meaningful game on the most recent generation for the XBox.

it alleged that local developers cannot compete on Steam with international developers, because those do not have to apply the local regulations:

That’s not really contrary to the point, but orthogonal to it. Steam is outcompeting on the basis that it receives special privileges on the basis of its international status. It’s still outcompeting because of a resource advantage. But that advantage exists because domestic developers are disadvantaged by virtue of national regulations over domestic developers.

what is my opposition that doesn’t encompass a de facto defence of free market capitalism? The damage to the users. What about all the Vietnamese people losing access to Steam’s online features, which are arguably necessary nowadays for many games, especially multiplayer ones.

Your argument is the same kind of “consumer rights” argument that I’ve seen everywhere on the internet, because you are implying that there is material harm to the people of Vietnam caused by Steam’s banning. Which is a fairly specious argument. It’s the loss of a luxury item. No one is materially harmed by it. It’s not like Vietnam banned insulin. And while you may not use the same language, you are effectively saying that every consumer on the planet should have free access to the best products available for whatever “thing” they want. In this case, video games. It’s a de facto argument for free market economic policies.

Everyone has accused every workplace of toxic culture. At this point I’m pretty sure going to someone and asking them to do their fucking job is toxicity.

We have reached levels of bootlicking with this comment that shouldn’t be physically possible.

It is impossible to criticize any actions taking place by any entity against a capitalist entity without defending capitalism yourself.

It depends on the purpose and shape of that criticism. If you criticize a communist nation banning a particular corporation’s marketplace from their country on the basis that doing so is a part of a grift that seeks to engineer a national-level monopoly over a particular corporate sector by banning external competition, then, sure, that’s a valid criticism because the intent is innately unethical. But if the Vietnamese video game industry is actively harmed by Steam, an American company, using its vast resources to outcompete Vietnamese publishers, then what is your opposition to this that doesn’t encompass a de facto defense of free market capitalism?

I hate capitalism. And Valve. Because it’s a capitalist institution and I’m at least consistent.

For anyone curious, it’s around 150 million USD.

Valve has faced criticisms from former employees in the past for its toxic work culture. And Gabe Newell, being the CEO, has a lot of power over that.

Just because the places you frequent on the internet don’t shove criticism of Valve down your throat the same way it would do so for, say, Epic Games, doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong with Valve as a company. All the pro-Valve/Steam information you get and the general sentiment towards Gabe Newell from people on Lemmy and Reddit are pure, undiluted corporate propaganda. That it comes from Steam users rather than being something Steam directs and pays for doesn’t change what it is.

you’re seeing different posts by different people and conflating the two

This ignores the reality that Lemmy is, at least in the part of it consisting of lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, and others, overwhelmingly leftist. This comment also attempts to dismiss the underlying criticism that Lemmy as a whole has a culture that, much like reddit, seeks to pick and choose its targets under capitalism and actively engages in corporate apologia, like in this post, while collectively professing a broad ethos that is outright hypocritical when viewed in the light of that other behavior. And if you think Lemmy is amenable to a diverse array of economic opinions, then maybe you should try posting a “Capitalism Appreciation Thread” on a major lemmy instance and see how that goes over.

Lemmy: “We hate capitalism! Companies aren’t your friends! Down with corporrations! Down with billionaires!”

Also Lemmy: “Except Steam! We love vidyagames! Valve is friend! Gaben is bae! No, we don’t understand irony.”

Edith Finch is more of an interactive short-story collection thematically and narrative centralized around a single family and their almost comical level of intergenerational neglect.

What is this from? Some kind of movie or t.v. show?

Sounds like a hell of your own making. Always change the background to something generic. Like a nice tree. Always. Nobody gives a shit about trees.

forgiving your younger self and understanding that books can be good in different ways

You can imply whatever you want about me, if it makes you feel better about losing an argument, but I read a lot of stuff that I don’t think is particularly good. That’s the present tense of read, by the way. As you get older, one thing you’ll realize is that you can acknowledge that something being entertaining and something meeting some set criteria of artistic merit are different things. I like a lot of things that I don’t think are executed with a great degree of skill or which have a great degree of literary merit. I acknowledge those things as enjoyable (which I’ve already done for Harry Potter), but I also acknowledge them as flawed in specific ways.

You’re nearly there yourself in your original comment. No one is comparing Harry Potter to Gravity’s Rainbow or Wuthering Heights here.

No, but you can compare it to other, superior works of fiction for that targeted age range. Many of the works of Ursula K. Leguin and Terry Pratchett that were intended for people in the similar age range as Harry Potter put Rowling’s work to shame.

I’m surprised you didn’t link to Wikipedia…but that’s not really the argument here.

I would say I’m surprised you’re complaining about things I haven’t done and arguments I haven’t made, but as I’ve been on the internet for more than five minutes and have engaged in arguments with people like you more than I would ever realistically care to, I can’t say that I am. But that’s not really the argument here, either.

And if you had been more reasonable - not called them “shit” perhaps - it would have been a different story. And I see you skirt the issue, but the reason people go on and on about the failings of Harry Potter these days is very obvious, and it has little to do with literary value.

I think they are shit, though. From the perspective of the entire thing, if you want a more nuanced analysis, the first novel is a masterpiece of world building. The second and third do good jobs of expanding the internal mythology of Harry Potter and his relationship to Voldemort. But that’s all they do. The last four novels become overburderend with meandering, often pointless content and are just hilariously overindulgent.

I think the core issue I have with the novels is that the main characters of the series experience comparatively little in the way of real character development and growth over the course of the series. They are essentially the same people at the end of the seventh novel as they are at the beginning of the first. Hermione is a little bit less insufferable, Ron is a little bit less of a walking inferiority complex. And Harry is a little…angrier? It’s hard to say. They have such little character development because the novels aren’t really focused on the complexities of growing up or the way in which your understanding of the world radically shifts from childhood to adulthood. These things, if they exist in the novels at all, are even less than tertiary to the core focus. The novels themselves are more concerned with action and worldbuilding, which…I get it. It’s accessible. It’s engaging for children. Things like difficult feelings and interpersonal drama are stereotypically boring for kids. Having a lot of stuff going on, a lot of fantasy and mythology and all the other bullshit Harry Potter is known for is part of its core appeal. But it’s also shallow. You don’t like the fact that I think those qualities makes the series “shit,” but I do. If you have a problem with that, then you have a problem with my criteria. And if you have a problem with my criteria, then I guess…too bad? There’s not really any point in trying to have any more of a discussion after that, because in order to talk about “good” and “bad” art you have to have some semblance of a shared definition, and the simple reality is that we probably don’t. You have your criteria for what you think makes a work of fiction good, and Harry Potter meets it enough for you to think it’s good, and I have my criteria and it simply doesn’t.

“accessible” is a weird thing to criticize in a work geared towards children, btw

It’s not a criticism. It’s an, at worst, neutral observation. It’s not like a children’s novel written from the perspective of a child in a concentration camp during the Holocaust and it’s not a children’s novel about a person growing up transgender. These things are comparatively less accessible because they require a degree of abstraction and empathy of which your average child, who likely doesn’t have similar experiences, is almost certainly psychologically incapable. That’s not a knock against kids. It’s just the psychological nature of being a child. Accessibility makes sense and is important for works looking to act as mainstream entertainment. And that’s what Harry Potter succeeds at being: entertaining. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment, but entertaining and artistically rich are different things.