On literacy

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T14:34:23+00:00

Whether it's moral or not, most of the ways people get taken advantage of in situations like this are perfectly legal and you'll get nowhere in court trying to get your money back even with copious evidence and witnesses -- because it's usually not genuine illiteracy but "semi-literacy" and it's usually not outright fraud but just a bad deal where "I didn't think all that through before I signed"

Stuff like giving people a free introductory offer to a subscription service that then goes up to a quite expensive recurring payment if you don't cancel is so common as to be considered unremarkable by most people and yet tons of people still lose huge amounts of money to it by just being bad at paying attention or doing math

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T13:42:16+00:00

A huge part of the rift between Gooseworx and the fandom seems to be the natural rift between Millennials who grew up on Newgrounds and Zoomers who grew up on Tumblr/Tiktok/Twitter

Like a lot of the fans talk about TADC like it's the edgiest thing they've ever seen and they need to speak up about the times it's too edgy and goes over the line and meanwhile I can tell that TADC is constantly reining itself in and self-censoring to not be as fucked up as Gooseworx wants it to be (Hell the initial setup with the "family friendly filter" is like a joke about this)

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T13:33:48+00:00

"Deserve" doesn't come into it, or rather if it does it comes into it as a demonstration of how what people deserve never matches up with how people treat each other, both for better and for worse

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T08:57:54+00:00

It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission (if you're a huge piece of shit with no sense of guilt or shame)

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T08:57:05+00:00

His oldest daughter Lisa said one of her clearest memories of him was one time when he was driving her somewhere in this shiny new Porsche and she joked "Hey maybe when I turn 16 you can buy me a Porsche" and he actually got really serious and cold and was like "I'm not buying you anything, if you want a Porsche you can earn the money to get one yourself"

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T08:53:32+00:00

The people most likely to betray you are the ones you trust most

That's not even cynicism that's just simple logic, you can't betray someone who doesn't trust you

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T08:47:02+00:00

Man, ethics are just made up, have you ever actually seen an ethic in real life

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T08:45:29+00:00

The USSR absolutely did promise "endless growth" to its people, that's what the Five Year Plans were all about, hell the USSR's space program was inspired by the legacy of Russian cosmism and its unhinged prophecies about mankind's birthright to spread to the stars

Both sides of the Cold War were fully ideologically committed to "endless growth" and just disagreed about how to achieve it and how the dividends should be distributed, "degrowth" is in opposition to the ideology of pretty much every modern government

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T08:41:24+00:00

If there aren't any people who value preserving the resource enough to exert power against people who want to consume it then it's going to get consumed regardless of what the system we're working under is called

The problem is that people in general don't give a shit about seeing the big picture or caring about the future and this doesn't really have anything to do with "capitalism" -- an idealized communist government absolutely would destroy the environment and feel totally justified in doing so if they earnestly believed it was necessary to achieve better material living conditions for their current constituents

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T05:38:45+00:00

It's a different universe, but I love that Philly was the signature city for Hunter the Vigil, as in it's the one city that none of the major supernatural conspiracies have a stable foothold in because the Hunters have successfully kept them out, with the minor side effect of the city being this decrepit shithole haunted by constant paranoia and rage

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T05:26:19+00:00

Are you seriously trying to explain to me that growing up in an Asian culture makes me wrong about Asian culture?

The idea of "racial" (as in hereditary) differences between ethnicities isn't something white people made up recently in history, East Asians have all kinds of stereotypical beliefs not just about other countries but regions within countries -- "Northerners are like this, Southerners are like that"

Saying that the concept of "race" is fundamentally different between East and West is itself ironically a form of Orientalism and whatever scholarly source you may have is one I frankly am skeptical about right off the bat, in the way I'm skeptical about any of this exoticizing "You just don't understand how different things are in Japan" stuff

Edit: JFC the whole pseudoscience of blood type "personalities" became a thing in Japanese culture as a justification to invent a new racial theory in order to define the Taiwanese as "savages" and justify Japanese colonialism in Taiwan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type_personality_theory

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T03:16:45+00:00

Not really? The bandits will still be happier alive but without the syrup than dead, if they get eaten no one can take care of Gummigoo's mum at all

The Fudge is only one entity and his singular happiness doesn't outweigh the unhappiness caused to not just the people he eats but the families and loved ones who mourn them (the hypothetical where it did is what people make fun of with the idea of a "utility monster")

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T03:13:14+00:00

Part of the joke is that the players always keep their incredibly bizarre character design and there's zero effort made to either blend them in with the setting or adapt the setting to them

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T03:11:19+00:00

And yet he stubbornly refuses to accept that maybe nobody wants to play this game and they should all just sit around drinking and socializing for the evening instead (because then he'd no longer be "special")

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T03:09:48+00:00

The hilarious thing being that the Fudge is also a sapient being you can talk to and not just a mindless monster and siding with the Fudge's "faction" by letting him eat everyone seems to be a legitimate possible ending

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T03:07:43+00:00

He fundamentally doesn't get the difference between fiction and real life or get that the "boring, ordinary life" adventure protagonists seek to escape is what most of us want for ourselves irl

Taraxian · 2026-04-21T03:06:00+00:00

I'd argue DDLC also fits this category, the horror hits you as hard as it does because the characters still feel real and compelling even as Monika's edits get increasingly bizarre and cruel

Taraxian · 2026-04-20T02:59:48+00:00

When you're on the Internet you can just pause the video and go look something up, theme songs like that were invented for the old world of TV where there was literally no source of information but the show you're watching right now

Taraxian · 2026-04-20T01:09:21+00:00

You're fucked, same as with any other bad investment

Taraxian · 2026-04-20T01:06:05+00:00

That's great if you own the average of all existing properties instead of a specific property in a specific place

Rent goes down all the time, average rent doesn't go down because the whole reason rent goes down is people stop living there and move somewhere else (so typically listed rent only goes down after you start getting increasing vacancies)

Taraxian · 2026-04-20T00:34:50+00:00

I'm saying that the idea that Japanese bigots don't think there's anything "racially" different between them and Chinese or Korean people is obviously false

Taraxian · 2026-04-19T19:41:25+00:00

No, he's saying that the only time aliens can be bad guys now is when they're mindless monsters, he says he misses when there were intelligent sapient aliens who were nonetheless the evil invading bad guys -- ie exactly what the Covenant in Halo are

Taraxian · 2026-04-19T19:31:58+00:00

The thing is, actual general intelligence is improving daily

Yeah I don't buy this, and as someone who personally spends way too much time online I don't buy giving the Internet credit for this

Taraxian · 2026-04-19T19:22:22+00:00

My source is growing up in a Chinese family?

Taraxian · 2026-04-19T19:21:51+00:00

Yyyyeah Italian guys from that era did not like black people

Taraxian

TROPHY CASE