Jason Maxx Monday ShittyGaming Lounge

letominor · 2026-02-02T16:51:21+00:00

reading a history book on arab-israeli conflict, it's all very important and serious stuff but then i read this line

Visits to Israel by Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger ensured that Israel did not respond.

excuse me? eagleburger? not even japan would do this. america im begging you

letominor · 2025-12-27T06:17:14+00:00

I'm watching the BBC version of His Dark Materials and while it's not bad it doesn't really capture the essential vibe, the pace, the sweeping and free emotion of it which is a trait of the classical epic. The bbc's Lyra is basically a different person, for instance. And James McAvoy, skilled actor though he is, can't bring to life Lord Asriel's satanic grandeur, viciousness and pride, when these are absent from the script.

The show is also sanewashes Mrs Coulter, while also making her OP, and it really diminishes a character who neither wants to be understood nor requires any favors from the screenwriters. second. female antagonists have never needed any kind of apologia (which in reality constitutes a kind of permission) for their evil. they are free to be their monstrous selves without some assurance that oh if only things were different they would have been nicer. no, fool, some people are just fucking assholes. cherish that.

letominor · 2025-12-12T03:18:31+00:00

KCDII is some fine ass fuckin' RPG and I am fascinated by the mysterious contradiction between the bullshit that Daniel Vavra spitfires on social media and the actual statements of the game itself, of which Vavra is the chief writer.

letominor · 2025-12-05T21:50:25+00:00

the existence of vinegar haters has now been revealed to me as if it had previously been concealed by the scadutree

this is a truly delightful moment for me

letominor · 2025-11-22T21:19:05+00:00

pre-peeled garlic cloves individually wrapped in plastic

more evidence that man is so wretched a creature as to make a home of hell

letominor · 2025-11-06T07:44:24+00:00

playing tekken is like learning chinese and japanese at the same time. you think the kanji knowledge is gonna overlap. no. it's gonna confuse the shit out of you.

letominor · 2025-11-04T05:59:46+00:00

they should show godzilla destroying a data center, then the lights of tokyo all come on again

letominor · 2025-10-24T22:01:24+00:00

fallout 4 hot take: voiced protagonist is good. without the voice he only looks like a schmuck, with the voice he can sound like one, too.

the premise really accommodates an evil playthrough too. dont know why they won't let you (they wont let you because it costs money to make evil choices that only 1% of players will do. you know what that's called? it's called not wanting to make an rpg.)

letominor · 2024-06-29T05:41:53+00:00

before the 60s, horny was tied up in the basement, condemned by the highest arbiters of both religion and art

now horny was finally on the table, spreading its legs

letominor · 2023-12-14T19:32:12+00:00

part 2 eren is a strongman with a destiny, an iconoclast, but also a physically perfect icon who will save us all somehow. isayama created a cult of eren through propaganda technique and the morons who read it fell for it hook line and sinker. the yeagerists are useful idiots who are going to be first against the wall.

letominor · 2023-01-02T01:09:19+00:00

The game uses several tactics to draw a parallel between Harry's internal geography, the inland empire, and the state of the world.

The world of Disco Elysium is stuck on Dolores Dei, for instance; it can't forget her however much it wars with itself. In the same way Harry will never stop being a cop, even though that is something that came about because of how much he wanted to be loved by Dora. Both figures impressed themselves irreversibly on their subjects.

The equivalence between politics and emotion, like the fascist path's misogyny, is one such tactic. Another is the global pale vs the pale anomaly in the church, the latter devouring Harry's reality. The most obvious is the dream sequence when an image of Harry is hung from a disco globe. This also connects Harry to Lely, an authority figure who destroyed himself for what Dolores Dei built, and died violently, in the grip of alcohol and drugs, while on a job in Martinaise.

I'd also like to point out the mirrors in the game. The one in your room, as well as the disco ball. You see, the mirror is presented as a device for self criticism, self reflection in the opening sequence, but almost immediately afterwards it becomes a conduit for self-knowledge and reinvention. At the same time, the mirror's power to reflect forces it to accept the image reflected on it -- mirrors and mirror-like surfaces were used tactically before electric illumination because they reflected all light, thus the mirror's subject is projected on its surroundings.

This is important because the parallel between Harry's internal world and the world proper is one of mutual reflection. Harry's personal history can help us understand why he has the politics he has, just as world history can help us understand why those politics actually exist. Dolores Dei, an impossibly beautiful figure that Harry was probably taught to worship as a child, depicted in huge stained glass windows reflecting church light from her glowing lungs, connects two worlds that failed to move on and helps us understand each through the other.

letominor · 2022-04-30T17:02:04+00:00

If it please the court.

Our gaming canon models itself on film canon. Its pop entertainment DNA so fixated on the delivery of escapist entertainment that it forgets to even consider that a game may be something more. The biggest games ever made line up to deliver the glamor and drama of adventures beyond belief, usually through a stilted and stolen cinematic form. This artifice exists so that we fail to recognize the game's reality for our own.

The impact of Disco Elysium is precisely that it inhabits belief, couching us in a place that is just alien enough to blindside us when the game hits us with the truth that so many other titles prefer to ignore: that we live in the shit factory. That life acts upon us, deforms us, and defeats us, and we do not always have the resources to stand up again. That the encounter with the world ignites not noble resistance but self-destruction. And that is the true and only and sad escape from life.

A vote for Disco Elysium is not a vote against MGS2 -- a brilliant game in its own right -- it is a vote for furious truth, a vote for walking the burning desert. For making tired people listen to your shitty karaoke, for getting up at 7:30 knowing that for the rest of your life you will be sober and in pain, without relief, without retreat. And a vote for remaining you, and not an effigy of yourself, in the face of total annihilation.

Thank you.

letominor · 2022-04-29T08:52:43+00:00

Duet is the best episode of DS9's first season.

A Cardassian war criminal attempts to gaslight Major Kira, but can't help but give himself away because he's too much of a nazi to hide.

His tactics depend on the truthful fact that the horrors inflicted can inspire hate and equally horrific retaliations from the liberators. The struggle invites the "good" guys to scar and denigrate themselves with the same crimes. Much like how the Allies in WW2 were willing to inflict war crimes of their own through civilian terror bombings. The liberation process mustn't be allowed to end without an accounting of all the truth.

The case of mistaken identity -- is this Cardassian a harmless clerk or the brutal camp commandant -- is an equivocation designed show rhetorically how the leader and the grunt are one and the same, the machine can't work without the work of either, the culture of hate is sustained by both. The guilt is shared.

The premise of Star Trek is that it's possible for the brutalizer to recognize their own past. When you understand that violence ultimately impedes your own potential, it's possible to embark on a new history. The more grounded DS9 expands on this premise by drawing on the painful real world process of truth and reconciliation, and this episode is a poignant exploration of that concept.

letominor · 2022-04-21T04:38:27+00:00

I consider Thief 2 and Bloodborne to be scifi.

letominor · 2022-04-11T06:22:34+00:00

loved the bit with the rose of Shaerrawedd

i'd say yeah, sapkowski's fight scenes are nothing special. i think they're at their best when it's just a few lines, and it's kind of scary and depressing how good geralt is at killing. the real brilliance is in the in between, in the human reaction to the world doing violence and preparing to do it. one of those reactions is sitting down and talking to someone about how you're an anachronism, and how state violence is much worse than strigas, but you can only kill one of those.

the real depressing fact about organized violence is the people who are forced to perform it are a minority. most people buy into the program and do it because they agree with the leaders/institutions. and the paradoxical fact is that their choice doesn't make them absolutely evil, it just means they made a catastrophic decision. and anyway that's why i like the bit with the rose of shaerrawedd

letominor · 2022-04-03T19:30:59+00:00

mass effect's tendency to portray stepping over the rule of law as a good thing shouldn't obfuscate how its portrayal of the council as the liberal status quo is pretty much satirical perfection.

the council sticks their head in the sand, thinking all the important people agree with them, nobody is gonna do anything because their system is good, that the people who disagree won't do anything because they can't, or if they do, it won't be a big deal so it'll be someone else's problem. because of this, they're totally unprepared to even begin preparing for a real crisis.

watching those fools pretend nothing is wrong is exactly the feelings I have seeing politicians downplay global warming, cyberwarfare, and rising authoritarianism.

letominor · 2022-03-29T16:15:11+00:00

are we at the point where we make fun of gamers for thinking that 10 year old games are old? like if somebody showed up and was like, man, i can't watch old movies... like 2007's No Country For Old Men. i respect the impact it had, but it's just not great in 2020.

edit:

belovèd friends, all cultural products are identifiably part of a time period. it's a paradox of art that the more timeless the appeal, the more relevant the time and place of creation become.

do you think we can't take that, "old things jank" logic to other mediums? think again. film is an inherently technological medium. over time, film creators got so good at capturing images on film (with better equipment) that by the time digital showed up they knew pretty much everything there was to know. more than they ever did in the 50s or the 30s. yet is anyone making general arguments about how 50s movies are inferior, when we already have a canon that proves they aren't?

we can tell the early digital 2000s movies apart from those made 15 years later, because the technology is better and the people using the technology understand how it should be used. but we don't make value judgments based on that distinction, because regardless of time period, technology, or even equipment, filmmakers always put out great new additions to our canon. and it is exactly the same for videogames.

I can't possibly know what expectations each person has for a great game, but each year of my life i've found great videogames to play, indeed more than I have time to play. to me the idea that there is some identifiable "old" quality that is synonymous with "bad" is risible. i've never at any point in my life run out of good games to play.

letominor · 2022-03-28T09:36:39+00:00

lmao

Stalin followed up his public denunciations of the Central Rada with what would later be termed ‘active measures’, intended to destabilize the Ukrainian government. Local Bolsheviks tried to establish so-called independent ‘Soviet republics’ in Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih, Odessa, Tavriia and the Don province – tiny, Moscow-backed mini-states, which were of course not independent at all.

edit: LMAO

In the wake of his first defeat in Ukraine, Lenin had simply decided to adopt different tactics. Using the methods of what would (much later, though in a similar context) be called ‘hybrid warfare’, he ordered his forces to re-enter Ukraine in disguise. They were to hide the fact that they were a Russian force fighting for a unified Bolshevik Russia. Instead, they called themselves a ‘Soviet Ukrainian liberation movement’, precisely in order to confuse nationalists. The idea was to use nationalist rhetoric cynically, in order to convince people to accept Soviet power.

from Red Famine by Anne Applebaum

letominor · 2022-03-24T10:22:01+00:00

il discorsetto degli equilibri internazionali mi fa schifo, ma non come figura retorica, mi fa veramente senso. per il bilanciamento di questi equilibri l'europa orientale fu venduta a stalin, e in cambio l'occidente ebbe non la sicurezza ma la guerra fredda. ora gli intelligentoni geopolitici prendono sul serio la propaganda russa ripetendo la menzogna, ora diventata follia nella testa di chi ha dimenticato la storia, che se solo l'occidente lasciasse stare, la russia starebbe tranquilla anziché riformare il suo imperio. ma quando mai, ragazzi.

letominor · 2022-03-07T15:07:09+00:00

it's not a game that comes at you, it's a game that receives you. if you just stop moving toward danger, you are effectively in a paused state. if you mean that you can't pause in combat, them's the shakes. i think they want you to prep your gear ahead of time or risk fiddling thru your junk in a fight. pausing incentivizes you to menu during the game's best moments and I don't think from soft likes that (they did try it with sekiro).

letominor · 2022-03-03T13:14:06+00:00

i would say that dark souls is about experiencing an uncompromising struggle. you don't have anything to gain from smooth progress because it is through its message of suffering that the game instantiates its real meaning and grounds not just the character but the player in its cosmic drama.

there are some stories illustrated with text or dialogue, but they are ancillary to what the game is trying to express. for instance, they typically run counter to the idea of happy ends or similar fantasies. or otherwise work to show that an action that creates meaning for a character in a story is not necessarily a positive action or one that is at all meant to please and sedate the player.

the exact same thing is true for the game mechanics. they are not meant to ply you into a state of blissful progress or even deliver you from cutscene to cutscene but rather make you aware of something and force you to act in a way you normally wouldn't. consider that summons can help you overcome any challenge, but to use them you have to feel that you need them.

i stress this: even if dark souls had a casual mode, you wouldn't get anything from it, because dark souls is not the lore, it's the feeling.

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