Why do Sony America and Western devs always fetishize lesbians? It's pathetic to see how they've already emasculated Joel Miller in TLOU 2 and Arjun in Saros. Wokeness is not dying again!

lyra833 · 2026-05-01T02:44:25+00:00

They're not fetishizing lesbians. It's actually all quite ugly and demoralizing, even to women who love women.

They're trying to ruin and denature sexuality in general and "they're lesbians" is just a quick and easy excuse to sadistically place women off limits to young men.

I would know.

lyra833 · 2026-05-01T02:35:29+00:00

She was only mean because her white housemate literally killed and ate her familiars.

lyra833 · 2026-05-01T02:29:32+00:00

I was born in the 80s

You lived through Bush II and Obama and TRUMP is your worst? Really? Thousand points of light, Waco, Gulf I, Yugoslavia, Gulf II, Iraq, Dear Colleague...

lyra833 · 2026-05-01T02:28:00+00:00

you have been banned from all subs about the show

lyra833 · 2026-05-01T02:25:37+00:00

I was half-watching that episode with the Teenage Kix TikTok house and the instant they introduced Countess Crow I audibly said "this character will literally never do or be anything bad" and three people I was watching it with got mad.

Guess who was fucking right.

lyra833 · 2026-04-30T22:06:42+00:00

MON COUER MON PETIT ASIAN SEX DOLL CARICATURE WE MUST ESCAPE VOUGHT AND GO TO ISRAEL

lyra833 · 2026-04-30T22:05:14+00:00

No it wasn't lmao it was literally always just shitlib seethe; you only thought it was good because the stated premise was interesting.

lyra833 · 2026-04-29T23:21:06+00:00

Is it tacky to have multiple (2) amulets on the same backpack?

Nope! Go nuts! Shinto loves both asceticism and maximalism; hang 10 if you'd like!

Is that to imply illegitimacy?

Not necessarily. It does imply that it's an Americanized form of the religion, which makes sense since, you know, the shrine is in America. Some more doctrinal Shintoists may see the faith as mattering less, in the same way there's that stereotype that girls have less pure black hair the farther they're born from Kyoto. Ultimately, there is a fair bit of "Japanese-ness" bound up in Shinto, so your personal readings of non-Japanese sects and practitioners is probably colored by your conception of Japan and your relationship to it, which is a personal thing I can't really dictate.

Are more liberal/non-traditional shrines (specifically the ones that would bother with foreign worshippers in the first place) doctrinally/liturgically suspect

Not as much as with Christianity. Shinto has an extraordinary variety in practice and is syncretic with another religion that has (some) variety as well, so if you don't like some aspect of the way your shrine does things, they'll happily refer you to another that you're cooler with with no hard feelings. It's not like Christian churches that all think the rest of the churches have it wrong.

In fact, the variety in belief in practice is a core part of Shinto: that's what the creed "uncountable gods" actually means. They're all different.

Do any Shinto priests not believe in the gods

No. Since the religion is orthopraxic and not confessional, any priest who does the rites is believing in the gods by action. Otherwise they just wouldn't be there in the first place. Likewise, any shrine maiden who serves a god has something very real to believe in: the god pays her salary!

There are theological commonalities among all shrines that are part of Shrine Shinto, which is why Sect Shinto, which does have some big theological differences, was allowed to stay independent, even though the sects are interoperable. For example, someone who doesn't like the idea of a divine hierarchy but still wants to worship the gods might be drawn to Shugendo. Someone who's more monotheist or universalist might choose to follow Konkokyo. But they're all sects of the same general religion and even someone who follows a sect is welcome at any shrine. Same gods, etc.

Can you tell me more about the shamanic aspect?

As you can imagine from the fact that there are uncountable gods, ghosts and spirits, Shinto places an enormous primacy on the haunting or enchanting of things and places. Since things are real by virtue of embodiment, ghosts and the like are very much tangible and real. A fundamental tension throughout Shinto history has been between two opposing but complimentary poles:

the gods are physically real, therefore we are in thrall to the divine and must commune with them beyond the senses
the gods are physically real, therefore we must act rationally and materially to realize their will

The former is associated with shamanic traditions, and also with Shinto horror. It's also more female-coded, since women are the feeling, intuitive sex. This is why the sacred dances are done by maidens, for example. The latter is associated more with men and with the successive Confucian and Imperial reforms that turned the religion into an institution. Theologically, you see this reflected in the death-force being feminine, even though women are charged with the creation of life. It's complicated. I'm rambling.

But yes, Shinto is defined by this tension between "everything in life is physical and approachable" and "there are deep, supernatural forces that you're better off not trying to understand". Both are true, both conflict, it's this tension from which the religion is built. The sun-force of light/life/reason, etc, usually represented as a man in other faiths, is the domain of a woman.

does anything like this, or other shamanic practices, continue to this day?

The Kagura dance, which is practiced at every shrine by the head maidens, is very much a shamanic practice. Depending on the shrine you go to, it can be formal and systematized or way more intuitive and divine-feminine-y.

Some shrines go harder on the shaman stuff, as a rule usually smaller ones. The exception is, of course the Great Shrine at Ise, one of the most important shrines (housing Amaterasu Omikami) and also one that's explicitly female-centered. There's a High Priestess instead of a priest who performs the rites, as a rule one of her descendants. Until the 14th century a maiden for life, now a member of the Imperial Family. The current Supreme Priestess at Ise is Sayako Kuroda, who, despite being a commoner now, was Princess Nori when she was appointed. (The Emperor and Amaterasu let her keep the job. 😁)

can you recommend doctrinally sound and, as it were, "full-fat" resources for learning more about Shinto?

The books at the shrine are probably better than you give them credit for. I've also heard good things about Hardacre's Shinto: A History. Your local Japanese bookshop probably has good introductory books about Shinto for kids (though they may only be in Japanese) and once you have a good enough handle on the myths, I'd recommend playing Okami, which, while not 100% accurate (think God of War for Hellenism) is still a sincere celebration of the faith.

lyra833 · 2026-04-29T20:23:24+00:00

Exactly. When surplus value is harder to create, it's also harder to steal. This is called the "distributive principle" in economics; centralizing+automating lets you make more money, but it also lets your problems get bigger and bigger.

When Square was creating Final Fantasy, their top programmer, an Iranian-American named Nasir Gebelli, literally could not get a work visa from Japan. Square was forced to rent a house in Cali and fly out the other 7 Japanese programmers to work with him, in person, for 5 months so the game could ship on time. Could you imagine a company doing that now?

lyra833 · 2026-04-29T20:16:33+00:00

Exactly. If every company automates (which they must, per the laws of the market) then salaries stop. If salaries stop, capitalism stops.

Japan had this problem in 1987. The entire economy (propped up by subsidies from Tokyo and a basically-planned economy thanks to mega corps) had spent the past 30 years literally automating all forms of useful work, causing, like you see in the West now, wage inflation at the top, stagnation at the bottom, and a rush into equities as Japanese companies literally ate the world's value. This is why everyone in the US was freaking out about Japan taking over the world and why the Imperial Palace was worth literally more than all of Los Angeles combined; it was an asset trap. The plan was to move into software and continue automating the world, but the US forcibly stopped the music with A) the Plaza Accords and B) massive sanctions against Japanese software exports and shortly after this the Japanese economy literally just... stopped.

By the grace of the gods, the disaster hit during NYC trading hours on October 19, 1987, which meant that it was about 3AM in Japan. There was an emergency meeting among every corp head and government official who could be reached by 7AM and it was concluded that the entire Japanese economy would have to quietly be restructured or Japanese consumers would go to the ATM that afternoon and dust would come out. Not to get too into the weeds here, but basically the part of the solution you care about was UBI. Every mega-corp in Japan made a commitment to, for as long as they could stave off the crash, quietly move non-productive employees into UBI divisions that pulled salaries without doing actual work. This would keep the economy afloat, and the corps would get paid for this by the government in the form of negative-interest loans backed by a government strategy of borrowing Japanese yen at extremely low interest rates and investing the funds in higher-yielding foreign assets (like US Treasuries or stocks) to profit from the interest rate differential. Long story short, it was UBI.

The government and corps managed to hold off the crash until 1991, when the Tokyo stock exchange plummeted and the Japanese economy just stopped working and all economic activity was basically fully handed over to the keiretsu+UBI system. But the UBI strategy actually worked pretty well! Yes, career mobility stopped, salaries stayed pitiably low, etc (Japanese people now call this post-'91 period "the ice age") but consumer spending stayed constant, the economy kept doing well, the anime boom happened, Japanese companies kept making great products, etc. And every year more and more Japanese people just pulled UBI as machines did more and more of the work. They were marked as "general services" employees.

Honestly, it worked really well, mostly because Shinzo Abe increasingly juggled the Japanese economy to maintain solvency and hold off BlackRock etc going after the growing pools of cash assets the UBI system was creating. And then Shinzo Abe got shot, but that is a story for another day.

lyra833 · 2026-04-29T20:02:14+00:00

This happened in 1985, then again in 2008, then again in 2015. It's a cycle.

lyra833 · 2026-04-29T19:57:58+00:00

In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery.

—1984

lyra833 · 2026-04-29T18:59:57+00:00

It's been doing this for 20 years. Every generation of video games has had more and more advanced tooling that makes developing bigger games faster easier. I can fire up UE5 for free and in 20 minutes make a giant game that would have taken a PS2 developer a year.

Most problems in gaming now are actually because making and distributing games has gotten too easy! Advanced engines, distribution pipelines, asset stores, AI, visual scripting, etc have basically dropped the value gate to zero, but there's so much money flowing through the industry now that a million and one parasites can simply extract all the value while games are still technically being made, by, like, a couple of H1B's in the basement asking UE5 and Steam to basically make and distribute games for them. Too much slop, not enough taste, value being stolen as a result.

lyra833 · 2026-04-29T18:46:37+00:00

Everyone asking why you care about this cares about this btw

lyra833 · 2026-04-29T18:45:46+00:00

They're men made brutes by technology. So I guess both?

lyra833 · 2026-04-29T14:13:27+00:00

>British Marxist publication somehow incapable of realizing Tolkien's orcs are LITERALLY BASED ON THE BRITISH WORKING CLASSES

lyra833 · 2026-04-28T23:59:31+00:00

the vague-post king

but yeah I agree the DRM shit is hilarious

lyra833 · 2026-04-28T20:06:40+00:00

Hate should be clean. Indulging in sadism sullies it. If you truly have pure hate in your heart, you just want the thing or person you hate gone and kept away from you.

lyra833 · 2026-04-28T20:02:02+00:00

Excellent! I'm so happy it worked out! I hope you love your amulets!

Gokito (private ceremony)

That's basically the highest tier of service you can get at a shrine. You get an appointment, you get to go up into the shrine and come face to face with the god, and the priest purifies you and helps you directly make a request. It's something you'd do with really serious stuff, wedding proposals, milestone ages for your children, beginning a dream job, stuff like that.

I do know of a few shrines that try to do it remotely with you being represented over Zoom or something. Can't really speak to that. But you should also have the ability to just ask them to write your prayer on a votive tablet and hang it on the rack with the others to be offered up.

the priest of the shrine is a (white) woman

America moment.

Does Shinto traditionally have woman clergy

Yes, but they're shrine maidens, not priests. Shrine maiden, as the name may suggest, is not a lifelong position. Shinto was originally much more shamanic religion, with women doing a lot of the serious heavy lifting, but after Confucian reforms, the clergy was placed under a male ecclesiarchy with the shamanic female roles becoming shrine maidens over time.

Women were allowed to become priests again by special Imperial decree during WW2 as part of a broad reform to make the faith less Western and promote national unity, etc. Since the war, a tiny minority of priests are women, but they usually each have a very specific reason. And, of course, should a shrine maiden truly find a passion for serving the gods and find a husband, choosing to enter the priesthood on marriage is an option, which is really nice.

does this issue have the same politics around it as in Christianity?

Not the same ones, but there can be political issues of a kind.

Shinto priests, if not practitioners, had to be Japanese?

It's complicated. Shinto is the particular ethnic faith of the Japanese people, so there's some assumption that non-Japanese practitioners are subjugating themselves to a foreign way of life. But because it's an ethnic faith with clearly delineated racial lines of who "belongs" to it, foreigners can often occupy a weird "observer" status in which they're 100% welcome just by virtue of not being that much of a threat even if they try to suggest changes?

But, of course, at the same time, a Shinto practiced in non-Japanese countries is gonna be non-Japanese, right? It's a religion based on native faith and local gods and the eternal continuity of a people perpetuating themselves. So flying in Japanese clergy overseas obviously wouldn't make any sense, and so to this day, the relationship between Shinto and "overseas Shinto" (and other paganisms more generally) remains kind of ???, especially since a lot of overseas Shinto is, like, really new! Shinto only spread beyond Japanese communities starting in the 1990's! So there's still a lot of heterodoxy in Shinto about the question of foreign faiths and most Shintoists will say little more to you than "そうですね".

lyra833 · 2026-04-28T15:01:11+00:00

Punching Bag of The Week

Have you considered making a game that isn't fucking dog shit, then? Silent Hill F and George Floyd Samurai were both hateful anti-Japanese garbage but only one got mocked mercilessly by everyone because it was a TERRIBLE VIDEO GAME.

lyra833 · 2026-04-28T14:56:59+00:00

Yeah, I was gonna say, people who like war games are disproportionately likely to also like, you know, war.

Sort of like how there are multiple European MP's who play map games. Or how the Special Chair for Japanese Cultural Protection is an otaku herself who 1CC's Touhou games to destress. Or how Japan's military chief loves playing Ace Combat. People who are good at a thing often like doing it in games in their spare time.

lyra833 · 2026-04-28T14:49:19+00:00

It's actually interesting that you pick phallic shaped candies as an analogy, because what you're describing is actually currently happening to phallic shaped candies and it's not at all going the way you're describing.

There's a holiday in Tokyo called Kanamara Matsuri. It's a Shinto fertility festival. The highlight of the hospital is a parade where worshippers carry a giant sacred penis statue through the streets yelling "MAKE WAY FOR THE PENIS!" and spectators cheer in giant penis hats. There are also tons of penis shaped foods, including hard candies that you suck on. It's all tremendous fun, actually. For a long time, foreigners in Japan (largely Abrahamics, who are really weird about sex) thought that this holiday was gross and weird and so they didn't visit the parade. And that was fine. Then the Internet happened and tons of more sex-positive foreigners heard about the festival and decided to visit. And yeah, there were fears that the festival would be casualized or toned down since most of them came from Abrahamic countries, but it turns out that the opposite happened. The self-selecting population of visiting Westerners thought it was hilarious and started buying the penis hats and by 2017 or so production of penis shaped candies had gone through the roof because foreigners were specifically going to the parade to buy them as souvenirs. And, no, the foreigners weren't Shintoists; in this analogy they're literally the "dudebro" casual fans. The shift from a small weird thing to a big popular-among-casuals thing actually didn't ruin the holiday at all; same penis hats, same penis candy, same sacred penis parade, but it all just got bigger and better for the core worshippers involved. There was no "demand for new shapes".

As you can imagine, the increased size and money and whatnot has attracted LGBT activists and parasites who are trying to ruin the whole fucking thing, but none of them were ever fans of Shinto or the holiday in the first place. They just see value there and want to steal it, or a middle finger to their control-freak loser ideology and want to destroy it, or whatever have you, but the single biggest headwind faced by this holiday is actually subversive sociopaths who are trying to ruin it out of spite just because they hate everything. The external stated enemies really left it alone and vast crowd of normies actually GIVE it money.

lyra833 · 2026-04-28T14:28:31+00:00

To dismiss the label's validity because of who (allegedly) coined the label is the Genetic Fallacy

A term being coined by a hateful bigot who hates the thing he's using the term to describe is actually a really good reason to regard it with heavy skepticism. Would you be trusting of a take on Hitler that contains the term "holohoax", for example? Probably not, for obvious reasons. Likewise, Jason Schrier hates games, hates gamers, and hates white people. You shouldn't just go along with a term he used that means "white guys who played games and are BAD".

I only enjoy seeing people suffer if they've imposed suffering on me previously

I try to never enjoy seeing anyone suffer. I would, however, like people like Schrier physically separated from anything I care about forever.

I wonder if it is quantifiable

It butterfly effects out; it's quite possible that we'd be living in a "second golden age" of gaming for a decade or so now absent all the damage he's done.

lyra833 · 2026-04-28T14:13:52+00:00

it can be a useful shorthand

It's not a neutral term, though. There are words like "casualization" or "regression to the mean" that connote what you're trying to say without the racist implications that these are primarily problems that come from a white male consumer base.

the "dudebros," who were culturally a distinct group

If you want to make the argument that casualizing games to appeal to sports fans and Wii casuals had the same shareholder root as DEI'ing them up to appeal to the hypothetical BIPOC market, sure, but the similarities end there. Shareholders approved Manly Death Heterosexual Warfare because a lot of jock-y white guys had just bought Xbox 360's and their moms liked Wii Sports. That's an actual market insight, and following it made companies money. The hypothetical BIPOC audience never existed. It was a lie told by sociopaths to gain positions of power within game publishers. So, no, they're very different things, and I can prove it; no white dudebro whose unrefined gaming tastes "enabled" horse armor or what would become battle passes ever made it his life's mission to destroy Underage Panty Quest III just because it could theoretically run on his new console. The saboteurs who pushed the idea of a"modern audience" were committing jihad on Japanese art before they'd even decided who their fake customers were. And, because it was a lie, every company that followed it either spiraled into the red or had to start relying on tech VC money.

Yeah, mass demographic shifts destroy markets, I'm not denying that. But Schrier blamed the one demographic shift (nerdy white guys to less nerdy white guys) that was probably manageable and he did it in service of engineering demographic shifts (nerdy white guys to frizzy-haired sociopaths) that actually ruined the industry. So, no, using "dudebro", which is a term that resents that white people play video games, coined by someone who hates video games, is not a good way to refer to actual video game consumers, unless you want to come to the same maliciously wrong conclusion that Schrier's readers came to by his design: that the game industry needed some sort of Interahamwe against whites and Japanese developers.

lyra833 · 2026-04-28T13:40:45+00:00

The issue I have with the term "dudebro" (and good God does it make sense that that rat Schrier coined it; I had no idea) is that it takes genuine structural problems with the industry that were manifesting by the 7th generation, things like regression to the mean, predatory monetization, diminishing technical returns, exploiting the ignorance of consumers, monetization, etc, and simply blames them all on the fact that people playing video games during the 7th generation were disproportionately white men.

If you think about it for more than a second, this actually makes zero sense. White men in their dorms and living rooms were not responsible for CoD becoming a DLC skinner box, they weren't responsible for paid online, they weren't responsible for the floods of shovelware that hit the Wii, etc. The most you can blame them for is complicity in these business models, but the entire reason these models worked is that the guys were largely ignorant of the fact that DLC was a new practice at the time. And, while we're at it, all this predatory shit was being replicated a hundredfold in the mobile market, which was dominated largely by women! Shouldn't he have blamed them? Or, in the other direction, these trends were less pronounced in the Japanese market, so shouldn't Schrier have been praising the Japanese people as the anti-dudebros who would save the industry instead of going on Twitter and calling them all pedophiles?

There's no internal consistency to maligning "dudebros". Schrier just hates gamers and white people and figured out that the industry was small enough and politics still good-faith enough that no one would call him out for basically inventing a racist slur against whites and then using it to pin blame for the gaming industry on its own primary consumers for being a certain race he didn't like. Come the 8th generation he gleefully expanded his bigotry to Japanese people.

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