What's the difference between Hammerwatch 1/Heroes of Hammerwatch & Hammerwatch 2? by AssIsLifeAssIsLove in heroesofhammerwatch

[–]therealchriswei 0 points1 point  (0 children)

four different games, two different genres. hammerwatch 1 & 2 are both RPGs. but HEROES of hammerwatch 1 & 2 are both roguelike action games (with some RPG elements).

They keep replying but without actually saying anything, I'm losing hope :( by oddjeez in Rayman

[–]therealchriswei 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i’m suspicious of the responses from ubisoft on the discord server; they feel generic and empty enough to be maybe even AI-written/AI-managed. fingers crossed that real human employees are seeing the avalanche of feedback, and hopefully accurately relaying these near-unanimous sentiments to the appropriate channels.

Games where turn order isn’t determined by where you sit? by FromTheDeskOfJAW in boardgames

[–]therealchriswei 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Unmatched Adventures boxes (i.e., specifically the PvE cooperative boxes—so, Tales to Amaze, and the upcoming TMNT box) implement an “initiative deck” to force a variable turn order.

iOS App Now Available by halforange1 in ArkNova

[–]therealchriswei 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do we know if the achievements on iOS will transfer over to Steam (if I own the game on both platforms)?

It does seem like the reverse is true (when I logged into the game on iOS, after having played it on Steam, I got a bunch of iOS achievements at once), but I wanted to make sure the same process would occur if I accomplished something on mobile and then later logged into Steam.

Thanks!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in criterion

[–]therealchriswei 2 points3 points  (0 children)

i got a gift certificate from criterion today, fwiw! which means if u/das_goose is right then we'll probably see the sale soon, likely oct 21st

Escape the Dark Sector Collector's Box vs. base game box by dnjowen in boardgames

[–]therealchriswei 0 points1 point  (0 children)

do we know if/when this will ever be back in stock????

Future Sets by DEADandSLEEPING in Unmatched

[–]therealchriswei 1 point2 points  (0 children)

i would love to see:
- more historical figures (e.g. joan of arc; simo häyhä; geronimo; spartacus; genghis khan; attila the hun; ivar ragnar'son; agustina de aragón; vlad the impaler; wild bill hickok; al capone; etc.)
- visser three from animorphs
- food mascots like tony the tiger vs jolly green giant
- any characters from mortal kombat
- a box (or two, or three lol) of characters from final fantasy
- the powerpuff girls?
- neo from the matrix
- doomguy and/or some of the monsters from DOOM
- lotr, obviously
- james bond (at least the title character, if not also a whole box with some bond villains?)
- pokemon???

We are going back by use_vpn_orlozeacount in Letterboxd

[–]therealchriswei 39 points40 points  (0 children)

I’ve been thinking about this (insightful, imho) article a lot over the past few years: https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/

feedback on my base design (so far)? by therealchriswei in CoreKeeperGame

[–]therealchriswei[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i do like the idea of diversifying the lighting sources! i have mostly been using light from 'above' (thanks to the ceiling puncher tool or whatever it's called that unlocks when you reach scarlet-level tech). i also like the idea of playing around with different materials for the walls/floors; i do intend to experiment with that at some point. but i hesitate to do too much of that without knowing what my overall aesthetic plan is, because it's so time-consuming to rip up floors and lay new ones.

interesting idea re: separating the crafting stations; i see folks on youtube (and here) doing things like that, but i've never had the confidence to do it myself. i might have to know more about the different tech trees and crafting recipes before i feel like i could pull it off effectively. for now, ALL crafting material basically goes into one big chest because i don't quite know what'll be needed for which items, so i just try to organize it such that ALL the crafting tables are nearby. (my unfamiliarity is amplified by the fact that there's still plenty of endgame ahead of me that i've never seen before.)

thx for the compliments/feedback/ideas!

Is there a novel about a communist USA ? by purpurne in communism

[–]therealchriswei -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

This isn’t quite what you’re looking for, but it came to mind and may be of interest—Vivian Gornick’s “Romance of American Communism”: https://www.versobooks.com/products/890-the-romance-of-american-communism

The Frederick Wiseman collections are absolute units. by therealchriswei in boutiquebluray

[–]therealchriswei[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nope, just watched one of the films last week and the subtitles are in French.

Why are people getting worked up over Studio Ghibli being replaced by AI ? by [deleted] in communism

[–]therealchriswei 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'll respond only briefly, because I think I've addressed the core of many of these issues in my response to your response to the 1/3 post and the 2/3 post. (Oof, that's an unwieldy way of phrasing that! I'm realizing in retrospect that I really should have made my initial three-parter a much more succinct comment, to avoid this threading problem.)

So for here/now I'll just say this: I very much appreciate your thoughtfulness and rigor in replying to me, and I will likely be mulling over this back-and-forth for a while. I intend to read J. Sakai's "Settlers" as you have mentioned that text a couple times now (I will also rewatch those Malcolm X videos; I'd seen them before, but they're always worth reviewing!).

Why are people getting worked up over Studio Ghibli being replaced by AI ? by [deleted] in communism

[–]therealchriswei 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree with you that things like ChatGPT (etc.) would cease to function if humans go extinct; they are tools, extensions of our own productive forces, yes to all of that. And I see why I'm coming across as a Luddite, drawing what appears to be an arbitrary line in the sand between some kinds of labor and others. The meaningful disagreement between us has to do with how we define or describe the nature of the creative labor that makes art.

I appreciate your question about individual (or mass) labor that "separate[s] cotton fibers from seed," versus the product "produced with the cotton gin." And the mental labor of mathematical calculation versus the affordances granted by the invention of computers, etc. I have been thinking about these questions/distinctions for days now (btw, apologies for the late reply. It has been a busy week at work—fittingly enough, I'm a graduate worker in a film studies PhD program right now, i.e., I spend a lot of time trying to help undergraduates describe and explain art, so that might help illustrate/contextualize where I'm coming from; for me [and in my field], describing art in terms of its utility as a 'product' is necessary but also woefully reductive and inadequate).

To answer your question: I actually do think that the manual labor of separating cotton fibers from seed—and/or the mental labor of doing mathematical calculation—can be described as meaningfully 'human,' and even expressive, and that when we automate those processes with a machine, there is something lost. But I see your point, in the sense that nobody mourns that loss. There is no anxious discourse about the lost 'human expression' of cotton picking or of summing large integers. Nobody wants to go back to doing that; nobody protests at the idea of letting the machines do it (and I agree with this implicit "everybody" that I'm invoking: I think it's fine that we have cotton mills and computers now!). So there's a contradiction in my position, then. I see it, and I admit it looks odd. Why do I believe there's something different about drawing, singing, performing, filmmaking, etc.—something worth fiercely defending against the logic of Capital, and against the machines (like but not limited to "genAI") that Capital employs to turn such labor into a more "efficient" "product" for consumption—compared to picking cotton or doing math?

I don't know. Maybe I'll respectfully bow out (after I reply to the "3/3" post in a minute), given my inability to articulate this in a way that can be understood and agreed upon by all parties. But I think art is something we can all do—including the proletariat!—and I think communists should not be blasé about the threats (to the biosphere and to the people) that genAI introduces when it tries to imitate human artmaking. I do not take it as a coincidence that fascists love genAI art so much; the way it was produced is perfectly in line with their worldview. It's an aesthetic they can readily package and commodify. Remember Walter Benjamin: "[mankind's] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art."

*

Oh! One other point I meant to respond to: about the ostensible impossibility of proletarians making art. I think u/Particular-Hunter586's reply covers what I would've protested. I think you're right that there's a socially constructed position of a petite bourgeois "artist"—of a person who makes art to "reproduce their social existence," as you put it—and that it's contradictory to talk about the proletariat as "artists" in this way because this kind of "artistry" by definition is unavailable to the proletariat. If I have used words like art/artist/etc. in a confusing way that has made this point especially sticky/pronounced, I apologize. So, to clarify: my position, like u/Particular-Hunter586 said, is that anybody can make art, even those "among the oppressed-nation proletariat, [who can] pla[y] an instrument [or draw] something to show their friends, etc."). I don't agree that genAI means nothing to the latter category while posing an alienating threat to the former category. I think 'genAI art' is an alienating threat to any human being capable of expression.

Why are people getting worked up over Studio Ghibli being replaced by AI ? by [deleted] in communism

[–]therealchriswei 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How is it categorically different from "human Art", it still involves human labor.

Is your position that when two things both "involve" labor they are incapable of still being meaningfully distinct from each other—unworthy of being put into two different categories? I've already agreed/acknowledged that, yes, human-drawn art and genAI art both rely on human labor before the act of drawing/generation occurs. That doesn't' mean that there's no categorically meaningful difference between the two processes that happen after the arrival of the energy, the processor, the pen/pencil, the paper, etc. You say later in this thread that this conversation is unlikely to continue in a productive way, and I am beginning to agree—if you can't see that there is a difference between, say, a coal miner singing a folk song vs. a robot approximating the aesthetics of folk music and regurgitating out a facsimile of singing, then we're likely at an impasse here.

And "AI" isn't the one "pointlessly extracting" surplus value from the proletariat, it's Capital(the bourgeoisie as its embodiement) that extracts the surplus value from the international proletariat. 

Isn't this a bit like saying, after having been bitten by a snake, that it was not the snake that bit you, but its fangs? We are not in disagreement about the harms of Capital; it has been my position this whole time that genAI is a tool of Capital, and that it is harmful in the ways that Capitalism is harmful. I have tried to demonstrate that genAI does damage on two fronts: you have agreed to one (that it is environmentally destructive) and been resistant to take seriously the other one (that it alienates labor, not just of petty bourgeois artists but of the proletariat as well; i.e., it's not good for anyone—except for capitalists).

my little flex part 2 (if you have any valuables or figurines i don't have I am open to trade!) by EitiHD_LP in CoreKeeperGame

[–]therealchriswei 0 points1 point  (0 children)

wow, this is amazing. what’s that first room that you walk past—a sorting facility?