i also think this was a partial streisand effect. once significant political figures put his name in their mouths, it sped along his relevance.

it is very apparent that hasan piker is in the process of a mainstream breakthrough as a political commentator. like it is actively happening.

equally as apparent: this has deeply rattled everyone who has pitched their tent in "centre-left" politics. from bluesky libs to sitting senators.

It's really funny to me when people throw around the term "filtered" in any sort of discussion about art, but especially common in anime.

Useful thought terminator that one. It is very convenient when everyone who dislikes your thing is magically not "the person it's meant for."

N64 controller evangelists will cite that it could be held multiple ways, giving developers more creative freedom. that is true and makes sense for the era.

nothing can get that away from the fact that no grip option feels comfortable.

their manic hyperfixation vs. your intentional pouring over the Silmarillion.

the constant glazing of george carlin irritates me, and i'm not even 100% sure why. probably because i see him as patient zero for the whole notion of "everyman comedian as truth-telling philosopher" archetype.

the praise always seems so... cloying.

But also they give her a character motivation. She has a streak of vindictiveness, selfishness, and cowardice when it comes to matters outside of protecting her brother.

Navi's big crime to me isn't the constant chiming in, but the fact that she has stilted dialogue. A character who is a mechanic.

Hijacking this one to talk about Majora's Mask.

Navi was an early example of an ever-present guide character, so they didn't really characterize her beyond Being A Game Mechanic.

Tatl occupies this role far better by chiming in more appropriately and calling you stupid when she does. Queen shit.

To be clear: I am not saying Gundam does not address ideology and materialism in war, just that it can be inconsistent on those things, especially as time went on. Wing currently stands out as the sole example of addressing both these things terribly.

Wing really just took that to its most extreme. I suspect this mode of thinking about war as a Collective Human Failing might have been a consequence of Tomino's upbringing in post-war Japan, where the state narrative about Japan's role in the war was very mum on specifics.

Not since 0079 and Zeta has Gundam handled this with any amount of notable deft. The whole franchise tends to treat fighting as heavily motivated by personal convictions, and sometimes borderline agnostic to political ideology, let alone any sort of material basis for war.

X also highlights another one of Wing's failures, born out of just treating their show like a Checklist Of Gundam Themes. X shows inter-factional conflict and splintering in a way that is grounded in character motivations, whereas with Wing, factional allegiances were arbitrary.

I didn't hear anything about Gundam X before watching it. Not a thing. It really surprised me and was very much a breath of fresh air following Wing.

I can already tell this show didn't get the runtime it needed (again) for the totality of its vision. The pacing on the back half is a bit fast.

So yeah. Makes sense that we continued down the rabbit hole, but now the self-satisfied smugness of being aloof to serious issues is gone. It's made its transformation into boilerplate fascism that naturally results from anti-intellectualism. Just now we have streamers acting as regime propagandists

You just want to enjoy some good old-fashioned apolitical video games, and a lurching feminist menace is trying to take that from you "by being cringe and caring too much".

A cultural environment in which everything "is not that deep and you shouldn't try to make it that deep. It is cringe."

It makes complete sense that so many terminally online young men could be funneled into a far-right base in this sort of culture. It's how consumer grievances of "ethics in games journalism" could be leveraged against progressive groups.

And listen: There are Family Guy bits I find genuinely funny. The shows rely on an overstimulating torrent of referential sludge that has to land sometimes on account of quantity. They might even make a cogent political joke.

But there is this implicit hostility to anything resembling activism.

This ethos of "everybody is to be mocked with unmitigated ruthlessness" was one thing. But there was a particular thread that tied it all together:

"Having deeply held principles is cringe. Caring too much is cringe."

If you had any serious convictions about the world, you were a joke.

Have you folks ever thought about how the pop cultural zeitgeist of the 2000s was so deeply anti-intellectual, but was also deeply smug about the fact.

I think about this a lot with "Adult animated sitcoms" ala Family Guy, South Park, etc.

Every day Mamdani comes out and is like "hey guys, I turned off the orphan-crushing machine. Literally just had to flip a switch. Took less than 5 minutes."

After decades of dem leadership pissing and moaning and fundraising about how complex an issue it is and how difficult the process is etc

Regardless of the credibility of Jay-Z's other allegations, ain't no way that he had the juice to be rubbing shoulders with the likes of Harvey Weinstein in 1996.

Pusha T for similar reasons, although that one is from 2007.

They are going to point at it and call it a Democrat hoax. Just watch.

File this one under Sentences That Nearly Drove Me Insane To Write.

"How could our glorious leader have committed these heinous acts. Look, they are claiming Jay-Z was on the island in 1996, fresh off his commercial flop of a debut album, and still selling CDs out of a car trunk. It is all lies and slander."

I am being very serious. A flood of information, much of it from an anonymous tip line and unverified evidence with celebrity name drops that make no sense in context.

They are hoping the public won't understand the distinction and leverage that to discredit the accusers.

The Epstein Files are a distraction from the Epstein Files lmao.

Lol CDPR was so cloying about it too. Their CEO was always making public statements about loot boxes and crunch being bad. Type of shit that would get upvoted on r/gaming.

Then bam, CDPR used a bunch of crunch to get Cyberpunk out the door. People gotta stop falling in love with corporations.

The gaming public goes through these cycles of taking a company and placing it on the "One Good Game Company" pedestal. They always fall off it and then they do it again.

Larian crawled onto it with BG3. Before that, it was CDPR with The Witcher 3.

As a Canadian, I've had to deal with this asshole in politics for my entire life. And make no mistake Americans, he has had a clearly expressed interested in steering your country towards it's current circumstances.

It did not need to be Kevin O'Leary. I am certain someone of Safdie's reputation could have found any number of fine actors who would have brought his scumbag to life. Billionaires are ontological enemies of human beings who don't deserve access to art. Cold stop.

This shit normalizes some of the worst, most parasitic individuals in our society.

And Kevin O'Leary isn't even some silent oligarch content to make money. Dude is a loudmouth, Trump-supporting, blowhard who has spent much of his public life advocating for privatization and austerity.