My gming style? Always framing myself as the victim of PC antics because people who play TTRPGs are all sadists.

My photo shows a frontal view of a buff-coloured Minoan pottery jug with a dark-red, stylised octopus painted beneath the dark red pouring spout. The jug has a rounded body with very short neck with out-turned rim, the body tapers downwards to a slightly turned out flat base also painted red. On each shoulder there’s a small chunky loop handle. The octopus is stylised and looks cartoon-like with a vertical dumbbell shaped body, with two large circular eyes with central red dots staring out at the viewer. From the top of the head emerge eight suckered arms. Four arms hang symmetrically downwards on each side of the body, writhing and curling at the tip. There is a similar red octopus on each side of the jug not shown in my photo.

A 3,500 year-old Minoan jar with a cartoon-like octopus under the spout! 🐙

From Kommos, Crete. Heraklion Archaeological Museum 📷 by me

#Archaeology

Kash Patel is actually passing out at work because his spirit is slipping between dimensions. The novel cuts to his perspective from time-to-time, but it is never clear what his astral projections have to do with the main storyline.

Because of this sprawling of disputes-without-referee, what a "leftist" is has become quite blurry, hence the good reason for the question. It may be that "leftist" is more of a historically useful category from the late 18th to late 20th centuries, but now we need new words.

Canons tend to sprawl out and disintegrate over time, especially if they lack institutional backing. Leftists had that once with the USSR, and so there was a relatively-stable-but-still-disputed canon, just like Christians and Catholicism with their canon.

I think this is a good question. I would define a "leftist" as a person who recognizes the historical and literary canon that informed the French Revolution, and developed from that time period forward.

I wonder what it would take to make a power fantasy that: 1) has its head on straight politically, 2) leaves space for the radical ambiguity that is entailed by *all* expressions of power. (1) is achievable, there are some TTRPGs that do this, but (2) may be strictly incompatible with the fantasy.

SL the show is setting itself up for some big twist; I have no idea what happens in the books, but I have a feeling that regardless of the future, Jeju is going to fade into the background.

I assume the justification for what makes SL "okay" is that it is an indulgent power fantasy. The problem is that fictional indulgent power fantasies start to lose their appeal when they start to overlap with real historical tragedies caused by the indulgent power fantasies of ruling classes.

HXH's analogue of North Korea doesn't always work, but Togashi's heartfelt solidarity with the people is always clear. SL, insofar as the show cares about anyone, it is so they can think how cool and hot the protagonist is.

In SL the populace has been massacred, and when the monsters are killed, there is a triumphant opportunity for South Korea to resettle.

In HXH a large amount of the populace is rescued, setting the stage for a tragically-framed takeover of the society by the corrupt international community.

One aspect that drew my attention is that the evil monsters in SL are placed on Jeju Island, where the USA and South Korean governments committed mass murders in the late 1940s; this history is never mentioned. In HXH, the equivalent monsters were placed in an equivalent to North Korea.

Solo Leveling is not a good show and its strongman ethic is religiously poisonous. I was super interested in its indebtedness to Hunter X Hunter, with the creators seemingly having the exact wrong response to HXH and what makes it great.

I study this with a philosophical lens, so I express concerns with how this language is cognitively distorting + bad for discourse and social trust + hits actual occult practioners in the crossfire + perpetuates this pattern of demonization.

I study demonization, so in this context I'm looking at how "occult" and "occultism" are used to construct the contours of legitimate philosophy without real justification, such as the examples of Sartre or mind/body dualism, who in this context are being "demonized" by association with the occult.

When I was an undergrad I remember being quite disillusioned when I looked into the codification of dual process theory. Rehash of psychoanalytic and behaviorist theories + a few extra bold claims that ended up falsified = humanities scholars still talking about "System 1 and 2" decades later.

This will be scripture in 122 years.

I do reckon "included or radical break" could be an inclusive "or."

If the paper gets made, I'll reach out!

I think the ambiguity is right; there's a causal/precedential relationship there, but it's up in the fair if Satanism is "included" or a "radical break." If I get the time to write a paper on it, I might try and bully a philosophy of religion or theology journal into publishing it lol

Does Satanism count as part of the Abrahamic tradition? It would be very interesting to flesh out the case for/against.

"The rise of extreme wealth is one of the clearest signs of this imbalance. In 1987, billionaires held wealth equal to 3% of global GDP. Today this tiny elite, just 0.0001% of the world population, owns the equivalent of *16%* of world GDP in wealth."

Once we're talking about harms, we're shifting to a normative stance. I have to be able to say "this religious practice is causing harm so we should stop" and give reasons for it, reasoning vulnerable to a response from the individual/community/tradition I'm critiquing.

To use Dennettian language, it is about the stance the researcher is taking. I'm a fan of approaching religion like one would ant foraging, though from that stance one would have to also be less worried about "obvious harm," in same same way that we're not morally worried about bee drone expulsion.

Influence on David Lynch?

philosophy is just a series of footnotes to Liam

Atwood uses autism to epitomize the attraction to violence and perversion (it seems like she thought autism was about "disconnection" from "normal" human relationality), and it's not just a one-off case, but gets repeated with multiple characters!

I was going to make a joke about the two types of people who academically study demonology, but I realized it was just a reinscription of Sexy Murder Poet/Basically Pleasant Bureaucrat, which is of course an all-subsuming typology.

Making myself a latte in the morning, the sound of the ice clinking against the metal of the thermos, slow sips while reading about the nature of Evil Itself, birds singing in the cool morning. It's a good life!

Do you enjoy Side Story? Why not tell a friend about it? Why not tell a friend about it on Reddit Dot Com, or in the place where games criticism thrives, that warm cavern with the pellucid sapphire pool that we are all trying to reach. Are you in that cavern? Tell the people there about Side Story.

Oryx and Crake is one of the most hateful novels I have ever read. Its disdain for autistic people is jaw dropping!