link

I have a few:

• Chosen ones, fate, destiny, &c. When you get down to it, a story with these themes is one where a single person or handful of people is ontologically, cosmically better and more important than everyone else. It's eerily similar to that right-wing meme about how "most people are just NPCs" (though I disliked the trope before that meme ever took off).
• Way too much importance being given to bloodlines by the narrative (note, this is different from them being given importance by characters or societies in the story).
• All of the good characters are handsome and beautiful, while all of the evil characters are ugly and disfigured (with the possible exception of a femme fatale or two).
• Races that are inherently, unchangeably evil down to the last individual regardless of upbringing, society, or material circumstances.

At least, that's what I'll do if I don't get bored before it's done (and that's admittedly a big if). Here's an early concept of it - all of the buildings in the residential zone are my designs.

The largest buildings take a lot of effort to make, so I won't do a lot of variations of those. That should work out anyway, since it aligns with the functional commie block aesthetic I'm going for.

Things you can expect a lot of in this city:

• High-density housing
• Mass transit
• Greenspace
• Video arcades
• Public swimming pools

Things you will not find in this city:

• Single occupancy homes
• Lawns
• Bright, gaudy advertisements

Someone on this site recently linked the blog http://www.indi.ca. It's good, for the most part. It's anti-imperialist, pro-communist, pro-China, all that good stuff. It offers, among many other things, solid materialist analysis of things like why Ukraine has been losing and why a model depending on infinite economic growth is inherently unsustainable.

Which is why it came as a surprise and disappointment to me when the guy responsible used anticapitalism to push theocracy. The fact that he otherwise has good takes is the only reason this piece stood out enough to me to critique. I'm going to break this down.

>Long ago—in the 'Enlightenment' they stole from the Lord Buddha—Europeans killed their Lord and called it a brave new day. They've been proselytizing this path ever since, calling it secularism. Instead of an invisible man they now believe in an invisible hand, with economists as its priests and scientists as its miracle workers. And this great golden god called 'the economy' really did work miracles. People got used to growth every year, something which used to be an anomaly. The first shall be first and the last shall be last, but don't worry, it'll trickle down eventually. When things got bad, as they do cyclically, the economists just sacrificed some children and poor people and it all got growing again.

>In truth, all they really value is money. Principal is the only principle, profit is the only prophet, usury is the only use. The astonishing belief that there was a man in the sky was replaced with ‘the [even more] astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds,’ as John Maynard Keynes said. A fairly full description of capitalism from one its architects. The 'invisible hand' was a throwaway metaphor from Adam Smith that somehow became a state religion, like basing your civilization on a random joke you heard at a party. This obviously hasn't worked out in the end (awfully hot, isn't it?). Westerners thought they were following science but, more accurately, they were following Satan.

The very first thing the author does is present a false dichotomy between religion and capitalism - the possibility that a person can be both religious and capitalist (see American evangelicals) or neither (see any socialist country with a policy of state atheism) is simply not entertained.

>Am I calling for a caliphate, or the return of God kings? I'm not against it.

Here we go. The bait-and-switch. Up until now, the article has been making entirely reasonable critiques of capitalism, but now it pivots to using those critiques to push social conservatism (a common fascist tactic).

There are so many things wrong with this, it's hard to know where to begin. The most obvious answer is to point out that theocracy has never stopped environmental destruction or colonial exploitation, and in fact, the two are often bedfellows. Franco's Spain was hardly known for its environmental protections. Saudi Arabia is under religious authority, and it's the largest oil exporter in the world while at the same time committing genocide in Yemen. Bolsonaro, a Christian fascist, gleefully bulldozed huge portions of the Amazon while driving out and murdering the indigenous population. The most rabid pro-Israel, pro-capitalist, anti-environment people in America are die-hard evangelical Christians, and Israel itself is a religious state. By contrast, communism - a movement the author repeatedly supports elsewhere - has a long and consistent history of anticlerical views and policies. Cuba has never colonized anyone and is the most sustainable country in the world.

>Religion is just a way of perceiving higher things. Why shouldn't it have a place in governing?

The author is straight, male, and a member of the majority religion in his country (Buddhist in Sri Lanka), which may be why this poses a legitimate question for him. It's very easy to answer "why shouldn't it" if you're trans woman in the US, a gay man in Iran (or the US), a woman in Saudi Arabia (or the US), or a Muslim in India (or the US). He does not consider these people even for a second - or if he does, he considers them an acceptable sacrifice. Given that he has already written about his own country's religious authorities persecuting minorities, I lean toward the latter. "I'm okay with you and your friends being murdered by theocratic fascists to save the world" would be ghoulish even if it would actually work. As it is, it's just grossly indifferent to human life.

>It all started when western philosophy severed the religious part of their brain (the practicing, not the preaching) and ran headlong across the continents, killing, colonizing, and enslaving and calling it ‘enlightenment’. This was supposed to be replaced with a secular, scientific morality, but we the colonized have never seen any evidence of this.

This is, of course, a completely ahistorical and absurd view of colonialism. The old-time European colonizers loved their Christianity. Residential schools, missionaries, and forced conversions were all part and parcel of the colonial playbook. Churches backed colonialism under the guise of saving souls, and the enterprise was carried out by kings and queens who justified their rule with divine right.

The author has spoken positively of Christianity elsewhere in his blog, so I'm sure he would say that all of these examples weren't "real Christianity" - an argument that rings as hollow as when capitalists say that monopolies and colonialism "aren't real capitalism." We must judge a system by its results when put into practice.

Pictured: a 179 cycle solution for the Small Excavator

An engineering game, as I'd define it, is a game where a primary gameplay element is designing machines for some purpose, weighing conflicting needs such as cost, versatility, and performance. I've only played a handful of these games, and I really wish I could find more. Here are some of the ones I've enjoyed:

Kerbal Space Program: I'd call this a definitive example of an engineering game, and one I have hundreds of hours in. I absolutely love designing rockets, figuring out what I'll need for each mission, experimenting with different staging mechanisms to maximize fuel efficiency, pushing my available tools to the absolute limit to land on far-off celestial bodies, etc.

Automation: The Car Company Tycoon Game: Yes, I know, fuck cars, but I'm having fun with this one. There are a lot of different niches you can cater to, and I enjoy specializing in affordable, reliable, fuel-efficient sedans and compact cars against the trend of turning everything into a gas-guzzling behemoth.

Master of Orion: Yes, a DOS game from 1994, and primarily a 4x, but its ship designer has some of the best balance between simplicity and depth I've ever seen. Ships have a limited hull capacity, but no fixed number of weapon hardpoints, and they can only fit a handful of special modules, but there are dozens to choose from, with widely varying capabilities. The number of actual choices to make is small, but they involve balancing so many things - durability, damage reduction, damage output, armor penetration, weapon range, maneuverability - and the turn-based combat gives enough control to let you really appreciate the impact your designs have.

Avorion: A space flight sim with highly customizable ships built out of blocks, with fine-grained control over things like engine power, maneuver thrusters, and armor thickness, and cargo bay sizes. I wanted to like this one, but it's way too grindy for me (building up your reputation with factions takes forever, and they won't let you buy better ship equipment until you do).

Robocraft: A game where you design a robot and then pit it against other players' creations in online team battles. My best creations were a spider bot that could scuttle up and over hills and ambush enemies with a massive plasma burst, and an air defense bot with bigass twin AAGs and a shitload of top armor. I had a lot of fun with this one back in the day, but nowadays it's so deserted that most of the players are bots.

The first says to the second, "You know, when I was young, I was a sniper in the Red Army."

The second says, "Oh, a marksman?"

The first shakes his head. "No, I was in it for the money, not the ideology."

The popular and trending games tend to feel generic and samey to me, I want a way to search for weird and obscure potential gems.

>Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

>Frame nothing as a conflict between national interests, have it clear that anyone talking of arms races is a fool. That we all live or die as one, in this, is not a policy but a fact of nature. Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.

Inspired by a convo with a trans friend of mine

!che-cigar

I have seen so, so many people with otherwise decent politics support NATO or make Xi Winnie the Pooh jokes or whatever. They can understand all about how the ruling class is fucking them over and capitalism is unsustainable, but they will cling to their notion that the West is superior and should rule the world like it's a life preserver in a stormy sea.

This is on my mind, since I had to temp-ban someone from c/vegan for it in the past week, and another example of it went unmoderated for hours after being reported in another community (though it was eventually dealt with).

It doesn't matter how much the person you're responding to deserves it. Odds are, they will not care. But you know who will care? Any comrades who happen to read the thread and who struggle with suicidal ideation and/or self harm. You could ruin their day. You could be the push that sends them over the edge. Even in the unlikely event that you cause grief to the person you're responding to, no amount of collateral damage is worth it.

Don't make suicide bait posts or comments. Don't upvote suicide bait posts or comments. Report and denounce them wherever they show up.

For more information, Google "Jordan Peterson Grandma Dream."

I don't want to give too many details so as to avoid doxing myself. I never left the US and wouldn't have done so if asked, but fundamentally, I don't think that really matters. It's all part of the same machine. It was well before I became anything that could be described as communist, but all that means is that it hit that much harder when I had to come to terms with what I'd been a part of.

Maybe that's the sort of thing you can't ever make up for, but I'll spend the rest of my life trying anyway. If anyone on this site never wants anything to do with me again after having read this, I understand.