Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

–Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness

There’s also the thread of dumping on a person for liking something because it is popular. “Boo! Basic opinion! You should like the weird niche stuff that I like because I fit into that extremely narrow niche!”

And I applaud the weird shit that isn’t for everyone, I think that’s where some of the stuff I love the most comes from, but sometimes there’s a very good reason that something is already widely beloved.

Just do it in the bathtub, that should be fine, right?!

“For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.”

In that way, he’s being honest; he “feels badly,” because the mechanism by which he feels feelings is fucked up, so he is bad at feeling emotions.

W dodged those shoes like someone who’d had shoes thrown at them before.

Relevant xkcd

dive deeply into the Oedipal aspect

keep it hard R

really f***ing with people’s heads

demented art-deco aesthetic

A Cure For Wellness was 2016. Verbinsky definitely brought some of his notes from BioShock with him.

I wonder if this was before or after A Cure For Wellness, because there’s a fair amount of overlap between ACFW and BioShock.

I’m convinced that most of Hades would work just fine on the PS1. You would lose most of the sexy vocal work, though, and that’d be a shame.

I love the idea that they’re having this conversation with Stormbreaker buried in Thanos’ chest.

Fun story!

I worked at a used book store for a while, and we were emphatically a no-judgement zone. The only things we wouldn’t buy were things that wouldn’t sell (or that were actively dangerous; the boss didn’t want us to buy The Anarchist Cookbook, not because it gave instructions on how to make bombs, but because it gave bad instructions on how to make bombs), and we made a practice of never ever talking down to a customer based on their reading habits.

A fairly common exchange for us was that someone would show up, deeply embarrased, with their dead father or grandfather’s collection of old Playboy magazines. We loved old Playboy magazines. They sell well, they hold value well. We wanted as many of them as we could. Sometimes someone would bring in old hardcore magazines from the seventies on up, and those were harder to sell, so we didn’t love those as much, but again, it’s not a conversation about the pictorial equivalent of gynecological exams, it’s a conversation about what does or doesn’t sell.

One time, a guy brought in his dead grandfather’s old smut collection, and it was pretty cool. Stuff from the 1950s with Bettie Page where it was ostensibly photography instruction magazines but the models were 95% nude women, with the occasional still life and ads for lenses or flash bulbs to lend an air of legitimacy. Literally French photography magazines from the 40s or before the war. Very impressive old smut.

Included with the collection, all of which we wanted, was a little pile of film reels in metal cans from at least the 1960s, and who knows how much older they might have been. They had hand-written labels on them like “Long Lake” and “Picnic.”

Now, we didn’t and couldn’t buy old film reels. But I told the guy bringing these in, “I’ll give you three guesses as to what’s on these reels, and the first two don’t count. I can’t buy them, but please don’t throw them away. There are some pornography museums out there, and you should contact them, because a lot of people in your position find this stuff, freak out, and throw it away, and then it’s gone forever, and that’s a loss to human culture, even if it’s smutty human culture.”

So I hope he contacted the pornography museum and that someone’s old pornography got preserved, because even the Library of Alexandria probably had a smut section.

Heroes of Might and Magic III

Super Mario Bros. 3

Hades

Katamari Damacy

Sim City 2000

I was at a Moral Mondays protest in Raleigh NC a while back and someone with a bullhorn called out “What do we want?!”

And the crowd yelled back, all at once:

“Racial justice!”

“Marriage equality!”

“Immigration reform!”

“Police reform!”

“Impeach Trump!”

“Close Guantanamo!”

“Better pay for teachers!”

…and a bunch of other demands too many to understand in a crowd that large, and while I knew I was with the right people, I had a sinking feeling about our chances of achieving much of anything.

Ski Or Die

‘Take the guns first, go through due process second’

Proper drinking technique demonstrated (on left):

Of what use, then, are the American Communists?

They serve one function extremely useful to you and to the country, so useful that, if there were no Communists, we would almost be forced to create some. They are a reliable litmus paper for detecting real sources of danger to the Republic.

Communism is so repugnant to almost all Americans, when they are getting along even tolerably well, that one may predict with certainty that any social field or group in which the Communists make real strides in gaining members or acceptance of their doctrines, any such spot is in such bad shape from real and not imaginary social ills that the rest of us should take emergency, drastic action to investigate and correct the trouble.

–Robert A. Heinlein, Take Bank Your Government

Replace “communism” with far-right ideology, and that’s it. People, humanity in general, are fairly agreeable and cooperative, when they are getting along even tolerably well. It’s only when conditions on the ground become intolerable that you see extreme political movements take hold, either left or right, because the established political order has demonstrated that it is either unwilling or unable to provide for the people’s needs.

If more people were able to afford education, medicine, housing, and had the financial breathing room to take the occasional vacation and provide for their and their children’s future, you wouldn’t see extremism. You’d see people happy that things were working out okay. It’s because we’ve allowed economic inequality and environmental chaos to become so widespread that people have become desperate enough to look to anyone who is at least saying they’ll make real changes to fix what’s wrong with the world.