Richard J. Anderson ✅ 🥔 @sanspoint@mastodon.social

@Tom Got two!

.

No, _you_ downloaded a custom bracelet mod just so your Sim of yourself could wear an Apple Watch like you. You did that.

"If mindfulness just helps people cope with the toxic conditions that make them stressed in the first place, then perhaps we could aim a bit higher. Should we celebrate the fact that this perversion is helping people to “auto-exploit” themselves? This is the core of the problem."

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/14/the-mindfulness-conspiracy-capitalist-spirituality

And on a pretty Sunday morning
A bunch of pretty Baptist girls
Linked their pretty hands and they sang
Life is shit, life is shit
The world is shit, the world is shit
This is life as I know it
This is life as I know it

My partner is their own person and I try not to impose limitations on them... but one thing I insist upon is that they’re not allowed to be on fire. No burninating the person I love, plz, or I will be very upset.

The marvel is not that the dog plays basketball well, but that the dog plays basketball at all.

And you may find yourself
in a beautiful house
With an American wife
And you may ask yourself
Well... how did I get here?

Maciej Cegłowski is probably the only white male in tech worth listening to. https://idlewords.com/2019/06/the_new_wilderness.htm

Oof, even Tom Hall is looking at this new Commander Keen and going "ew."

https://kotaku.com/1835365383

Commander Keen re-imagined as a free-to-play vertical platformer.

In the immortal words of Mr. Horse: "No, sir, I don't like it."

If anything, SimCity helped make me socialist. At least from SimCity 2000 on, it's the job of the government (i.e., the player), to provide and maintain the services needed by SimCitizens. The government provides health care, education, water, garbage removal, public transit, and more. If SimCity truly had a neoliberal or conservative bias, those wouldn't be the responsibility of the player, but of the SimCitizens and the simulated economy.

Something like Maganasanti can only be done if the player casts aside the constraint of worrying about quality of life. If you've ever cheated in SimCity to get free money to build a utopia, you've done the same thing from the other side.

There is an ideology to SimCity, no question, but it's an emergent ideology, and the player can choose to either embrace it, push back on it, or have a fun little dance with it. That's what makes it _fun!_

I'm really annoyed by the take that SimCity is inherently neoliberal or conservative. Doubly so when these takes use Magnasanti as an argument.

Part of the fun of playing SimCity is the balancing act between building and growth (which is where the action is), budgeting, and quality of life for your citizens. There's nothing stopping a player from creating a small, self-sufficient town, and letting it go. You don't have to build a dystopic skyscraper hellhole.

Got some serious imposter syndrome yesterday hanging with a bunch of trans and non-binary peeps for not being enby enough.

But I’m identifying it as imposter syndrome. Nobody called me out, nobody deliberately made me feel this way.

Of course the minute the Brooklyn Pride parade ends, here come a bunch of Jesus Freaks with their hate signs. GO AWAY. NOBODY LIKES YOU.