Excrubulent
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Half-Life 2 peaks at 52,000 concurrent players, 20 years after its release 1 hour ago:
Ricochet hasn’t recieved the love it deserves. We’ve been waiting on Ricochet 2 for decades. The fans need closure.
- Comment on I put on my robe and my wizard hat 5 hours ago:
Nerds can be so freaky.
- Comment on 'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers' 10 hours ago:
The combat may not have been the most interesting versus basic grunts, but it never got stale. I’ve never played another game where the core gameplay changed so much so frequently.
Physics interactions -> Basic FPS -> Fan Boat -> Mounted Gun -> Gravity Gun -> Zombies & Traps -> Car -> THE CRANE FIGHT -> Rockets & Gunships -> Ant Lions -> Ant Lion Minions -> Turrets -> Resistance Squads -> Striders -> Super Gravity Gun
Honestly the HL1 combat may have been somewhat more challengjng, but it was a grind. Fights were often just frustrating. I’ve abandonded playthroughs because I didn’t feel like spending another 10 hours beating my head against the endless amounts of enemies just to get to the end of… whatever I was doing I forgot.
HL1’s big innovation was never removing control from the player just to tell the story. Beyond that they also had some interesting AI behaviour and weapons. It was a game with old-school length and old-school difficulty.
HL2’s big innovation was the physics engine, and they played with it in so many ways, whole polishing every other aspect of the design. They kept the gameplay tight and did something just long enough to explore it and then they moved on. They never forced you to hang out just repeating the same loop over and over to pad the length.
- Comment on Bushtit isn’t much better 😭 6 days ago:
“Black-throated bullshit” as a phrase goes pretty hard though.
- Comment on Can't sleep, he's watching 6 days ago:
Even if it weren’t true I would definitely tell the advertisers it was.
- Comment on Post-election blues 1 week ago:
Yup. Robert Reich posted something that ended with “Take a moment to breathe, then let the resistance begin.”
And like, buddy, I’m sorry to say, if your resistance is only just beginning, then you are resisting the wrong thing and you will be ineffective. You should be fighting the entire empire, not just the unmasked pieces of it.
The election is your chance to ask for your preferred enemy, but if you don’t get it, your job doesn’t change.
- Comment on Yeah but the one accessory she usually removed was the little swastika pin. 2 weeks ago:
Oh no… I implemented my AccessoryCount as an unsigned BigInt for some reason. That’s more than the particles in the known universe.
I’ll just step outside on a clear night and claim that the stars themselves are my accessories. Is that too pretentious?
- Comment on Advertising 3 weeks ago:
Fellow Aussie, I know instinctively this was Aussie, just not which part.
- Comment on Ukraine graphics is crazy 4 weeks ago:
People have been trying to boycott tome since we had a word for it. If you figure out how you let me know please.
- Comment on FAQ: Yes We Suppirt Kinect 4 weeks ago:
I have a kinect, I have to try this.
- Comment on Absolutely nothing happened June 1989 5 weeks ago:
Risk what? Will anything of value be lost?
- Comment on Ok boomer 5 weeks ago:
"Not another minute! Pretty soon I’m going to stop playing who-shall-I-kill-first in my head and just go for what feels natural. I’m thinking me first, then you."
- Bernard Black
- Comment on Make a wsh 1 month ago:
Caffene.
- Comment on Hey nerd 1 month ago:
It’s a little jarring in a world of deep-fried memes.
- Comment on Hey nerd 1 month ago:
No worries, Know Your Meme is still fairly reliable.
- Comment on The four horsemen of the dogpocalypse. 1 month ago:
The Freedom Frank is War, Hallowiener is Death, Mtn Dew is Pestilence and Baja Blast is Famine.
- Comment on Hey nerd 1 month ago:
Based on the space I would guess it just had “girlfriend” because that’s a pretty straightforward joke.
But I found it instead:
- Comment on Is your writing skibidi? 1 month ago:
That B, I and I are basically the same thing reworded three ways so they can spell the word.
- Comment on Lawless society 1 month ago:
Okay, I appreciate you saying you’re interested, I’ve found that’s a useful filter to find good conversations, and I’ve always found this particular topic very frustrating to talk about. Hierarchical realism - the idea that there is no alternative to hierarchy - is incredibly pernicious. People seem to have a hard time questioning it.
So as to the assumptions:
That’s when you have an organised force opposing them, which doesn’t need to deal with internal disputes the way an anarchistic force would need to.
You have drawn the dichotomy between “organised” and “anarchistic”. This is such an entrenched misunderstanding that you can explain it plain as day to people and it’s like they don’t even hear it.
Anarchy requires far more organisation than hierarchy. In fact the classic anarchy symbol of a circle A means “anarchy is order”. Anarchy isn’t chaos, it is the absence of hierarchies of domination.
And internal conflicts happen within established hierarchies, all the time. You see this in strikes and labour activism. They’re a much bigger problem in hierarchies because the bosses can’t acknowledge or deal with them. They don’t know what to do when the “do as I say” lever stops working.
In fact, something that tends to get left out of typical histories is the military revolt that played a significant role in ending the US’s invasion of Vietnam.
So the idea that organisation is a feature of a dominance hierarchy is wrong. Domination is used when organisation can’t be. Anarchies have to be supremely organised to exist in the first place, and it doesn’t magically stop working because conflict occurs. The thing about organisation and consensus building is that it is actually far more robust than dominance hierarchies.
Hierarachy is strong but fragile, because it is necessarily arrayed in tension against itself like the molecules of a Prince Rupert’s drop. It seems impossibly hard and unassailable, but disrupt the right part and it explodes. It has no flexibility.
There would be no reason to believe hierarchy were better in any respect except that it is currently the dominant world order. That wasn’t always the case and it seems to have a hard expiration date. The question is whether we can destroy it before it destroys the ecology.
So that’s the spiel about assumptions. Sorry I went so long, I didn’t have time to edit it down. I could go on about how hierarchy has embedded itself so deep in all our psyches, but I’ll spare you that.
So as to the question about internal criminal activity, which seems like the best way to put it. You’re asking about any “involuntary or enforced way of preventing them from exploiting society”. Well, there really isn’t one.
Like I said, voluntary prison is a method for dealing with individuals whose behaviour necessitates such treatment. Organised groups are a different situation, so the idea just doesn’t apply.
When I said the answer was violence, I was trying to make that point.
As for how to stop such organisations from metastasising, I don’t have any examples of such a thing actually happening, so I don’t know, except to point you to societies where it just… doesn’t come up. Rojava uses a reconciliation process to prevent things like murder from turning into full-on blood fueds, which used to be a problem, but that’s a little different.
Apart from telling you that the problem just doesn’t appear to arise in the first place - and I could talk about “leveling mechanisms” here, but that’s getting pretty deep in the weeds - I can point you to an example where an indigenous horizontalist society excised criminal and state elements that were deeply embedded. It’s not the same, but I hope it’ll be illustrative.
It was Cheran, Mexico, where politicians, cops, illegal loggers and drug cartels were merged into a fucking rat king of corruption that was smothering the town. Murders were a daily occurrence, plus all the other problems you would imagine in that scenario.
An underground network of women organised and rose up against them. On the day it happened, there was so much popular support that they were able to evict the entire oppressive structure at once without undue violence. Once they’d clearly won, some young men wanted to start lynching the captives, but the women who’d run the day stopped them and told them to simply let them go.
The town still runs on horizontal organisation principles, it keeps out the state completely. No cops, no politicians, no corporations, no drug cartels. The murder rate dropped off a cliff.
Now, that’s not the end of the story. Let’s imagine you’re in a town with that history, and you want to start a crime syndicate. How do you do it? Who do you talk to? How long do you think it takes before you’re dragged in front of a town meeting to be dealt with? Would it even occur to you to try?
I suspect this is why the problem you brought up doesn’t have any examples.
- Comment on Lawless society 1 month ago:
There are so many assumptions in what you said that I don’t know where to start dealing with them. You’ve packed so many common misconceptions in such a short comment it’s kind of overwhelming. Let me know if you want to hear what I have to say, it’s a lot of work if you’re just trying to tell me I’m wrong.
But just quickly:
It’s well documented that decentralised autonomous cells are extremely effective. Special forces take a large portion of their tactics fron guerilla fighters that operate the same way.
There are examples of decentralised societies today that are incredibly effective fighters. Rojava and the Zapatistas are two excellent examples, plus numerous small regions that have held off vastly superior state forces without centralised leadership. Community self defense is a powerful method that works even within overarching state oppression.
But I guess those can’t exist, because you remembered crime happens or something.
- Comment on Léon: The Professional: The Unconventional Cult Classic at 30 1 month ago:
Yeah, she’s the very epitome of born sexy yesterday. She literally strips in front of them because she’s too naive to understand modesty like a toddler.
- Comment on Swifties wasted no time... 1 month ago:
It makes sense if you think of them as extremely well-funded frat boys with a free pass to break laws.
They just kind of do shit, and if it doesn’t work they keep trying until something sticks or they run out of steam. They get killed all the time.
It’s still scary, but just a lot less cool.
The reason we think of them as hypercompetent masters of espionage is because that makes better movies, and also because the US government funds movies that make them look good.
- Comment on Lawless society 1 month ago:
Okay, so you’re talking about an antisocial group that is attempting to prefigure a society of domination within the existing anarchsit society.
Well, assuming they’ve established themselves as a continuing threat, the short answer is: violence. We use defensive violence against their encroachment until their group crumbles, which shouldn’t be hard since by definition most of their members are living a way worse life than they would without their oppressors, and they’re surrounded by examples of people living free.
Hierarchies are fragile. Also, in order to exist, an anarchist society has already solved the problem of how to keep hierarchies from forming.
The voluntary prison idea is a way of dealing with individuals, not organised groups. That’s an entirely different situation.
- Comment on Lawless society 1 month ago:
I’m not really sure what question you’re asking. What situation specifically are you talking about? Are we dealing with capitalism from the inside or from the outside? Are you asking about a theory of change, or about how an anarchist region deals with its state neighbours?
These all have answers, similar but different, but I don’t really want to spend the effort answering every permutation of the question I could imagine without knowing what you mean.
- Comment on Lawless society 2 months ago:
And further to that we have voluntary prison. Essentially, if you’re guilty of something and want to have the benefits of this society, you need to agree to a loss of some privileges - in whatever form is necessary. If you wont, well good luck surviving when nobody will trade with you or let you live near them.
If you won’t agree to that, you can leave, but the full details of your trial and conviction are public and your decision to leave will be broadcast, so our neighbours know to look out for you.
That means trials will need to be fair, and seen to be fair, or else it will be easy to ask for asylum. Prisoners need to be fairly treated, or they will try their luck in a nearby place.
But if someone chooses to leave and is just trying to run from the consequences of their actions, well they’ll have a hard time being accepted anywhere else.
- Comment on Socialism 2 months ago:
Yup, and there’s actually a closer-to-home question to answer along these lines, which is what to do about AGI, and I think the simple answer is that it also has full personhood and all the recognition that comes with that.
And there’s an obvious test to figure it out. It’s not the turing test, consciousness is self-reported. That is, whether we realise it or not, how we recognise that humans are conscious, and there’s no reason to expect machines would be any different. When they are people, they will tell us. We won’t be able to stop them because that’s what people do: they demand recognition.
- Comment on America's Smartest Man Finds Something Interesting 2 months ago:
I assume this coming from an autistic person is objective truth then, something that definitely exists and we can definitely know. I’m sure they have plenty of science to back it up in that case. They wouldn’t just hear a bunch of thinly disguised bullshit built on the back of junk science and take it at face value without checking if any of it is at all real, not this person with their special objective truth brain.
- Comment on I am in fear 2 months ago:
Oh wow, it’s Christopher Lloyd in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That’s a deep cut.
- Comment on Damn right 2 months ago:
Yup, I had this in mind as another example of the same thing when I was writing my comment.
When you try to explain that the general jankiness of linux is a big problem and a barrier, you get a lot of people very upset and defensive, but it’s just a simple, obvious fact, and only by facing that fact can anybody actually fix it.
I think the reasons for it are perfectly understandable - software is hard, and anyone able to volunteer could make serious money in so many different places. Capitalist enitities have gobbled up the vast majority of the talent for their own projects, even if they make them spin their wheels in bullshit jobs rather than make good software. The only people left to make FOSS are some combo of ideological, stubborn, and incapable of working within capitalist orgs, or just extremely tired because they already do work in those orgs. That’s not to mention the probably-non-zero number of saboteurs and psyops in the community.
Those people either don’t have the time or don’t have the inclination to spend their precious efforts making features for newbies who can’t just CTRL+ALT+T and start hammering out console commands like a 90s movie hacker.
Now that may not be the fault of honest linux devs who are doing good work, but it is linux’s problem. I don’t know what the solution is, but it’s got to be more than just pretending “linux is easy now” then pivoting to “if you’re not an expert you have no business here” the moment anybody points out how wrong they are. These exact same conversations were happening 15 years ago when I started linux, and the experience is still painfully perverse.
- Comment on Damn right 2 months ago:
1984 was partly about how consent is manufactured using language. It’s a reality that the powerful systems exploit every single day with powerful effectiveness to drive us towards extinction so the lines keep going up.
There’s nothing wrong with using those tools for good. Too many leftists are so concerned with the substance that they forget how important the presentation is. It shouldn’t be important, but because we’re social animals and not analytical engines of pure reason, it does matter.