And the MOVE bombings happened in my lifetime. It was all over the local news when it happened, and then off and on for years. And anniversaries.

Duck walked across the keyboard.

On the other hand, my notes:

APC

Excel

Fri

It all made perfect sense when I wrote them down. But two hours later I have no fucking clue what any of it is supposed to mean.

I expect a report when you return, along with an essay about what you did during the summer.

theyrethesamepicture.jpg

“Gotta tell you, those shirts are so last reich.”

Previous discussion: https://slrpnk.net/post/16128827

Result: !gundam@ani.social

Thanks as always for the meta oversight 👊

Edit: I see this conversation was already had 😂 That’ll learn me to reply to mentions before waking up properly ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ

Ah, ya know it’s funny… these people, they go to sleep, they think everything’s fine, everything’s good. They wake up the next day and they’re on fire.

Not strictly co-op (it’s 1 vs all), but your post reminded me of Jaws. Not a great game, not terrible, but it hits nostalgia notes for me so gets a pass on some of the clunkiness.

Desert is my favorite of these as well. Island is great for introducing the concept but is fairly basic. Sky is okay but didn’t grab me as much.

I enjoyed the experience of Pandemic legacy, but yeah, it feels so wasteful. We started a game of Betrayal legacy (got shelved indefinitely due to life and scheduling) but it was much the same. More immersive, but everything was intentionally permanent.

Right. Individuals can be okay. Awesome, even. But “people” as a whole include many individuals. And the more individuals you have, the more likely that one or more of them is an asshat. The problem with bad apples is that it only takes one to spoil the bunch.

Imagine a few dozen people sitting in a park enjoying a nice day. If one of them starts flinging feces everywhere, the problem is not just that person. Is that person and the mess they made and ruining everyone else’s day.

Now imagine that society has spent generations financially rewarding shit-slingers. Not everyone is going to do it, but every day in the park brings a non-zero chance of getting pelted with poop.

People have incentivized being awful to other people.

…have I mentioned lately that I hate people?

That kit is the pinnacle of Bandai engineering… for now. They’re eventually going to top it because that’s what they do. It’s really amazing how much they’ve innovated over the years.

On one hand, it’s a very affordable hobby. $20-30 for a well made kit is an absolute steal in the modeling realm, and puts most actions figures in that price range to shame.

On the other, it’s a very expensive hobby… there’s just… so… much. If you’re someone who leans towards completionnaire’s disease, consider this your warning lol.

But it really does bring another level of appreciation and immersion to the shows. The newer kits especially let you inspect all the little details that just flash by on the screen. Gunpla is a big part of why Gundam both took off and persisted this long. It’s not required, but it adds so much.

I’m going to try and talk around spoilers, but if anyone hasn’t seen it and is interested, just watch. It’s relatively short and well worth it.

I’m going to echo just about everyone else and say the pacing bombed out in the second half. Some sub arcs seemed to drag along. As the end got closer and so many threads were still dangling, I thought for sure it was going to get another season. And deserved one, because the setting and characters were exquisitely crafted. But then everything happened all at once and we got a pretty little bow to try and hide those loose ends.

I really enjoyed Prospera as a character. And reviled her as a person while still retaining some forms of empathy. That’s a pretty big win IMO.

Agreed that they dropped the ball on the meta theming. On one hand, it’s a Gundam staple to “save the world” while not much materially changes. On the other, it’s very much relevant to the present day, and unsatisfying to leave things mostly as they were.

The mech designs were hit and miss for me. Which should not come as a surprise, since they hired different mechanical designers for each of the corpos. I really appreciate this kind of attention to detail.

Speaking of details, they are everywhere, and they build on one another. Things like using cinematography to mirror an earlier scene, then later doing the same but with a different perspective to highlight the changes in the characters. The symbolism is rampant, some obvious, some subtle. This wasn’t a Tomino story, but it builds on one of his tenets: show, don’t tell. Environmental storytelling. I have a friend that really only engages with Gundam as “second screen” material while she’s doing something else. Unsurprisingly, she’s ambivalent about most of it and actively hostile towards WfM.

Overall I loved the idea, got very immersed in the setting and characters, and was a little disappointed when the pacing fell off. Still an easy recommend.

Btw, @wjs018@ani.social was kind enough to open up !gundam@ani.social for us. And @Endmaker@ani.social volunteered to mod. So feel free to hop on over there and join us! 👊

Some. Some had it good. It’s true that back in the day a single income could sustain a family. That stopped being true for many 50-some years ago. My parents were tail end boomers. In the 80s, they were able to buy a small house right next to a top-5 city for crime and raise 3 kids on a blue collar job supplemented with part time cashier work. In the 90s, expenses started needing two full time positions. In the early 2000s (after a move of necessity), I had to chip in for a third of the mortgage. Now that (refinanced) house is falling apart, my mom can no longer work, and my dad is dead. There are millions with similar stories.

Is my mom a racist piece of shit that nods along to Fox while blaming everyone else for her bad situation? Yup. But that’s not a boomer thing. It’s not a generational thing. That’s a culture war thing. The same culture war being propagated by the people who actually pulled up the ladders behind them. The same ones who have been waging a class war and winning handily in part because of the culture war distractions.

Some loony was going off the other day about how X was just as bad as the boomers because of Musk, Fuckerberg, etc. Same shit, different decade.

Society has bred sociopaths for countless generations. The most ruthless get the most rewards. The less successful sociopaths strive to be more sociopathic, so that one day they too can win harder. And this behavior gets modeled and tweaked over time until people grow up thinking it’s perfectly natural to crush others in pursuit of success. “Sucks to suck, I got mine.” All of this is very visible and only becoming more acute due to social Darwinism and the swamp of bullhorns that is the internet.

But for every greedy fuck that’s actively making things worse, they have countless peers that are just trying to live their lives. Some live them fighting the culture war. Some live them fighting back. They may hate each other. But they have more in common with each other than they ever will with those that have been waging class war since before any of us were born.

Forget the generational shit. Recognize the culture wars for what they are. And may every miserable psychopathic shit on the winning side of the class war find themselves staring at the inside of a wicker basket. Briefly.

Xennial checking in with an update to the format:

🤝