I just read through the thread and tried to mentally filter for people saying it’s a common thing. Didn’t find anything particularly overt in that way. Don’t think anyone was making claims as to how common it is either way, but I guess I could have missed it.

It’s telling to me how fragile the gender binary is when people feel the need to police attraction lines based on such arbitrary physical characteristics as how much someone does bodybuilding or fitness.

I have some experience with modding and game making - not paid company work type of stuff, but studied it in college, have made (small) games on my own or with others and have done extensive modding in one game that got a fair bit of attention.

I agree with cf saying it depends somewhat on the game. But also, overall modding is likely going to be easier for a number of reasons:

1. Scope. Modding forces you to work within heavy constraints due to being unable to directly edit the game engine, source code, etc. For creative control, this is a drawback, but when you’re just trying to get something, anything made, it’s a help. It means what could be an overwhelming pool of possibility and a vision gone out of control becomes more akin to, “Okay, let’s see if I can change the color of this house.” In other words, it forces you to approach tasks as a smaller set of steps and in so doing, makes it easier to make some kind of progress at all, rather than none.

2. Framework. Modding a game means there’s already an existing framework there, a game that functions relatively well, presumably has a decent gameplay loop, etc. So you don’t have to worry about, “Am I making something that will be utterly boring/unappealing/etc.” because there’s still the underlying game beneath it. So it’s a lot harder to spend time on something that isn’t enjoyable at all. And it means you have existing game design to mimic. In the game I heavily modded, some of the stuff I did was effectively repurposing features that were already there to use them slightly differently. I was still being creative and doing my own ideas, but much of the actual work of it was already done.

Does this mean modding will always be easier than making your own game? Not necessarily. For example, you could make a simple console-based (like command prompt, not game console) grid game with C++ that uses ASCII characters to simulate where stuff is and a player moving from a starting point to a goal. Something I’ve done before. But, will this fulfill your desire to enact a creative vision? Probably not. The more you have to learn to get started, the harder it’s going to be to get to the creative part and that seems to be the part people usually crave as an entry point.

Hope that makes sense!

And some of us live in the US, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, is built on genocide of the indigenous (still an ongoing problem), slavery (prison labor loophole still exists), and is currently funding and supporting a genocide against the Palestinian people. You can repeat the word cosplay as many times as you want, it doesn’t suddenly make your world real and others not.

My point about you “living in anecdote” is you’re playing the internet trope “I was X and I understand it better than you” card, and so far, as far as I can tell, you have yet to even name what this mystery country is, in spite of being directly asked by someone. Meanwhile, you’re pushing garden variety “vote blue no matter who” talking points and showing repeated ignorance of what kind of person Biden is comparative to Trump and what the US is actually like.

You are not “way to the left of Biden” in actual substance. You are enabling of genocide by framing one of two runners of it as lesser evil. You call others cosplayers, but it’s you who is treating the claiming of a political label purely as a badge you put on yourself rather than something that has to be backed up by, you know, actually aligning with it.

Trump was already in office for 4 years though. It’s not some big mystery how he would act as president. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The nature of US fascism is not identical to every other country, but you’re just ignoring history if you think it has never seriously opposed communism internally. Like, COINTELPRO for starters? Come on.

It just comes across to me like you’re inventing this arbitrary goalpost for fascism, so that you can say the US isn’t at it yet and then say vote for the other guy. With a helping of vague “I lived under anecdote” to go with it. Like what is with this language of calling people cosplayers? Where exactly do you think US citizens live, not in the US?

I’m genuinely confused as to what your politics are supposed to be.

I would say it’s closer to “the US taking the mask off on being fascist” vs. “finding ways to keep the mask on for longer”

I have had conversations with self described communists who don’t care at all about minorities.

There are those who co-opt, historically. And in modern day, in the US, there’s patsoc MAGA communists (though I’m not sure how much they actually exist beyond online bullshitting).

But I would also ask what you mean by “don’t care at all about minorities,” like if they have actually expressed such things to you and in what way, or if you’re inferring that from something and from what. Because sometimes there are disagreements on what is actually going to make a difference and that is taken as a lack of interest in caring what happens, in bad faith. For example, democrats in the US who shame people on “the left” for not supporting their blue ghoul because the red ghoul might get in, citing that their disinterest in validating the blue ghoul as a candidate means they don’t care about XYZ issue minorities have that the blue ghoul pays lip service to.

I need to reread State and Revolution, cause I want to say Lenin distinguishes between the two there as OP replied, where one is transition state and the other is after the state has “withered away” but now I can’t recall exactly if he used that specific terminology. Either way, the phrasing I tend to see used is that there is a socialist worker state with a vanguard party who suppresses the capitalist class and has a dictatorship of the working class, or proletariat. And then there is communism, which is the end goal to transition to. But the party itself is communist.

So something like:

• People doing socialist worker state: communists heading up a communist vanguard party that focuses on the needs of the masses and on educating them in communist principles and methods of analysis (such as dialectical materialism), and guards against the reaction
• The state power model: dictatorship of the proletariat in order to suppress the capitalist class and empower the proletariat
• Goals: to create and maintain a socialist state along the lines of “to each according to their contribution” and transition to a communist “to each according to their needs” as the need for the state “withers away,” and maintain the revolution which is an ongoing process of transition and guarding against the reaction, not something that ends as soon as you have state power.

If anyone thinks I’m oversimplifying, am open to correction. (Is worth noting that the details of this will vary some in practice because of the conditions unique to the socialist project and what they have developed and so on.)

I’ve not researched this piece extensively, but I am remembering now this piece on Jonestown: http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=78282#p8

The narrative associated with Jonestown of people being misguided in their thinking and so “drinking the Kool-Aid” may have been a major distortion. It’s been some time since I read through the article in full. I’ll try to see about re-reading it later, so I’m more clear on that point.

edit: wording

I can still remember somewhat when I thought like them (maybe not as egoistically as some, but still…). There’s this noticeable blind spot in it that relates to what people are saying about state department talking points. “I do research and check sources” means little if your inherent assumption is that US and allied sources are reliable and anywhere the US calls an enemy is unreliable and suspicious. The US has crafted this narrative that impartiality and neutrality is possible if you simply decouple emotional tone from what you’re saying, wear a suit while saying it, and outsource the narrative to someone who isn’t a direct elected official of the government.

But… though there are elements of reality that are observably true with consistency, there is no such thing as being neutral. Every narrative has to choose what information to include or not include and how to include it. You can’t include things on “both sides” and now you are impartial. For example, if one group has power and another has none, speaking about them as if they are on equal footing in a mutually-instigated conflict is not neutrality, it’s implicitly taking the side of the group that has power.

Conscious fascists understand this and they choose to side with dehumanization, with systemic violence. Many a well-meaning liberal does not understand this and acts like they can rise above, extract themself from the fray, stand apart, and be clearer of mind for it. But the real clarity comes from understanding what the factions are, the sides there are, and choosing sides. When I thought like a liberal, I had to rely on forced attempts at universalizing complex situations and reducing them to vulgarized oversimplifications about “human nature” or “cultural trends” or some such vague thing. When I started thinking like a dialectical and historical materialist and learning about the movements and events that have come before, even with only a bare bones understanding of it, I got way more clarity than I ever got out of “do research and check sources” liberalism.

I think of that satirical idea, Last Thursdayism, that the universe was created last thursday, in such a way that it would seem like it has been around for a long time. That is what I would compare liberal “free thinker” thought process to. It behaves as if history began only a few days ago, as if everything runs on simplistic, unchanging universal themes, and if you just point at the themes and laugh, you’ll be above the fray and can be content with knowing you’re not falling for the tricks that those not-free-thinkers do.

Fine print: But only if the USA had a regime that was in opposition to the USA exploiting its citizens, land, resources, indigenous and otherwise marginalized groups. And then the USA would use a color revolution to justify couping the USA and create a brutal and suppressive government that was far worse than anything previous.

So let me get this straight, your family bribed your way into owning a factory and you want sympathy because you had to give it up? Meanwhile, in the US, the supreme court is going to be ruling on whether states can fine people for sleeping outdoors, while homelessness gets worse. It might be the case that had your family done the same in the US, you’d still have that factory and be wealthy too. That’s not a good thing. The dictatorship of capital in the US comes at the cost of everyone else.

In the US, cities have been known to bulldoze homeless encampments: https://www.vice.com/en/article/5db7qb/dc-bulldozed-a-homeless-persons-tent-while-they-were-still-inside

And you’re saying “China bad, US good” because you lost control of a factory.

Then there’s the part where they are so deep in paranoia and racism they think you are a foreign spy if you say anything sympathetic about the country. (I actually had this happen to me once online.)

Reminds me of that quote, IIRC from Capitalist Realism, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” The way it’s ingrained in some people goes very deep. When their view is that it’s capitalism or nothing, it sort of makes sense their only view of an alternative is running away from it rather than confronting it.

Oh yeah, political education in the US is oversimplified warmongering dross. And the vilification of anything anti-capitalist that is formed as an organized system is a real problem in the way people get taught politically. Far too many people who will say stuff like “communism sounds nice on paper, but in practice, it was just people pretending to care and then becoming dictators.” Or they’ll say that it’s “idealistic” when the reality is that it’s an obnoxiously scientific exchange between theory and practice and is in opposition to notions of purely “striving to be morally better” as a means of achieving meaningful change.

It’s far too common in the US for people to be terrified of nations they’ve never set foot in and think they know better than entire peoples and cultures they’ve never met because they read a few news headlines that said what the situation is supposedly like.

whatever the fuck

If you don’t know what is actually going on in China, it’s probably better not to speak as an authority on it. Good intentions don’t inherently make you any more effective at being well-informed. You can be more well-informed still, if you translate the intent to a certain amount of humility about what you know and find the right people to listen to. Right now, how you come across to me is a western chauvinist who is determined to oversimplify the world and pretend other cultures and peoples are identical to yours, while speaking from a position of implied superiority of knowledge and understanding of the world.

You might think that’s a lot to extrapolate from your post, but the tone of your post is a lot more generic of an ideological position than you might realize. It’s good that you recognize the harm capitalism causes. But that can’t be the end of it or you miss the larger picture of the world’s development and history. You have to recognize what colonialism and imperialism are, as a bare minimum, and preferably attain some understanding of how the targets of these things have developed in their efforts toward self-determination. Notably, the western empire is still an ongoing thing to contend with. If you exclude that from your understanding of nations, you will be viewing the world through a simplified lens of “good/bad nation” and missing a large portion of not only development and the whys behind it, but also information and bias, and being able to recognize, for example, that much of the “information” you will find from the western empire about China is coming from a place of empire wanting to undermine it.

Recognition of biases is pivotal to going further than condemnation of vague descriptions of reality like “greed.” Greed is real, but it is insufficient to explain the mechanisms of development of a nation, a people, much less the entire world. Choosing to consciously side with colonized people’s over colonizers is a form of bias, but this does not make it bad. There is no escaping bias. There is no ideology where you can be above the fray. The question is, do you come to recognize the biases and choose sides, or do you pretend to be above it and condemn vague descriptions of behavior that are commonly associated with immoral action. The second one might make you feel good, but it offers no materially proven solutions to the problems of the day. The first one is what history is actually operating on and will continue to operate on, whether you recognize the mechanisms or not.

Oh yeah, I’m sure there’s a whole discussion to be had about capitalist media that depicts anti-capitalist themes, but does it in such a watered down way, it’s more of an aesthetic than an actual criticism of what’s happening. I’m not sure if it’s always meddling or if it’s more that the people writing it are too liberal to have a clue how to represent such a thing. I mean, I admit that even with what I know, it is a challenge to write a fictional representation of such matters because there is always some element of it being divorced from the realities, but I’m sure if I was writing a cyberpunk-esque story, it’d be one that involves people being organized against the source of the problems and contending with the unique technological challenges involved in opposing it.

Been into Civ 6 lately. Sometimes I kind of have to go like “ok, this is a strategy game and that’s what I’m treating it as” because the way they portray civilization can be a bit… I think maybe colonial-centric is the phrasing I’m looking for. I feel it’s very in need of a win condition that comes from deep alliances and not just faux forced diplomacy “only one person can be the winner” kind of thing. But if I treat it as a competitive strategy game with a civilization-based outfit on and don’t take the cultural influences too seriously, it’s fun enough and has a lot of depth to it for improving at the strategic elements over time. So I can really sink a lot of hours into it, if I let myself.