araneae

But for Deus Ex, we've got... I don't know, Cyberpunk 2077, maybe? But the whole open world thing doesn't really fit in with the usual gameplay loop of Deus Ex. There are a fair amount of great cyberpunk games, but none seem to really scratch that immersive sim itch. I guess Prey is pretty close as well (in addition to its System Shock influences), if you consider some of the body/power upgrades, but it's not all that similar thematically.

Check out Cruelty Squad by Ville Kallio on Steam. Aesthetically and spiritually it scrys into the future on the same level Deus Ex did and delivers an even more dire prophecy that feels as disturbingly prescient. It takes the open ended levels of DX and adds insane verticality and mind bending traversal. It plays more tactically than Deus Ex but the augment system is really rewarding and enables the player to munchkin their way to their target.

You may notice it looks artistically like a 13th century Christian piece with a Jackson Pollock splotch of New Years Eve stomach soup all over the canvas. I retort that so did DX1 most of the time. The CS playerbase refers to our ability to parse and navigate this style of level design and eclectic color composition as the 'CEO mindset.'

But seriously I am a big Deus Ex enjoyer and other than Thief nothing has come as close to the full breadth of experience that world evokes in me. It is both terrible and beautiful to behold.

The left: Man... I'm never gonna fully get over having gone through puberty for the gender that I feel doesn't represent me. I wanted to take my own life at times and I had no support. I see that people who started transitioning younger have better results passing and are generally safer for it. I wish we could talk about this openly.

The medical community: It should be alright to delay puberty for trans kids on the same ground we delay puberty for cis kids if there's a developmental problem, I guess. I don't think we'll be providing any life altering surgeries until adulthood however except in maybe extreme circumstances. We'll see if there's a suicide risk maybe.

The right: THE LEFT R GONNA CHOP OFF MY SONS DICK AND MY DAUGHTERS TITS THE MOMENT NEXT PRIDE MONTH ROLLS AROUND, I HAVE SEEN IT WRIT IN THE SKY, I HAVE SEEN IT SPELT UPON THE WIND, THERE WILL BE HORMONE GAS ATTACKS, THERE WILL BE ROVING GENDER-SWAPPER MACHINES, MY LINE WILL END IN DEGENERACY

The leadership: This is factually correct. Let us begin the Great Work. Alexa play Yhorm the Giant Dark Souls III OST by Yuka Kitamura.

Centrists: I am just not sure where the line is, y'know?

Hey friend. All you can do is get medicated as best you can and learn to say the right words to get what you want out of therapy and make them take you seriously. But make your continued existence your rebellion.

Edit: and granola bars, nutrient drinks, some fruit, few nuts. Learn what your body wants/needs day to day and eating can become a relatively easy chore when you don't have the spoons for food prep. But remember starving fucks with your head.

By the same token gait recognition.

Counterpoint: My sibling had their goddamn desktop ransomewared by this thing when they dared to uninstall it. It isn't privacy nerd sensabilities, Windows now behaves like malware under certain opaque conditions and at unpredictable intervals. This was four years ago on Win 10. How great do you think non savvy people are about clicking things they don't understand anyway and essentially springing a trap?

If Amazon has a dress code, either it allows for a degree of self expression or it does not. The move to ban political messaging in the workplace doesn't apply to the mere statement "black lives matter". Black Lives Matter was a social movement and its name was informal and de-facto. There is an activist organization Black Lives Matter that claims (to my knowledge) a limited ownership of white-on-black "#Black Lives Matter" but the phrase itself doesn't have a PO box, it doesn't make political contributions. It is a value statement that one believes black human beings have inherent value. So to cede that the English phrase "black lives matter" is political assumes that the default LEGAL and POLITICAL viewpoint is that they do not, which is the terrifying, unspoken, yet not codified by law, truth underlying half of the America justice system. When you make the argument that Amazon has the right to ban such a phrase from clothing on political grounds you and Amazon are both admitting that you believe black lives in a general sense have no value and you're willing to take it to court, because that is where this is probably going.

Are we really thinking that anyone at Amazon who matters actually believes that? Believes that this fundamental values conflict of American access to protected speech would actually resolve in a way that decidedly points to black lives having no worth as a legally upheld opinion in America? Really that is neither here nor there, we're watching a version of this fascist semantics argument about free speech play out with minor or medium consequences all over the internet. This sort of move will curry some favor with racist culture warrior consumers and businesses, but it is about clamping down on employee rights to communicate symbolically at all. If the color chartreuse was a meme amongst unionists and union proponents, Amazon would do the same thing. On one side of the coin they are making a concession toward a racist status quo and on the other they are saying that the SCOTUS ruling they cite allows them to ban symbols in the workplace.

It isn't good to shop at Whole Foods with this knowledge in the back of your brain. We will now, if you want, employ the thought terminating cliche that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and this is almost always true. However Amazon should not be allowed to target symbolic expression like this without a dress code saying "our employees wear an apron with the Amazon smile on it and a grey, breathable jumpsuit underneath". There are workplaces like this with dress codes where this isn't an issue. You are seeing Amazon casually admit it controls the symbolic language of the workplace entirely if it suits their agendas. Legality is not universal truth, especially when the Supreme Court has been arranged to flagrantly serve the interests of the business class. So there's one argument for why people should get to wear chartreuse colored shirts that say whatever the fuck they want but hate speech.

I lost this typing it the first time and my second try wasn't as good. I don't care if you have a bunch of holes and flaws in my arguments to point out, I will quietly read them and appreciate them, but I will maintain you're arguing for something racist and unethical either way unless it's a really good argument. IE you're not going to get me to say "gee you are right" by drawing similarities to Twitter cancellations over bad words and deplatforming of conservatives for speech that would get them punched in the nose in a public venue. In life, it is impossible to avoid political ideas, and even more impossible to avoid the techniques for propagating memetic formatted ideas like ads for conflict diamonds or unwell street preachers screaming the good word. You should buy your seitan somewhere that isn't trafficking with fascist pseudolegal interpretations of free speech so they can control their employees by betting that a spineless lower court will uphold a directly evil SCOTUS ruling.

Really stupid. I mean REALLY stupid.

How Cool And Liberal and definitely not two faced. So while black people begin to avoid Whole Foods, you'll still be shopping there because its not a problem for you. And as a good liberal of course, you agree there's no reason people can state "black lives matter to me" on their clothes. Sure, in the privacy of your own property but not in Massa's house. Bezo's free speech quashes the protections of the speech of his lessers and... that is simply the law. You're relieved of guilt.

You know, I'm not a tankie, but the self deluding, boot licking, and casual racist assumptions about whose lives are "political statements" based on their lamenting of being constantly murdered and stepped on by society, do give me a sympathetic window into their specific disgust of neoliberals. People like you go along to get along and nothing more.

You're quite fine with racism because Whole Foods is cheap.