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Last Morning
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Thingvellir National Park, Iceland. This was where they would drown women who got pregnant out of wedlock.
Gullfoss National Park, Iceland
Gullfoss National Park, Iceland
Great Geysir National Park, Iceland
Ready Or Not is such a fucking insane, fascinating game for unbelievably ugly reasons, and one of the most bizarre aspects of that is how a huge portion of gameplay footage I see coming from the community shows players dead-checking fallen perps in a game which explicitly punishes you for unjustifiable use of force.
One of the weirdest and infuriating things about Ready or Not is that YouTube keeps recommending me shorts from people who just mow down hostages and kill surrendering suspects, and the comments will be full of people making excuses for why it was justified
Bootlicker Simulator 2k23
There is so much to be said about this fucking game it's insane. How like 1/3 of the missions are cranked around this pizzagate child pornography conspiracy, how 1/3 of the others are varying degrees of turbo-methed super-predators getting supplied by The Cartels. How none of the AI has any self preservation instinct and will attempt to kill you at literally any random opportunity, and how the AI is literally, straight up broken and has millisecond response times with perfect accuracy and can see you through cracks in the door from across the map well enough to shoot and kill you through a wall you cannot shoot through yourself.
I think the most appalling, egregious aspect of the game is the half-hearted, ai-generated assets in the police department regarding police PTSD. This makes me think about how cops have been talking a lot about PTSD lately, modeling the conversation after the way PTSD was such a massive propaganda win for the global war on terror and changed the nature of conversations drastically. In Commander Mode, you have an xcom-like roster of officers. They each have a unique skill you can unlock after repeat missions. They also have a stress condition, which will degrade on missions. When their stress degrades too much, you literally hit a button that says "SEND TO THERAPY" and they're out for a mission. I figured their condition would degrade dependent on mission performance and injuries incurred. After playing a number of missions, fucking up a bunch, doing some less-lethal runs (more on this later), I think I've figured out how this system works. Getting injured does not affect their condition. Failing a mission does not affect their condition, from what I can tell. I've failed several missions doing LTL-only runs because of the insanely cracked-out AI. And I've run completely successful missions using lethal weapons, where nobody was injured, no civilians harmed, even with only one or two perps outright killed rather than incapacitated or apprehended. It appears the only condition for the deterioration of the mental health of these officers is shooting people. Shooting people is what causes them to get sad and need to go to therapy. There's also a bunch of weird loading screen hints about how the officers' morale is getting hurt cuz of what the public is saying or whatever. It's so fucking brazenly shoot-and-cry copaganda in a video game which is so memetically popular right now.
And the thing about LTLs is nuts. There's no way to order your officers to use LTLs only. In SWAT4, which the game is emulating, you can exclusively equip your officers with Less-Than-Lethal equipment. You cannot do this in Ready Or Not. Even if you give them beanbag shotguns and pepper ball guns, their sidearm HAS to be a real gun instead of a taser. Because of this, I have had numerous Would-Be S-rank missions bungled by one of my officers randomly deciding to draw his sidearm and shoot a perp in the chest when he isn't surrendering. Additionally, it appears values have been changed between the pre-release and 1.0 versions of the game which make some perps actual emboldened by less-lethal munitions rather than beanbags, flashbangs and stinger grenades persuading them to surrender.
The guns have, by far, the most attention in the whole game. Everything but the guns is shit. The maps are terrible and make no sense. A huge portion of the assets are really lazy AI generated shit. The AI is straight broken in a way that makes all your tactical tools hit-or-miss. Tons of content was cut from the game, including core, promised features, apparently with no word of them coming back into the game. The guns got all the attention, in sound design, in feedback, in controls, everything. Most of the guns in the game are meme guns. The kinds of things Garand Thumb and Administrative Results make obscene money off of with clickbait thumbnails. There's a fucking SA58 OSW in the game. It's the only .308 gun in the game, despite there being a model for a full-length FAL and a G3 in the game files used by perps. The G36C in the game is explicitly in the same configuration Garand Thumb showed off on his youtube channel. Like half the fuckin assault rifles are in .300BLK for some reason, including the two MCXs in the game. Your whole team is equipped with fucking ATAK and high-cut helmets and combat-pants and high-speed plate carriers and shit. They don't have a feature to issue orders over the helmet cam system like you could in fucking SWAT4, a game from almost nineteen fucking years ago, thus completely invalidating any reason to split your element into blue and red teams and do anything like a split-entry. But you can get a PEQ-15 and an Elcan SpecterDR on your fucking HK416 with a Geissele rail and rock that with GPNVGs on the mission where you, a five-man city SWAT team, go down to the border in order to clear a massive, intricate tunnel system being used by the fucking cartel like in Sicario. Because not only were ground branch the good guys in that movie, but cops are basically the same as the fucking SAC anyways.
This game is fucking insane. It's a grotesque microcosm of the glory-hunger which drove police officers to cast themselves as warriors on the same level as special forces, provoking gamers to undergo the exact same self-deluding militaristic metamorphosis into over-funded deathsquads as police have, and it meticulously constructs a NextDoor-esque nightmare world in which this descent is not only justifiable but necessary. The game actually, for real, wants to make the players feel like being on a fucking shitty metro SWAT team is the same thing as being a tier-zero operator while, actually, being harder, more noble, and less rewarding.
I'm trying to collect all my thoughts on this absolutely insane game but I feel it's also feel the way civilians are handled is worth noting. A core gameplay feature is zip-tying everyone you come across, even if you literally blew off their head with a shotgun. There are several missions where perps will appear to just be civilians, even donning disguises and drawing weapons on you as you secure them. Sometimes they even draw knives, which appears to be an underdeveloped aspect of the game as I have only ever seen them draw kitchen knives, oddly. But, there are two objectives constant to every map. Rather euphemistically, they are "Bring order to chaos" and "rescue civilians." "Bring order to chaos" refers to neutralizing all threats on the map. A bit of an odd way to say that but it makes sense, as it refers to active threats. In many missions of the game you'll find yourself having brought "order to chaos" by killing all hostiles in the area, yet you still need to "rescue civilians" in order to proceed. Such cases typically entail the player and their team, either human or AI, scouring the map to find a tiny broom closet containing one frightened civilian. When you find this frightened civilian, you shout them into surrender. If they do not surrender, you can employ any of a variety of less-lethal weapons on them to force them into surrender. This was a more developed aspect of gameplay in SWAT4 as different people would react differently and you would much more frequently need to pepper spray or zap somebody with a taser, but that always felt a bit jackbooted, even when I played at at age ten. That aspect is largely gone in Ready or Not. But you always need to zip-tie the civilian. Even after you have brought "order to chaos," you need to "rescue" all the civilians on the map by forcing them to their knees and cuffing them under threat of violence. The glaring extenuation of the language is so jarringly bizarre. Everything else in the game can be reasonably justified in its own little constructed reality. But this one is just a little too far, and it stares craters into the players as they slog through tedium. You're left with nothing else to think about. These are not the cartoon villains spraying submachineguns at you through three walls. These are docile, frightened lambs, and you need to save them by arresting their movement and shoving them in the back of a truck, even though you objectively know there is no longer any danger in the area.
this game is so disgustingly profound
Pretty incredible that this game gets thrown in my face every time I open Youtube.
sneaky midnight mug
orange juice in quiet house
the dog watches me
Takashi Murakami: I Know Not, I Know Not (2010)
Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” explained.
I saw someone on Twitter say that compared to leftists, liberals are at least “willing to do what needs to be done” and immediately deleted the app. Maybe forever.
You can’t fight that kind of willful dipshittery.
New books came in :)
image id: a mastodon post by @/[email protected] that reads “David Graeber got an economist to admit that he was not aware of single case where a company was fined more than the profit it turned breaking the law. He summarized this as the government saying: “Do all the crime you want, but if we catch you, you have to give us a cut.”. end id.
Feed the Hungry
The news recently has been full of the most ghoulish behavior imaginable -- a lunatic driving through an FNB distro, cops ticketing people feeding the homeless, and now this, unknown saboteurs destroying and salting a garden meant to feed the hungry.
Read my fuckin’ lips: if you would stand between people who need food, and those who would freely provide it to them, you are no longer recognizably human. You are trash.
Please help Mz Burd rebuild her garden.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/a-meal-on-me-with-love
I hate living at a time when optimism feels profane.
The systems we are subjected to are so fundamentally, irredeemably evil. And most of us have no choice but to be complicit. All the attempts to lash out get recuperated and sold back to us. And when you point this out, the most obnoxious people you know lecture you about "hope", but it's such a superficial, vacuous hope. People have so little space to feel real hope for the future.
But then I'll kiss my partner and spend time with my friends, and I become normal about it all. Sisyphus happy and so on.
I literally just got an ad for an online climate change life coach. I...
I fucking hate this apocalypse. Psuedo-therapy babble and tawdry performances of social and ecological consciousness all the way to the bank. Awful. Clown world. Shoes honking right into Armageddon.
When I was about 16, the US entered the “zombie apocalypse” craze, which is hard to describe if you weren’t around for it. I was in high school -- we made zombie apocalypse plans, talked about weapons and vehicles, scribbled maps of the town and neighborhood in the back of our notebooks.
At work (Circuit City -- that’s how old I am), there were dudes in college and their early 20s, all doing the same, talking about katanas they wanted and how they’d stack furniture against the door and shit.
Everyone was thinking about this idea of a disease turning people into monsters that they could slay by the dozen in their violent, individualist fantasy of freedom from work and taxes.
Now I am 32 years old, and fully aware that an apocalypse is coming -- but that the solution to it could never be swashbuckling individual action against inhuman monsters; the solution is collective action, talking to your neighbors, solidarity with distant efforts, and resistance to the *actual* inhuman monsters your neighbors chose to wield power over all of us.
And I just don’t know if it will be enough. Capitalism wrings our necks more tightly year after year, leaving people less time to rest and catch their breath and realign themselves against the forces destroying our world. Volunteer hours worked in the US have been shrinking along with our free time.
We all see it, but there is a gun to our head that tells us “if you do not work enough to make ends meet, you will be hungry and homeless”, and our desperation for stability through the paths permitted by this system bids us to work harder and longer.
It’s a very clever trap they’ve set for us, and I don’t know if we can escape it.
my life fucking sucks because they dont let me play with grenade launcher