Tuuktuuk

Героям слава!

It’s been years since I played through these games, and I have forgotten much, but “has to dance for money” is not the whole story.

It’s more like “has to dance for money, has to always give all income to another person and is physically not able to leave before having saved up a large sum of money to pay the debt”, or something along those lines. And the reasons were out of her control, but very crucially, also out of the control of the protagonist.

I find it refreshing to get to play the bad guy in a game. He’s doing things I absolutely would never do, and it is me who has to click the button to command him to do those atrocities. It’s good because you should know your enemy, and this gives me a perspective that let’s me peek into the thinking of an absolute fucking asshole. Also, if you ever find any similarities between what you’d do and what the protagonist does, you know that’s something you need to process in yourself.

But… There are so many spots where the horrible things happen to the people in the game for reasons not in control of the protagonist. So, you should probably re-read previous paragraph, adding a lot of “would” words in there. Because when it’s not about the protagonist being evil, it’s about the developers being mean. You’re not role-playing an asshole, you’re playing a game that is an asshole towards various minorities.

Of course: I did play the game in German. Others are saying many of the jokes get missed if you play it in English. Maybe the game is kind of milder if played in English, then? Maybe it’s left more ambiguous whether the people in the game will really live a miserable life for the rest of their days?

There are a bunch of jokes in this game that I absolutely am not okay with.

Yeah, the whole point of the game is the main character being a horrible asshole.

But then, the game for example makes jokes about a black woman ending up a slave. She ends up as a slave not because the main character is being thoughtless. Yes, his actions affect the result, but it’s a pure coincidence he could not have reasonably predicted. The joke boils down to “look, we dare to be this inappropriate.”

Some of similar jokes could maybe read as commentary on horrible bigots who really do behave towards other people in the way the protagonist of this game does, because technically the bad things happen to those people because of the protagonist’s behaviour. But when the same things sometimes happen to them kind of “just like that”, it puts the rest of the jokes in a very different context: The developers of the game actually are making fun of the fact that black people were used as slaves or that women often experience sexual violence.

And then there’s also the transsexual who turns out to be the worst stereotype of a transsexual that a MAGA person ever could imagine. And, and, and.

Some of the jokes are kind of more neutral: At one point the protagonist needs to feed some ten-ish children to a monster, camouflaging them as hot dogs and covering them in ketchup and mustard. And then the children do indeed get eaten and the game progresses. I mean, okay, it’s super inappropriate in a way, but it’s not perpetuating hate speech. But a surprisingly large share of the jokes are punching at various minorities.

I’ve never seen as much bigotry in a game as I saw in the Deponia trilogy when I played through it.

Beside other things mentioned, by adding the hat on the Israeli guy, it’s also trying to make it look like Jewish people in general are siding with Israel’s atrocious behaviour. Many are, but those who have relatives who were in German concentration camps are of course strongly opposed to genocides, including the one committed by Israel.

The meme is trying to create anti-jewish sentiments, and that’s not okay.

Ah, so there will be shaheds attacking targets in Ukraine? Do I guess correctly that Iran will be helped by its friend, the Russia, to launch said drones? Must be a schocking new experience for Ukrainians.

I upvote when the argument is good or I want to give a little more visibility for the argument expressed in the comment. And if it’s a joke, to show that I enjoyed the joke.

I downvote if an argument is in bad faith or not thought of thoroughly at all.

I wish there was a way to efficiently spread knowledge inside NK that if soldiers surrender, they will be allowed to return to SK or NK according to their own wish. That would at the same time dramatically increase North Koreans’ willingness to help the Russia in the war, and just as dramatically reduce the North-Korean leadership’s motivation to send any soldiers to that war.

A lot of this was about neurodivergent people. How they had become what they are because of malice by fairies, not by happening to be born with a certain neurology that is likely to be even beneficial.

Misrepresent what?

Did she know back then what was coming?

It’s impossible that she would somehow not have known what was coming.

I suppose at some point people might be figuring out that Putin is not the same as Russia and that they are better off with a different set of institutions.

I have a feeling they won’t figure that out. I was talking with a person here in Finland just a few months ago, and they said “Putin is not a good president, but all the other options we have are even worse”.

…which is an absolutely bonkers thing to say. Who on Earth would be worse for the Russia than Putin is? Nobody else would have elected to continue this war once it was clear that Kremlin had fucked up. Even if they would have been bad, there’s almost no way they could have been worse than what Putin is doing now.

But still, that’s what the otherwise completely adequate-seeming Russian told me. The inability to see how bad Putin really is, is extremely deep in that people. The thought of Putin as the father figure of the whole country is so ingrained in the Russians’ heads that it will be only the generation after the next one that will be clear of it. And then the Russia can maybe start developing into a third-word country at least. And then maybe even back to being a second-world country.

The past for years experts have been talking about this going to happen around 2025 or at latest 2026. Because it has been inevitable, it has made sense factoring that into the strategies.

Many reporters have written about it in a way that has made it look different, but already in late 2022, experts who actually know the subject were talking about mid-to-late 2025 as the limit for the economy of the Russia. They did it get wrong by about half a year, but overall, I’d say the prediction was very accurate.

What was assumed that since the impending economical crash of the Russia was visible already in 2022, the Russia would have drawn the conclusions and left Ukraine. And therefore, by all logic, the economical crash of the Russia should have ended the war already in 2022 or 2023. But instead, the Russia decided to go for a suicide instead, because that’s what its people decided they want.

It’s because the scale of those US wars has been one percent of the war the Russia is now waging.

USA has not tried having a war with a peer. If it did. The result for its economy would be very similar.

What year did these two trips take place?

I’ve hitchhiked from Finland to China and onwards to India.
And then of course shorter trips, such as many trips between Finland and Spain. Etc.
Absolutely the best way to travel anywhere!

Absolutely the best way to travel! There’s a community for hitchhikers in the Forumverse, BTW: !hitchhiking@anarchist.nexus .

That would mean that China is not sovereign 🤔

We were talking about sovereignty here, not freedom.

So, in your own country you don’t have a government that decides about what happens in your country?

Okay… And what have they told the people as a reason for Japan being dangerous? “The leadership of China is butthurt, therefore Japan is dangerous” is not the most logical sentence one can utter.

Okay, so, are you saying that Taiwan does not have its own government that decides about its things?