ail (and by extension, everyone else) was reliably informed (after he had the temerity to find an American setting for a game boring, gasp and shock) that there are only three games about America, and so obviously American culture is just so ignored and underrepresented in media, I have somewhat revised my opinions about Gramsci's "war of position" and how cultural struggle is approached.

It's clear that cultural hegemony is a real and immanent force that strongly gets into the heads of even "progressives" including nominal socialists. It's also clear, per Vonnegut, that the Power Of Art as a progressive force has been decidedly oversold. It's no surprise, then, that people have gotten disenchanted with the idea of cultural struggle.

The problem with counterstruggle has largely been that it has been pursued via eg "culture-jamming" on one hand, and Big Legitimate Art on the other, and both have the problem of usually not presenting either, a) a clear statement about capitalism or imperialism per se being the problem, or b) any kind of positive program or response. The abandonment of the war of position to Adbusters and the like has been a pretty serious negative impact.

Presenting any kind of clearly socialist response in any context, of course, is already being declared (per the current vernacular) "cringe" (and has been treated negatively even by vaunted socialists for the entire post-Soviet era at least); you can note that the SVB collapse was due to Tech Bros, but if you clearly state it was a failure of the capitalist system you can expect to get booed. From liberals, of course, that's expected. From nominal socialists, however, you can also expect to get static. After all, "everyone knows that," "you're preaching to the choir," etc, regardless of the content or the actual audience.

And that's why there's only three games about America. Revolutionaries should be used to being mocked and attacked for being such already, so that shouldn't affect what we do or the strategies we pursue. The near-complete abandonment of war of position (at least in the cultural realm) must be revisited, but we have to be able to firmly state both problems and solutions, and any cultural struggle also needs to be grounded in real material struggle, not just Saying Smart Words.

The tech bubble collapse has begun, with aggressive layoffs across everyone's least favorite large capitalists, from Amazon to Microsoft. The usual fascist scum are crowing about how this will weaken workers, end diversity programs, get them dates and any other Nazi fever dream you care to name, most especially halting the advance of organized labor.

The best time to organize was years ago; the second best time is now.

Layoffs come because companies have decided to shrink their business operations or because they think they can make the existing workers do all the work the previous staffing levels did. That means that anyone not laid off is even more critical than they were before the layoffs. Either you are in a more critical role than the folks who got shitcanned, or they've just made you more critical because you are now carrying the workload of whoever you're picking up the slack for, plus your previous load.

There is never a bad time to organize! Don't "consider yourself lucky", understand that the company needs you, now more than ever! Remember this: They just showed you that they are not your friends. They can and will thrust anyone they don't absolutely need to keep lining their pockets to the wolves. Remember that. The company is the enemy, but they need us. They need us, but we don't need them, and the union makes us stronger than they can ever hope to be!

Saying it's "kinda like Hollow Knight but not really?" is a really stupid description but it's the only thing I can think of. In some respects it feels like Prince of Persia but with a technical combat system and lots more schmoovement, some medium Celeste-style aerial platforming, so far a really interesting world that's on one hand bleak but on the other feels like it's actually populated with people and not just people-shaped signposts and vending machines, and it just plays really nicely in general. There's some busywork type quests of the "collect ten bear asses" variety but they serve to guide you places and once that's done the fetch quests seem to be just things to do while you're following main paths and plot threads (kinda SMTIV-like in that respect?). Besides all that, it's absolutely beautiful and the soundtrack is fantastic too, I could just chill and listen to it all day

So far, at least, it's extremely fucking good. I haven't played a new game that grabbed me like this in a while. Go check it out and give Shirakumo some love.

So this year I'm doing Advent of Code and I'm putting up all my solutions on a git repo here. So far up to day five!

Because this post is bursting at the seams

I posted about this Cohost already but I've got an initial implementation of a client library for the current (unstable, unofficial) Cohost API up in a local Git repo. Enjoy! Or don't. I'm not your parents.

"Sometimes people ask me why my web sites use those colors. This is a thing that people sometimes ask."

jwz's kind of weird and cranky but so am I and this video is a mood from another time period.

Not really, but the security patch deathrace is partly caused by the extreme complexity of modern browsers. They're basically full operating systems complete with, at this point, a fairly complete hardware virtualization layer and a managed-code VM (fuck you Brendan Eich) for running software on said operating system. The result is that it is basically impossible for anyone with less resources than a state actor or a Fortune 500 company to create and maintain a usable browser, and so in practice about two and a half companies have absolute control of the client-side (ie the side that drives all development) technological infrastructure of the web. That's absolutely horrific!

So Cohost is cool as fuck. Here's hoping it really takes off!