Orcocracy [comrade/them]

No, that joke crosses the line.

Or just nothing at all.

The article is a little vague on this, but it seems like this round of price hikes is just for the US and it’s due to tariffs.

The smaller third party companies market and advertise their Hall effect sticks as something special to differentiate their products from the big companies. There are probably overstated claims being made in much of this advertising, as there tends to be in all advertising.

Perhaps this is the great lie of Hall effect marketing. Everything breaks, especially if you let kids use it.

Really, the N64? The N64 stick was not in-practice long-lasting. I’ve never gone out of my way to get modern Hall effect stuff, but if they’re anything like that then I understand why they remain a niche thing for hobbyists who will baby them.

Is it as simple as planned obsolescence, or is there something else about the production or use of Hall effect sticks that causes every single console from Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and Valve to not have them?

It’s not familiarity thats just a byproduct of the cycle. It’s because New York (and Tokyo, London, etc) is important to capitalists and to capitalism and is one of the centres of global power. So the big studios set their stories in New York, people around the world see films etc about New York, people are made to be familiar with New York, so then stories are even more likely to be set in New York because it is important and people around the world are familiar with it. Or rather, they are not familiar with the real New York, they are familiar with the mediated representation of New York. They know New York from watching Friends and Seinfeld, neither of which were filmed in New York.

I can’t get extra mad at all of those Tokyo games when there’s also all of those goddamn New York and LA games. I wish studios would set their stories somewhere that isn’t the same four or five places over and over again, but a big corporation isn’t going to subvert the forces of cultural imperialism. Quite the opposite, really. This is all part of the cultural industries reinforcing the global cultural hegemony.

After all, many of the big games set in versions of US cities aren’t even made by US studios (eg GTA, Cyberpunk). Just like how many of the films set in the US are actually made in Canada. This is all part of cultural production under capitalism. The market logic says that people already watch films and tv shows and play games set in New York, LA, Tokyo, and London, so therefore all films and shows and games must be set in New York, LA, Tokyo, and London. You want to set your story in Tonga or Malaysia or Chile? No, that’s not allowed, it must be in New York or LA or etc etc.

I can’t even figure out what order I’m supposed to read this in.

I don’t see anything in this post specifically about Italy or Japan and I’m feeling misled

It’s a pretty standard rock band formation shot from a high angle with a wide lens. Not exactly an unusual composition. I tried a quick image search to show some other examples but it was filled with fake AI slop so I gave up, but there’s a lot of promo photography and music videos that use the same kind of shot.

Yes, it is certainly fair to take the reading that the point is to play the game by continually resisting the fascist options that are provided. However, I’m not sure if the “was it worth it” hollow victory screen at the very end forgives the many hours of fascist “hard times make strong men” scenarios that precede it. If anything, the “was it worth it” further underlines the “hardness” of those “hard choices” and therefore does not contest or critique the fascist frame. The fascist would proudly answer “yes” and the game would appear perfectly coherent to them.

It’s not that one needs to take a fascist reading of the game, but to borrow from Stuart Hall, the dominant reading of this game is clearly a fascist one. Yes, an antifascist reading is possible, but that reading is one built through a very careful process of negotiation with the text.

It’s a game that constantly gives you overwrought “tough choices” where the two options are either a) fascism or b) you are soft and naive and everyone will die.

Just for fun I’m going to attempt to combine this with Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura (probably not my best work): It’s not the act of farming or being called a ‘farmer’ that that dispels the aura, but the act of creating something that is designed to be posted. Nothing on social media truly has any aura to it in Benjamin’s sense, given the way social media is massively commodified by the corporations that run it, the influencers and advertisers that populate it, and by capitalist society in general. There is only the appeal to the concept of a nonexistent non-commodified authenticity, the “false spell of the commodity”. Calls of ‘aura’ on social media crave for that impossible authenticity that social media can’t possibly provide, and calls of ‘aura farming’ merely point out the posts that stray too far from the “false spell”.

Oh Nintendo already does make exploitative freemium games, but they (mostly) put that stuff on phones and not on Nintendo devices.

Yes, and the Hollywood directors who depicted white-military-hero-man walking away from an explosion without looking at it weren’t card-carrying members of the Nazi party either. But that doesn’t mean that reading this stuff as having some relationship with the aesthetics of fascism is incorrect.

If it’s often used in the form of an ironic critique to undermine the proud macho posturing of the ‘aura farmer’ then that is promising, but so often that layer of critique is quickly lost (for example in the online hero-worshipping of Patrick Bateman and Don Draper).

Oh so it’s like Evola, the Italian fascist who glorified war and violence so much that he went on contemplative walks during air raids. Unfortunately he wasn’t killed by this nonsense, only wounded. Now fascists on the internet share this picture to fucking honour this vile man:

I wonder if this also ties in with the origin of the Hollywood trope about the hero walking away from the explosion while not looking at it. There’s definitely a lot to be said about aesthetics of fascism with respect to Hollywood, especially in its love of militaristic heroic ‘justice’.

It’s also quite depressing how much contemporary slang in the English language can be traced back to the fascist parts of the internet (eg chad, alpha, based, incel, looks-maxing, possibly aura farming too). This doesn’t bode well for the future if that is what is influencing the way we speak to one another.

The original Game Boy weighs 220g (I’m not sure if that includes batteries or not), but the Switch Lite isn’t much more. It’s 275g with the battery included.

However, the original Switch is quite a bit heavier at 398g, the Switch 2 is 534g, and the Steam Deck is a whopping 640g. The new Xbox handheld looks like it will be quite a bit bigger than the Steam Deck and will probably be even worse to carry around. These devices simply aren’t suitable for kids, and some of them aren’t that easy to hold for adults either. This is a real shame and pushes kids further towards using phones that are filled with exploitative freemium games and social media slop.