DemonMama @DemonMama@masto.anarch.cc

In the last week and a half Ive played two games that couldnt be more tonally opposite: Citizen Sleeper, with its sadly sweet yet beautifully endless sense of hope, and Signalis, unforgiving and unrelenting in horror and heartbreak.

I can't help but feel my experience of each of the games was enhanced by the fact I played them in such proximity.

Both games grapple with dystopian settings rife with repression, exploitation, and severe dehumanization. In both games you play a character that is a sapient agent but denied recognition as a "human." Both games take place mainly in highly dangerous areas of mass exploitation - metal salvage yards for Citizens Sleeper and Mines for Signalis. Both games severely limit the tools with which you can fight back against those who wish you harm. And both games feature a biological clock - your body is breaking down in real time and there is no way to stop it.

Signalis offers no reprieve from the horror. It presents a wholly corrupted world from which there is no escape. A world in which the tomb we built for ourselves is already sealed and all we can do is bear witness to our own suffering and the suffering of the characters we meld with. In this way it is cautionary, it terrifies us into recognizing that our world could yet become so dark and reminds us to respect the depths of possible suffering.

Citizen Sleeper never shies away from depictions of horrific events. It's an incredibly politically charged game in which you play the whole game as a person with literally no legal rights. In order to survive, you must find the cracks in the systems that bind us and crush us, to slip through and ultimately try to thrive even in the shadows. Urging us to look closer at the world around us and to seize every potential for solidarity, Citizen Sleeper focused my attention on the lines still available to alleviate suffering and prevent future captivity.

Signalis sharpened pain and fear while Citizen Sleeper urged me to take solace in the tools still available to me.

Remarkably complementary games despite their complete tonal difference. I can't help but feel that I'll be thinking of Signalis and Citizen Sleeper both for a very long time to come.

Signalis is a really scary game and I'm really liking it a lot. Everyone is a cyborg and their organs are mutating and you have to crawl through meat and horror constantly with your weak body and a few guns. Cybernetic Silent Hill, no joke. Loving it.

Ive been resting up for the last few days after my last stream threw out my voice and I have watched SO MANY GOOD MOVIES

All Quiet on the Western Front

The Prince (technically a stage play in video form)

The Empire Strikes Back

and

Silent Hill (2006) okay this one isnt like GREAT but I still like it and its fun

cant wait to talk about them on stream once my voice is no longer lost lmao

@exiliaex I am proud of you and I think this project will make you happier than the last one

I have so many opinons to share about Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones on next stream once Im back home O.O

Our journey has been somewhat interrupted by weather and food poisoning :( doe got sick :((

Doing a lot better today thankfully after getting a day and a half of consistent rest! hopefully the return trip will go smoothly for us!

@gayfesh I will agree with this 100% the end of the Dathomir storyline was REALLY rocky. Merrin was under-baked and so was the weird sith hobo guy. It was odd to me that she joined the ship and not your friends from Kashyyyk. The whole latter half of the Dathomir story was rushed as hellllll

Just completed Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order and I really enjoyed it. My review on yesterday's stream holds strongly.

I got 100% of all secrets, chests, and unlockables because I really did enjoy exploring the beautiful planets and getting the bits of lore. Proud of that :)

The exploration is very fun, the environments are really well done visually, and the boss fights are intense and engaging.

The weak spots are in late-game enemy variety, the extreme bugginess of the environment and collision detection, and the wasteful overuse of "sliding segments" and other "cinematic action" sequences.

The actual cinematics look really nice and I quite enjoyed them when I wasn't having to slide through an obligatory and incredibly easy mud or ice tunnel.

While the dialogue writing isn't perfect, and some of it is a *little* awkward, the themes of the story shine through very strongly and are built on throughout the games levels and dialogue. While the ending was very linear and the enemy variety had completely fallen off by the last 10% of the game, I actually quite liked the storyline conclusion and found it really endearing.

All in all, I enjoyed my experience with Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order and will most certainly be giving Jedi Survivor a try when it comes out!

Being on the road and desynced from social media feeds for a few days was an incredible break. Returning back home and catching up has only further convinced me how stupid and useless these spaces are. Considering removing all feeds and simply using social media one-way for the most part. Putting out my thoughts and ignoring the algorithm trash input. I know for a fact the thoughts I choose to share raise the bar of post quality everywhere Im present.

The trash I see incoming is mostly bigotry or the most moronic discourse bait on the planet. deleterious to an extreme degree.

@Semilocon I will check this out !!! thank you!

"Ozempic retails for about $900 a month if your insurance doesn’t cover it."

from the above article

It's wild, I talked on stream about a month ago about people abusing Ozempic, a perscription diabetes drug, for the purposes of rapid weight loss, but a major article just dropped about it and the entire article is just one giant documentary on the normalization of eating disorders in the United States.

Ozempic (and other "GLP-1" drugs) prompts your body into a repellant response towards food. As in, the thought of eating food makes you feel disgusted or sick, and eating food can often make you feel nauseous while on the drug.

The article explains how diabetics who NEED the drug are severely struggling to get it because so many people have requested prescriptions to help them lose weight, and that there is an entire class of people who all have no appetites because they're all getting weekly injections of Ozempic or similar drugs. They cant stop taking Ozempic because they will immediately regain the weight because the way the drug works is to MAKE FOOD REPELLANT TO YOU and when that effect goes away, none of your habits have changed.

The long-term side effects of Ozempic aren't heavily studied and its generally prescribed because, for diabetics, the effects can be life saving and are almost assuredly less dangerous than the negatives of diabetes.

And yet all over the country TONS of people are rushing to take the drug as a miracle cure for body fat, and reading the way people talk about it in the article...they literally talk about it as if the drug is purging them of sin.

The American psyche is so fucking broken.

I was barely chubby as a child and was ruthlessly bullied for it even by family members, so at this point I am well aware that people consider me a monster for being fat. Sometimes I feel like I don't always deal with the pain from that or the internalized fat hate all that well, but this article has reminded me just how far ahead of the pack I am.

American culture treats psych meds like they're the devil, they treat HRT like its this sinister injection you have to rely on forever, and yet you dangle weight loss in front of them and all of a sudden they're signed up for life no matter the cost, even if they're sick from it every day.

Americans hate fat people (themselves, usually) so much it literally breaks minds.

The article: https://www.thecut.com/article/weight-loss-ozempic.html

@gayfesh I LOVED that scene. I liked the care the film took to never belittle Koba's pain, instead focusing on his inability to deal with his fear and pain in any other way than violence and domination.

My personal favorite scene was the scene where Caesar revisits the attic he grew up in. Calling back to the first film, which was so drastically different, really sold home a previous scene between Caesar and Maurice, where they were discussing how distant and strange the past seemed since they left human society.

Watched Dawn of the Planet of the Apes last night. Welcome and surprising change of pace from Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Almost every aspect of the movie was better than the first one.

Dawn had a more coherent message, minus one line that really counteracted the rest of the film, and it was significantly more visually interesting. A lot more attention was paid to the individual personalities of the ape characters, and I like that a lot since the apes are more interesting than the humans.

I wish a little more attention was paid to the humans obsession with "returning to normalcy." The leaders of the humans were unable to thrive because they could not live in the moment at all. They could only see the world as a "decline" from where they had been previously. Despite having superior medicine, weaponry, and nearly unlimited space, the leadership of the humans was blinded by their desire to "rebuild." Notably, they wanted to rebuild the very world that failed them in the first place.

The Apes, despite the perfidy of Koba and his loyals, lived in their world. They made the best of what they had and were able to articulate a thriving society, at least until war broke out.

Looking forward to the third film.

Days after watching Europa Report I'm still stunned at how hilariously childish the movie was. It really wanted to make a "statement" but it really didn't have anything to say at all, and it ended with a goofy squidmonster which undermined its own weird science-collectivism. It would have been so much better if the characters just all died for a picture of some space algae 😂

There was a line one of the characters kept saying like it was meant to be profound:

"Compared to the breadth of knowledge yet to be known... what does your life actually matter?"

and it's so pathetic and soy and reddit it hurts.

When that line dropped I just immediately thought of this ancient meme

@Fawn_Over_Fun I hear the next two films are where the series really shines. I really liked the old school Planet of the Apes films from the 60s + 70s but I can completely understand passing them up

Last night watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes and it was a very reasonable and fun movie. It did not have a lot of depth but I didn't go in expecting that. I was happy they just committed to everything being CGI. It was basically just a CG animated film, which I can live with. Nothing amazing in the camera work or the performances except ANDY SERKIS who plays the worlds best chimpanzee. Andy Serkis is an undersung blessing to mankind and apekind alike.

It was fun to watch apes fuckin around.

Ive seen the old school Planet of the Apes movies, which I enjoyed a lot when I was younger (the lobotomy stuff scared the hell out of me), and I also saw the dreadful 2001 remake so when these Apes films came out originally my brain turned off completely expecting a really crappy "apes cinematic universe" but after years of hearing people say they're solid fun, I'm excited to watch the rest and happy I enjoyed the first.

Certain communities have an almost signature approach that really boils down to gaslighting: insult you harshly and then claim you’re emotional and “bad faith” if you respond at all to the fact that they’re clearly highly emotionally involved themselves and acting out of rage to be harsh.

Demented! Internet people are unwell!

The internet exposes you to so many latent gaslighters who will roll into your comments berating you, outright insulting you, giving you backhanded compliments at best and then when you respond with even mild sarcasm, they'll fly off the handle and act like they're a victim

Eepy levels are out of control today 😴😴

@jonulrich the tentacles shot was soooo fucking funny hahahah