While being poor I had a lot of fun from games. It’s called piracy. And once I stopped being poor, I largely stopped pirating. I have no hesitation torrenting The Sims or The Witcher (since CDPR refuses to take my stinky Belarusian money), but I see no problem paying for anything else if it’s sufficiently convenient. And even when I didn’t have time or just wanted quick fun, there was a way to do so. It was known as “cheats”.

“Free to play” incentivizes a certain game design where a game is so terrible you want cheat codes, and then selling those cheat codes to the player. Additionally, it preys the most not on the people who have money to burn but on neurodivergent folks predisposed to addictive behaviors (like I am but thankfully I dodged the worst of it and learned to just never touch the stuff at all). Hell, that’s why the game is not sold — the point is to probe the market for vulnerable people with the free first dose. This is immoral, predatory behavior, and while nobody would argue that a developer needs money, it’s this particular way the developer skills are used to make said money, and from whom, that people rightfully find repulsive.

Actualy Kurzgesagt replied in the comments and they only opted to address the point about the funding lmao.

But who’s to judge the right from wrong? When our guard is down I think we’ll both agree that MGR OST kicks ass.

1. Morrowind. I spent like 7 years playing mostly it in my school years.
2. Doom probably, I still play it modded from time to time
3. Space Engineers. I love sandboxes and this one has me building stuff that actually moves around. 4-5. The Witcher 3. Played the first two years ago but was so burned out I never gotten to 3rd. Had to torrent that one since I’m from Belarus and CDPR doesn’t want my money anymore.
4. I have a PC and a laptop, but I emulate a ton on my phone with bluetooth controllers too. Played a lot of console games on my last 3 phones that I never got the chance to play while I was younger. I also have an old Sega Genesis at mother’s place but that thing hasn’t been turned on in over a decade.
5. I don’t remember because some games are not “bad” but just mediocre stuff I lose interest for. Maybe one of those Famiclone fakes like Super Mario 16 I played in a classmate’s home in my yonger teens?
6. It Has To Be This Way

Does Fortune work on data in the latest patch?

LPR and DPR have started from a genuine popular uprising as a reaction to Euromaidan coup. The wave of social explosion have pushed people with, well, more or less lack of consistent political ideology, to the leadership positions, and in first years most of the popular leaders have been assassinated (some expressed anti-oligarch views, even though there has never been a proper socialist movement), leaving only the likes of Igor Strelkov (who is a known fan of White movement and has long and deep history with Russia) in control. Additionally there’s, like, fishy election manipulation wrt. organized communist movements. Like, DPR’s communist party (ignoring the question of how communist they are) was banned from elections in 2018 by a backdated state decision of its dissolution in 2016 that nobody in the party knew about.

Like, the only way in which you can consider them any sort of “leftist” is that some forces use Soviet flags as cumsocks for bourgeoisie interests.

Funny how you asked that on the birthday of Ivan Yefremov, a popular Soviet sci-fi author. Coming from arguably the times when Soviet Union has reached its’ peak, he’s been considering how would the late-stage communist future of humanity look like.

I suggest looking at The Great Circle trilogy, which is Andromeda Nebula (novel) / The Heart of the Serpent (short story) / The Bull’s Hour (novel). While they are set in the same universe and I’ve listed them in chronological orders, they address different aspects and the storylines aren’t related to each other, so you can read them in any order. Andromeda Nebula focuses for a large part on the life of space workers on the communist Earth, Heart of the Serpent is a story about a first encounter with an alien civilization (where they are a friendly intelligent industrially developed race instead of some unspeakable horror), and The Bull’s Hour is a dystopian story about an expedition from the communist Earth exploring a remote planet where a splinter group of humans from Earth have escaped in the times of great conflicts and have recreated a capitalist hellscape.

While somewhat dated, and, frankly, Yefremov lacked a good editor, I think it’s probably the best reflection of the high hopes Soviet people had for the communism in the long-term.

Yep, thanks

I’ve learned the hard way that if a protest movement is not class-based, there’s no class and it’s not based.

As a part of a labor aristocracy suffering with alienation throughout my whole life, I was a vague idealist socialist suspicious of USSR before I got tired of buying shit and started trying to fix it - like patch up clothes or solder some electronics. Eventually that lead to me realizing how much labor all over the world the stuff I’m used to - like a smartphone - actually takes and how long did it take for it to get where so many can be made. It was a small step from there to realize the importance of material conditions for economic development. In addition to that I’ve watched plenty of quality history content about USSR which was so wildly different from the picture my history lessons taught I’ve come to be very sceptical of what I think I know and what makes “common sense”. That led to me understanding how AES countries are a product of their history too.

Just tell them they’ll be the number 2000 bazillion and one?

they can’t take that away from us

US ideological hegemony complex: and I took that personally

All because of this communist Zhou Bai Deng

Okay, here’s my serious take:

If you want to go by Lenin’s words, you only need to look a little bit further:

Anyone who would in all earnest refute the “slogan” of defeat for one’s own government in the imperialist war should prove one of three things: (1) that the war of 1914-15 is not reactionary, or (2) that a revolution stemming from that war is impossible, or (3) that co-ordination and mutual aid are possible between revolutionary movements in all the belligerent countries

The war is *currently *liberating for people of DPR/LPR and deals a huge blow to the absolute most reactionary form of capitalism, and the economic front of it is loosening the grip United States have on the world. It’s also currently very unlikely that a proletariat revolution would stem from it, given that the RF units are formed from conscripts from DPR/LPR and contract military, and with them yet seeing the nazi atrocities firsthand the material reality itself would deter them from turning against their generals.

Then again, this is only the early act of the next World War we’re seeing unfold. We won’t be able to determine the character or sides of the WW3 at this point of time, as even some of the EU countries are not all that contempt due to sanctions against Russia.

That doesn’t mean you should forget all the Russian collaborators whitewashing, or support for scum like Ilyin, Solzhenitsyn and Yeltsin, or anti-worker laws that have come under Putin. It’s not a socialist state. It’s not even a pro-worker state. It’s merely temporarily aligned with the interests of working class in crushing the US-centered unipolar order, and that alignment may change any time.

Critical support is dialectical: contemporary capitalist Russia is cringe, but killing neo-Nazis on NATO’s payroll is based.

But do you need to be at the imperialist stage of capitalism to do imperialism as foreign policy? E.g. Russian Federation wasn’t at the imperialist stage during its participation in WW1 with imperialist goals.

Repeating history might backfire, for after the next February might come the next October.