Can you imagine the backlash though? From chuds and boomers alike.

I spend too much of my life in games (board, social, or video I play them all!) and I really do wish more people who enjoy them were interested in critical analysis of them. Outside of gamedev circles and weird youtube channels asking “why is this being presented the way it is?” is a technique for speedrunning slur%. Especially if a game is non, or non traditional, narrative. Like I dare you to try analyse the themes of slay the spire or whatever on the subreddit haha.

How dare a piece of media, I product I bought, challenge me by pointing out that the standard media of this type depicts horrific acts. Clearly it wants me to feel ashamed for playing, and not to reflect on why it’s so uncomfortable when highlighted, but so banal it goes unacknowledged when not?

Could I use this moment to grow? To ask how we got here and whether we should stay here? Certainly not, because games are masturbatory toys of indulgence and nothing more. Unless of course I’m defending how I spend my time, then they’re art.

Gamers are the least media literate of people who’s entire hobby is about exposing themselves to media.

That’s honestly one of my favourite jokes on Wikipedia.

James is a weird one. I am a pretty big fan of his books “the art of not being governed” and “seeing like a state” as academic examinations of the conflict between everyday life and statism. I also think his “against the grain” is a fascinating look at how agriculture actually came about. This book though is not it, he writes with the casual defeatism of someone who is among the highest rungs of society. Mustering the same casual defense of the status quo academics and philosophers have been deploying for generations, most humourously skewered in this comic imho https://existentialcomics.com/comic/350

I think if people who might be the audience for this would be better served reading something like Graeber’s Debt or The dawn of everything. While they focus on different things they both appeal to the same intellectual liberal audience (as well as other ofc) and the analysis of history is more interesting; Nudging people towards more radical conclusions.

Honestly it’s quite sad to see someone who studied peasant resistance and wrote a very even handed criticism of centralisation reduce anarchism to crossing the street on a red light and sometimes listening to crowds.

Um that 8 folf star is the symbol of chaos from Moorcock’s work. 40k appropriated it, in Moorcock’s stories chaos and law are balancing forces. It also saw extensive use in occult stuff before warhammer.

My understanding of why it’s popular as a symbol in like Greece, Chili etc is in the Moorcock sense. I.e. when states centralise and suffocate chaos is needed to restore freedom and balance. Similar to flying a black flag as the negation of flags.

Nothing in 40k is original and everything in it is a shallow ripoff of something more interesting.