mindbleach @ mindbleach @lemmy.world

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The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer.

Any turn of events somehow bolsters their claim, because their worldview is unfalsifiable nonsense. It is not even wrong.

And yet: "education" is never the panacea people pretend it is, when they scoff at DIRECT solutions to visible problems. 'Don't take action! Let's opine about a generation-long project to prevent this from happening again.'

Because if there's anything safe from the meddling of disinformation-pushing conservative bastards, it's school.

Educated fascists abound.

Not that anyone should take you seriously, with that inane conclusion. 'Oh, arresting kidnappers? Like the kidnappers did? No thanks.'

I wanna put my weeeener inner

-- Iranian-American white supremacist

90s parody movies lean way too hard into deconstruction, and aren't very good at it. They're trying to say "here's how that would really go" but lack the patience to be clever. E.g. Scary Movie 3 having a character square off against the scary girl from The Ring. That's not a fully-formed joke. That's a three-second cutaway gag in Family Guy.

The clearest line between deconstruction and reconstruction might be Neon Genesis Evangelion versus Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.

Eva takes the cynicism and plausible physics of real-robot shows like Mobile Suit Gundam, and applies them to children piloting skyscraper-sized combat vehicles in monster-of-the-week battles. It doesn't kill off characters left and right, and the action is rarely gory or played for shock value, but there's a level of emotional violence that is unmatched outside of surrealism. It has an audience-insert protagonist specifically to go "this is you, and that is bad." The last few episodes are infamously a sharp left turn into abstract philosophy and, like... giving characters therapy. On some level Neon Genesis Evangelion is a mecha anime series that actively despises its audience for enjoying mecha anime.

Gurren went "yeah that's nice" and wrote a love letter to joyously stupid mecha anime. The universe literally runs on whatever sounds awesome. It is unselfconsciously goofy in a way that wraps back around to being cool as fuck. Now: it's not unaware of criticism. It was made by the same studio as Evangelion. But the key figures would eventually split off into Studio Trigger, whose output is primarily reconstructions - shows rooted in asking "how would this insane premise really work?" and then building a fun story within that universe.

Ironically, there is no trans allegory in I Wanna Be The Guy.

Scream is the perfect answer. It was a response to the waning 80s slasher boom, making it all more real, more visceral, and more of a threat to the savvy audience, while still being funny as hell. Comedy and horror go beautifully together. There's a shared tension with the unknown.

So a deconstruction / reconstruction shuffle. A work picking apart the tropes of a genre, making you question them... and then putting them back together in ways suited to a self-aware audience.

One Punch Man looks like a decent example. The premise is a rebuke of who-is-stronger anime, like the endless power-level treadmill of Dragonball Z. The main dude is stronger. Next question. And the next question is, well, what does a setting with assorted superheroes and supervillains look like, if there's some guy who is unbeatable 1v1, but is otherwise just some guy? Does society support him, after he's basically relegated to an occasional "come save our asses" phone call? How do other supers proceed with their equally-cliche motivations, when SSJ4 Goku showed up in episode one?

Shaun Of The Dead is definitely a reconstruction of zombie tropes - timed right at the crest of the 2000s zombie-movie revival. But Hot Fuzz is a little odd to mention here because it's actually three distinct genres. It goes from screwball comedy to murder mystery to blockbuster action without missing a beat. Ironically I'd say the weakest part is the screwball comedy at the beginning. It's very sedate compared to what it almost was: there's a deleted scene where Angel did Word-art banners for each department, ending on rainbow lettering reading "sexual assault." The opening we got is held-back to ease the later shifts in theme. And while each of these shifts is truly masterful, I'm not sure I'd call the movie as a whole a great example of anything it riffed on.

Really - does it fit any movie marathon that would unironically include Point Break?

How has this not been on The Worst Fighting Game?

Vampire visual novels are the trashiest purple fanfiction on the internet. Vampires support an industry you'd swear was taking the piss, but they can literally smell insincerity. Some extremely old money goes to teenagers and spinsters with incomprehensibly naive views of romance. Somehow they build the most meticulously-crafted storylines imaginable. Popular streamers occasionally play these as a joke, and the utterly gripping emotional intensity can turn them into "RenPyFields."

Half-elves are too busy stanning HoloLive to play games.

State judiciary: powerless versus their congress.

Federal judiciary: unquestionable.

Get the fuck out of our government, you miserable bastard.

Dark Elves fucking love Among Us. Any backstabbing accusatory "social deduction" game is right up their alley. Dark Elves have GMod Murder variants where there is only one innocent and you win by killing them last.

Tabaxi committed like half the funding for Star Citizen. Any game with exploration and arbitrage makes their pupils go wide.

Warforged adore racing games because they don't understand there's a little man inside the car.

They had.

Dragons have neverending arguments about idle games which seem painfully generic and interchangeable to anything on two legs. Swarm Simulator Simulator, Multiversal Paperclips, Urban Dead, that sort of thing. In reality the games are just an occasional distraction, and what they're really addicted to are those years-long threads of snippy factional elitism about the games. Dragons routinely get banned from MOBA forums for being the absolute worst accounts that technically never break the rules. They bicker about the meta like they're experts hiding behind toons. They have literally never played the game.

Liches are the ones getting wound-up by dragons in all those forums. Unironic edgelords with giant signatures and arcane medals below their ooh-so-spooky avatars. Any account created a week after the game launched, chewing out some friendly newbie for not knowing something the developer mentioned once on IRC, then getting tilted when a lizard-themed sockpuppet incorrectly nitpicks their grammar? Lich. They are of course the most toxic players in any game they hyperfixate on, because they'll never, ever get banned. Through unnatural rituals like privately befriending the programmers, they are beyond consequence. They can still be spotted on chan boards saying shit that no mortal moderator could excuse. Ironically none of them play Urban Dead because they consider the revival mechanics insensitive.

Fairies are the squeaky shit-talkers in hypercompetitive shooter lobbies. They are genuinely terrifying where twitch reactions matter. Fairies can rinse through Nuketown with twin shotguns while playing on DK Bongos. Their contentious relationship with humanity arises primarily from not respecting any strategy besides "Rush B."

Captain Carrot, as a captain of industry.

The music could come from the supply chain. Like if Midinous or Nodal had conveyor belts instead of wires.

LCD was fine. Locked 60 Hz refresh rate made no sense whatsoever. Even shitty laptops can dip down to 40 Hz, and that'd make dodgy framerates less stuttery. But the Switch is Nvidia hardware. There's no excuse to not at least support 120 Hz polling to flip framebuffers.

Dull.

You forgot to say anything.

100.0%. There is just no benefit whatsoever to rocking that boat. The Switch is a converted Android gizmo, ARM is still the only sane answer for high-performance mobile platforms, and their video hardware is from the company that bought ARM. To say nothing of the PR shitstorm it would be to slice their market in half.

That said, you'll still have to buy Virtual Console games separately, because Nintendo.

If they don't embrace G-Sync, they're fools. It's such an obvious advantage for power-constrained rendering where they provide the screen.

Also yeah obviously fix the damn drift. Joysticks are not unexplored technology. At some point you're begging for a lawsuit over basic consumer protection. If you can't be arsed to fix a problem everyone complains about, when it'd cost 0.01% of MSRP to address, you're doing capitalism wrong. Grease your squeaky wheel already.

Beyond that... I'm not expecting any huge leaps. Look at the DS line and how it printed money. Those occasional upgrades, not quite generational, balanced ongoing software compatibility with eager hardware adoption. Consider how they still own the entire handheld console space, somehow. There's no overwhelming motivation to reach for immense power or gobs more memory. If they get Unreal 5 looking good at a whopping 1080p40, they're golden for another five years.