mauveOkra

Is it a thing for turbo libs to be into Czech stuff? I've met someone just like this who told me she had a dream of joining the CIA or some other spook agency.

Oh, confusing plots and lack of resolution can be really cool, I really like when a book has a suspended dreamlike quality. Can you share some of your thoughts about the book here?

Personally I don't think it's very interesting to approach the game as critique of society directly, maybe because of the RPG mannerisms of kings and queens, but I think the game does have something interesting to say viewed as a media critique. What I got out of it was this postmodern parody of the narrative tropes of video games (and other media as well) wherein you are a cosmically anointed ubermensch going out to do something and you'll kill anything that gets in your way without a second thought of its interiority. So as a foil look at Hollowknight which is pretty much exactly that narrative structure, and while there are a couple bugs with interiority most of them are othered quite explicitly through a mind virus. But beyond even that there's creatures that are just set dressing like the birds, which you end up exploding without even realizing when super dashing across a map. In HK these moments are normalized through a lack of commentary while the whole point of UT is problematizing this dynamic by creating a sense of interiority in these small background creatures whose life is at your mercy. The frame of this is individual ethical choices which same may call a liberal branch of thought, but I personally think it's worth examining your personal ethics.

Interestingly, the subversive narrative of the true pacifist route not only includes pacifism which is obviously anathema to serious political leftism (but again, I'd say is a good pursuit as an individual), but this narrative also includes building together a community and transforming the society of the game. If I remember correctly it's maybe a restoration of monarchy (ew), but the narractive structure of sublimating your individual interests in order to help others and reshape society is quite radical. And the salient point: UT implicitly makes us question why this narrative structure is uncommon compared to destructive quasi colonial ones of other games. So then the question posed is not "why is society not like undertale?" but "why does society create games with violent individualistic narratives?"

Not sure if it's what you're looking for but I'm enjoying The Iron Heel by Jack London right now, it's an early sci fi book about a failed revolution in the US basically. But it's quite expository and has lots of speeches, that early 20th century socialist style. But the conceit of the novel is very cool in my opinion--you're reading the journal of one of these future revolutionaries annotated by a historian in a future utopian society.

Honestly I found it kind of cheesy when I read it in high school. I just had this idea the other day about a similar idea for a novel but it has some sort of sci fi future archeological slant...

In my experience it doesn't matter how much coffee you were drinking, you'll get withdrawal headaches. I even think sometimes when I've been drinking absurd amounts then suddenly stop I don't get headaches somehow. I think they go away in less than a week though.

It's kind of impossible to not judge others by the standards we set for ourselves, but I think it is important to learn to isolate that judgement from the appreciation of someone else as an individual---social life is full of contradiction and you must learn to operate with these ambiguities---that is to say, I don't think you need to stop being critical of how people use substances but you can compartmentalize this thought and still be friendly with people. From another perspective, people are usually offended by judgement of their habits, so it doesn't serve you to share these thoughts directly. They will be more receptive to you and your ethical code if you give them enough subtle social signals that you don't care what they do, and if you actually want to change someone's behavior you have to form this social bond first.

And with regards to partners, it's not unrealistic but you may have to be very patient. Personally I sometimes think about how capitalism reifies this one path of life, finding a life partner and starting a family. All the media and narratives in our current society reify this, elevating and transforming the sexual impulse towards this; whereas in radically different social contexts of the past it was not pathological to deviate from this. Engels wrote about this ("On the Origin of the Family" I think) and as comunists we should interrogate all aspects of the existing social order.

The early films of Sergei Eisenstein that propagandize communism and the Russian revolution. Battleship Potemkin, Strike, and October are the three that I have in mind (and have actually watched). Strike is the weakest, but has some more intimate and personal tones as well as some excellent naturalistic shots of daily life at the time. Battleship Potemkin is the most famous and retells the mutiny of the titular battleship during the 1905 uprising. October is really excellent and probably the height of Eisenstein synthesizing high-art film-making with a revolutionary purpose, but I think it may have been censored due too being to abstract for the purpose of the film that he was asked to make. (Not sure if censored is the right word, sometimes western resources apply the word very liberally.)

All these films are available without copyright, though the best viewing experience is to track down a DVD (check the library!) as these predate synchronized scores. A physical reissue of a public domain film from the early silent era often budgets in producing a decent score, which is expressly not PD. Some versions available on the internet have poor-quality scores or even AI generated audio.

Oil! last paragraph:

"You can see those graves, with a picket fence about them, and no derrick for a hundred feet or more. Some day all those unlovely derricks will be gone, and so will the picket fence and the graves. There will be other girls with bare brown legs running over those hills, and they may grow up to be happier women, if men can find some way to chain the black and cruel demon which killed Ruth Watkins and her brother---yes, and Dad also: an evil Power which roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men and women, and luring the nations to destruction by visions of unearned wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and exploit labor."

If only the entire book had prose the quality of the last chapter! I think my dream author would be Dickens if he were a communist in the early 20th-century... oh well...

I've been rather enjoying some novels of late. I just finished Sinclair's Oil! and am in the middle of London's The Iron Heel. Both are pretty explicitly communist books and have this revolutionary optimism, kind of like a book equivalent to early Eisenstein films. There are these bits of The Iron Heel that could pass as quite trenchant prose of today which is refreshing.

Oil! is fascinating to me because it has so many contradictions. It's kind of not great--vast swaths of the book are Sinclair reporting everything that happens--yet the first and last chapters display quite incredible captivating prose. The last line invokes oil as some kind of demonic metaphor as a material accelerant of capitalism and really hits because the prior 400 pages of "then this happened." Everyone learns about him in school but I'm not sure anyone reads him, he's very explicitly a communist or at least a sympathetic socialist. There's even random tidbits in the book that sound like parapolitical/acid-marxist stuff of today which is kinda crazy considering how old it is. There was some throwaway bit reflecting on how radio broadcast tech homogenizes thought, which perfectly echos that feeling we (or at least I) have nowadays that society is sort of trapped by phones--how can we possibly change things when peoples thoughts are suggested through the capitalist controlled broadcast technologies...

Even crazier is apparently he later wrote these Lanny Budd novels which from wikipedia hit all the parapolitical conspiracies, but unfortunately I don't know if I could make it through that much more of his stenographic prose.

Anyone else read any revolutionary novels like this? I feel like there's more of this before the 1950s when anglosphere intellectuals got turned off of communism by Khrushchev's secret speech.

TFW you meet a Latin American student at a US university who only knows 1 word in Spanish "from his nanny".

Unfortunately I think that would be a compelling story to these people