i’m going to say the 7th generation, but for a different reason. you chose it for community, i choose it for continuity. those consoles were the standard targets for games companies for an uncommonly long time. consoles that came before and since haven’t matched that. some of this, i think, is due to them kind of being architectural dead ends. that was the last console generation where the hardware wasn’t just PC hardware but a little bit different. the PS3 in particular is an incredible feat of human ingenuity with second hand PS3s being hard to find at reasonable prices since the US military depends on them for nuclear research. but all this cleverness made them too expensive to develop for corporations seeking to design hardware to sell at a loss to play games sold at a markup.

but during the era of the 7th generation? it was incredible. whichever console you chose you would have so many options for games that would give you incredible and unique experiences. and the hardware exclusivity was an actual real constraint sometimes with developers knowing they were making a PS3 exclusive or a 360 exclusive targeting that hardware to get every drop of performance out of the hardware, whereas now it’s just a form of manufactured scarcity since new consoles are on the same architecture as PCs nowadays.

the games that have come since that generation also haven’t had any fundamental paradigm shifts in how they’re played that makes them more fun either. there have been some paradigm shifts that have made gaming less safe and healthy to engage in with companies shifting the brain chemistry of their players by creating addictive structures in the rulesets and paradigms of the games.

in conclusion: 7th generation good, industry bad

i think we’d draw wisdom from pre-colonial societies who responded to community members violating consensual paradigms of existing with community based corrections. the challenge i have is that on the Eurasian continent something went awry and when the most extreme punishment in this paradigm, exile, was assigned enough, eventually the exiled created their own domination societies that would go on to eliminate the societies that had exiled them (examples include the Kievan Rus’, the Romans, and the Huns). part of a realistic thought process towards solarpunk means asking ourselves how we prevent domination societies from re-arising

they do not, but most artists still encourage listeners to listen on bandcamp since so few artists on streaming services are getting all that many repeat listens, and if you repeat an album enough bandcamp will encourage you to purchase. once you get to that point, and buy maybe 1 album a month (about the same price as spotify premium) you will end up getting more money into the hands of artists, and especially the small artists who are around you in your city, than you ever would have paying for Tidal

that reminds me of how there was MensLib which was genuinely about advancing a better understanding of what feminism means for men, and the ways an egalitarian society rather than a patriarchy would be better for men, and then there was MensLiberation which was a Men’s Rights Activists (manosphere) subreddit.*

*editor’s note: i may have these backwards

r/bald is an example of male centered body positivity. does it tend to be a little bit toxically positive? occasionally. however, the broad strokes are very healthy and deserve to be commended, especially as this is all ultimately a conversation about accepting what it means to perform masculinity in this day and age without bringing along a litany of toxically masculine traits. i genuinely appreciate what they’re doing and want to give them their roses as a male whose hair style is gender nonconforming. thank you, r/bald, for being kind, patient, and accepting of eachother

this is in fact the opposite of what i’m saying

Alas it’s getting increasingly hard to find paper maps a lot of places. They’re just not sold anymore. If you find yourself in or near one of these places, I recommend CoMaps

most farmer’s markets where i am have a heavy emphasis on community building and resiliency as well as income stabilization for vulnerable people with the bank’s sword of Domacles hanging over them. of the three i mentioned, they are the weakest form of resistance but they still have a role to play, which is why Granges put so much work into making sure they are available to non members of the grange

Farmer’s markets, co-ops, and mutual aid all exist as forms of resistance to capitalism purely by making sure your dollars go to people within your community rather than get captured by the modern company store through Wal-Mart or Target. At the same time though, they are also not everything. It’s a whole thing. Nothing anywhere is or can be perfect. The best we can do is the best we can do. I know that sounds like a thought terminating cliche but sometimes it’s important to set aside the things you can’t control and to focus on the things you can and have faith that the more people that do that the easier it will become to resist the horrors that surround us all

Disney learning what Marvel learned in the 90s: people fuck with Spider-man. they enjoy the storytelling of a man who doesn’t view a cataclysmic galactic event or a shooting in his neighborhood as fundamentally different, but both as fundamental threats to people like his ability to live, thrive, and enjoy the spaces they exist.

“there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” has to me always been a clear call to reduce your consumption within a capitalist system. yes, it is these shit heads who shackle us. but when we reduce our dependence on them we begin the breaking of our bonds to a system that kills thousands every year

A lot of what you’re arguing is tangential to what I was trying to say, but I’ll still go through it.

1. We were glad in NoVA that Spanberger won in an extremely conservative district in Northern Virgina in 2018. It was a relief compared to what was there before. The follow up in 2020 was also nice.
2. I’m not trying to say that she didn’t win by enough. I don’t really care about vote margins in electoral politics, I care about what politicians do in office to shift how people perceive the political process. Spanberger has been a consistent corporate vote. Better than the overt fascists. Still complicit in the erosion of our environmental and labor protections. She’s part of the false binary we find ourselves in in this country between overt hyperfascism and slow neoliberal fascism. We won’t know until we try it if a populist left wing candidate like a Zohran Mamdani or a Bernie Sanders could win in a general. Virginia hasn’t had an opportunity to do such a thing in my lifetime.
3. I also don’t think that the NYC populace is the same as Virginia. I think our left wing populism would look different from their left wing populism. I know this because I’ve experienced it first hand. The center of left wing life in SWVA is the Grange, the Mutual Aid Hub, and the Water Defender. In the urban centers the focus is much more on economic unions and labor unions for the factory and office worker. I’ve lived both lives, and have seen that organization efforts need to fall along different lines and put different focuses on confronting poverty. In the countryside you need to empower people to support eachother through their access to clean drinking water and growable food. In the urban centers you need to empower people to organize their people power to demonstrate to their bosses the ability to say “No.”
4. I missed my CWA chapter endorsing her. I didn’t know that the CWA endorsed her. That’s my mistake. Most unionists did tend to vote for her anyway because Winsome Earle-Sears was an overt fascist. You will receive no argument from me. But this was the first time in my life that the unions refused to endorse either candidate. That’s HUGE

5. If she ran unopposed in the primary, why didn’t Progressives put up a challenger? Is it HER fault she ran unopposed? That’s EXACTLY the organization failure I was trying to point out. Democracy is not a single event that occurs at the ballot box in November. Even the bourgious electoral form of democracy practiced in the United states requires participation 2-3 times a year to get the best possible outcome, but moreover, it requires dedicating time to go door to door to talk to people about candidates. You get more enthusiasm to do that when people are enthusiastic about the candidates. I haven’t seen that in Virginia in a decade. No one trusts any of our politicians and people dedicated to the value of democratic values have been much more focused on community organization with their neighbors. It’s been a monumental shift, and one I’ve very much seen accelerate in the past 4 years since the western regions of the state were devestated by hurricane helene along with our North Carolinian and West Virginian brethren, with many people slowly viewing themselves less as residents of any of our states or border states, and more as being parts of the cultural communities we exist in. The people of Bluefield, Tazewell, and Boone have more in common that their political representation reflects. So why do we even pay attention to the state borders when our real connections are through our food and our water? More and more people want representation that reflects this, and if Democrats don’t run a socialist who reflects this, they risk losing to a national-socialism who does Definition of fascism by Seth Tobocman. If we are to resist fascism, we must acknowledge how it takes hold. The “Virginia wants corporate dems” narrative undermines our ability to assess and resist our standing when increasingly there is a boot on our nets.

6. Not being Winsome Earle-Sears is not clear policy value. Virginians like some of her policy positions, but some of her policy positions are WILDLY unpopular, and as a result she has become increasingly unpopular. We do need to acknowledge that there is an element of misogyny driving her unpopularity. I renounce anyone who roots their criticisms of the 67th governor in her gender. Fuck that and fuck off if that’s you (not you who I’m replying to, obviously, but I know there’s a chance someone’s reading this hating her for her gender). I’ll state my stance that our last good governor was Francis Harrison Pierpont. Spanberger is a better governor than Youngkin, McDonnel, or Warner up to this point, but we do have to acknowledge what the specific issues with her governorship have been
7. You think I don’t know the short sessions and long sessions are completely insane!? THEY’RE COMPLETELY INSANE!! “Oh it’s to avoid a permanent professional class of politicians from running the state” bull fucking shit, the result is representatives that spend somewhere between 1 and 3 months a year doing anything, and the rest of the year schmoozing. I fuckin’ hate it. I’ll have to take your word for it on that it was the centrist dems mainly saying she scuttled collective bargaining and environmental protections we’d been hopeful on. That was the feedback we got from our union endorsed representative and from multiple environmental groups in our valley who spend a lot of time talking to representatives, senators, and anyone else who will listen to that we’re tired of the arsenic in the New River, so it was the understanding I had taken away from this past session.

Abigail Spanberger won a tight race against an overt fascist without endorsements from any of the most powerful political blocs in virginia, like the UMWA, USW, UAW, or CWA. she also ran virtually unopposed in the democratic primary. she is not an example of someone who won because of the value of centrist politics. she’s currently wildly unpopular for vetoing populist left wing bills from the long session (60 days) without providing input during the session about what she wanted. the next, and final session of this legislature is a short session (30 days) and none of the legislaters knew what she wants or needs to pass environmental protections, labor protections, or affordability measures as Virginia experiences a housing crisis.

so.

no.

this is not a good counter example to Mamdani, but instead a good example of exactly why no one trusts corporate dems or ex-CIA agents

it’s just down the road from me. it’s a convergence point between a bunch of mining towns so it’s a bit of a significant labor organization point in central Appalachia. it’s also where Mother Jones founded the UMWA. also prior to European colonization it access between the Allegheny highlands and the great valley made it an ideal trading hub thanks to the New River, so it holds significance to indigenous rights organizers in Appalachia as well. the fact that the median income is $19k/yr is very much a policy choice of enforcing poverty

Beckley deserves so much more than to be a tourist trap where people get told lies about the union

also by even scheduling a debate between say… Bill Nigh and a creationist, the illusion is created that these are equal things, equally deserving of our attention and time. before you ever get into the moderator bias creating an impression that the truth lies in the middle of these two people when in reality only one of them is speaking in good faith.

“that’s good”

so we’re clear i’m really not into an anti-intellectualism. what i’m into is knowledge sharing without barriers based on class hierarchies

too many people have the attitude of “why contribute to something when X corporate service works fine”

but more and more, with these companies giving less and less of a fuck and relying on stale and outdated knowlege calcified in training data that itself didn’t represent the real world as well as they think, the information we share with eachother for the love of sharing will become more valuable

We need both more citizen science and citizen journalism