KulakRevolt
Writes at https://anarchonomicon.substack.com/
Writes weird Twitter Threads @FromKulak
Rides motorcycles... poorly.
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Winner of Motte Post of the Year 2019
User ID: 905
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
I feel like you're disappointed they didn't explicitly have a scene for every character where they monologued about their Tragic Past like a Kojima game.
Every character has a really well defined disposition, attitude, set of motivations, and yes backstory... the show just doesn't stop to tell you them, you catch their story through glimpses of their personality, lifestyle, decisions, stylistic choices... you know like real life.
Maine andDorio's names, character designs, interactions, and dialogue tells you everything that narrative essential about their characters and back stories, without having to spell it out.
Kiwi's interactions and relationships with Lucy, Faraday, Maine and Falco are all you have to see to start drawing out the past of her character... Even her design, she specifically chose Cyberware that didn't have a mouth and would prevent her from being expressive, purposefully alienating herself from everyone around her, fleeing the interpersonal Trauma implicit in everything she does.
These are characters are incredibly designed characterized and fleshed out, unique backstories and personalities are implicit in everything about them, StudioTrigger just followed the show don't tell school of thought (as you expect from litteral animators and artists) and embodied this in their characters and actions instead of stopping the show's breakneck pace.
And as for the characters who's inner monologues we do get ,its incredibly rich!
The entire reason David keeps doing merc work instead of ditching and enjoying his modest wealt and girlfriend is he feels he needs to become a great success in order to live up to his mother's dreams and retroactively undo his abandonment of her ambitions through success, He feels he needs to continue Maine's ambitions so as to render Maine's tragedy a success...
He's fleeing his Trauma by embracing the very danger that caused it.
That is very strongly characterized and very subtlety handled, and every character is like this!
This is how in 10 episodes they can cover so much ground at such a break-neck pace, and with so much style, because their writing, artstyle, plotting, and even music is operating at maximum efficiency.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
I mean... yes, but that's still just Saburo Arasaka...
The dude's a 180 year old Japanese flying ace from ww2 that's run his company and most the world more than most people's grandparents have been alive, and he pretty much literally eats people's souls
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
I never wrote about it no.
If someone here did though I'd be very interested to read it. Always found that character inspiring
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
I disagree strongly... The entire point of edgerunners is that it comes at you fast and the characterization is done through animation, subtle character moments, implications that you read into it...
Also deaths aren't furthering the plot? The plot is they're punks trying to get rich and not die, and the tragedy is they know they probably will. You might as well complain the Deaths in "All's Quiet on the Western Front" not furthering the plot... that's the point, death can hit you at any time, you're not special.
I feel like you expected the story to be "And that's how we decided to do "Big important heroic thing" and advance "the good" and this is the story of our noble sacrifice..." no the point of edgerunners is they're just trying to achieve their personal ambitions, make it out alive, not be crushed by the world around them... and everything escalates because the intense friction and pressure they're under just achieving that.
We get the backstories for David and Lucy because they share them with eachother, the rest we get to gleen so much of their personalities, their values, what little part of life they're holding onto, just from how they behave an interact.
Its incredibly efficient show don't tell and it works remarkably effectively. There's a reason it has 100% and 96% on rotten tomatoes.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
You realize they could have just written their own world if that was the case...
Not like even Gibson came up with anything expecially unique, he just brought all the elements together that other writers had put out in the 70s and layered a cool style over it.
No individual sci-fi elements hadn't already been done by someone else.
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And honestly if anything they turned the silliness up... the Chainsaw arm became the mantiss blades or monkey arms, They explicitly made all the goofy rockerboy stuff Canon and made one of the main characters a rockerboy who did 9/11 but with nukes, played by Keanu reeves.
Like there are entire flashback missions in game that plays out exactly how they played in the 2020 corebook.
Hell the only 2 character from the corebook who aren't one to one transplanted into the 2077 game are morgan blackhand who doesn't appear, and Johnny silverhand, who's character design they had to redo to look like Keanu reeves.
Aside from that Rose, Alt, Rache Bartmoss, Spider, Adam Smasher, Saburo Arasaka... their character designs haven't even changed. Rose even has the big 80s hair and leather jacket in the flashbacks.
Its actually incredible how much CDPR leaned into the silliest aspects of 2020 and managed to make them work in a serious and dark setting
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
That character should have real ties to their world and their actions should have real consequences.
The lifepath and FNFF systems ensure that their is no way for your character to be a generic orphan without grief, while the FNFF system ensures your character can't be superhero effortless evading the consequences of combat or conflict, but instead must take everything smart and always be in real meaningful risk even if they are smart.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
Ok that does sound more interesting
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
I was refering to people who thought CP 2077, a game made by the people who made the wticher games, rpgs.... was going to be some next level rampage simulator where you hire prostitutes then murder them to get your money back.
A lot of the backlash to CP 2077 was people who the marketing campaign had trained to think it'd be GTA... but in the future and with a full cybernetically customizable character.
I'm not even that fond of Rockstar personally. Their worlds always felt dull and uninteresting once you got past the initial jokes.
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My contention isn't love of the tabletop rpg is what drives the continued interest in the world. Its that CDPR and StudioTrigger's close hewing to Pondsmith's rules of storytelling and aethetic commitments is what drives their success.
The franchise is remarkably consistent in resisting every temptation of bad modern storytelling/superhero bullshit that defines basically every other franchise, and instead hewing to Pondsmith's original narrative commitments.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
I included the lond form of the Title!
Basically its a dive into how Cyberpunk 2020 the table top game died, revived itself, died agian, and then revived again... and how its a franchise that will keep getting second, third and forth chances with obscene budgets.
I attribute the amount of affection it has to its unique gameplay mechanisms, which are basically designed to create dynamic, tragic, consequencial stories, of real meaningful deprivation and struggle... and how that's so vastly different from basically everything in our superhero driven culture.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
I honestly don't get Shadowrun...
Like my overwhelming emotion about it is just... "WHY?"
Like imagine if Call of Cthulhu was out... then they made a competitor game that was Call of Cuthulu, but there were elves and dwarves... or Vampire the Masquerade... but there were also halflings...
Like I've never gotten into it so I can't judge, but I just don't get how throwing high fantasy into the cyberpunk future wouldn't detract from both...
Like honestly the opposite of shadowrun would seems way cooler on paper... Shadowrun is a world where high fantasy has crashed into the real cyberpunk world through some sort of cataclym... It'd seem a fantasy world that just kept technologically advancing til they were cyberpunk would be way more interesting. Is the wizards guild losing influence now that Hackers are doing more and information is the main currency... how are the ancient order of knights adapting to everyone being an augmented killing machine... are they outgunned and the whole thing is falling to chaos... or have they made the deal with the devil and are now leading the trend? Is it an age of high colonialism where all the dark lands are being conquered because the humans and civilized races are now so technologically advanced?
Like I've never played shadowrun... but Its world feels disrupted enough that litterally anything could happen at any second and there's no predictability or consistency that the characters choices can have real consequences... like you can't dispatch the kill teams after the players for doing something dumb, when so little makes sense and no one even knows what would be dumb.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
I played the game VTM:Bloodlines. Hands down one of the most engaging worlds I've ever played... The game itself shows its age after so long, and the way they manage their contentmeans you can complete all the interactions and the world starts to feel dead towards the end... but those first 5-15 hours are some of the best in all of gaming.
I've never played the Tabletop VTM, but I checked out V5 of the tabletop game... no idea how the mechanics work, but read through the introduction and my god it has one of the best world build hooks I've ever encountered.
The entire history of VTM there have always been whispers about Ghenna, the end times, there were all these prophecies the doom of vampires was right around the corner, and something was going to happen that would kill them all off... these immortals were running out of time.
Well in most material of the setting its played off as some antediluvian vampire like Cain coming back and killing all their descendants... but in V5 there's a big suggestion it might be smart phones and the NSA, that tracking the supernatural has become so much easier that self righteous mortals are hunting them down and exterminating them, vampire hunters have become major threats, government blackops are wiping them out or black bagging them for experiments like its Delta Green... and the older vampires who're established rich and have a steady supply of blood and everything... they're looking at all the young, poor, cell phone using vampires as loose ends to be tied up.
Meanwhile there's the question of if this really is Gehenna, or if there's another antediluvian eldritch shoe to drop.
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Again no idea how it actually plays, if its mechanics are still solid, or if they shaved off all the edges that make things fun... but the setting they build, the writing and the artwork are just exquisite.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
I mean his ex-wife was literally in Cyberpunk 2077.
Grimes plays a full-borg pop star who hires the player to dig up dirt on her older lover.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
Ya especially with Europe's energy crisis coming, economic downturn, and the existing European precedent of the yellow vests and dutch farmer protests... anything anti-lockdown, but ultimately anti-government has the risk of pouring over into general international anti-technocrat class war...
but then the CIAs never been that smart with who they fund and what they choose to enable... they Ignored the Berlin wall protests and were actively shocked when communism fell at the same time they were pouring millions into funding Bin Laden to fight the soviets...
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
Because the red tribe has had no functional fight with its leadership, and developed no ways to pressure them to actually implement policies which favour them when the corporate donor class would rather not.
Its incredibly assymetric. The new deal and civil rights act have created decades worth of administrative and academic muscle to grab corporations and institutions by the throat and make them enforce left wing social norms.
ESG scores are backed through blackrock and co by the full force of the feeral reserve. You creditworthiness and stock value will drop by billions if you are insufficiently woke.
And right wingers are just now developing influencers networks and intellectuals to even notice this is happening because these tactics were so effective they killed even right wingers ability to organize for 50 years outside deep state approved National Review channels, so now everyone has to rediscover shit the John Birch society understood back in the 50s and the old right was actually organized to fight against in the 30s before FDR declared himself god empreror (actually he got SCOTUS to back down to him by threatening to just pack the courts, and made sure voters couldn't hold him accountable through aggressive FCC strongarming of any who spoke against him)
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Conservatism is a mistake.
By the time the conservative movement happened there was nothing left to conserve, the 50s were just the dying embers of the pre-new deal world the FDR had already killed. Ya you respected proffessors in the 50s, they had gotten their degrees in the 20s and 30s when actually would just be straight denied entry if you didn't know Latin. Not that you'd be failed if you didn't learn Latin, you were expected to show up at 18 practically fluent, and then start work harder than most modern professors don't even rise to doing, and you'd do that on day 1.
Of course all that had to go in 45 with the GI Bill, you can't enforce standards on uneducated war heroes...just make em read an English translation.
Every institution was degraded in this way. The modern university has the IQ required to graduate that a high school did in the early 40s.
Bank managers used to personally know everyone in town or the neighborhood, and be esteemed on par with the Doctors or Lawyers, and issue loans off his expert knowledge not only personal finance but the trustworthiness of the guy across from him... Imagine how conductive that is to building hightrust communities, and getting good actors established... fucking gone.
Everything the right valued: Community, high trust institutions, standards of excellence, opportunity matched with responsibility and consequences...
All these things had been attacked and killed or were just clinging onto life by the 50s...
A war was waged on the constitution, civilization and the idea of community itself... and "conservatives" are still sentimental that instead of fighting that war for basic decency itself, Americans went to die in France and adopted the exact same economic system as the fascists to do it.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
China's economy was on the rocks before COVID hit, then they destroyed their supply system, and now they're seriously looking at fuel, fertilizer, and food shortages in the coming year(s) due to Ukraine... major ones.
And all this right as their demographics were set to completely implode, and their housing market (the largest market of any asset in the world) had already started to collapse.
China was always attempting a long takeoff on a short runway given how poor they started and how bad the one child policy fucked them, there has been talk for decades "Will China get old before it gets rich?" (and ergo not be able to afford to care for its elderly, crashing its economy)
Seriously in 2012 at the peak of "China will replace us" hysteria, Niall Ferguson, the Harvard historian, was making documentaries about how China had so little runway and risked plummeting off the abyss if it didn't do everything exactly right, Peter Theil has also spoken extensively on this, ditto Peter Zeihan
And now we know both their engines just exploded before they could take off.
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This is has been an understood thing amongst the Chinese elite for decades... Get your money out, get your kids to western schools and then residency permits... Who knows if it could all come falling down. There's a reason they were buying millions worth of real estate in western cities they let sit empty , they wanted their money the hell out of China.
And now you can't leave.
Beijing has choked off all new permits to leave the country, has restricted removing capital even further, has some of the harshest travel restrictions that have ever existed outside orthodox communist states...
And well you either had really good plans in place and boxes checked before things went belly up, or now you're screwed.
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The CCP for the longest time acted as if its legitimacy depended on high growth rates, above 10% ideally, above 5% for sure, down to maybe 1 or 0 in an emergency... But THREE years negative!? And under those conditions, the worst years China has had since Tiananmen or probably Moa, that's when Xi Jinping just declared himself ruler for life...
There's a hell of a lot of turmoil everyone expects to Erupt in China right now... like the memes and clickbait are "China's going to collapse this month/week/hour/minute", but for decades very respected experts have been saying "You know china looks strong but it could get nasty real fast if even a fairly routine economic or geostrategic crisis hits it, they don't have a lot of wiggle room" and we've just seen the equivalent of 5 of 6 hard scenario crises hit them in rapid succession.
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Think of how scared people got with US politics in 2020 how high the temperature rose, lockdown protests, the summer of Floyd, the election, Jan 6th... Think of how many times it was "Wow that could have death spiraled really quickly"...
And then think the US is a wealthy country, that didn't lockdown that hard, could afford to just pay people not to work, the government didn't respond to protests with the need to assert their authority in the most violent way, and even the politicians openly calling each other traitors all pretty much knew they'd all of them retire with their millions.
In China politicians were being executed for partisan corruption charges well before 2019... there's basically no safety net, people die in their homes from lockdown (lack of medicine, food)... Every second there and for the past 2 years has been at a higher defcon level than those first nights of Floyd, or Jan 6 or the first week of lockdown.
Hell we don't know if one the biggest geostrategic events in history has occured, which factions are in charge of Xi, if they've already had lesser coups against eachother that were hushed up...
And that probably the main reason China's doubling down of Zero Covid, sure there's the face saving, and punishing less loyal regions, etc...
But with that much inherent instability in the air it gives the central government an excuse to already have the security state forward deployed incredibly aggressively, already be expanding the camps, already be dragging undesirables out of their homes...
Because if Xi isn't moving against lots of people and moving fast... the obvious question is who's going to move against Xi.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
Never... It'd actually be kindof interesting on the 1% this is the thing that Berlin wall's China: The western elite would either have to pivot really fast ,spin hard, or put up with the newly opened China basically being the first of the new generation of revolutionary governments who reject the technocratic class.
Same way monarchist Europe all fretted about Constitutional brittain and then America... then Brittain and the Dutch and the rest became the old guard against republican France... then all the contitutional, repulican, and remaining absolutists all tried to contain bismarkian nationalist Germany then they all were allies almost imediately after ww1 to try and contain socialism... then swung back again to contain fascism... then again to contain internationalist post-war industrialized communism...
Its very likely a chinese revolution would bring in an ideology going hard on right wing Arch-American slogans, the kind our elite loath in their own population, you see it not just in this case but the Hong Kong protests waved American revolutionary slogans, the Chinese Expat and nationalist community, especially the falun gong, is littered with major American-Patriot influence... the Taiwanese swing this way on a lot of stuff.
And right as our own elite are doubling down on treating these as hate symbols, and these sentiments as dangerous extremism... (not to mention what would be revealled if it came out every western figure China was funding or buying off, something the new revolutionaries might tweet out before any of their leaders can tell them no those are their bargaining chips)
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There's a real chance our elites would try t snuff that revolution out rather than let every ideal they ever scorned coalesce there.
They've long seen the chinese leadership as people like them or even people to be admired (remember all the glowing new york times pieces on how China was a model for how the us should run its economy back in the 2010s?)... And they'd rightly perceive that a full throated movement rejecting the CCP and the Chinese bureaucracy could easily coalesce into a wider movement rejecting them...
There's a reason the US prefers former communist countries to become failed states and only became more aggressive against Russia after it converted to capitalism and nominal democracy... young systems of governments run off ideas, and the most prominent ideas are always the ones taboo elsewhere
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
There is a profound difference between being ready to act on your axioms immediately, and being willing to merely say it.
The communists were willing to talk about reigns of terror and liquidating the borgesoise decades before they ever got close to a revolution, ditto facists, likewise neocons, likewise libertarians.
Its really normal for people with political commitments to say "Yes ideally we'd pursue this violently. No we're not doing it now, we don't think we'd win"
Pro-lifers don't do that. They don't openly suggest the day of the rope is coming for abortion doctors, they don't openly speculate about getting their hands on the medical files and tracking down every murderous woman who dared be party to killing their own child. They don't discuss this. They don't fantasize about it. They don;t hint at it.
That makes them damn fucking unique amongst political movements.
Hell My fucking mother was big into the anti-lockdown stuff and her, her friends, and the commentators they follow commonly discuss the Nurremburg precedent and the possibility of hanging everyone involved in passing or enforcing lockdowns...
Many of these same people are Pro-lifers... Damn if that's what they dream of doing over restricted movemnent, what do you think they talk about doing to people who've systematically murdered millions of children every year?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
One is reminded that The Odyssey is the story of a travelling swindler
The trickster is an archetype in all cultures
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
This logic is never applied to any other circumstance.
If someone is attempting to murder a regular child the regular american celebrates the person who violently stops them. If a mass shooter strikes the ordinary non-governmental person who runs in to shoot them is celebrated as a hero. We have an entire culture based around celebrating the idea of resistors to nazi occupation, or the british, and who actively imagines violence against a hypothetical tyrannical government ALL THE TIME.
And yet the question of guerilla violence against abortion doctors "Child murders" in this logic... is not only not done, it is not even discussed as a question except by pro-lifers saying "Look obviously you don't believe this... you aren't even willing to discuss violence"
I can even count the number of nations that have been bombed in my lifetime, and certainly can't count the number where bombings have been openly discussed by the common laymen... the number of people who have suggest the death penalty for drug dealers, or going and vigilante turning back illegal immigrants, or punching facist, or standing up to communists...or defending the enviroment... or defending your property from enviromentalists.
Talk of escalating to lethal violence is the NORM of political discussion. People regularly praise fathers who kill pedos, or mothers who go vigilante on killers of family members... or hell women who cut the dicks off of boring dates they often never even subsequently accuse of sexual assault (people will praise just literal crazy people for maiming others)
hell VIOLENCE is the logical end of all politics... that what we're discussing when we discuss politics, who we'll organize to employ violence against... do you think taxes are backed up with only letters?
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And yet the only issue where there is no talk that violence could be justified, where there is zero tough talk of escalating to lethal solutions... just so happens to be the one where its claimed millions of children are being murdered.
I've literally heard more earnest talk in my life of escalating to violence over drag queen story hour, or Milo giving a speech on campus, than I've ever heard over abortion.
Do you not find that weird!?
And then you get even to the legal state backed solutions... and there are no teeth. No one proposes charging women who get abortions with homicide (meanwhile you hear howls for blood when it comes to mother of born children who kill their kids), there's very little discussion of even charging abortion doctors... You'd think talks of the death penalty for abortion doctors would be really common given they're supposedly SERIAL MURDERERS OF CHILDREN.
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Somehow this one issue, the holocaust of millions of children, is the one issue in politics people just seem to never get overly worked up about. contrast how much violence there was over a few hundred police shootings a year... or a single "'stolen election'"... or merely being forced to use a coivd passport, and be restricted from engaging in civic life.
Did any anti-lockdown pro-lifers look at lockdowns and the the covid authoritarianism... and when a comrade compared it to Nazi Germany say to them:
"What the hell are you talking about? Medical passports? Restricted economic activity? Maybe making Quarantine camps? That's low level 1930s stuff! Regime "Doctors" murdered almost one million CHILDREN last year alone. And they did the same the year before that. AND THE YEAR BEFORE THAT! We've been at 1945 sheer moral horror EVERY YEAR OF OUR FUCKING LIVES. And you're talking about them starting to maybe make camps!? We've been living in one of the top 5 worst regimes in human history, at a perpetual midnight of horror, for 50 years!"
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No pro-lifer thinks like that. None sit around cursing the day Washington was born, that had any moment in US history changed, maybe if the British or French had held control, none of this would have happened. None sit around wondering maybe if the south, or the Kaiser, or Hitler, or Caececescu had won... maybe 1 million children wouldn't be murdered every year...almost none sit around praying for biblical judgement to destroy DC like Gomorrah or Jericho. But its exactly what their own axioms would suggest.
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
Maybe 1/3 of the crypto space is actually meaningfully tackling the problem of censorship and institutional control/blacklisting, and the remaining 2/3rds is just ponzi schemes and speculative bubbles driven by fed money.
so much of the space is just hoping that central bankers will pick their unsecure totalitarian surveillance system to be the social credit system of the future, and provide not even convivence value. A shocking amount of the space is openly hostile to the original libertarian vision of the first crypto projects and actively trying to co-opt it into the surveillance state...
The problem is: the Fed isn't interested in it. Powell and every fed official is dreaming of the day they'll leave the fed, go to work on wall street and make their billions. They have zero loyalty to central banking total state, and absolute loyalty to the jank and intermediation that keeps the current financial titan profitable and in position.
There will be no great reset, there will be social credit system... there's even shockingly little inflation and the fed seems shockingly commited to protectng the dollar... because Wall Street is the only one that can make Powell richer, and Wall street isn't giving up the intermediation that generates its fees.
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So ya expect every crypto project that doesn't actively enable drug dealing or dissent to get torpedoed by rising interest rates and the drying up of fed money
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
You'd think, but no.
Indeed there was even a joke in 2014 and series of memes "Based in What!?" that had some clueless character insistently asking the question, with the joke being the audience should know its freebased crack. Though you're right most people don't know it and its obscure enough (freebasing) that The crack reference is rediscovered and reinterpreted into the culture of the term fairly regularly.
But because its always being rediscovered, the term is never able to memetically diverge from that meaning
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
a deep dive into the linguistic history of internet slang and its political implications.
My first foray into the linguistics of politics since Alex Jones Wordsmith
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
Ya Theil will basically have his own private senator if masters wins... which we'd expect anyway, given Masters was the one who wrote his book
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
I was hearing about how the entire system was going to fail from deficits, inflation, and the demographic collapse of social security since 2008 when i was still in Gradeschool.
The centrality of the looming death of Social Security and medicare under the boomer's mass retirement has been a fiscal hawk talking point forever.
David Stockman, Regan's Budget manager, has been talking about almost nothing else since the mid-90s. This is also a perennial obsession of anyone related to Austrian economics. Anyone who's work appears at Zero hedge... this a founding narrative of the modern American economic right... and the timeline has not changed like other doom predictions, though several tried to suggest the market wold correct early in anticipation and a lot of people lost money gold speculating that inflation would suddenly hit in like 2012-2014...
But the narrative arc and the timeline of when social security and the empire would collapse under demographic and fiscal weight... that's always been late 2020s early 2030s and maybe a bit sooner if the market notices the gravity kicking in
Suspending basic freedom of assembly, bodily autonomy, and travel for 2 years is the biggest things western governments have all done since conscriptions, mass internments, and human experimentations (look up what they did to conscientious objectors) that characterized the world wars.
We SHOULD hate each other over this. This SHOULD poison our every attempt at discussion. This SHOULD divide us so thoroughly our grandkids look at each other as subhuman, the way the grandkids of the various factions in the 60s look at each other today.
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