domain:houseofstrauss.com?page=1
TwiceHuman
4m ago
There used to be no moderation. I thought the world had gone insane first time I heard of a police visit due to an online threat (I think this was Runescape, 2016). Calling people faggot is nothing, you could SYN flood a stupid kids server and demand 20$ for him to stop. You could sexually harass children. You could doxx people. I remember a guy who tried to get himself temp-banned on Runescape, and the things he wrote would get him arrested today, and he only got a warning after a day of harassment efforts (this was 08 or 09). I don't remember meeting power-tripping moderators (with rare exceptions) before like 2014, and not before 2016 did I meet people who supported attacks on freedom.
We complained about monetization since DLCs started, and DLCs aren't even considered predatory anymore. I'm partly immune to the "burning frog" thing, so you may imagine how I feel about gaming now. Anyway, they might not care about a little wokeness, but the characters aren't attractive anymore, and some people are getting banned for just playing normally (Writing GG in the chat, picking specific characters in Overwatch, Japanese players yelling "Nigeru" in Apex). Many MTG cards are also being removed, disrupting gameplay. Even naive friends of mine who are not into politics and who still thinks that LGBTQ is about accepting people for who they are, are frequently confused or annoyed by down-stream consequences of wokeness (and the more abstract tendency of companies taking control away from users). Tekken-like games are being toned down to be less bloody and less sexy too. Some people notice this. There's also the "You can't hurt children in Skyrim" thing. Game lore, characters, textures, etc. are being changed/censored/removed retroactively to comply with the current moral norm, and many people are upset when they notice.
I guess that current children, who grew up with what we have now, have much lower standards, and that they don't care very much. I'd say that people older than perhaps 25 generally dislikes DEI and its consequences.
ABigGuy4U
5m ago
They used to buy those games. But increasingly “woke” games are now associated with fundamentally broken or derivative technical/design aspects and are starting to flop. For example:
-Concord: a game you have to pay 60 dollars for that’s worse than a free game that came out 10 years ago
-Star Wars Outlaws: broken AI and particle effects that look like they came out out of a 1996 Tomb Raider game.
-Assassin’s Creed Shadows: the 400th derivative remake of the first Assassin’s Creed game from 2007.
There are exceptions, like Baulder’s Gate which was pretty woke and had solid underlying mechanics, but increasingly AAA games are just a garbage fire of slop.
hydroacetylene
6m ago
After all, there are roughly 2 billion people from high-average IQ populations like whites, east Asians where people with an IQ of 120 are likely to become devs. Only cca 500 million of these live in countries where woke is the official culture.
Is that true? Europe is 500 million, Japan+Korea combined is about 200 million. Brahmins roughly similar, we can probably guesstimate another 500 million whites and Asians in the western hemisphere. Arab Christians are about 15 million, add African whites to get to 20 million, and Russia is about 1/3 Muslim 2/3 Christian- if we assume all Russian Christians belong to high IQ groups(and most of them are ethnic Russians so this is probably close enough for government work) that’s 100 million. Add Oceania and the Ashkenazim. So we’re at 1.5 billion before we account for China, which might be lying about either its population size or its IQ scores, but we can probably say at least another billion at an average similar to other East Asian countries. That’s 2.5 billion before we start trying to chase down every Tutsi and Igbo and Yakut, but there’s so few of them that it doesn’t matter very much.
Of those, woke is the official culture for the western hemisphere(hate to break it to you, but Latin American elites are not based, although some of them are racist and woke on every other issue), plus most of Western Europe(Italy and Austria seemingly the only partial exceptions) and Oceania. This is probably closer to a billion out of 2.5 billion than than .5 billion.
Japan at least is already over represented in game design.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
17m ago
I have noticed that with a lot of games with publishers, I assume it's a lack of communication. Square Enix are particularly odd about it - a game like actraiser renaissance or trials of mana you can get on android for $15 cheaper than steam, but the ff pixel remasters cost the same on both platforms and then you get paranormasight, which is more expensive on android than steam.
I grabbed a copy of dune on android, it seems like a straight port so why not?
hydroacetylene
19m ago
Notably, this thesis has to account for a control group- Roman Catholic seminaries.
Seminaries are generally agreed, by everyone with actual knowledge of the situation on the ground, to sit well to the left of their median graduate. The most basic available course of study is a non-watered down masters degree and doctorates are common, so we can assume human capital is at least semi-elite. Seminary professors and rectors enjoy much more respect among the student body than is the norm at universities and there are no TA’s. It’s also a totalizing, residential institution which heavily restricts student’s internet access and reading material and doesn’t allow phones. Yet new priests grow steadily more conservative over time.
The actual difference, I think, is that the Catholic right is good at appealing to high human capital and other right wingers are not.
Spookykou
21m ago
This seems exactly backwards. Solo indie devs with shitty art assets and buggy code are over night millionaires if they actually have a cool game idea, on the flip side, AAA games with polished performance and graphics flop left and right because the fundamental game play is shit.
HalloweenSnarry
26m ago
I admit, I don't know that much about boxing, but the boxers of old probably drank more or something. For musicians, surely you're aware of how endemic coke and heroin could be--drugs can keep one going during long concerts and take some of the strain off of hard touring schedules.
mrvanillasky
26m ago
ok neoeraction, transhumanism, ea, rationalism and PUA are the most important ideas we have seen so far in terms of their impact, the solutions they offer and number plus quality of arguments. PUA was the best in terms of solutions since it completely solves the entire issue it aims to solve and NRx is the best in terms of understanding the actual problem.
It all starts with Moldbug, he began reading older econ stuff and you go from mises to hayek, freidmand, rothbard and finally hoppe, each getting slightly more conservative with hoppe straight up being anti democracy. After that he read more reactionary literature and came up with what we noe call NRx or neoreaction. A neoreactionary does not a total retvrn like a reactionary but has simialr vlaues, instead he wants a new way of governance. He would jot this down on his old blog, unqualified reservations and wrote quite a bit up until early 2010s. His primary ideas were that of the cathedral, that we have a church today and it has its sacred cows, its priests. Leftism is decentralised, where one is in a feedback loop, as priests keep purity spiraling, the feedback loop gets stronger. The idea that its "the jews" behind everything gets discarded once you read him. We trace the rot back to Martin Luther who removes the clergy, protestanism happens, purtians come up in england, they get exiled to the US, the french revolution happens and we get full fledged communism which is followe by bioleninism. One thing to note is that Moldbug is not good with soltutions, no one in NRx is since this is the hardest problem to solve. He does suggest you how having a CEO king but he is NRx marx, great anaylsis, no good solutions.
Nick Land was a competent british philsophy professor at the famed CCRU and worked on accelerationism, the idea that techno capital will advance to the point where it consumes humanity. "Nothing human makes it out of the near future". He was a marxist in his early days and slowly had been progressing towards different view points, moldbugs writing kicsk off the next part of our cannon in Nick lands work on the dark enlightenment and xenosystems, he fleshes out some ideas better and even talks about urban planning in one of his posts. Land hoever is always remebered by his accelratioanist work, somehow quoted the least in terms of the first three people mentioned. I have not read him much at all so will have a different answer later I presume.
Spandrell is the third, a euro not from the anglosphere, Spandrell is more evo anthropology than history or philosophy. His main idea is bioleninism, how groups that are of lower HBD will bond stronger than higher HBD group, a universal phenomenon traced back to Lenin who gave status exclusively to outcasts as they are inherently more loyal as people who are better off genetically or socially will never have the same incentives. The cat lady at the DNC who is obese, single and has mental issues will be far more loyal than Handsome McSmarty pants with a loving family as the latter will do well in any world but former needs leftism to stay in power to be high status. Spandrells main concern is Human Bio Capital, his last two essays I mentioned give you a good idea as to why we need a schelling point to pay lip service to but how unstable that ultimately is.
You also had fosetti and plenty of other people, they are mentioned by Alf below.
Post NRx. They can also be called simply reactioanries or Rx people, simply put their ideal world indeed goes back to the past and the main node here is a man named Jim Donald. Jim came up during the PUA heyday and talked about how women should be property, how every scripture and culture on the planet says so and how spandrell is right to point out that every sine place that is not poor and has female emancipation witnesses colapsing birth rates. Yarvin would want a CEO King whereas these people actually want a real king of sorts. Not better in terms of solutions, they cover other areas that the above three did not. Jim blog (blog.reaction.la) is quite vast, he has been blogging actively for decades so his memes are better understood by two different guys who came up during similar times though Alf is older than Aidan.
Alfs motive is to give you a crash course in NRx and post NRx thought. For him, Jim being a christian and acknowledging what people call the WQ or the woman question are two important factors. Alf offers no epxlicit inisght of his own and his work titled truthinaworldoflies is an afternoons reading that anyone who is a dissident can pick up to get a good idea of the reactionary ideas around at this time.
Aidans work is more spiritual, a 101 to Rx instead of just NRx, whilst Alf is a reluctant christian who wants people to be religious so that they cooperate, Aidan is more sincere in his faith as hid understanding of the world and thigns around him is more spiritual and liberal artsy. Aidans work is in the same line as Alf but more expansive, easier to read and just as dense. His solutions again surprise surprise are wait for ceaser or become ceaser or now to help trump out. His new blog is chevauchee.substack.com and twitter under the name chevaucheen. Aidan is an amerikaner, unlike alf who is likely dutch. Aidan has great posts about why nationalism is bad, why romantic love is not a correct ideal and most importantly how the warrior caste needs to rise up and get people to cooperate or else the priestly caste will keep purity spiraling even in a reactionary utopia. Aidan offers far more insight than I expected him to. He even gives a good writeup against abortion.
How to start
- if you are a total normie progressive, start with Moldbug, anyone else will put the progressive in question off. So an open letter to an open minded progressive is the most recommended book in this sphere for a reason, not just because it establishes the issues we have of having a decentralised leftist world where they have won in broad strokes since the beginning of the reforms
- if you are a normie con who is slightly redpilled on some issues but lack times then you should start off with Alfs archive truthinaworldoflies which is a good reading of where we are and how we got here
- for anyone who is into HBD already, spandrell is the default for very obvious reasons. Spandrell btw also gives a reason as to why just being aware of HBD is not enough in his essays I mentioned.
- groypers, yes I am making a recommendation for the fans of nick fuentes too, I would suggest aidan.
Ideas
- people are unequal, the church needs you to believe in the opposite of this as much as a catholic needs you to believe in the divinity of christ. establishign HBD is the bare minimum.
- democracy wont work because people are not stupid about entryism. Nick Fuentes grand plan was entryism and it is a real time demonstration of it failing. Vance is not your CEO King, in fact most people in tech are not and will not be given the likelehood of them having deep ties with intelligence agencies. Thiel or Musk are less likely than Vance too and that is saying a lot
- you need people to cooperate on a societal level, this is a big idea, it explains religion, why feudal federal structures work and why centralisation of power is a lefty force, something aidan expands upon
- everything popular is religious, just not the religion you like, consume as little as possible and stay away from people who suggest violence as a solution, they are feds in 100 percent cases, especially in the US
what to do
- redpill yourself and others with actual memes, not culture war hot takes, steve johnson or curtis yarvin spoke in a manner that was very polite, it worked for a reason. yarvin is the ideal starting point.
- git gud, git rich, be high status. this is normie advice but super important. Yarvin was CS prodigy, Land was top tier academic. If you are not a priest, at least you can survive and help others, more importantly yourself out. Thiel to his credit has funded plenty.
- cold approach girls, select for good genes, dont fall for "love" unless you are in high school
- do not play the villain. People want you to, there is nothing based about screaming profanities and attacking sacred cows if you are weak and attract attention
- on the git gud part, you can start more internet communities like themotte and just keep them honest. The main issue with hestia and NRx from the mid 2010s was that the original ideas got exhausted, having a ratioanlist space that is tolerant of hbd is far more effective than having an out and out dissident space.
- live in a big city. Do not retreat to small towns or suburbia, I am stuck here due to my own stupidity and have to move out. The advice given out by many is to move to the country which is just hilarious.
Alfs archive is a 101 to how we got here but to build a rock solid understanding, you would need to supplement this with actual courses in logic, epistemology, ethics, basic econ for starters. I lack all these and am not as confident, so laying out stuff I will need. Having a good understaning of reality, why others get it wrong is very hard, to go beyond that for solutions is even harder but this is a good enough cannon to start off with.
We are in a mini thermidor and the world will only move leftwards. The only way forward is with a new religion, it can be progresivism but with HBD and embryo selection or it can be vedic hinduism where the swiss alps are seen as divine abode of Shiva, but the current lefty worldview cannot survive without an alternative. The priestly caste needs ideas for the warrior caste to come fight for and then later justify everything. MAGA is not it, it never was it and it wont be it. Even MAGAs detractors on the right are not far off from what VDARE and co said 20 years ago.
The only real solution besides entryism is to have an even better understanding of the world and finally find a direction, none of these people mentioned ever found a way out that worked, in fact none of the ideas I mentioned ever found a true solution besides PUA.
Short Tangent (optional)
PUA inside a small subset solved the WQ. The only real solution to the WQ according to reactionaries is arranged marriages or shotgun marriages but we cannot have that since we on the right are losers, objectively. If we are already low status, how can we at least in the meantime ensure that we can fix some parts of our lives so that our genes get breathing time, enter cold approach. PUA actually solved what it set out to solve. You are an above average guy fed up of not getting the girl/girls you want, that is how we all started. Women want status, but how do you become "alpha", the answer is by getting status from pickup. Having other girls like you is a very strong signal of status, a man who has nothing but just does will do just fine mating wise. Once you go out enough, you figure out the terrain of what mating looks like and the pointers given to you act like checkmarks that represnet the actual behavior of a world class lothario. It gives a real time understanding of social dynamics and having people like you for who you are is always fun. I learnt about PUA because of themotte which now hates PUA for reasons that i dont think are super well thought out.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
26m ago
Still thinking about which engine to use. Are you tired of this topic yet? I am.
I had a bit of a thought.
- My main objection to Stride and Godot (and by extension Redot) is that they're buggy and poorly documented and support is often unhelpful. They're decent when they work, but too often they don't and it takes too much time and energy to figure out why.
- My main objection to Unity is that I'm not confident in its future development. Even with the recent issues concerning the pricing model having been laid to rest, Unity suffers from the company that manages it seemingly seeing it as a vehicle for advertisement, and its main target user base being mobile developers. Not exactly what I'm doing.
- All this switching engines has strongly reaffirmed my commitment to a maximally strict separation of my model from the engine, as explained last week.
- So there's nothing really stopping me from returning to Unity so long as I strongly separate the model from the engine so that if Unity does become unusable or intolerable in the future, a switch to another engine is as easy as possible.
All of this assumes C# scripting for easy migration, of course. So Unreal is right out.
From that thought onward, I considered my existing Unity codebase. There's a lot in there, ready to use, but it follows the old design doctrine of "everything is physical first, abstract second", which is of course the opposite of what I have discovered myself wanting. So even if I do return to Unity, it will take a lot of work to reshape the old code to conform to my new view, plus hanging into into the framework I build in Godot. I should think carefully about how to approach all this so as to achieve a good result without having to redo it several times over.
All that said, I'm strongly considering going for Unreal after all. It's been a pain so far, but for all the effort required to get anything done in Unreal, I am at least confident that the it will bear fruit at some point because the Engine is doubtless capable and not possibly-actually-broken like the others are in many respects. And unlike Unity, I needn't worry about its future nearly as much. That said, my two big pain points are of course C++, but maybe I just need to live with that language and its abominable two-files-per-class structure, and the fact that I won't be able to migrate over any of my old code.
So to recap: More thinking, still no coding.
And thanks for keeping this up. It prevents me from getting distracted entirely. Not like I'm getting much done either way, but this way I'm at least forcing myself to consider the issue regularly. There's hope yet. Please don't stop pinging me.
HalloweenSnarry
31m ago
It's to point out you don't get good at anything working on a single project for 10 years.
I'm pointing out that these game developers racked up feedback on their products at a much faster pace than game devs today who slave away on a single mediocre arena shooter for Sony for 10 years straight.
I dunno, Dwarf Fortress and UnReal World (no relation to the FPS series) suggest that forever projects can produce quality. The problem with Concord has less to do with Duke Nukem Forever Syndrome and more to do with "not reading the room" (i.e. the market: any corporation who shoved out a hero shooter with bland characters in an oversaturated market would have gotten egg on their face regardless of dev time, budget, or name branding).
And nowadays, you can slave away at a project for a good long time and get valuable feedback along the way: it's called Early Access. Even games that aren't on Steam can take advantage of this paradigm (again, see also: Itch. A good example would be the indie horror sandbox Voices of the Void, which has been worked on by a single dev and a couple of artists for a number of years, supported mainly by Patreon subscriptions).
Spookykou
32m ago
Hogwarts Legacy. Is this a woke title?
Yes, JK Rowling is very progressive, and only differs from woke orthodoxy along a single axis.
I recall there was a furore around the announcement trailer because one of the main characters was a 'girlboss' in WW2.
LoL's character design branched out from big titty anime girls years ago, but are a handful of 'diverse' characters enough to deem it woke?
Rainbow Six Siege has get some shit recently because of a character in a wheelchair, and I believe the much criticized recent 2B design was a skin from that game. But again this is just a handful of characters available.
Yes, all of these seem like central examples of the kinds of things people are complaining about when they complain about woke in video games.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
32m ago
Hey gang haven't been crossposting my stuff here as much recently, let me know if you'd like me do that more....
Yes.
hydroacetylene
32m ago
Well yeah, and my understanding is that Japan, Poland, etc are a lot less woke.
some
37m ago
Are you implying that a Christian would perceive Holywood movies as "perfectly neutral"? Because from my understanding of US Christians, they would think a more accurate analogy would be between political movies with politics you like, but cut off from major funding vs political movies with politics you hate, but with budgets in the nine digits.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
39m ago
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
40m ago
I think the idea is that relatively little of the 75% of discretionary spending by women is being captured by games while a lot of the 25% of discretionary spending controlled by men is captured by games. This makes appealing to women relatively more attractive as a vector for making money. You don't need to convert as many of them as you do men for a similar payoff, which in theory should be easier.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
40m ago
Boid simulation in Redot
Short entry for today. I dusted my old code and adapted it to Redot's compute shader, and even managed to fix a bug that stumped me the last time I was working on this project. I was hoping I'd have enough time to clean up the code, upload to github, and show off the results, but today was a brutal day, so the github repo, and a more elaborate description of what I managed to get done will have to wait until tomorrow.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
42m ago
Reversed stupidity is still not intelligence.
Since you don’t play games, let’s talk movies. Assume you have to choose between a perfectly neutral film and one that flatters your politics. How much is that flattery actually worth?
We don’t really have to imagine this, because the Christian film market exists. They’re still trying to tell compelling, entertaining stories, but they’re doing it without the talent, funding, or awareness advantages of Hollywood. As a result, they are generally worse on technical and social metrics. The audience is there because they think the messaging is laudable.
soy-type politics
Come on, now.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
43m ago
Precisely! I mean, there's no point in empowering chumps who don't spend money, right? A business genius looks at that situation and says "women spend money like crazy, but vidya is male dominated! If we could only get women to buy our wire monkey of masculine development we'd be rolling in dough! I know, let's paint it pink!"
roystgnr
50m ago
Fries with garlic salt + fresh chopped parsley don't really need anything else to dip in, IMHO. Add black pepper and/or ground chili pepper too to taste.
The parsley might not stick well to air-fried less-oily fries, though. That could take some experimentation. Maybe just a little vinegar first?
TowardsPanna
1hr ago
Uh what. Women already control 75% of discretionary spending, and the encouragement is to... empower women?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
…yes and no.
Devs are overworked, underpaid, and lack creative control. Yes. They are politically oblivious, subject to the whims and aesthetics of their MBA-wielding superiors. Yes.
But these are not a consequence of anti-expert sentiment. The door isn’t open for everyone. Those managerial nobles and HR legions were invited in thanks to the iron law of scaling: comparative advantage. Time spent managing is time not spent on interesting technical problems. Most of the senior devs I know, socially competent or not, are much more interested in the latter. So they hire their counterparts who, technically competent or not, prefer to manage.
Cartelization doesn’t help. Every hour spent on management or marketing or compliance or HR or accounting or basket-weaving is an hour not spent on the core technical task. If you need them all you have to hire more manpower. That’s more expensive with constricted supply.
The smaller studios of the 90s just had fewer non-core tasks. You don’t need a manufacturing specialist when your whole production line is one CD burner.
Supah_Schmendrick
1hr ago
But it's weird to me that the video game industry is so woke considering that the user base is so anti-woke. Why aren't there anti-woke game publishers?
(1) Ethan Strauss's "Undecided Whale" effect: The majority of money spent on AAA videogames is spent by young men. However, women control far more total discretionary spending than men overall, and can be spurred to spend on some games. Therefore, there's a significant incentive for executives looking to expand their sales figures to try and appeal to women, which given the recent massive leftward political shift of young women, often results in the insertion of hamfisted political messaging.
(2) Overrepresentation of Trans and other sexuality/subculture minorities in STEM. This one isn't complicated; transwomen, furries, and other nerds with odd subcultural affiliations around gender and sexuality are overrepresented in programming and among the type of monomanaically-focused near-autist who are more likely to go into intense knowledge-work professions like game design and creation. Thus, they're perfectly positioned to influence products from within.
(3) Standard labor law and NGO pressure-group tactics. See Hanania and Rufo.
But it's so... outdated and sexist! How can modern audiences relate to Dumas' female characters if they aren't brought up to date and empowered?
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