The last 20 years of American history can be summarized by car size getting smaller after 9/11 due to rising gas prices. Then the domestication of the hummer because gas guzzling became a symbol of defiance against the A-rabs. Then the giant SUVs also getting steadily smaller due to even higher gas prices. Then finally settling on re-hummerization of cars by convincing people they need a giant pickup truck to haul a 2x4 from the hardware store for their weekend projects.
Then maybe they shouldn’t own an animal capable of maiming or killing people.
Wow it would really suck if “Russia” nuked a US city right now. A city like NYC that is the old center of financial power. It’s not like there’s a new order in California of fintech ready to replace it should it fall. It would just be so surprising if a US city was nuked. Then continuity of government kicked in, a hapless senile President was retired and the private-public partnership military industry took over. Surely nobody is planning on retooling the US government as a major power against China and haven for the wealthy during climate wars.
Anyways. We gotta get that Putin guy, he has nukes.
This. When these things fail as factory workers he’s going to spin it off into sex robots. There will be a culture around them like there is Tesla. Jordon Peterson will be there to expound the virtues of young men safely and morally work out their libidinal energies on the machines. They’ll push it as a men’s right issue to tap the incel bazingas directly.
Bioshock Infinite.
The city of Columbia was built as a haven for the ruling class of 1800s America. Complete with a white underclass and, of course, slaves. It was built by a scientist who discovered a new technology and was to serve as a floating World’s Fair showing the world how great and advanced America is. Pretty okay premise if done right. Many opportunities to talk about real history and draw comparisons to today. The city is politically divided among several factions, which isn’t a fleshed out mechanic in the game due to development issues. But you have a cult that worships John Wilkes Booth and hates Lincoln for ending slavery. You have people who are hyper religious and treat the Founders as religious prophets. You have normal upper middle-class people who are tuned out to the politics. You also have the revolutionary group Vox Populi who are trying to overthrow Columbia’s government and install actual democracy. Again, some great ideas in there for good stories based in real history. But then somewhere towards the end of the game it makes the Vox Populi just as bad as the imperialist, racists, sexists, zealots. When you start the game there is a couple being physically abused for miscegenation, in front of a cheering crowd. Yet the black lady trying to stop it is bad because her and other workers killed some cops and are pushing the middle class white people out of the city. It’s total “both extremes are really the same” kind of thing. And to make the revolutionary leader bad they write her to kill a baby or something? It’s been a while I can’t remember if she tries to kill Elizabeth or just Comstock. She was also going to use Columbia’s weapons and invade NYC to liberate people on land too. But that’s bad because NYC in the late 1800s/early 1900s was good.
Some people might bring up the development troubles as a reason the story got so simplified into horseshoe theory. But there are early gameplay videos from before the troubles started that show Vox Populi implying they want to sexually assault Elizabeth. So they meant for them to be bad from the beginning. The only real thing that was different was that Comstock was supposed to me more nuanced. So the people’s revolution of communists were pretty much always a political cartoon and they had to jam the right wing factions into one guy. Instead of getting the subtleties of “cleanse all the immigrants” from many different factions, we get it from one guy. Thanks 2k/Irrational.
Ken Levine is a fucking hack and always has been. Keep him away from games.
Star Wars was a product. Think of all the Star Wars that never got made because no studio would pick them up. Think about the vastness of human experience and commentary that exits outside of white guys in Hollywood, CA in the 1970s/80s. You’re thinking too narrow. There could have been much more and overt anti-imperialist films being made and Star Wars would have been one thing in hundreds or thousands. The fact that it was a brand meant it had to be reinforced in culture and continued to keep churning profits. Thus it was further embedded in the mythology of Hollywood. Plus they were fine with making an anti-imperialist movie because Americans never saw themselves as the Empire. It was modeled after Nazis. Anti-imperialism was fine a long time ago in the US because it specifically meant anti-European imperial powers. The US wanted to cement US capitalism as the world order. JFK was all about anti-imperialism. Though we all know that American capitalism is just another form of imperialism, liberals don’t. The average person doesn’t.
Star Wars is not anti-imperialist because the movie had rebels fighting an evil empire. It’s a product of empire. You can’t separate it being a product of empire from the story or plot or message or whatever else. The idea that Star Wars planted a seed of anti-imperialism and therefore that’s why people are leftists now is pretty immaterial. Don’t get lost in idealism. People were anti-imperial before Star Wars but for different reasons than you think (as I said above) and people were anti-war because they could be drafted. Then, after Star Wars came out, Americans very much became okay with being the Empire. In fact they doubled down on it right around the time the Prequel Trilogy came out. Revenge of the Sith came out in 2005, during the height of Americans wanting to crush the rebels for blowing up their towers.
Movies are downstream from politics, not the other way around.
If it weren’t for copyright these things wouldn’t be major cultural signifiers.
Seriously, Oregon was created as a white-only state. Oregon and Portland was historically racist and bad place. Then in the 00s it became hip to live there so everyone moved there from California and there was a lot of gentrification. Probably for a decade now the city has street fights between antifa and chuds. The Pacific Northwest of the US has lots of white nationalists and anti-state right wing extremists. There have been literal terrorist training camps there. Huge part of the militia movement in the 80s and 90s. Portland is this very liberal place surrounded by lots of chuds.
Yes. Steve Buscemi is good. It has a lot of the 1920s corruption and vice. Tons of historical eastereggs.
It’s a period piece obviously so a lot is not technically eastereggs but just plot. Like how Margaret gets a pamphlet by Margaret Sanger, about how to do birth control by douching with Lysol after sex. Then later Margaret is confronted with a woman who has a miscarriage. She had drank ecoli-infested milk to induce an abortion. Her husband kept assaulting her and she had no choice as they already had several kids. That’s based on a real woman who drank ecoli milk by mistake and had a miscarriage. That’s what partly inspired Sanger to get into reproduction rights. So the show takes real stuff and integrates it into the plot, like any historical piece does.
There’s also cameos and brief shots of stuff that are more subtle. Gaston Means shows up in S3. There’s tons of Irish Republican stuff and the war with England. Black and Tans, all of that. There’s also a bit about Cuba under Machado. Tons of stuff.
The pit just got 10ft deeper.