Nuclear Monster

  • Christinne Muschi:

    Nine asylum-seekers, including four children, barely made it across the Canadian border on Friday as a U.S. border patrol officer tried to stop them and a Reuters photographer captured the scene.

    As a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer seized their passports and questioned a man in the front passenger seat of a taxi that had pulled up to the border in Champlain, New York, four adults and four young children fled the cab and ran to Royal Canadian Mounted Police on the other side.

    The photos and story in this article are some of the most depressing scenes I’ve ever seen. 

    The background for the Sudanese refugees is that their nation has been in an unending civil war since 1955. That these people can’t find refuge in the United States is truly awful.

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkslF3X5YY0

    Games with pieces in them similar to tetrominoes aren’t usually my thing. I like them stacked up at a similar height until they’re removed. Wacky tetrominoes that don’t clear lines or have wacky physics applied to them are even worse. You think you’re better than Alexey Pajitnov? Nah, keep trying.

    Robots In The Wild, from Heatbox Games, is a kind of spin on Rampart’s strategy. Instead of overhead castle building, you’re playing the side-game. Building up structures out of tetrominoes to survive and fight back. Different combinations of tetrominoes turn into energy robots, or laser shooting robots, or lanterns for night missions, and so on. Keep the heart of your base alive for multiple nights and you’re on to the next planet with a new twist.

    The whole intro sequence involves the menu talking. A talking menu. Like Talkie the Toaster but without the aggravation.

    I’ve played a bit of it, and enjoyed what I’ve played so far, but not enough to give it a full review yet. It’s one of the few games that aren’t Tetris and uses those tetrominoes well.

    Robots In The Wild is in Steam‘s Early Access program now for a tenner on Windows and macOS.

  • Roger Waters’ politics are his music, and that looks like it won’t change a bit in his next album, Is This The Life We Really Want, which was announced today as coming soon with the teaser video above. He’s also touring in the US again.

    There’s a good interview with him on a recent episode of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast.

    Decades ago I saw Waters in concert, and his Radio Waves solo album is one of my favorites. Can’t wait for this.

  • Jacob Clifton writing about the recently publicized (on the WSJ) anti-semetic videos from Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg:

    With a celebrity like Kjellberg, it also invokes the idea that, if being a “fan” is part of your identity, any questioning of him is an indictment of you on at least two levels: both as a heroic independent thinker, and as a man with refined enough tastes to like the thing that you like. An exploration of your culture, whether that’s video games or YouTubers or white supremacy, is absolutely an attack on you, from an angle you’re no more likely to see than you are the back of your own head.

    The title of the article was “PewDiePie Isn’t a Monster, He’s Someone You Know” before it was edited to “The Downfall Of YouTube’s Biggest Star Is A Symptom Of A Bigger Illness.” I suffer from the same syndrome of changing headlines, but I believe the first title was more appropriate.

    There’s a combination of a 27-year-old with money and fame, and a regular theme from gaming culture online that it is standard and expected to say bad things and prove how little you care, that created this. It’s the smug attitude you might expect if you picture a late-90s hacker, or all of the communities on reddit, 4chan, IRC networks, and elsewhere that celebrate hate as a matter of course.

    They will be up-in-arms at every attack on PewDiePie and their right to be assholes. I left one of my favorite gaming communities on IRC when it turned into a place where anti-semetic, racist, and homophobic views couldn’t be questioned. My hope came from the others that left first when we met up again in another online place.

    Clifton:

    Are they monsters? No. But you use the “monsters” to keep yourself from recognizing this about them, to avoid talking to them about it, to keep from opening the can and seeing what’s inside. You’d prefer to wait, and hope that the endpoint of the story in his case is something different. Violence, hatred, and organized activity are for the ones other people associate with, not the ones you know and love.

    PewDiePie’s response, besides deleting the videos with anti-semetic messages, is that the reporters are to blame. He spends the first few minutes of the video explaining that because he’s rich, and he pushes back on “the media,” that’s why, he says, they highlighted his anti-semetic videos.

    During the video Kjellberg says he’s sorry that although some people thought what he did was funny, others didn’t think like his jokes. His joke was hiring people to hold up a sign that says “Death to all jews.” It’s the kind of apology that a teacher would describe as “Not good enough.”

    Kjellberg also complains in the response video that it’s a generational gap that makes people not understand his not-at-all-funny anti-semetic jokes.

    Finally, Kjellberg ends the video by thanking the people that support him and flipping off the camera with a sarcastic “Thanks, Wall Street Journal.”

    Kjellberg is not a monster, he’s not sorry, and he will continue to receive advertising dollars from every video he puts up. Google’s YouTube business will still get paid, as well, they only removed ads from some of his videos before but declined to remove them from YouTube. If he had actually made a sincere apology, I wouldn’t have a problem with him continuing, but without that he has emboldened his fans to make their own anti-semetic jokes and nothing has changed.

  • During Trump’s 77 minute tirade on fake news about the illegal leaks that didn’t happen and definitely weren’t why he fired Mike Flynn, he happened to drop this bomb. All those hours in Fallouts 1, 2, 3,  New Vegas, and 4, are going to come in handy.