Founder of Glass Bottom Games comments on LEGO Universe’s failure
If kids occasionally seeing a penis or two is enough to get your multiuser environment sued out of existence, then I don’t understand how the city of San Francisco is still a thing.
@endecision But we legit saw a dong lying in the streets of San Fran, tho.
In Finland we have this thing called the sauna, ensuring that by the age of 18 a sufficient majority of the population is conditioned to not be shocked over the possibility of kids seeing penises, by themselves having seen enough penises to consider it a perfectly normal feature of human morphological diversity. Melanin, on the other hand, is what they get quite perturbed by.
#sometimes i need a euro pride tag
… I feel like, given the last sentence of your comment, that wouldn’t turn out quite the way you wanted it…
My brain thinks Europe is basically good with some tragic flaws, and individual countries are basically evil with some redeeming features (except Iceland, which is cool). Europe means high-speed rail, dense cities, bicycles and trams, wine in grocery stores, social liberalism, a reasonable attitude towards sex and nudity, legal drugs, open borders etc.; while Finland is a bureaucratic corporatist shithole, Germany wants to build a fourth reich for its banks, and Sweden pretends to be left-liberal while hating drug users, sex workers, and other marginalized people.
Thus, when something good happens on the western peninsula of the Eurasian continent, it’s a european thing, while bad things are national. In the US it’s the opposite: San Francisco is basically good, but America is basically evil. Ingroup-outgroup mechanics are weird.
Weird, San Francisco and is mostly just a lawful-evil-government-reigning-over-people-of-a-mix-of-alignments thing to me. (99% because of zoning laws and not-in-my-backyard-issues. My brain labels most categories of SF residents–gay people, techie entrepreneurs, both the populations who are getting gentrified and the ones who are doing the gentrifying (because really, neither one of them is at fault for conflicts over neighborhoods) as neutral good.) America in general, on the other hand, is something I view somewhat positively.
Maybe it’s because I live closer to San Francisco, so I have more room to view it as a multifaceted place? My views of most European countries are not very complex (there’s the “tourist view,” “politics and economics view,” and “people I know who come from there view,” and I use the 3rd one much more often than either of the first 2.)
Also, we have wine in grocery stores in the US too. I’m not sure how you got under the impression that it’s a Europe thing, but it’s not. I’m sure the wine in European grocery stores is better though, because everything in your grocery stores is better.
Well, the government is definitely lawful evil, but the culture and society aren’t. The government is usually Outgroup anyway to me.
I should elaborate more on the tribal mechanisms later, but basically Europe as an idea is U-tribe while America feels like R-tribe. (I’m using U and R for a pattern of archetypes that seems to occur very consistently; in the US they roughly correspond to “blue” and “red” as known in the diaspora, while in Finland they’re called “red-green” and “blue-white”) The R-tribers around here are usually anti-european-integration nationalists whom I associate with their respective countries, while eurofederalists are extremely U. San Francisco is the most U-tribey place I’ve been to, and I’m very U-tribey so it’s Ingroup. Federal flags are rare and seem timid, as if apologizing for their existence, and national flags are R-tribe. U-tribers in Europe feel united across national borders; Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin etc. are closer to each other than they are to the areas inhabited by nationalistic conservative R-tribers in their respective countries.
Wine in grocery stores happens in the US as well as the civilized countries of continental europe, but it doesn’t happen in Finland, so it feels like a european thing.
Cognitively I’m in favor of many american ideals, like immigration, “land of actually existing opportunity for people like me”, somali refugees not being a thoroughly marginalized underclass, and not having the government regulate the opening hours of grocery stores; but as U-associated ideas they emotionally feel like “europe done right” (that’s why my brain currently thinks SF is Best Europe and the border between the continents is somewhere north of San Mateo) while the US is very strongly R-associated (surveillance, violent policing, racism, wars) because the european media reports on those things instead of the weird feeling of liberation I get from being in SF. And cognitively european institutions are very problematic, but in Finland the typically presented choice of narratives is that one is either a nationalist or a eurofederalist, and the ideals of the latter are ones I support even if their implementation has often been shitty.
It’s not rational, but I can’t pretend I’d be immune to ingrouping things that way in such an environment.
(Seriously, our media is whataboutist as fuck and the US is extremely unfairly maligned and the only people who challenge that tend to be obnoxious crony capitalists who effectively discredit the US by association. Like, our muslim population is marginalized in many of the same ways african-americans are, but “islam is not a race” so Europe is not racist amirite. French banlieues are very much like Ferguson, but when muslims get shot by cops for dubious-to-unjustifiable reasons the ensuing riots are treated as barbarians looting while BLM has at least managed to draw attention to the actual problems. It’s very curious to notice oneself falling into the “expatriate falling in love with SF, which is legally located within, and under the jurisdiction of, USA, and explaining to everyone how some things are way better over there” archetype and I can see that it exists for a reason.)
(via exsecant)
3 months ago · tagged #user's guide to interacting with a promethea #i never promised my brain would make sense to others · 5,267 notes · .permalink
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