wantonviolins [they/them]

4chan and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race

personal conspiracy theory: vulgar materialism was invented to confuse and discredit materialist analysis

well, that’s basically it - is it morally correct to steal a loaf of bread? what if the baker beats his children? what if without that loaf of bread you will die? etc.

moral relativism at its most basic is just the idea that depending on perspectives and circumstances, what is or is not morally correct will differ. every conversation about “is it wrong to go back in time and kill baby hitler” is an exercise in moral relativism.

the sticky thing about moral relativism is that since both the cop and the protester think they’re acting in a morally correct way, morality becomes kind of a worthless way to talk about injustice and inequality, like you’ve said here. All three of us, you, me, and UlyssesT, are on the same page about this, it’s much clearer to talk about ideologies and class and identity relations than to boil it down into “morality” where it could mean something different to anyone who hears it.

you’re just rehashing moral relativism here, which is also what @[email protected] was getting at in terms of finding the concept of moral frameworks, and the use of morality as a substitution for a coherent ideology, insufficient for discourse

he also had a sexual harassment suit swept under the rug

if you pirate a game made in Unity, the developer will still have to pay Unity for the “install”, so “install bombing” could become the new “review bombing” as irate s rack up bigger and bigger bills on your behalf

Unity says “our statistical model won’t count fraudulent installs” but they also say “trust us bro” about all of their install data collection and modelling instead of providing any hard info about anything

WotC understands that if they destroy their cultural cachet they have no business model. They definitely want to suck more blood from their fans but they have to tread lightly. I don’t think Unity Technologies, and their fired-from-EA-for-ruining-the-business, notorious art hater, sex pest CEO John Riccitiello, have any idea that destroying developer goodwill will ruin them. Or maybe that’s the point! Pump and dump the whole thing.

I believe them completely when they say they’ve had this whole scheme vetted by legal and believe it holds water. All of the big players (Niantic, miHoYo, etc.) won’t be affected, it’s just AA and indie productions that will suffer - the ones who don’t have the money to fight a protracted legal battle with a giant corporate entity. Entire market categories within the Unity ecosystem just became nonviable.

ok but you understand that despite the fact that they can’t, they’re going ahead and doing exactly that anyway? like that’s literally the situation, they’ve clarified that the only version of the licensing agreement is the current one and you’ve agreed to all future permutations of it the second you release something using Unity

your “but they can’t do that!!” protestations are irrelevant

It’s 20¢ per install max so even if that policy is literal it isn’t quite that extreme.

If I release a game for free, and a million people download it (because it’s free), and Unity thinks I’m making money (because they use a predictive model to determine this rather than any kind of hard data), I’m suddenly on the hook for $200,000?

If I released a game in 2015 and forgot all about it and some popular streamer in 2025 plays it and it gets millions of installs all of a sudden, I’m now liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars for a game I may not even have the code and assets for anymore?

Every single part of this is extreme.

“You Are Now Entering America”

Trump’s border wall is a 15-minute city?

I really like the 5G Matrix aurora

That doesn’t make a difference because they just replaced the “metaphor” with the real thing and cheaply posited that as the “happy ending”. That is literally stating that the current world we have, although not perfect, is the best option, not only for individual self actualization, but in terms of seeking “happiness”. I also fail to see how the angels, nerv, and the evas have any real-world equivalent other than climate change and the deep state.

that’s not at all what any of that states. the textual “happy ending” brings with it the baggage that the entire show and five movies established prior: life is difficult and you will get hurt. it, by providing a point of contrast, underlines those ideas. life is difficult and you will get hurt, but it is worth it

the real world is never once posited as the best possible option for the world or individual happiness. it is the only possible option because it is all that exists. you, as a human being living on earth in 2021, cannot wave a magic spear and make global communism happen, you have to go out, into the capitalist hellscape of the real world, and work to bring it about, suffering as you do so, because that is what it costs to achieve things. other, better things can exist, but if all you do is sit in your room and watch mecha anime you will never bring them about, and that’s the entire textual and metatextual thesis of evangelion

I strongly disagree with this interpretation of the original Evangelion series having such a didactic message towards the audience.

Then you strongly disagree with Anno on that one, he’s been pretty consistent when speaking about the themes these past 25 years. The original has an episode titled Hedgehog’s Dilemma near the end of the first act, blatantly spelling it out. Anno’s answer to the posited dilemma has always been an emphatic “other people are what makes life worth living”.

All the elements that make Shinji “happy” within the rebuild ending are only valid as such under the current order (mainly the salaryman job), not some grand universal secret that makes life worth living. This is just capitalist realism.

The “grand universal secret” is spelled out pretty clearly in Anno’s answer to the hedgehog’s dilemma. Capitalist realism, in the context of the ending of 3.0+1.0, would be if Shinji remade everything exactly as it was, with Evas and NERV and the angels and all of the conflict inherent in that, because that is already the metaphor for the real world within the larger meta-framework of the narrative.

I gotta get to sleep so I’ll write up a longer response to this tomorrow, but it sounds like you’re considering the rebuilds as if they are meant to be understood separately from the original series instead of being complementary. They build off of one another, Asuka’s development in the original is still important to your understanding of who she is in the rebuilds.

spoiler content

I have never found any of the endings (original series, EoE, or Rebuild) depressing. The entire thesis of Evangelion, the original series, EoE, and all of Rebuild, has always been about stepping out of the warm, umbilical embrace of escapist fantasy into the bright, harsh light of the real world, and Rebuild hammered that point home so hard that Anno used live-action footage as a visual metaphor in that final scene. It was never about Shinji’s self-actualization, it was about the audience’s. Shinji’s ultimate happiness was only intended to convey that there are things which make the real world, despite its faults and difficulties, worth inhabiting. They didn’t need to create a world better than our own, that would be yet another retreat into fantasy. We don’t live in global communism, and we can’t build it if we spend all day dreaming instead of acting.

I also think it was the kindest presentation all of the characters have been given in any form. We got a chance to understand and empathize with Gendo, of all people.