If There's One Thing Ive Learned From My Math Education It's The Ability To Judge A Textbook By It's

From 'Dungeon Meshi'

to be honest, to me starting at the top seemed easy. the way i learned was basically a sequence of "this is how x really works under the hood"-type revelations, which suited my learning style reasonably well. im sure i could have gone the other way around too, though i feel like you might have lost me starting at assembly because a high level language was relevant to my other interests then in a way assembly wouldnt be

half of the mystique around "tech stuff" that most people experience is mostly just because they don't know the difference between a "tech enthusiast" as constructed by Apple et al's marketing team and "people who know computers work" and how there's very little actual overlap between these two categories. the only actually good programmers are the ones who want to fuck the computers or perchance have undergone some other technopsychosocial adaptation, which does not correlate with knowing how many dozen cameras the latest iphone has or being able to get along well with the business major interviewer at a startup called Zyergote who drives a tesla

me: I have GOT to get weirder!

also me when I do get weirder: *visibly shaking* I'm going to be killed with hammers by everyone for being a freak.

im going crazy you have GOT to decouple romance/amatonormativity and marriage in your mind. you have GOT to understand that marriage is a legal document that protects you from exploitation especially if you are a woman or a stay-at-home anything. it is not some evil unique to heterosexual people. it is a legal document that says 'this is who i want in my hospital room when i die, this is who i want to have my stuff when i die, THIS PERSON OWES ME RECOMPENSE IF THEY KICK ME OUT OF THE HOUSE I LIVE IN"

You are not immune to being taken advantage of by your partner if you are queer. do not wind up homeless because your garbage live-ins name is on the lease and they decided to drop you like hot coals.

to me the deserter seemed personally important because as an eastern european, i have met this guy irl. he is intensely familiar, down to the phrasing, sometimes (the whole "a liberal and a pederast" bit, oof) and DE acknowledges this literal old communist on an uninhabited island, acknowledges the reasons why he is the way that he is, and just straight up tells you "you cannot be this way. you have to find a way to become something else". that last bit is the difficult part, of course

playing disco elysium for the first time felt so familiar because it was made by communists. i kept getting the feeling of - i see you! i know you! every time i came across encyclopedia worldbuilding checks and recognized the tools of historical materialism brilliantly used. i wince when i see people describe DE as just being ironic about communism or whatever - no! this is the most communist game ive ever played!

sometimes i see people point to the deserter's character as evidence that DE isn't truly a communist work, but i don't think the deserter is meant to be a paragon of communism in the game. he's a revolutionary stuck in the past and that is his grave error. "The material base for an uprising has ended," "The historical condition for a revolutionary opportunity has passed. It will not come back anymore. However hard I try, whatever I do." but everything you've seen the game proves his statement wrong. DE's world still has the objective conditions for revolution because the working masses are sick of all the ruling order's shit, and there are plentiful opportunities to develop the subjective forces as we see in the communist quest that young people are willing to continue the communist struggle. but the deserter cant see that from his position and his trauma - ultimately this is what makes him fail as a communist because he has let go of the basic principles: that world is always changing; that change is made by people, through class struggle; that a communist must always be grounded and alert of their own material context.

the scene in the communist quest where you get through to steban and it tells you that "you're witnessing his ironic armor melt before you" - i think that was the devs taking their ironic mask off, too. i believe that because steban's reasons for his communism are the same as mine. we have to struggle even if it's hard and even if they kill us because this is what keeps us human. to struggle for freedom is the next best thing to actually being free. to fight for communism is to fight for the future. it is not about being imprisoned by failures of the past. in fact it IS about failure - because the movement is the working class's school in the struggle for power and we need to learn from each failure and move forward.

i just know that if my comrades and i were somehow in a room with the devs and we had to sing the internationale, we would all know the words. in different languages, but we'll sing the same melody and when we get to the part, the word "international" will be sung in unison. do you get me? i think disco elysium is to some young game-savvy communists of the world today as "what is to be done" was to lenin's generation. something something international communist solidarity...

You can heal a part of your soul by licking blood off of someone

hauve you guys seen trey the explainer

🪷

There seems to be a lotus blooming in my askbox. Let's all fold our hands behind our backs maturelike and view it for a moment

["guy who's building a machine made out of people & noticed you don't fit into their machine" voice] something's wrong with you

from impossible to difficult to unfamiliar to familiar to easy to automatic