Nooooooo Free Her

Evgeny Sedukhin - “Symphony of the sixth blast furnace” (1979)

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...

GUMROAD IS BANNING NSFW CONTENT IN THE NEXT 24 HOURS

I haven't seen anyone talk about this yet, so I might as well.

They've updated their content policy to comply with payment processor Stripe and Paypal's censorhip. They gave 24 hours. On March 16th 2024, Gumroad TOS will no longer allows sales of any written or drawn nsfw content.

This is going to hurt for so many creators. Giving that little time leaves people's source of income wildly unstable, especially with such a huge overhaul of what content is allowed.

I hate this. I hate what censorship is turning the internet into. I hate that nsfw content creators keeo getting pushed to the fringes, that they need to digitally migrate so often, because nowhere can be trusted to allow their art for long.

I don't know what to do next, there isn't some sort of "here's what you can do to help!" People just deserve to know.

Disco Elysium Flow

What’s a food from your culture that u HATE #hatersonly

Tortures

by Wisława Szymborska tr. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Nothing has changed. The body is a reservoir of pain; it has to eat and breathe the air, and sleep; it has thin skin and the blood is just beneath it; it has a good supply of teeth and fingernails; its bones can be broken; its joints can be stretched. In tortures, all of this is considered.

Nothing has changed. The body still trembles as it trembled before Rome was founded and after, in the twentieth century before and after Christ. Tortures are just what they were, only the earth has shrunk and whatever goes on sounds as if it’s just a room away.

Nothing has changed. Except there are more people, and new offenses have sprung up beside the old ones — real, make-believe, short-lived, and nonexistent. But the cry with which the body answers for them was, is, and will be a cry of innocence in keeping with the age-old scale and pitch.

Nothing has changed. Except perhaps the manners, ceremonies, dances. The gesture of the hands shielding the head has nonetheless remained the same. The body writhes, jerks, and tugs, falls to the ground when shoved, pulls up its knees, bruises, swells, drools, and bleeds.

Nothing has changed. Except the run of rivers, the shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers. The little soul roams among these landscapes, disappears, returns, draws near, moves away, evasive and a stranger to itself, now sure, now uncertain of its own existence, whereas the body is and is and is and has nowhere to go.

the game Season: A letter to the future is like if the person who wrote that "disco elysium but a witch in the alps" tweet had actually good ideas for a disco inspired feel-good game

hey its charlotte charlottan i was terminated i appealed but i might not be back. so this might be goodbye

tagging mutuals in case any of them want to rb this to spread the word

@cryptotheism @jame7t @girlballs @serialunaliver @prohaloplayer @nyancrimew @evilscientist3 @thyrell @grimeclown @txttletale @omegaversereloaded @r0zeclawz @hustlerose @psygull @grox @heycrabman @davidtennantpussytulpa @lakemojave