No I hear you. I just think you’re letting your negative perception of that element of the game’s community weigh in a little too heavily on your analysis of the game. People being annoying by talking about the game like beating it is a badge of honor (spoiler alert guys, you’re meant to beat the game) and your assessment of the Souls-like gameplay loop are, at best, tangentially related.

No shade to you, by the way. How the culture receives and talks about media is as big a part of its legacy as any constituent element of the text, and it’s a worthy subject for criticism. It’s just that, in my opinion, criticism is sharpened when the author is very clear about when they cease to review the game/book/movie and when they start to review the phenomena around that media.

Fwiw, this subject has been on my mind since reading a review of the movie Eddington in which the author talked about the temptation to stop talking about the movie and start talking about the subjects the movie was touching upon. I have been making a concentrated effort to improve my critical writing this year, and that line resonated with me. So, this diatribe has been fermenting in my head for awhile now, and your post was my excuse to get it out. By no means do I mean to lecture you on how you should feel about Dark Souls or it’s fandom.

Start the music you say? Daring today, aren’t we? [Full disclosure, everything I know about Star Trek comes from memes and the 12 or so TNG episodes I’ve seen]

Man, if they aren’t putting “It’s David Cronenberg’s Kenshi, more or less” on the metaphorical box, they’re making a mistake.

Would never ask you to.

Depends on how reductive you’re being. To me, your initial assertion that Dark Souls isn’t difficult (or is not as difficult as an online game) because it’s ultimately just a test of your pattern recognition / memorization and reflexes is ignoring the forest for the trees. If I applied that same mindset to playing an instrument, I could argue that, mechanically, they’re the same. You learn a boss’ pattern (I.e. learn the sheet music) and then it’s just a matter of moving your fingers to hit the requisite inputs.

Of course, I think most people would balk at describing making music as nothing more than playing the right notes at the right time, and rightly so. We tend to attach a certain amount of ineffable poetry to that act. I’m not saying that they’re 1:1 equivalent, mind you, but I’ve heard enough folks discuss a Souls boss fight in musical terms (tempo, rhythm, crescendos, etc.) to see the parallel.

Not relevant to the Tom Joad specifically, but I want to share a couple more Woody Guthrie tracks that I discovered over the past week. I’m sure many people are aware he is much more than just “This Land is Your Land”, but I wasn’t.

Tear the Fascists Down

All You Fascists Bound to Lose

And a bonus cover in a modern bluegrass style: The Bootstrap Boys - All You Fascists

And finally: The Almanac Singers - Which Side Are You On? - this is like a supergroup of leftist folk artists, including Guthrie, who recorded a whole album of labor songs in 1941.

Sorry for the tangent.

Christ, I’ve been thinking the dude looks like the guy, but I knew that probably wasn’t right. Thank you.

Fwiw, not that you’re under any obligation to care as a non-citizen of NYC, his name is Zohran Mamdani. Not Zohani.

I figure the man is about to have every two-bit piece of shit out there fucking his name up, whether intentionally or not, because it “ain’t American”. Least we can do is get it right.

Are you insane, or have you achieved CHIM?

Not that there’s an appreciable difference…looking at you, Michael Kirkbride.

Art like this is why I check the Black Gate blog almost exclusively for the book covers. I suspect I’m a generation or two removed from the regular contributors, so they are frequently featuring genre books with this same painterly, abstracted style, and I find it all just so evocative.

The few that I’ve collected have not, however I guess I’m not in the habit of exposing them to the elements, so I couldn’t say for sure.

Idk what to tell you man. Trying to achieve a sense of intellectual superiority over a religious person by pointing out how the literal text doesn’t make sense when the entire purpose of an allegory is the SUBtext seems just as silly to me as cursing a fig tree for not bearing fruit.

I’ll allow that you’re free to use this tactic to dunk on proponents of Biblical inerrancy, but most mainstream sects of Christianity don’t subscribe to that doctrine.

Take religion out of it for a second. Someone says, “when I was a kid, I had to walk to school for 5 miles, through the snow, uphill, BOTH ways!”. Obviously, this is a statement which doesn’t make much literal sense. However, you probably understand that the person is actually just trying to communicate that they had it hard growing up, and that their words are not meant to be taken literally.

this video comes to mind. It’s not about the figs, it’s about Israel.

Now, think of the message what you will. I attended a lot of Catholic school, but I’m staunchly irreligious, so if you want to keep dunking on believers, you go girl. I just think you’d be better served (and more likely to get a believer to consider their beliefs more critically) by engaging with the text the way the believer does, lest you wind up just talking past one another.

Presumably related to the news today that GRUV Entertainment is taking over distribution of Shout Factory releases?

Was very concerned they were shuttering their home video department entirely there for a second. Not while I have so many more 4K steelbooks to acquire, like a really nerdy dragon.

well, first of all…

Not saying you’re wrong in a practical sense, but carrying practical sense into an allegorical story from a culture and time not your own is, if not folly, at least ill-advised.

I mean, I feel like making Jesus a samurai is as authentic to history as making him a blond white dude.

Also, wandering the countryside, helping out the peasants and tweaking the nose of the establishment, gathering a crew of like-minded friends/followers, and culminating in an act of self-sacrifice which results in the protagonist’s willing death? I can easily see how someone could imagine, “what if Jesus, but ronin?”.

Shit. Im gonna end up buying one or both of these at some point…

TIP TEAM!

Try these cool moves, like, playing the game!

…God I miss forum-based let’s plays. I was never a SA member (Something Awful, not Sturmabteilung, though there’s probably some degree of overlap there), but I did browse the lparchive website once upon a time. Some folks put so much effort into their presentation, I want sure where the game ended and the LP narrative began.

There was one in particular that was an LP of the Blade Runner adventure game. That’s a game I had watched my dad play on our family Compaq back in the day, so I thought I knew what I was getting into, but the combination of the game having secret narrative branches (that change based on a random seed when you start a new game, I think) and the posts being written in a first person, hard-boiled noir style, made me think that we had played different games.

There is a convenience store I stop at which has a self help / religious book rack. On it, there is a copy of “The Action Bible”, and, given it’s cover, I assume this is the DMG for OPs campaign.

Thank you for your response. I know it’s difficult to convey tone, so I hope my wall of text didn’t come off as lecturing, as it was not my intent. As you say, it’s all in the eye (or ear, in this case) of the audience, and any interpretation can be as personally truthful as any other. I’m just offering some different ways the song has spoken to me over the past few years as an alternative.

For what it’s worth, my interpretation is not born out of my lived experience matching the narrator’s, but rather that self-destructive individual. Had a crash out some years ago which resulted in a period of hospitalization, and this song was an expression of what I feared my support system were thinking when I leaned on them.

Ultimately though, if Maynard’s misanthropy (and for all my talk about separating art and artist, I’ll agree that homie DEFINITELY has some misanthropic sentiment) is not something you can get over, I totally get it. As I alluded to earlier, I think Mel Gibson is a great actor and director. I also will never support another project he’s involved in because of who he has revealed himself to be. J.k. Rowling is another that falls in this camp.

For me though, Maynard being a mean lil troll doesn’t raise the same amount of bile in my throat as folks of that ilk. I remind myself that I’ve written lots of things that don’t reflect the totality of my perspective on a given subject, including juvenalia which boils down to “everyone is an asshole except me”. A lot of them are journal entries, some of them are exercises in fiction. In either case, I was trying to exorcise myself of thoughts and feelings I wasn’t happy having rattle around my head, so I got them out onto paper where they could wither in the light.

Again, not saying that this is at all what is happening with Maynard. I’m clearly living in relative ignorance of his intent and the wider context surrounding his lyrics, and I absolutely don’t mean any of this to say “I’m right and you’re wrong”.