ssjmarx [he/him]

  • 4 Posts
  • 99 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2020

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  • AFAIK the arcade boom was pretty popular with both men and women, since at that time it was a social hobby and kids were doing a lot of hanging out and hooking up at arcades. It wasn’t until the turn to console gaming, which was primarily an anti-social activity, that video game advertisements started really focusing in on young boys. Nintendo bears a lot of the blame here, since they defined the western market following the big crash, and they saw the NES as exclusively a boys’ toy - but it wasn’t just them of course, in particular I remember the OG XBox’s marketing doing a lot to create a “bro culture”, along with stuff like the channel G4, which I think was created intentionally as a reaction to the previously existing perception of gamers being nerdy.




  • This is what I meant.

    Ugh the clip in that thread. Norm is blaming Angela Davis for the liberal establishment coopting her message and whitewashing it - like what the fuck else is she supposed to do, Norm? Advocate for a communist revolution which in America right now is every bit as far flung a possibility as prison abolition is? Immolate herself on the steps of the White House in protest? Stop punching left for fuck’s sake and that goes for the article in the OP as well.






  • You know, even when I was a kid I thought Magneto’s plan in the first X-Men movie to turn everyone into mutants was fucking baller and they should have let him do it. Just 'cause that one guy turned into a water monster doesn’t mean that would be the default - the X gene expresses way differently in everyone who has it.

    An no, I don’t think giving every human the X gene constitutes genocide, that’s fucking stupid.






  • 100% correct, no notes.

    I have a theory that part of the function of the “where is your child now?” stuff that really curtailed kids’ freedom in America in the second half of the twentieth century was a reaction to the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam movements. Both were prominently participated in by kids, the anti-war one especially, and when society goes from letting kids have a significant portion of the day to themselves in between school and supper to basically forcing them to go from one controlled location straight to another with no in-between, all of that potential youth-lead political organization falls apart because it doesn’t have anything to support it anymore.

    I don’t think it was the primary driver - after all most kids weren’t joining the Students for a Democratic Society - but it is a relevant secondary reason. The primary driver was almost certainly “property values”. I remember one of my only interactions with the HOA where my parents lived concerned plans for a playground being voted down based on the logic that children playing outside would somehow lower everyone nearby’s home value (they also made the equally-bad argument that teens would hang out at the child’s playground to smoke). Multiply this interaction by a million HOAs around the country and eventually even the kids whose parents don’t demand that they come straight home still end up going home anyway because there’s nowhere else for them to go.