@srol have you played FTL? I felt like that was the most treklike space combat I've played; each crew member has their assigned post, but they still end up running all over the ship to make repairs and fight off intruders
plus you're like ... constantly rerouting auxiliary power to the shields; I never would have thought they could have made rerouting auxiliary power an actually fun game mechanic
@clacke when I grew up in Indonesia this was what red bull was so when I saw people drinking it in the US I was like wtf! didn't learn until later that the recipe was different of course
@enkiv2@mwl (guy who's only watched 2 john carpenter movies voice) basically the way I see it is that if you're carpenter there's only 2 stories you can tell about post-reagan america; either the protagonist resists and goes out in a blaze of glory or he is inescapably drawn into collaboration with a system he hates and is stripped of all meaningful agency, forced to be a pawn of the powerful in order to survive
@enkiv2@mwl I guess it's subversive in that Reagan fans will see Snake as being cool as hell and want to be Snake, but Snake hates cops
but he is a cop in the end anyway, so the point ends up being ... that you can't resist them? I'd take Roddy Piper going out in a blaze of glory any day
like if the person being satirized can watch the film and not get angry at it, what have you really accomplished?
at least with starship troopers the director had the excuse that he was european, he could be forgiven for not understanding how deeply fucked up the US popular conception of the military is
@mwl I was really surprised watching this after my only other Carpenter exposure was They Live, because EFNY kinda leans into the whole "criminals are dangerous degenerates!" reactionary shit; like ... how did this come from the same mind as They Live?
@rose people really don't get it, but like ... if an advertiser makes a claim without evidence, (like the claim the 404 article was reporting on) the correct response is to assume it's false
@sherlock_holmes@skaeth Broken Earth is a future-fantasy series by NK Jemisin I read a couple years ago; I should have listed that in my recommendations earlier; it's kinda dark but it's a great story
my recent faves are the Gideon the Ninth series (sarcastic queer necromancer space opera) and Babel (anti-colonial lingustics-magic historical fantasy)
also been reading some great fiction by fediverse residents including Situation Normal (gritty space opera-ish), git commit murder (unix crime mystery), and Black Water Sister (urban fantasy set in Malaysia)
@sherlock_holmes the novel Walkaway goes into this in much more detail, but it posits a sci-fi scenario in which large-scale 3D printing just like ... magically solves housing problems, so ... it's a fun read but not actually that relevant to current events
@sherlock_holmes the way I see it, it's very hard to interpret the Omelas story as anything other than a fable pointing out hypocrisy (the presumed hypocrisy of the reader but also of the author)
the story depends on the assumption that people *can* walk away from Omelas, but it never mentions where they're walking to, which doesn't really reflect the way things work in reality
what does it mean to leave? I can't walk away from my country of birth, because no other country will let me in without something like a work permit or a visa sponsor, which are only available to people who haven't walked away! if I walk away from my job and my mortgage, I'm considered a vagrant, which is illegal, and I get arrested
if walking away were a thing you could actually do, I suspect people would do it! but society is structured in such a way that ensures it can't ever actually be walked away from