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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

This whole discourse reminds me of that one 2016 election thinkpiece that went "Do I believe Bill Clinton is a rapist? Yes. Do I think that makes him a bad person? No." And, the victim being unconscious makes it extremely difficult for me to believe it truly was just a mistake

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The problem is, i've been around long enough to see waayyyy too many "progressive" white men given a pass on this that nobody else is given, and my political organizing experience has me leaning much more toward the "security culture" end than the "maybe he's changed" end.

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Cass (makes games) @cassmakesgames.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

New Blog Post: Why I Love Unfair Traps in Arcade Games People usually dislike hard memo traps in arcade games, or at best think they're "not that bad". I love them, though, and I think arcade games would be worse without them. Here's why: duckberet.com/blog/i-like-... (game: Violent Storm)

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

"Mob justice" has never, ever been the existential threat that the Michael Traceys of the world have been, in short

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Basically, i do not see how his own feelings matter one iota as much as the feelings of all the survivors out there who were reminded once more how much society refuses to listen to them. *especially* given the timing of all this, as i mentioned in my main thread here

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Calling for death is obviously beyond the pale, but i also wonder how much of that is survivors exaggerating for the purpose of venting. This is what a lot of the "kill all men" talk was, for instance - people just did it in a more public space than they should have

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

so the fact that he opted for that kind of career at all tells me he never fully realized the seriousness of what he did. i see people act like his video essays were proof that he did the work, which is utterly ridiculous if you talk to actual restorative justice theorists

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

sure! what i'd say there is that being a popular content creator puts you in a position of power over thousands of fans (a good chunk of whom are women, in Geller's particular lane), which is particularly dangerous if you have his sort of history. think of how many ProJareds & Onisions there are

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

for me, it just sucks to see all this right at the same time as the Cornell 7 story. goes to show how many people talk a good game about taking SA seriously until one of their favs gets implicated. same as it ever was...

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

i'm also of the opinion that you will not defeat fascism with video essays, and my impression of the people standing by Geller in this is that they're exactly the type who think content creators are on the front line of this ideological war

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

a key part of my stance on this: a public platform is not a human right i think because so many people invested in this discourse are constantly on social media, they treat these sites like one's home and think making someone persona non grata there is functionally rendering them homeless

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

jesus we're STILL doing Geller defense out here? people act like we're saying he should never have a job anywhere again, when what we're actually saying is that people have the right to deplatform him over hiding his history and companies have the right to drop him over this

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Usually this sort of thing happens bc a bunch of online media folks are buddies with the guy - i saw the exact same thing happen with literal neo-nazi "hacker" Weev way back when. It's a pretty obvious tell when people who never talk about restorative justice otherwise bring it up here

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This is very true! But the problem is a lot of the stuff i've been around is a little too weird/unhinged to tell somebody new. Like i don't think i wanna lead with Jinmaster or Joey Crack lmao - the spiciest i've gone is the story about the Hawaii MvC2 scene running their locals in a strip club

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Not only guys do this, i've also ranted before about women saying they like "dad bods" when they don't mean actual dad bods, they mean Chris Hemsworth when he's not dieted down to play Thor But i've found the hyperfixation on weight/bodyfat% to be much more common with men

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Serious competitive bodybuilding is one of the few other fields besides modeling where you're rewarded for having an eating disorder and a drug addiction, and like modeling it's created completely unrealistic ideas of what "health" looks like that we carry over to everyday life

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

So that's where the "fitness industry" as we know it began, and it was rooted in bodybuilding in a way that persists to this day. i'd argue this has completely fucked us up since bodybuilding is counterproductive to any other type of athletics and is less healthy long-term than being "overweight"

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Really i'd argue this all stemmed from the film Pumping Iron and Arnold's resulting Hollywood career - if you look at action-movie heroes from earlier in the 70s, they were built like ordinary guys. When Arnold & Stallone blew up, ppl wanted to know how to look like them and that's where it started

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

So many dudes will write off a woman as fat and out of shape if she has any visible cellulite at all, for instance, when you can point to countless successful weightlifters and other Olympic athletes who defy that. If that's your standard, your odds are lower than those of the "6ft+ only" women

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

You hear all the time about those TikToks with women saying they won't date anybody under 6ft or w/e, but guys often have this ridiculous perception of what even a physically fit woman should look like. This is a side effect of bodybuilding culture dominating the "fitness" industry

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Obviously you can find groups of people of all genders who WOULD love to talk about video games for hours in person...but the women there aren't hot enough for the guys who complain about being alone in the comments. We don't talk enough about how unrealistic our own standards can be!

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Most ppl out there IRL don't find it interesting to talk about video games in depth. Even playing games at high competitive level doesn't fare that much better, which was a tough pill for me to swallow at one point in my life! The charity aspect of GDQ is what's gotten the best response in my exp

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Found a smaller youtuber with actual interesting thoughts on dating discourse, been going through her comment sections over the past couple days, and a conclusion i've reached is that Extremely Online Men mainly suffer from being too doomer and not doing anything cool outside the house

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

wtf i'm pretty big into eurogames and didn't know that about terraforming mars (can't stand that game so luckily nothing lost for me there whew)

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This seems to be real common in nerd spaces, we've also been going through this with the first Mario movie (the one where the directors hijacked the project and turned it into "what if Blade Runner but dinosaurs???")

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Old arcade games are the main example from the commercial side of the industry, i'd argue. i like to say "arcades were the indie games of their day", which sounds ridiculous if all you know is Street Fighter & NBA Jam but makes more sense when you dig into the obscurities there

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

If you want an arcade game that *really* uses this type of mechanic well, check out Magic Sword! That has the Gauntlet-style declining health, and it gets really cool when playing for a high score since you have to do a lot of back-and-forth balancing with your decisions.

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Don't forget about arcade games, where you needed to make sure the same person didn't stay on the machine too long! Those are my favorite games to this day and the timers add to that more often than not imo (though arcade Double Dragon 2 gets ridiculous with it in the last stage)

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

FWIW it was mainly the kind of Marxists who've stayed on Twitter to this day and tended to subtly push other right-wing talking points (e.g. on trans rights or ~cancel culture~), i saw most other tendencies under that umbrella push back against this stuff

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Like 3/4 of my favorite music of all time is meant to generate anxiety (and other unpleasant emotions)! "Objectively bad" is a mindset we need to get past if we want to truly understand art

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

There's a reason they call it "the game of 1000 video essays" haha

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Games being treated as ~kiddie shit~ for so long left a whole lot of folks with massive inferiority complexes

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Agreed, though this has been a thing throughout the whole history of that industry tbf. You had the whole FMV fad as the most obvious example from the 90s, then in the 2000s we saw Gears of War win GOTY entirely because of how much it felt like a big-budget sci-fi blockbuster movie

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Wonder how much of this is related to modern media consumption habits, where you can seek out recommendations for the best stuff and stay away from all the random filler. So many people grow up not knowing what the latter is like or how it can make you appreciate greatness more

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Also as a bit of an aside, in recent years i've become a little more anxious about the fact that my favorite music (industrial that's not NIN or Marilyn Manson, noise music in general) is being forgotten by history. Feel like the same sort of "unpleasant = bad" impulse is behind that...

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

But that's not high art according to the industry commentariat - games have to be 80 hours long and chock full of text to be great art. Having a hamfisted entry-level sociopolitical message is a bonus there, too!

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Stories winning the ideological war within the medium is what pushed me away from video games more than anything else, probably. i've read plenty throughout my life and Darius Gaiden + G Darius are some of the art that's affected me most deeply to this day, through gameplay + visuals + music

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

In fairness, this discourse was around way back in the day with water levels and/or ice levels in platformers as well! Even back then, players could be every bit as reductive.

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Yeah, a good friend of mine made a similar argument with button-mashing (which i used to think was Inherently Bad since it didn't involve decision-making and could even damage controllers - there's an emotional component there that makes it worth it in small doses, i've learned)

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This first became apparent to me when David Sirlin was treated as an authority on game design - a ton of his fanbase was exactly like this, as he was famous for saying games should loosen execution requirements (even his own genre of fighting games, where execution can lead to interesting decisions)

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It's like saying an album entirely about one man's heroin addiction that's ful of frightening noise is objectively "bad music" (This is real and it's my favorite album of all time)

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Tuxedo Catfish @tuxedocatfish.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

the ideal form of commercial gamedev is a fidget spinner that is also a slot machine it's not about communicating anything, it's about self-soothing. this is the rosetta stone to understanding like half a dozen different recurring game design discourses and the design trends that kick them off

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Said leftists should've been the ones who actually sought out info on the above, of course, but my point is that if the Trump-the-dove narrative had that much pull with THAT crowd, it should be no surprise that it carried a lot of Median Voters(tm)

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Even a decent number of online leftists did! And considering he did not in fact start any wars in his first term and the actual heinous military shit he did (sending coked-up troops into random houses in the Middle East and shooting whoever was in there) was grossly underreported, i kinda get it

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

god i love that these ~enlightened liberal~ publications have just been torching their kayfabe these past couple years

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Yeah this is the consensus i've heard from folks in the know, and i remember a fighting-game player who passed away from blood clots at a younger age than PAC so that seems most likely AFAIK

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Thread w/ new public revelations - FYI, Bix is referring to certain WWE Twitter grifters assuming PAC's death was from steroids and acting like this is AEW's George Zahorian moment (Maybe it *was* from steroid use, but PAC also had a known history of blood clots - we don't know yet, is the point)

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Played Majuular's gigantic video on Ultima Online today and boy was that ever a case study on libertarian ideology hurting user experiences and the bottom line (The designers opposed any new rules to prevent PK'ing/griefing/etc. even after that was proven to reduce subscriber numbers)

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genius player jesstopher @rdtmshr.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

ko-fi.com/jesscrisis once again getting fucked over by the world and cant catch a break

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joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social @joshthefunkdoc.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

i think this streak broke with the Big Show, as they didn't really have a good candidate to feed to him. Vader had left for Japan, Mark Henry had become a midcard comedy act, and Kane was still too fresh to be sacrificed like that. Underrated factor in Show's run turning out the way it did imo

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