CuriousCat Archive Page 155 of 202

  1. What's your old-school video game soundtrack? Like, 8-bit and/or 16-bit era?

    Probably something with a Chrono Trigger sense of composition but a Genesis sound chip arrangement.

  2. Is Universal Basic Income a good idea?

    let's find out!

  3. Whose more racist:
    A) my white mom, circa mid 1980s around the age of 23, getting corn rows in her hair, OR
    B) my Grandpa, who flipped out on her when he found out she had anything to do with black cultire

    I think it's worth reflecting on how something seen as acceptable, even progressive, to 23-year-old white women in the 80's was seen as radical to the generation before and as regressive to the generation that has followed. It's not a question of ranking the racism, but one of asking ourselves what we are getting ally cookies for today that may not always be seen as good allyship, and be prepared to change with the times.

  4. What is your favorite eat-out joint?

    your mom's house

  5. I mean you are really good looking, but I can't blame you for wanting to keep your face off YouTube so that the comment section and your interactions with fans are generally about the content you produce and not your sexy sexy neck.

    in response to Okay so! I doubt I'm going to get a candid answer from you because the situation of me being a random fan and you being a creator heavily incentivizes you to not be candid but I'm going to ask anyway because I'm just really curious and either way I'll probably find the answer interesting. After Oliver's Shakespeare's stream I couldn't help but really notice how much thirst is being thrown at leftie content creators and I guess what I'm wondering is... when that kind of stuff happens, does it make you uncomfortable? I can see that you probably get less of it then someone who appears shirtless in his videos from time to time, and because you don't appear physically in your videos often. so most people don't even know what you look like. But still, I can see that these comments about your appearance are kindly motivated. These people clearly want you to feel good about yourself and, good because you should! And who doesn't like a compliment about their looks? But I can only imagine unwanted comments, even positive ones about your looks from strangers must feel weird? and if it does feel weird do you feel like you're able to freely tell your audience without fear of losing a significant number of your patrons?

    I think you may have a neck fetish friendo

  6. the way olly presents in his videos gives me so much anxiety because on the one hand it does seem like he invites those comments but on the other hand there are times in his streams where and he seems uncomfortable with some of the things people say about his looks, but I could be misreading the situation.

    What really worries me though is a knowledge that even if he was uncomfortable, like maybe he changed his mind about inviting those kind of comments or something. There would be no way for him to go back on it without a good bit of backlash. And if anyone could manage to minimize that backlash with their charm it would definitely be Oliver. But there would still be a ton of backlash. As a fan I just can't know. I can almost never know because as we stated earlier, they can't be candid by the very nature of the situation so...! I guess I'm frustrated because I feel like there's this wall of communication up and I really want to know how everybody is actually really feeling and it's not possible and and maybe more importantly I as a stranger am not owed his true feelings on anything. Or yours. Or any creators.

    in response to Okay so! I doubt I'm going to get a candid answer from you because the situation of me being a random fan and you being a creator heavily incentivizes you to not be candid but I'm going to ask anyway because I'm just really curious and either way I'll probably find the answer interesting. After Oliver's Shakespeare's stream I couldn't help but really notice how much thirst is being thrown at leftie content creators and I guess what I'm wondering is... when that kind of stuff happens, does it make you uncomfortable? I can see that you probably get less of it then someone who appears shirtless in his videos from time to time, and because you don't appear physically in your videos often. so most people don't even know what you look like. But still, I can see that these comments about your appearance are kindly motivated. These people clearly want you to feel good about yourself and, good because you should! And who doesn't like a compliment about their looks? But I can only imagine unwanted comments, even positive ones about your looks from strangers must feel weird? and if it does feel weird do you feel like you're able to freely tell your audience without fear of losing a significant number of your patrons?

    Why do you feel there'd be an enormous backlash if Olly said those comments made him uncomfortable? Some contingent of his audience would be frustrated, but I don't think an enormous one. Especially since he's a cis white guy, I think most people would listen to him.

  7. I have this weird thing where I'm in near-total agreement with your three arguments on MI1 video, but simultaneously feel that MI2 is still the superior game - mostly because I feel The Four Map Pieces is still a masterpiece of a chapter, even if the more open structure also opens up more instances of solving puzzles without knowing why.

    But then, in discussions of the lean, near-perfect original versus the more-ambitious-yet-also-more-unwieldy sequel, I do generally tend to come down on the side of the latter (See also The Raid 2, the John Wick sequels).

    in response to Curse of Monkey Island is the best because rhyming insult sword fighting and lactose-intolerant volcano gods. (I may have grown up on that installment). PROVE ME WRONG

    It's OK if we like different things.

  8. Thoughts on Tiny Money? https://youtu.be/w36sb4ga_HQ

    I'm keeping an eye on it.

  9. Okay so! I doubt I'm going to get a candid answer from you because the situation of me being a random fan and you being a creator heavily incentivizes you to not be candid but I'm going to ask anyway because I'm just really curious and either way I'll probably find the answer interesting.

    After Oliver's Shakespeare's stream I couldn't help but really notice how much thirst is being thrown at leftie content creators and I guess what I'm wondering is...

    when that kind of stuff happens, does it make you uncomfortable? I can see that you probably get less of it then someone who appears shirtless in his videos from time to time, and because you don't appear physically in your videos often. so most people don't even know what you look like.

    But still, I can see that these comments about your appearance are kindly motivated. These people clearly want you to feel good about yourself and, good because you should! And who doesn't like a compliment about their looks?

    But I can only imagine unwanted comments, even positive ones about your looks from strangers must feel weird? and if it does feel weird do you feel like you're able to freely tell your audience without fear of losing a significant number of your patrons?

    in response to Ian, plz. It's important to my sense of self that the only reason I follow you is pure intellectual appreciation and not some weird Para social thirst!!

    I get very few of those comments, because, like you said, most of my audience doesn't know what I look like. So, when it happens... yeah, I do kind of like it. Which is one reason I'm so sparing with selfies - there is an appeal to getting validation from my audience but I don't want to ramp it up because I think I would relate to that unhealthily. You can be out and proud about thinking you're good-looking and appreciating that others agree, and I suspect that's where Olly's coming from, but I don't think that's me.

    I imagine people who get a lot of that attention who *aren't* looking for it are probably uncomfortable with it.

  10. Do you agree with the tweets aligned to this dril political map: https://twitter.com/MozuDisposition/status/1169719865181163521?s=19

    kinda feels like the x axis is backwards

  11. As the resident "gamergate understander" is there anything to that post milenial article talking about Zoe Quinn. Because at this point I'm just tired of delving into the reactionary gators to figure out what the heck is going on in the internet.

    "Abused person did not publicly state she was being abused while abuse was taking place, therefore is a liar" is a fucking bullshit take, especially when everyone from Alec's closest friends to coworkers to family members to ex-girlfriends say he's done this to multiple people.

  12. who would win in a fight: Guybrush Threepwood, or Manny Calavera?

    Manny. Guybrush doesn't have any sproutella.

  14. Why is everyone having a "Games of Thrones" syndrome where people are obsessed with a movie/tv show series to kill off the main characters in each season?

    Like it's the most brave and creative thing to do?

    is there a way to combat this? Or is this the only way to keep audiences engaged?

    There is a default of stasis to much TV, where you know main characters have plot armor and nothing will change the dynamic of the show too much. So killing off major characters is one of the most efficient ways to demonstrate THIS show has lasting consequences and can surprise you. So, like... if most TV wasn't so static, there'd be less oomph to breaking that trend.

    That's what comes to my mind, anyway.

  15. Recommendation for podcast game Slay the Spire. It's a fun roguelike card game.

    I'll take it under consideration.

  18. Curse of Monkey Island is the best because rhyming insult sword fighting and lactose-intolerant volcano gods. (I may have grown up on that installment). PROVE ME WRONG

    Rhyming insults were a weird rehash of an idea that had already been done.

  19. do you meet vampires a lot?

    in response to nice neck

    do I!

  20. Hi! I get this is weird because there are no huge channels like CrashCourse's content, but would you ever considering halting the ARP while working on something like, CrashCourse Leftism?

    just wondering how you would feel about the loss of total control in exchange for access to an efficient content pipeline, with a significantly reduced load?

    I actually tried to pitch a Crash Course Web Culture, but it didn't go anywhere.

    It would be interesting if they offered Crash Course Leftism to me. To my understanding, CC tends to divide up the roles such that the host is rarely the writer, so I'd basically just be a mouthpiece. That would make me ask all kinds of questions as to whether I'm the right mouthpiece for such a thing, and who is the right mouthpiece, and do I know enough about the subject to trust that the writers aren't getting anything wrong because the CC folks are not exactly leftists, and wuhhhhh.

    That said, if I was just flying off to Indiana or Montana or wherever they shoot CC to record batches of episodes now and then, and didn't actually have to write them, I might not need to pause the Alt-Right Playbook, just take short breaks now and then.

  21. Is life a lot harder if one is ugly?

    I wouldn't know, HEYOOO

  22. I think what this person is asking is why has AO3, as a platform, superseded fanfiction.net, which used to be the most popular platform for fanfiction. To that I think the answer's pretty simple. AO3 is simply a better website than FF.net with better, more intuitive website design and more active management, and in the absence of FF stepping up their game and attempting to build incentive to stay there over AO3, the latter overtook the former.

    FF was an objectively bad website anyways, so it's not like it was a hard bar to clear. This isn't even remotely comparable to the effort it would take to create another platform that supersedes Twitter in a functionally similar manner.

    in response to If systems keep people from moving to mastodon, how come archive of our own has gained so much traction and hasn't died yet?

    I've also explicitly talked about how one platform replacing another is a common occurrence.

    I would suspect AO3 isn't exploitative because it's not making anyone a millionaire.

  23. If systems keep people from moving to mastodon, how come archive of our own has gained so much traction and hasn't died yet?

    in response to Maybe you didn’t mean to, but your answer re mastodon came across as very apologetic and matter-of-fact-y. New question: how can we move everyone to platforms less driven by exploitive profit hungry surveillance capitalism than FB/Twitter/IG/YT/Snapchat?

    I don't... see what AO3 has to do with... anything? AO3 is not an alternative to Twitter, it's very much doing its own thing by being a fanfic repository, and, being the largest platform for fanfic, it is providing a service that other big social media platforms are not. Hence, people go there for a specific reason.

  25. Do you still use tumblr in its current state?

    It's still where I put my video transcripts and capsule reviews of adventure games and any other bloggish stuff I wanna post. But my feeds have been mostly dead since the desmuttification.

  26. What's something you find relaxing/calming/soothing?

    nothing

  30. Do you really enjoy wearing ties? I felt like putting on a noose whenever I put them on.

    in response to What sort of clothes do you like to wear the most?

    why you gotta make me self-conscious about liking neckties?

  31. scub?

    scub

  32. What sort of clothes do you like to wear the most?

  33. you ever use Wine to play Windows games on Mac?

    in response to Have you played Outer Wilds ?

    I tried to use Wine ages ago when getting things to run was more complicated. I should probably try it again now that it's easier.

  34. I'm a new lefttuber with a meager amount of subscribers and very few Patrons, and some person or persons keep sending me curiouscat asks asking me how I feel about being a "grifter" who's "faking it for money" and demanding I confess about my imagined "trust fund," "pampered upbringing," and what have you, none of which exist. I am very poor, lack any outside financial support, and I am under no delusions that espousing leftist ideas will make me loads of money.

    Why would anyone believe these things about me?

    calling people hypocrites is easier than refuting their arguments

    (curious cat has a block button, fyi)

  36. Leftism is obsessed with equality at all costs. But it is a false idol. Equality is impossible to achieve. You can waste your time trying to achieve it but other people, other cultures who don't care about equality will take advantage of you and destroy you.

  37. Ik you’re not saying the topic of the next vid. But would you say the next chapter? The dialectical diad, mainstreaming trilogy, ideology five parter, and now what?

    This one is standalone.

  38. You should check out "The Last Jedi: A Journey" by DonLasagna on YouTube. It's about Masculinity and criticisms toward the new Star Wars movies

    I really don't need anymore TLJ takes, even good ones.

  39. as an audience member, what did you think of black panther?

    Better than most Marvel movies but suffers from a lot of the same problems as the rest of them.

  40. Have you played Outer Wilds ?

    I really want to but it's not on Mac or Switch.

  41. IAN OMG JASON STANLEY AAAAAHHHHHHHH

    kill me now

  42. what's the funniest thing you've gotten extremely adamant about and earnestly debated

    A friend in high school insisted that he'd proven pi was closer to 2 with Cheerios. We argued about that a lot.

  43. wait, undertale? :O that's odd! sorry not meaning to be one of the "BUT YOU HAVE TO PLAY X!!", it's just that a rare occurance to find someone who's not head over heels about it. Was there something specific that didnt grab your attention?

    in response to I think Undertale isn't a very good game. Am I doomed to burn in hell?

    The puzzles didn't click for me, and there are a bunch of them in the beginning.

  44. So, in Blood Is Compulsory, the sentence "We often only condemn the game if the shooting and the stuff is crap, or one is crap enough to ruin the other" is accompanied by footage from Max Payne 3. As someone who enjoyed (or, at least, remembers enjoying) the game, both the shooting and the stuff, I'm curious - do you think Max Payne 3 is crap? Or was using the footage there not really meant to convey that?

    So, Max Payne 3 plays over a whole sequence where I talk about a game doing interesting stuff thematically and also having good shooting, and ask "does the stuff benefit from being in a shooter?" THAT is why I wanted Max Payne 3 playing, because it's sort of famously a good shooter and an interesting plot that don't necessarily fit seamlessly together. Errant Signal has a good video about it.

  45. I think Undertale isn't a very good game.

    Am I doomed to burn in hell?

    I bounced off the demo and never played the full game, so if you burn, we burn together.

  46. Shaun doesn’t want us parasocialing him anymore and I think he kinda hates us. Can we parasocial you instead?

    fuk no

  47. How do you get your scripts to be so tightly written and dense with information and meaning?

    A lot of rewriting.

  48. what're your thoughts on everything going down with Contra?

    I wish the internet at large could say "your discomfort is valid but your phrasing is needlessly divisive towards NB and non-passing people, and given the size of your audience Twitter is probably not the best place to have this discussion" without a thousand people convinced Contra hates NB folks calling for her head.

  49. sans is in Smash

    Mii Fighter costume != "in Smash" but still pretty cool

  50. What are your thoughts on sending sheep into space?

    Can I come to?

  51. Seriously, be specific

    We're talking about pac-man tho. Anything that overtly political about/in pac-man??

    in response to In what way are they political?

    I note you've moved the goalpost from "political" to "overtly political."

    But I'm serious: start with the premise that all art is political. You see Pac-man, Tetris, and landscapes and think, "How is this political?" And, well, think through. How might they be political? No wrong answers, just throw some stuff out.

  52. are you ready to bumble

    in response to are you ready to rumble

    Bumble seems like a great platform but it's too hard to tell whether or not people are poly on there.

  53. Maybe you didn’t mean to, but your answer re mastodon came across as very apologetic and matter-of-fact-y.

    New question: how can we move everyone to platforms less driven by exploitive profit hungry surveillance capitalism than FB/Twitter/IG/YT/Snapchat?

    I feel like that's a weird way of framing things? Like, it's basically saying "how do we get people to vote with their dollar against capitalism?" Voting with your dollar is a fundamentally capitalist concept.

    We should be regulating platforms so they can't be as profit-hungry surveillance capitalist, and obviously it would be great to just not have capitalism. But until we can do either of those things the incentives in place will keep people on exploitative platforms. You can move to Mastodon and encourage your friends to meet you there, but it's not going to happen in a widespread way without systemic change.

  55. but then other date also date and me sad? how do?!

    talk lots

  56. You kinda do?

    in response to are you ready to rumble

    you overestimate me

  58. why aren't we using Mastodon

    The product being sold with any social media platform isn't a set of apps or policies or aesthetics, it's a way of interacting with Everyone You Know. For platforms to coexist, they have to offer a different way of interacting with Everyone You Know: Facebook is distinct from Twitter is distinct from Instagram is distinct from Tumblr. You go to these platforms to interact with many of the same people, but they're different enough that it's worth having accounts on each.

    If a platform is offering the same fundamental experience, you're going to choose one or the other, and the one you choose will be the one that has Everyone You Know. This is why Facebook killed MySpace and why Google+ couldn't get a foothold: people don't want Everyone You Know divided between multiple platforms, they want them all in one place. So it doesn't matter if Facebook is a worse platform than Google+, they're offering more or less the same way of interacting, and Everyone You Know is already on Facebook.

    We're not on Mastodon because Everyone You Know isn't there.

  60. you are a good noodle

    thanks! I try.

  61. Jokes Aside though, emotionally how does being poly make you feel compared to be monogamous if you'd ever done that? I've never really talked to Poly people outside of weird Mormon families with six wives and one husband so I'm genuinely curious about what that's like for somebody who doesn't treat women like cattle. I know in my head that that's not how most poly relationships are, but I'd like to learn as much as I can some people who are actually poly so I can dislodge this weird idea nugget at the base of my consciousness

    It's a little hard to describe, because, at this point, polyamory just feels normal in the way monogamy used to feel. Before I was poly, my experience of jealousy was rooted in loneliness: someone I liked was with someone else so that meant they weren't with me. I find it a different experience when the person I like is with someone else *and* with me; there's no loss, so I'm not lonely, so I'm not jealous. I can still feel jealous if they have an experience with someone else that I was hoping to have with them, but that happens in monogamy, too. And obviously sometimes I like someone whom I don't end up dating, but that happens when you're single, too. They are all surmountable issues, and you get good at just talking things out.

    The real core question, for me, is: much as we insist otherwise, if you date someone long enough, one of you is going to like someone else, so what will you do when that happens? In monogamy, you have to either distance yourself from the person you like or break up with your partner, either of which is sad, but, if that's what you prefer, that's valid. In poly, there's a third option, which, if everyone is good at communication, has the potential not to be sad for anyone.

    I've got a character limit on Curious Cat, but I can recommend books if you're really interested. The two books you'll find on pretty much any poly person's shelf are Sex at Dawn and The Ethical Slut, though the one I'd recommend is Opening Up by Tristan Taormino.

  62. https://youtu.be/DTsdKycVZZ4

    wow yet again I find this video could be completely wrong

    you asking me out?

  63. Say for the sake of argument, isn't it feasible that there would still have been a huge spike in racist violence and literal Nazis recruiting on college campuses if we'd elected a Democrat?

    in response to Hey, Ian. Ran across this Medium article arguing against the idea that voting for democrats reduces harm and that there's no tangible difference between dems and reps. I've heard this a lot and thought of it as equivocating, but the guy seemed to have a lot of data on his side. I'm wondering, since you're a smart guy who's got issues with democrats, what your take on that is?

    Authoritarian followers take action when they feel the authorities are on their side.

    So no.

  64. I have heard a lot of leftist people say the phrase "All art is political" but i feel like if you think about it for more than a few seconds its not true. For example pacman or tetris or paintings of landscapes. Can you explain to me why people say this?

    Pac-man, Tetris, and landscapes are all political.

  66. are you ready to rumble

    do I look like a motherfucker who's ready to rumble?

  68. Thoughts on Steven Universe: The Movie?

    I tuned in late and missed the first 20 minutes, but I quite liked it! I'm still a little mixed on the show's "anyone can come around if you just talk to them" ethos; it's really aspirational, and it's probably good to tell kids to listen to each other, but Spinel is kind of a textbook person-who-becomes-abusive-after-having-been-abused, and the Diamonds are authoritarian dictators, and constantly trying to appeal to their better natures is how people get exploited.

    That said, they are also metaphors for friends and family members whose histories or social roles are causing them pain, and the things that make them hurt others also hurt themselves, and it's a worthwhile message that assholery hurts everyone including the asshole, and and everyone has the power to change, and you can be accepted by being your authentic self.

    So... I dunno. There's a lot of good in these metaphors, even if I'm ambivalent. But I've been feeling that way ever since Season 5.

    The movie was still good!

  69. could an argument be made that ecofascism, if only done for a short time while it is deemed "necessary" in order to brute force our way to stopping climate change, and then thereafter ended and replaced by some form of egalitarianism, could be a viable path to saving our species?

    in response to is ecofascism preferable to extinction?

    Any system that consents to being disbanded isn't fascism.

  70. What's your feelings on the new Telltale situation?

    in response to what if video games were good?

    It's a different company with the same name.

  71. best video game sword

    Masamune.

  72. is it weird to be in my mid twenties questioning my sexuality

    that's awesome!

  74. I'd be curious to learn more about Poly from you, given that the mental image many people have of poly men is less then super awesome. Maybe some truth and fat from a real person could help with that in some small way?

    in response to Are you poly?

    I would need a more specific question. Also, I'm fairly private about my personal life, so whether or not I answer and in how much detail is at my discretion.

    But you can ask.

  75. Hey, Ian. Ran across this Medium article arguing against the idea that voting for democrats reduces harm and that there's no tangible difference between dems and reps. I've heard this a lot and thought of it as equivocating, but the guy seemed to have a lot of data on his side. I'm wondering, since you're a smart guy who's got issues with democrats, what your take on that is?

    We have a Muslim ban, an economy just about to collapse, courts stuffed with hard right conservatives, a huge spike in racist violence, massive tax breaks for the wealthy, and literal Nazis recruiting on college campuses.

    We wouldn't have any of these if we'd elected a Democrat.

Anon commented:
Ian replied: