One man's website all about the stickers that you can find on fruit. Astounding. h/t to Laura.

Thus the video game writer is by nature a very political animal, whose job involves not only writing story but advocating for it and adapting it to changing circumstances as the project evolves. Often the role of producers and team leads in video game studios is to shield their teams from having to throw out work because of iteration; narrative really is no different.

Great post from Bruno about game narrative and how it functions. Highly recommend reading if you're interested in any of this.

Everything is so evidently handcrafted, giving it the energy of a high school production (complimentary). A small orchestra, manned by people dressed in Pride regalia, sits off to one side. Behind them, a table holds 10 different zines covering everything from how to get off Spotify to the role of surveillance technology in schools to “Why GenAI Sucks.”

The kids are alright?

Once you notice a ChatGPT flyer, you will see them everywhere if you keep your eyes open.

These have been fucking destroying me. They are EVERYWHERE. They are EVIL

Self-reform is how the CPC answers the oldest question in Chinese statecraft: how to escape the historical cycle of rise and decline. Its answer is to never stop struggling, and never let up on its fighting spirit in order to improve and to better represent the interests of the people.

Funny that I ran into this right after posting (positively!) about this piece on Ukraine from Fight For A Future, which is a publication that I do not agree with about their views on China (though I will admit they are not the rabid anti-China sort like many other worse members of the commentariat).

Carlos Martinez is one of my favorite writers on modern China not just because he is a fanboy (which I think is completely fair given the state of modern China compared to most of the US-aligned global West) but because he is a skilled writer and arguer about the ways that the CPC is specifically utilizing Marxist-Leninist thinking in their operations. Not shying away from fair criticisms, but taking the stance that adaptation is crucial to any ongoing communist project.

Where I think the PRC, and the CPC specifically, excels is the understanding that progress will take a long time, and thus it is imperative that a socialist project survive, even if that means taking some Ls along the way (and for what it's worth, I think the PRC has made a lot of mistakes, both historically and contemporarily! I just also think those mistakes do not change the progressive direction of CPC leadership). Or, to quote Martinez:

Ultimately, however, the test on these new battlefields is the same test the CPC has passed before, in a new form: Whether it can keep identifying the principal contradiction of the period and mobilizing society to resolve it, without either capitulating to external pressure or abandoning the peaceful, people-centered and win-win character that has defined Chinese modernization. On the record of the last 105 years, I would not bet against the CPC and the Chinese people surmounting these new challenges.

Behind the curtain of war propaganda, the Ukrainian working class is suffocating under the weight of increasing state violence and corruption.

Getting reasonable analysis of the war in Ukraine is a total pain in the ass in the United States, at least. I appreciate this piece for being a straightforward and well-argued analysis of the class aspects of the war.

The modern Russian federation is no worker's state. Modern Ukraine is neither. I don't see a way to interpret this war as a fight that Leftists (& especially Marxists) need to 'support' on either side. However, also and importantly, this is not a case of entirely imperialist adventure -- the government of modern Ukraine is explicitly right-wing and interested in maintaining a relationship with the imperial core. The government of modern Russia is explicitly right-wing but not interested in maintaining a relationship with the imperial core (favoring the modern coalition of BRICS, which has fair things to critique but is definitively not part of the global imperialist core).

This robbery of the working class in Ukraine is of course no new phenomenon. Just as in Russia, since the reintroduction of capitalism, “big business [has] turned the state into an institutional tool for realising the interests of oligarchic groups. There [has] emerged a peculiar phenomenon of ‘state capture’”. However, the development of full scale war has led to a shift in the nature of capture, away from local oligarchs and instead in favour of internationalised (western) capital.

It is nearly impossible to overstate how much the current political terrain of the former Soviet nations was explicitly the goal of the American-led crusade to destroy the USSR. This war would not be happening if the USSR was still around. That is not a paean toward a past that we lost as much as a statement of reasonable fact! When I see the peoples of 'Ukraine' and 'Russia' fighting each other, it is heartbreaking precisely because we have living memory of a time when these lines of identification did not bring about warfare. It was in the time of the USSR.

Although many opposition parties have experienced wartime repression in Ukraine, anti-communist and anti-socialist repression has been widespread since 2015, when a number of authoritarian laws were passed following the victory of the far right during the Euromaidan.

I do not care for the modern Russian federation, the same as I do not care for the government of the United States. It is a tragedy what happened, and it is a tragedy that continues to unfold. But to support the Ukrainian state uncritically is also deeply fraught, and I would argue not any more defensible as an ideological position.

New laws banned the Communist Party and its publications, along with any communist symbols. Singing the Internationale, the international song of worker’s solidarity, was made punishable by up to five years in prison. The use of the state to persecute the left followed severe and bloody street violence perpetrated by fascist paramilitary groups in Ukraine during the Euromaidan. Just a year before the ban on communist party activities, on the 2nd of May 2014, around a thousand fascist thugs under the banner of Right Sector (a Neo-Nazi paramilitary group) surrounded the House of Trade Unions in Odessa, setting fire to the premises where dozens of terrified workers had sought sanctuary. Right Sector members, barricaded exits and beat the men, women and children who threw themselves out of the windows of the building trying to escape. A total of 48 people were burnt alive that day, in what Right Sector proudly described as “yet another bright page in our fatherland’s history.”