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YggiDee posted:I like El Goonish Shive a lot but I never discuss it in here because I assume most people here don't read it, and also I never have much to say aside from "golly I like Susan" and also "despite having annotations under each comic that link to any relevant pages I still have barely any idea what's happening, ever". The start is Real loving Rough but it was also a very important webcomic for me as a late teens/early 20s egg and it still holds a special place in my heart. I also think it shows very dramatic improvement in quality, of both art and writing, over its run; the difference between 2002 EGS and 2012 EGS is striking. All that said, I'm not reading it on an ongoing basis for the same reason I'm not reading anything else, i.e. within a month I have no idea what's going on because all the prior context has slid out of my brain. I need more recommendations for good stuff that's actually completed while I wait for EGS, Girl Genius, K6BD, etc to wrap up.
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Apr 21, 2024 01:26
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Rand Brittain posted:I mean, I get this, but I feel like it it falls flat because there are not actually any bad clowns. Everything bad about the Clown Corps either stems from bad (civilian) leadership or from the slanderous lies spread about them by evil, jealous mimes. There are not actually any bad apples spoiling the bunch. At one point there was a villain who was a former clown who was locked up for clown brutality. So bad apples do exist, but the Clown Corps efficiently weed them out before they can cause institutional rot, which is more fantastical than clowns with superpowers fighting crime
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Apr 21, 2024 02:00
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Rand Brittain posted:I mean, I get this, but I feel like it it falls flat because there are not actually any bad clowns. Everything bad about the Clown Corps either stems from bad (civilian) leadership or from the slanderous lies spread about them by evil, jealous mimes. There are not actually any bad apples spoiling the bunch. Honestly I think it's more interesting for sidestepping that point, because as it's starting to investigate: Is any amount of good intentions and lack of bad apples able to overcome what being the cops structurally does to you?
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Apr 21, 2024 02:01
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Captain Oblivious posted:Honestly I think it's more interesting for sidestepping that point, because as it's starting to investigate: Yeah, for me personally the main thrust of that the Corps is being turned from emergency rescue services into cops, slowly but steadily and without some of them even realizing it, is more than enough.
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Apr 21, 2024 02:24
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Captain Oblivious posted:Sinfest is NOT benignly bad, it's cancerously bad, but it is at least hilarious to pull out the deeply unhinged ideological underpinings of each new curveball. Japanese American Tatsuya Ishida is now advocating for a form of Esoteric Nazism that believes white people are space aliens who originally settled in Scandinavia because it is closest to the climate of their home planet! Sinfest is the kind of bad that's kinda scary to me because I don't really know how somebody goes that far off the deep end, and I don't want to really contemplate the whole chain of reasoning for fear that it could somehow be contagious. There've certainly been other people who've gone down similar paths. Ishida is objectively talented as an artist even if he chooses to do bad things and has lost whatever sense of humor he used to have, and Sinfest a decade or so back was actually pretty nice and cute, so it's sad for it to be so bad. Although it's not the most unheard of thing for someone in their older age to reject and resent the things they loved as an adolescent.
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Apr 21, 2024 02:33
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the holy poopacy posted:At one point there was a villain who was a former clown who was locked up for clown brutality. So bad apples do exist, but the Clown Corps efficiently weed them out before they can cause institutional rot, which is more fantastical than clowns with superpowers fighting crime Aha, that's a good point. It reminds me of Ice-9, where the least absurd thing about the story is the existence of a world-ending superweapon.
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Apr 21, 2024 02:46
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SlothfulCobra posted:Sinfest is the kind of bad that's kinda scary to me because I don't really know how somebody goes that far off the deep end, and I don't want to really contemplate the whole chain of reasoning for fear that it could somehow be contagious. There've certainly been other people who've gone down similar paths. There's a certain kind of liberal that when you inconvenience or correct them even one, start to crack and peel until a fascist is there.
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Apr 21, 2024 03:37
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Captain Oblivious posted:Honestly I think it's more interesting for sidestepping that point, because as it's starting to investigate: The juxtaposition between Binky recognizing the selfish government/corporate actors trying to use him for their own ends and having the moral character to resign, and Bout immediately accepting and spouting off what are effectively a bunch of thin blue line arguments about the value of his oath to the Corps when pressed on it (because he'd already been having self-confidence issues and values having the affirmation of the position over the moral value of a version of the Corps he's never known) is IMO about as clear an example of how these things start as you get. Bout's not a bad person! But he is a person, and this is what happens when an institution that gets held up as The Law has to be staffed by people who actually exist, flaws and all. Separately on the bad apple topic: I do actually like how some of the current events are serving to show how completely hollow Mustard is. The second she discovers her sister is alive, she just completely abandons any pretense of caring about the Corps or the people it ostensibly serves, gives McBell a speech that could be about valuing her own life, but in context is probably closer to projection and self-justification for her own selfish actions, and starts threatening/beating the poo poo out of Oats/Livewire despite knowing what she went through because clearly she must still be holding out for some reason? It changes the comic from her being inspired to join the Corps by her sister, to it being more that she literally has no character outside of her - her name, her costume (her current vigilante look is literally just her old costume but in her sister's new colors), her affection for McBell (who has the same sense of humor as her sister), etc. It's like her entire participation with the Corps was just a character she was roleplaying as a placeholder for the memories of her sister, and now that she can get the real thing back she doesn't see the point in even pretending to care about this anymore. I saw someone refer to it as a character assassination not by the author turning her evil but by the character turning herself lame and pathetic, and I can definitely see that.
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Apr 21, 2024 03:43
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Trump broke a whole lotta brains Even during the Obama years, Sinfest's criticism of Obama was largely that he wasn't doing enough for the liberal cause, that he talked a big talk but didn't back it up with actions. Which was very on point! Then within 5 years he was writing fanfic about White Christians Taking Back Our Country From Woke Mobs
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Apr 21, 2024 03:44
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Ishida was never a standard liberal, at least not in a politically active way; he got into feminism in a ‘men bad, I am good ally’ way and then it pretty quickly cooked into considering himself a radfem ally. Make TERFs are loving weird, and he got weirder about it than most.
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Apr 21, 2024 03:51
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Yeah Ishida’s issues are ultimately entirely about women and everything else is an outgrowth of that. It starts out as generic dudebro horny, eventually becomes apologetic and well meaning feminism due to his guilt/conflicted feelings over the horny, then people gently criticize his anti sex worker and transphobic remarks and he digs his heels in 300% because he has never dealt with criticism in his life (seriously way back in the day even mild critique led to him nuking his forums) and goes full radfem TERF. And TERFs almost always join arms with other reactionaries eventually. Like so. It’s as fascinating as it is sad!
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Apr 21, 2024 04:12
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I think there was also a whole thing about deciding that porn is evil and having a whole moral crisis that he felt the need to publicly repent every time he jacked off.
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Apr 21, 2024 04:52
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SlothfulCobra posted:Sinfest is the kind of bad that's kinda scary to me because I don't really know how somebody goes that far off the deep end, and I don't want to really contemplate the whole chain of reasoning for fear that it could somehow be contagious. There've certainly been other people who've gone down similar paths. We don't and can't have full access to Ishida other than the content of his work...and bear in mind the discussion of the danger of reading too much into a hated comic artist's work in this very page of the thread! That said, three things to bear in mind when considering a crazy conservative trajectory generally and Ishida specifically: 1. Ishida in specific held to the use of what we'd then have considered dumbly edgy racial stereotypes from the beginning of his work, as well as the sort of attitude toward groups that generally suggested detachment if not alienation, an at best arms-length understanding of their common humanity that made him only look to represent those groups in their stereotyped form. This alienation gets worse when you remember that Slick, the protagonist he used as his authorial standin since high school, is white, and when someone dug up those illustrations they were very much in the same vein of defensive distancing; mockery to reflect alienation. 2. One axis that was strongest with Ishida throughout the entire course of his work is that the assumption of the gender binary was always a thing- and it's also the angle that ran through the whole desire, horniness and weird self-castigating morality play of the comic. Other smarter folks have written way more on this than I could, but the way that people build and lean upon the gender binary in the construction of their own identities, desires and insecurities seems to make attacking it an extremely effective method of breaking their brains. 3. With all that said, I'm sorry, but no one is immune- at a minimum, neurotrauma of various kinds from drug abuse to direct physical trauma to dementia can cause a dramatic shift in this direction. Intellectual closure, where you let a narrowing stream of media sources, social media self-selection, or absolutist ideology radicalize you, can take you down a similar path (and not just the one with red caps and mens' rights). The check to deal with this latter route is to have a really wide range of sources of information and a hipstery enough set of beliefs and influences, coupled with a capacity for changing your views when you get new information. Critical rationalism's great for that. Conversely, you can be abby normal in a lot of ways, mentally or ideologically, without being a raging bigot or right-to-player of any kind. If you're not building your identity on a similar unipolar set of assumptions, or undergoing the sort of single-stream radicalizing, you've got relatively little to worry about in this direction. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Apr 21, 2024 |
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Apr 21, 2024 06:32
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I do see Ishida as a great example of the SWERF to TERF pipeline. I stopped reading Sinfest for utterly unrelated reasons (because he had no RSS feed) when he as just starting becoming "sex negative". And almost everybody in that movement came out as transphobic later. So I wasn't surprised when I heard of it.
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Apr 21, 2024 09:46
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Synthbuttrange posted:There's a certain kind of liberal that when you inconvenience or correct them even one, start to crack and peel until a fascist is there. Yes, they're called "liberals".
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Apr 21, 2024 09:58
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I appreciate the discussion of Clown Corps. What a great comic. I hope the author can stay engaged with jt long enough to reach some kind of conclusion.
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Apr 21, 2024 10:47
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I can't decide whether Sinfest is the worst comic being posted to the politoons thread. But it's clear to me that's where it belongs. It's not a webcomic, it's a political propaganda strip somewhere to the right of Branco, Kirschen (maybe), Garrison. It's posted as one big summary post, so it's easier to scroll past. If you stick and read, it's incredibly awful and utterly bereft of hinge.
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Apr 21, 2024 14:25
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What was interesting to me about Sinfest was how apparently he reuses the same symbolic characters over and over. There was a twitter thread that went into the madness of reading the whole comic archive and reported how the comic evolved, and the same character could, in the span of years, and sometimes month, switch what they were supposed to represent, sometimes representing approval of a concept and the next time representing disapproval of the same concept. He also apparently uses symbols that only make sense if you are running in the internet right-wing circles, so the result is a weird slurry of ideas that interally shift logic over the years unless you are extremely into the same social media the author is at the same time?
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Apr 21, 2024 15:08
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Yes, it's remarkable how incoherent and incomprehensible it is. It has completely lost the plot. Incredible, really, for what started as a gag a day comic.
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Apr 21, 2024 15:23
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Ah, found the twitter thread, if anyone is interested? I feel like this is something that could be done in some sort of media analysis class: https://twitter.com/bitterkarella/status/1498104642881798149
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Apr 21, 2024 15:39
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PoliToons is posting Sinfest again? I was under the assumption people were leaving well enough alone since "22 because the idiot was drawing children on strip poles.
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Apr 21, 2024 15:47
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ConanThe3rd posted:PoliToons is posting Sinfest again? I was under the assumption people were leaving well enough alone since "22 because the idiot was drawing children on strip poles. Never stopped.
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Apr 21, 2024 15:49
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Wittgen posted:I appreciate the discussion of Clown Corps. What a great comic. I hope the author can stay engaged with jt long enough to reach some kind of conclusion. Joe's burned out a little bit from time to time so hopefully now he knows to take breaks.
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Apr 21, 2024 15:52
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I could swear he did give a rough estimate of the length of the comic at some point and iirc it's not super long, we must have passed the mid-point by now? So I have faith he can complete it.
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Apr 21, 2024 15:57
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VictualSquid posted:I do see Ishida as a great example of the SWERF to TERF pipeline. They overlap because they're appropriating ideological talking points from the same fringe second wave radfem cranks. It's contextual stuff coming out of lesbian separatist discourse that was still reflexively and thoughtlessly hateful at the time, but having it out there in "feminist literature" as an academic thing people discussed (and eventually agreed was untenable and bad) is enough for it to be repurposed by even bigger bigots now.
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Apr 21, 2024 18:27
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Neito posted:Never stopped. That's honestly surprising, when posting Day By Day was forbidden for what could be considered somewhat less.
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Apr 21, 2024 18:41
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Jedit posted:That's honestly surprising, when posting Day By Day was forbidden for what could be considered somewhat less. DbD (I think?) and Stonetoss were group concensus. It comes up every so often to ban it, but the current method of limiting it to once a week dumps rather than posting each comic every day contains it to basically the last half of Sunday and the first half of Monday, mostly.
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Apr 21, 2024 19:17
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DbD was as much because it had straight porn content. Stonetoss et al was partly out of concern about spreading discussion and decoding of an insurgent cryptofascism- in line with the creators’ intentions
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Apr 21, 2024 19:27
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The only positive thing I can say about Ishida is that he's mostly ineffectual as a propagandist.
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Apr 21, 2024 20:28
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Joe Slowboat posted:The only positive thing I can say about Ishida is that he's mostly ineffectual as a propagandist. I occationally get the idea that I want to do a video essay on Ishida (motivation and lack of energy is a bitch sometimes), and one of the things I always want to say about Ishida is that he's not interesting because his radicalization is unique; he's interesting because it's stock standard boring pipeline poo poo, but it's documented.
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Apr 21, 2024 20:32
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Rand Brittain posted:I mean, I get this, but I feel like it it falls flat because there are not actually any bad clowns. Everything bad about the Clown Corps either stems from bad (civilian) leadership or from the slanderous lies spread about them by evil, jealous mimes. There are not actually any bad apples spoiling the bunch. what the police fundamentally are is a big gun wielded arbitrarily by whoever holds power against those without, and it doesn't really matter how individually nice the components of that gun are. Clown Corps is being pretty smart in bypassing the endless twiddling about how many sensitivity seminars cops should take between homeless camp purges to deal directly with how even in a cartoon fantasyland with no bad cops, all cops are bastards. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Apr 21, 2024 |
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Apr 21, 2024 20:52
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Discendo Vox posted:DbD was as much because it had straight porn content. Stonetoss et al was partly out of concern about spreading discussion and decoding of an insurgent cryptofascism- in line with the creators’ intentions DBD was blatantly traced from porn long before it was banned. The ban happened because Muir had his self-insert (TW) practice corrective rape on his wife. I haven't been in Politoons since last year at least so I don't know exactly what Sinfest is up to - not that I would have read it if I had been - but I'd put sexualised images of children at least on that level if not higher.
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Apr 21, 2024 23:57
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Sinfest is mostly up to using Lord of the Rings as a completely incoherent metaphor for Israel Palestine and, as mentioned, pushing Esoteric Nazism that suggests pure aryan vikings are ancient aliens. This is as always interspliced with bashing on trans women by drawing them with comically enormous bulges.
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Apr 22, 2024 00:02
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Jedit posted:DBD was blatantly traced from porn long before it was banned. The ban happened because Muir had his self-insert (TW) practice corrective rape on his wife. I haven't been in Politoons since last year at least so I don't know exactly what Sinfest is up to - not that I would have read it if I had been - but I'd put sexualised images of children at least on that level if not higher. I stand corrected, it was before my time.
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Apr 22, 2024 00:56
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Captain Oblivious posted:Sinfest is mostly up to using Lord of the Rings as a completely incoherent metaphor for Israel Palestine and, as mentioned, pushing Esoteric Nazism that suggests pure aryan vikings are ancient aliens. Posts like this are making me tempted to read Sinfest because that is some next level bonkers
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Apr 22, 2024 01:05
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TwoPair posted:Posts like this are making me tempted to read Sinfest because that is some next level bonkers I wouldn’t! It’s just ‘a competently drawn but aesthetically bad newspaper cartoon goes off the deep end in every available fashion in sequence.’ Read the twitter thread about how it went that way instead.
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Apr 22, 2024 01:17
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TwoPair posted:Posts like this are making me tempted to read Sinfest because that is some next level bonkers I agree with Joe mostly, read the twitter thread instead for a greatest hits grounding in the subject matter to avoid the sea of inoffensive mediocrity before things get wild. Then continue if you like because imo the twitter thread stops before a lot of the hilarious dementia happens. Your mileage may vary though. Some might enjoy sifting through its humble beginnings to better contrast how bad things get, but it is a LOT of material. I’ve read it all but I’ve also read all of Lore Olympus. And Namesake. God I hate Namesake. Do as I say not as I do kids. 
Captain Oblivious fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Apr 22, 2024 |
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Apr 22, 2024 02:36
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Looks like I missed the majority of EGS chat, but I wanted to chime in and say, the thing I find most fascinating (and low-key respect) about it after reading off and on for the past... two decades... is how dedicated Dan is to getting all the proper perspective and proportions and whatever other metrics he (they?) uses regarding transformations and other sci-fi nonsense EXACTLY SO. A new page will have a link to something from seventeen years ago that looks like it was hastily scribbled on a bar napkin in an active war zone and maybe kind of obtusely references something you just read if you're squinting, but the commentary will say something like "Grace is probably about 2% bigger than she should be in Panel 4, but it was mostly because I didn't want to spend another six hours rendering fake comic book covers for the comic rack in the background, despite the fact that it should be clearly visible over Grace's right shoulder and to Sarah's immediate left." It is frustratingly endearing.
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Apr 22, 2024 05:33
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EGS is the product of a very specific monomania and that makes it kind of wonderful, but also I got fed up with the style of storytelling that creates a while ago and dropped it.
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Apr 22, 2024 06:07
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Forgot what thread I had open and spent about ten seconds wondering what Tim Sweeney's very specific monomania was
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Apr 22, 2024 06:09
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