Picking toki pona back up again! I’ve been really bad at staying on top of my practice as of late due to a depressive episode but now I have literally nothing else to do. So.
One thing about disco elysium that really intrigues me is how it doesn't exactly break the fourth wall, it bends it. It doesn't have anything explicit where either the narrator or Harry acknowledge that "hey we know we're in a video game", but Harry's video-game-y-ness is still acknowledged and either explained by Harry's character or acknowledged that this is a weird thing that Harry does and not how Normal people act. Real life people don't constantly zip from one "interactable" object or "container" to the other, but Harry does because that's just the preferred method of officers in his precinct. Real life people can't/don't run everywhere they go, but Harry does/can. Because he used to be a gym teacher. On the other side of the "weird", it's a total mystery to everyone else how Harry can get people to just reveal anything he wants to know. That's just how Harry is. It's weird, and people acknowledge how weird it is. He literally has a reputation as the "human can-opener". Real life people don't speak in "lists" or "trees" of questions, and Harry can even acknowledge that he only has a limited number of "options", to which everyone replies "What the hell are you talking about." Many people can even remark how much Harry loves questions, which Harry usually just chalks up to being a cop, but that's never the full answer. So Harry is either the weirdest person in the world because Normal people don't act like video game protagonists, or he's the only normal one because he's the only one who's actually acting like he's in a video game (which he is).
“When I was growing up, I was taught in American history books that Africa had no history, and neither did I. That I was a savage about whom the less said the better, who had been saved by Europe and brought to America. And of course, I believed it. I didn't have much choice. Those are the only books there were.
I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement, I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads. Under someone else's whip for nothing. For nothing.
If one has got to prove one's title to the land, isn't 400 years enough? 400 years, at least three wars. The American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors. Why is my freedom or my citizenship, or my right to live there, how is it conceivably a question now?
What we are not facing is the results of what we've done.
What one begs the American people to do, for all our sakes, is simply to accept our history until the moment comes when we, the Americans, we the American people, we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other.
Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it.”
—James Baldwin, debating William F. Buckley at Cambridge Union Society, February 18, 1965
[I do not fear the fire. I travel the land and seek. Yet I cannot find the way in. The spirits guide me in my dreams. Yet the threshold stays beyond my reach.]
thinking about how honest the hope is in disco elysium, if that makes sense. how you face consequences for the actions and life you can’t remember. how your nightmares come back and they just might be there to stay. how you still wake up in pain and have to very actively fight off the cravings of your old addictions. how it isn’t easy trying to chose not just life, but living better, living for yourself. how it doesn’t mean any of the problems will go away, or the pain will stop, but it gives you an option other than constant suffering. there’s always a silver lining, it’s just a matter of being able to look up and find it.
hope isn’t always easy, and sometimes it is a choice, but in a torn up world and a torn up body, it’s something. it’s not always pretty or perfect, it’s clumsy and sometimes foolish and hard to keep close, it’s difficult, and maybe it’s all you have but it’s something - streets and sodium lights, the sky, the world, you’re alive
genuinely bewildered at how it's just g@merg@te again. like it's just exactly the same strategy, except now it's a cabal of dark and sinister narrative designers instead of "there are women near my games" but it's like the same fucking thing and I'm so tired honestly