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Welcome to my blog where I get opinionated and shit. TW

Call of Duty is pro war propaganda

Created: 7/25/2024

Have you ever questioned the logic behind the media that you consume? I have a feeling the average cod player does not. To be fair, the last call of duty to not just be straight up propaganda was World at War and thats because it wanted to portray WW2 as a brutal and violent experience which it did really well for the time! However this post is not calling out WaW, it's calling out direct connection that CoD has with military indoctrination and recruitment. I will be comparing CoD to the Hotline Miami series due to their similarities and their key differences.

Hotline Miami is anti-war
(Spoiler Alert!)

Hotline Miami 1 is a game set in... you guessed it, Miami. It takes place in a timeline where Russia was at war with the US, they won by nuking San Francisco causing a surrender from the US. Due to this, American and Russian politics are on shakey grounds and the Russian Mafia swoops in during the power vacuum. This causes a large portion of the population to become Russophobic. Jacket's (the character you play as is Jacket) friend who just goes by the name 'Beard' was in San Francisco when the nuke dropped, killing him instantly. The player is unaware of this at first due to Jacket being a unreliable narriator that was stuck in a coma for most of the game. Before you realize any of this, the game asks you "do you like hurting people?" which gives the player incentive to think about their actions. Jacket doesn't kill because he enjoys it, Jacket kills for revenge and does not enjoy it but the players don't understand this unless they think critically about their actions. In Hotline Miami 2, Jacket is not a playable character. Jacket is in a jail cell waiting for seemingly nothing. This pissed off a lot of player that didn't understand the plot of HM1, in fact so did the rest of HM2. Hotline Miami asks you if you like hurting people and Hotline Miami 2 says "fuck you for enjoying this, heres more of what you wanted but we don't think you will like how it ends" HM2 starts you off as a movie director who is using his own movie to larp violence, this brought his own downfall when he gets shot on set with live ammunition by mistake, Alec Baldwin style. Next you play as the fans who mirror themselves off Jacket and make violence into their asthetic. These characters are direct references to the HM1 fans that play without a care for the story and just like the thrill of violence. They also meet a violent end. Manny Pardo is a detective and serial killer, his motives are similar to the fans but his methods are different. He meets his end holding a gun at his front door, parinoid that his police buddies had found out about his secret life when in reality they had only called him to warn about the nuke that is about to hit Mimai. These nukes were dropped as a direct result of these copy cats attacking Russian politicians and Mafia. The message that you should get from Hotline Miami 1 & 2 is that violence begets more violence and will ultimately result in the destruction of everything. When I beat these games, it personally was a life changing experience that resulted in me going down a different path in life.

Call of Duty is pro-war

In stark contrast to Hotline Miami, CoD is series that will often times glorify and make war out to be a cool, action filled experience. This feels way more sinister when you look at the core audience of CoD which is people under the age of 18. These games target younger and impressionable people and at no point ask about the senselessness of the actions taking place on screen. If fact, war crimes are often commited then immediately ignored. These games will often times portray russians as brutes without an ounce of moral fibres which is in stark contrast to Hotline Miami 2 which makes you play as one of the Russian Mafia members which humanizes them and deliberately adds a moral conflict between what the players want and the what the gameplay is showing. CoD never does this and when it attempts to, it's for shock value and to dehumanize the baddies. In CoD you almost always have a baddie that you need to go after and their stance is unquestionablly evil. The US military likes this because it trains young people to do as told and not to question the orders and motives. There are exceptions to this rule but again, their motives are not thought provoking and instead mirror that of a child's (Shepard in MW2 I am talking about you). Hotline Miami wants you to think critically about your actions while CoD's stories and world building falls apart with any real retrospective thoughts.

Why bother talking about this?

Until around mid 2023 I was constantly playing CoD games. Did you know the that the Wii ports still had functional multiplayer servers up until the end of last year? The verification server's on Nintendo's end went ages ago but you could still access these servers and play matches online thanks to ocarina codes. I left that community shortly before the shutdown due to the growing transphobic sentiment and the lack of care around people cheating. These games were my childhood and I now have extremely mixed feelings about them. They are fun but they are also propaganda and should be treated with critical thought in order to avoid any brain worms that they try to insert. When I was apart of the CoD Wii community I noticed a crazy amount of children there. I don't think video games make people violent unless the player is impressionable which the average child is. I can only image what kinds of brain worms kids are picking up from them now. There is way more that I would like to say on this topic and I could talk about Hotline Miami for day but I also want to do other stuff lol.

My head is about to burst I swear

Created: 7/21/2024

If you have read my blog post titled "The state of US Politics" then you understand that shit in the US is most likely going to hit the fan soon. Since making that post I realized that this shit is more dire then I originally thought. These people are straight up fascists and I have no issues saying that anymore because they are saying the quiet parts outloud. This shit is being writen on the walls for eveyone to see. Trump claims that he has nothing to do with the heritage foundation yet his own "Agenda 47" takes points straight from Project 2025 AND hes the likely candidate of the upcoming presidential election.

Current Objective:
Survive

If you are not a christian cis white male, you need to find community and like minded people + support them. If you are a christian cis white male but understand where we are heading politically, please become an ally and give support where possible. If you have money and space to spare, please find and help people that are going to need shelter. Talks about civil war is becoming more and more common place so if you live in a right leaning state, consider moving to a sanctuary state or to a safer country.

My current situation isn't great

With that being said, I at least have plans in place depending on how hard shit hits the fan. If you don't have plans already, please please please fix that before it's too late!

Firefly Sighting

Created: 7/13/2024

I saw fireflies for the first time last night, at first there was only one but then I saw multiple flashes of light coming from the grass. They only flashed for a second or so which made getting photos of them hard, thanks to my boyfriend we have this picture.

The state of US Politics

Created: 6/29/2024
Updated: 7/21/2024

The Presidential Debate

I'm not talking about any debates that took place on tv, I'm talking about the current debate between US Citizens. Once again we are left with two options and both suck. On one side you have our current fossil of a president and on the other you have a fossil of a felon. Neither are good options and both are very much showing their age. Once again we are in a situation that requires everyone to get out and vote but thats not likely to happen. There are people out there that genuinely think Trump is the better option out of the two now which is batshit insane. Biden isn't a good option either but at least he's not openly trying to turn the government into a dictatorship. The system is broken beyond repair if our only real options is vote for someone who wants to continue to help a genocide overseas or someone who wants to genocide their own citizens.

Existential Dread

I am extremely concerned about the future. Project 2025 is seeming like a possible reality, people that I used to be freinds with have pushed me away due to their political beliefs and I have had to so the same. I wish this was a topic that could be talked about calmly but at the end of the day one side of the "debate" wants people like me to not exist. If you think rationally and with the wellbeing of other people in mind, you are their enemy. The parallels to Nazis are way too common to be coincidence. Nazis thrived off uneducated people that followed orders without questions. Both Nazis and the "republican party" have this weird thing against immigration. Trump has many upon many parallels to Adolf Hitler and his retorics. How is a felon not allowed to vote yet is allowed to run for president? How does that make any sense at all?

Seperation of Church and State
(is being undermined as we speak)

Ever thought it was a bit weird that up until college, all kids in the education system have to repeat the pledge of allegiance? Ignoring how weird that concept is for a moment, why is god mentioned in the current pledge? Which god are we talking about? (thats a retorical question, it's specifically the Christian variety despite Christianity being Abrahamic) The original pledge had no mention of god whatsoever so why was this added?

Project 2025 is bad news for
EVERYONE

If you are not aware of what Project 2025 is, you have been living under a rock. It is a 900+ page plan made by the Heritage Foundation. Some of it's goals include:
- Expanding the power of the president
- Gutting the Department of Education
- Create a body that will certify teachers who embrace right wing extremist values
- Attacking programs related to LGBTQ+ Youth and anything diversity related
- Tax cuts for already wealthy buisness people
- Place immigrants into camps
- Place Furries and LGBTQ+ folk in jail
- And many many more nasty horrible things that are the opposite of democracy.

If it seems like they want people to be dumb and uneducated, thats the point. These people love the dumb and uneducated because they are more likely to blindly listen and do what they are told.

Presidential Immunity is fucking dumb

Not even two days after starting to write this, the supreme court ruled that any official acts that the president commits cannot be prosecuted in court. What does that even mean? It means exactly as it sounds. The ruling was vauge to allow the president to say what is and what isn't official acts. Not only does this protect Trump from any criminal charges, it makes whoever is the president at any given point able to:
- Order assassinations on anyone
- Legally charge someone with something they did not commit
- Pardon criminals without contest
- Setup and run a coup
- Resist the peaceful transfer of power at the end of their 4 years
- Basically anything else you could imagine

This ruling pretty much makes the president into a king. As things currently stand, it's hard to call the United States a Democracy. It's a scary time to live here...

Have you seen this moth before?

Created: 6/18/2024

It has been identified!

According to midnight solarium, this is a Blinded Sphinx also known as the Paonias excaecata. After doing my own research on it I am pretty sure this is correct! The Paonias excaecata is a somewhat common large moth able to be found around most of North America. These moths are nocturnal, you can find them easier at night. The Paonias excaecata start off their life as a Hornworm Caterpillar. Once they mature and turn into their adult form they no longer eat, they only use the energy that they have stored up! This makes their only priority finding another Paonias excaecata to mate with. Despite this goal, they are docile around humans!