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• bear@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  They’re either poorly explaining or poorly understanding a well-known link between fascism and the overindulgence in nostalgia for bygone times. But not the nostalgia of “I loved the games I played as a kid” or “I think the industry has gone downhill since then”, and instead the more general and politicized “society/everything was better back then, remember what (((they))) took from you”. You’ll often see nazis posting video edits of late 90s to early 00s home video footage with massively overdone VHS filters of white people smiling and shit. What they don’t tell you is that the people making these videos weren’t even born then, and that’s the central flaw of the nostalgia-fascism pipeline that usually gets left out: it’s the strongest on people who weren’t actually alive yet.

  There can be some overlap with retrogame crowd because that nazi-nostalgia can take many forms, but this is usually from the easily-discernable “games are WOKE now, why can’t games be non-political like Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid” types. A subsection of nasally-voiced overweight 30-something nerds who are mad at the world because they can’t get a girlfriend. You can actually find a lot of them in the modretro subreddit soying out about how epic and based Palmer Luckey is for making the weapons-grade Game Boy that triggers the libs.

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  • yermaw@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Thanks that makes a lot of sense.

    But also, Im very much out of the loop on a lot of this, and will do some surface-level research later because that whole last sentence is a fucking trip

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    • bear@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Oh yeah, I should probably expand on the context for that.

      Palmer Luckey is an outright fascist (see: thread picture above defending illegal executive military autonomy without the explicitly necessary congressional approval) who currently owns a company called Anduril that specializes in weapons and surveillance. He is also notably a Game Boy enthusiast, and ran a Game Boy modding site way back called ModRetro. He took his blood money and started a new company with the same name that produces a Game Boy clone called the ModRetro Chromatic, which is admittedly quite good quality, and publishes indie games as physical cartridges. I’m including this information just to be fair; unlike Elon Musk, this guy isn’t a poser posturing because he thinks it will endear him to the nerd crowd or whatever. He has a legitimate history in the community long before he got big, he knows his stuff, and there’s no way ModRetro is profitable, so it’s likely a genuine passion project for him and a love letter to the console.

      However, any good will or endearment is completely wasted because he just recently produced an Anduril-branded Chromatic made from the same material as his attack drones. And ModRetro’s main fanbase is almost exclusively comprised of fascist or fascist-adjacent soylent losers who simultaneously claim that this shouldn’t be political but also think it’s Dang Heckin’ Epic that he made a Game Boy out of the same military murder metal as his weapons. They sometimes leaked into Game Boy enthusiast spaces and get real steamin’ angry that everybody else hates them, so for the most part they stay in their echo chamber now.

      I personally really hate this guy because he keeps dipping his fascist dick into things I’m really passionate about and causing significant community fracturing over it. First VR, then NixOS, then Game Boys and the indie homebrew scene for it.

      Some sources for my claims about the typical fanboys of ModRetro:

      reddit.com/…/better_look_at_the_anduril_chromatic…
      www.reddit.com/r/…/can_people_stop_pretending/
      reddit.com/…/buying_a_chromatic_isnt_an_ethical_d…

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      • AntiBullyRanger@ani.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Ai, thanks for more eloquently explaining what I meant.
        It’s depressing although the fascists still in this network.

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