God, musta clicked something cause suddenly all my Twitter For You is all people sharing their commune dreams
I actually learned in college about American commune moments of the Second, Third, and Fourth (the hippie Age of Aquarius) Great Awakenings, they’re remarkably similar
“What if there was a place where all you and your weirdo friends could live apart from the rest of the world in a way that supported you through common enterprise” is exactly what my small town boarding school fantasy is about and it is not conceived as a commune for good reason
Oh yeah, I took a “US Religions” course in college, that one was great. One of my takeaways was “Jim Jones wasn’t actually that special until the meth made him super paranoid”, which we spent a week or two on. Fun to learn about, like, right before Far Cry 5, the one about fighting an apocalyptic religious commune, came out.
Silent Hill is nominally set in Maine (I think largely as a Stephen King reference, like the street names) but from architecture and typology it’s clearly in the Pacific Northwest, it shouldn’t be surprising that’s the kind of American small town that’s most legible to Japan
It just occurred to me: of all the video games series, I think Mario is the one that the greatest amount of human intellectual effort has been spent on. In general Mario seems to dominate the speedrunning and challenge-running communities (stuff like the SM64 A-button challenge), and the amount of thought and effort that has gone into understanding how these games work and playing them optimally with respect to certain objectives is just astounding. And then on top of that there’s SMW romhacking. I don’t know, it’s possible more time and effort has been spent on some kind of esports game (Starcraft?), but I’m not sure. Mario is definitely among the top contenders. And as someone who is, you know, something of a Mario fan and also something of a human ingenuity fan, this makes me really happy. Mario is, frankly, Serious Business these days. And I think that’s cool.
