Yes, but is it inside a Brutalist monolith concrete building with a single small slit of a window? I get what you’re saying, but my point in regards to Vs initial apartment is that despite it’s small niceties, the harshness of the world that exists just right outside their door is mlre prison like than almost all modern 1st world apartments today.

I love the gig where you have to comfort and console your neighbor, Barry, because you get to see that his apartment is slightly smaller, slightly lower scale than yours, but more or less the same.

A similar portrayal can be seen in the apartment of K in Blade Runner 2049. Sure the interiors are nicer than some, but the apartments, to me, feel like the architects intended to treat the tenants like prisoners with nicer digs than actual prisoners. Space efficient to the point of just barely not cramped. Nice enough that initially you don’t complain. Isolated enough that you don’t connect with your neighbors.

Grant you there are community spaces like the boxing gym, but again, it reminds me of a prison gym mainly because of the Brutalist concrete foundation of the building.

Youtuber Dami Lee does a much better job breaking down Cyberpunk style architecture than I ever could. Id highly recommend you check out her video on the subject.

I love the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. Ive played the TTRPG, the Game from CD Project Red, and loved the anime. But no way in hell would I want to actually live in Night City…

Cyberpunk 2077, the video game, is a great story partially because Night City is practically more a character than a setting. It consumes and shits out all who are bold or stupid enough to think they can make it there.

The person romanticizing their world has somehow missed every theme of the story. Immortality is only achievable by sacrificing every last bit of your humanity through either replacing every part of your body with chrome (Smasher), or through horrific body snatching tech (Soulkiller).

Illness does exist in Cyberpunk, many characters through the story refer to their sick relatives. V themself is portrayed as being sick after installing Soulkiller after the Arasaka heist with Jackie. Indeed, Soulkiller is portrayed like a high tech, fast acting cancer.

The world in Cyberpunk reflects a kind of criticism of capitalism in showing us how excessive the divides in economic and power dynamics can become if capitalism is left to rule unchecked by governmental power (i have not yet played phantom liberty, which I assume addresses in part the corrupted and futile attempts to restore governmental agency in a world that long has handed off the reigns to unfettered capitalists).

The characters generally live in squalor. Vs initial apartment is little more than a glorified closet in a bleak concrete monolith. Quality Health care is only available to those that can afford an ultra Premium plan, executed by a Military Style Medical Corporation. Otherwise, you’re lucky if your loved ones’ ashes are dispensed via a Vending Machine, as seen in the anime Edgerunners.

Again, love the game, love the anime and TTRPG. NEVER in a million years would I want to live in that universe… unless maybe it was a choice between there and literal Hell, cuz at that point the line of difference befween them starts to blur…and they end up looking the same.

The problem with freedom of speech is that not everybody has an equally sized platform to be heard from.

Who gets to be heard isn’t based off of who has the best ideas or has everybody’s interests at heart, it’s based off of who is willing to say the most outlandish things, or is willing to tell people what they want to hear, or sometimes simply because they have alot of money/power.

I used to listen to Rogan a lot, but I remember a few instances adding up over the years and I distinctly remember the instances that made me eventually say “this guy is not a good person.”

When he interviewed Milo Yiannapolis, I was genuinely upset Joe gave him a platform to spew his hateful rhetoric. Milo is a toxic person whose xenophobic, misogynist, and transphobic rhetoric directly hurt a lot of people and Joe simply gave him more ammo.

When his old friend Duncan Trussell visited the podcast for one of the last times, Trussell and Joe were celebrating his move to Spotify deal, and in the middle of a drunken ramble, Trussell warned Joe not to field Ben Shapiro, that Shapiro was not a good person, to which Joe simply shrugged it off.

While I’m unsure if the two are on good terms today as I no longer listen to either podcasts, Trussell is one of Joe’s long term friends and it made me respect Joe a lot less that he wouldn’t engage with his friend on this topic with a genuine discussion/debate. This struck me as one of the first instances where Joe drew a line in the sand, displaying that criticism of Shapiro was somehow off limits.

His indulgence of Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris has not aged well as both have been revealed through the careful scrutiny of time to have been vectors that infiltrate, manipulate, and inject grade school level philsophical viewpoints into the mainstream public discourse as if these belabored arguments haven’t already been repeatedly disproven in academic circles. This is made very apparent when they encounter actual intellectual debates like the Peterson/Zizek debate which demonstrated Peterson didn’t understand even the most elementary aspects of Marxism.

The harm of Joe’s platform can be exemplified by the fact that Peterson is still more culturally relevant. This is due in part to the fact that Zizek could never be on the Rogan podcast because his ideas are honestly too intellectually robust to be of interest to the majority of Joe’s audience, and pose a strong existential antithesis to capitalism, much stronger than Bernie Sanders, I might add. But a philosophical mind like Zizek’s is exactly who anyone respectable on the right would need to contend with in order to pose a legitimate argument for capitalism. The fact that Peterson was posed as some sort of equal to Zizek, and that their debate was one of the most watched in recent history, points to the power of Joe’s influence in adding legitimacy to Peterson’s platform when honestly Peterson shouldn’t have any. Instead he was, and, to a lesser extent, still is, considered to be the greatest proponent for capitalist and traditionalist thought.

Lastly, Joe stood up for his long time friend Alex Jones multiple times, making excuses for him when things looked bad, and failed repeatedly to call him out on his bad faith conspiracy lunacy. The last time Alex Jones was on Joe’s show, which I believe was one of his last Youtube shows, I stopped watching. I disavowed Joe as a shill for the right wing, and I’m honestly ashamed I gave him so much of my time and attention.

Seconded on Run With The Wind. Recognition of self, non-self, and community are major themes.