4 Shitlibs I Somehow Actually Like
Originally posted at https://shitposter.world/notice/AueguGD0PKyYFO9VFA
I'm a consooooooomer. I enjoy reading, watching, playing vidya, listening to podcasts, and hell, listening to people IRL. I always find it better to listen than to speak. And I find I can enjoy someone's creative work while despising their opinions on politics. It's easy to "separate the art from the artist" when there is an enormous gulf in quality between the two.
Maybe you think I'm being too generous, and that all four of these entries are hopelessly Pollyanna towards my current and bygone admirations. Still, I have an undeniable fondness for all of them, which I will sperg about in detail. Also, I could add Seanbaby to this list, but he hasn't done anything good in at least 15 years, and I already wrote an article praising and condemning him.
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1. Super Eyepatch Wolf
Reasons to like him: John Walsh has this powerful earnestness and seeming honesty for everything he talks about. When he reviews a video game or an anime or a comic or a music album, he plunges himself into it, immersing himself and the viewer in a sea of information and emotions. Three minutes into one of Eyepatch Wolf's videos, you've forgotten your surroundings as he guides you on a journey into the almost mystical nature of the media he is reviewing. He breaks down the individual pieces of an item, describes the appeal, and gets you as excited as he does. It's like witchcraft how he makes it happen.
For example, his "What the Internet Did to Garfield" video is legendary. He explains how this mostly bland but long-running comic strip with a lot of merchandise somehow evolved into an internet mega-meme with superior comedy (Garfield Minus Garfield), disturbing fan art (many), and the best damn Youtube series ever made (Lasagna Cat). The whole time, he's in awe of how bizarre and fascinating the world of Garfield fan works is, even wondering if his own content can possible measure up to these insane geniuses.
His pro rasslin' videos are so infectious with their child-like optimism and love for the theatrics that they have single-handedly got many people (even on the Fediverse) hooked on the medium. He is--by his own admission--overly emotional; he says he even cries during crappy romance movies. But it's that enthusiasm that is the core of Super Eyepatch Wolf, and why he has 1.8 million subscribers and my career as a video game reviewer never got past the first hurdle.
He is also absurdly hard-working, with multiple podcasts and many trips overseas to various nerd conventions. This eases the months-long wait between his immaculately edited videos. Super Eyepatch Wolf/John Walsh is at the top of this list because he consistently makes the best material. Youtube gave a minuscule sliver of hope for reviewers who give a shit and how they can make a living doing what they love.
Reasons to dislike him: He did a charity stream to fund The Trevor Project, a "charity" that poisons vulnerable children with artificial hormones and places them in the homes of homosexuals so they can get raped.
He also raised money for the already well-funded anti-White terrorist group, Black Lives Matter:
He has basic bitch shitlib opinions about everything from elections to abortion to climate change.
Fortunately, he usually keeps these wrong opinions out of his videos, but he occasionally briefly sneaks them into an hour+ video, like in his Fear & Hunger video where he complains that some savage ooga-booga characters (in a game full of non-stop torture and murder) are heckin' problematic towards Injuns. Just embarrassing.
If I met him IRL: He would probably be patient and listen to how I explained that it's okay to be White, how an open borders policy is disastrous for any country (almost every cell in your body has a cell wall!), and how equality is manifestly false. He might even mention in one of his videos having a strangely pleasant conversation with an internet fascist, then he will carry on as usual.
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2. They Might Be Giants
Reasons to like them: They make the best music in the world. They are endlessly creative after 45 years in the business. Their cryptic lyrics often contain dozens of possible interpretations while never being meaningless artfag nonsense (which is rare to say for two musicians from Brooklyn who got their start in the 80s performance art scene). The two Johns have a perfect symbiotic relationship as songwriters--Linnell crafts the catchy pop songs, Flansburgh does the weirdo one-minute songs, and together they can fill an album with 20 "bangers", as the kids call good songs.
For example, "I Palindrome I"…
began as Flansburgh strumming on an acoustic guitar and mumbling those three words (you can hear this on old Dial-A-Song archives), deciding he couldn't do anything else with it, and handing the song over to Linnell, who turned it into a masterpiece. The end result is album after album of strange and profoundly beautiful pop music. And good luck getting "Particle Man" out of your head for the rest of your life.
John Linnell has this rare talent for picking up an instrument, playing with it for an hour, and being fully proficient afterwards. Their interviews from the early 80s to the present are consistently entertaining and thought-provoking. They make great use of new technology, including Dial-A-Song (where you could call them and listen to new song demos on their answering machine; I did this several times as a kid after promising my parents I'd pay for the long-distance calls), crafting the world's first mp3-only album (Long Tall Weekend, which has some brilliant songs like "Certain People I Could Name" that are good enough to be on the main albums), and fans making the first wiki I ever saw, even before I saw Wikipedia.
My personal favorite song of theirs is "Sleeping in the Flowers", though their first five albums are brilliant. The concert of theirs I experienced in 2001 was one of the highlights of my life.
Reasons to dislike them: They have this snobbish Redditor atheist opinion of the lowly KKKristian plebs, whom they are so much better than. They have this obnoxious 80s liberal naivety that everyone can get along, no matter how obviously incompatible. They support trannyism, and had no idea about it until the TV told them to, even though they lived in Brooklyn from the 70s to the present and were no doubt exposed to all manner of sexual depravity. They kissed Obama's ass in 2008 because the TV told them to. Flansburgh's horrible evil Jewess wife spent all of 2021 screeching and lying about the January 6 protesters (and Kyle Rittenhouse, and anything else the uppity Whites seem to like). In 2020, they sold cloth Covid masks that said "science is real" to own le chudderinos.
If I met them IRL: If they somehow made time for one fan out of millions, it would probably be for a quick photograph with me and they would go back to working on their music. No time to question their long-held and easily refuted beliefs.
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3. The CRPG Addict
Reasons to like him: Chester Bolingbrooke (not his real name) is one of the most in-depth and prolific vidya reviewers on the internet. The title of his blog isn't a joke; he has played thousands of these games from this specific medium and genre. Bolingbrooke goes into amazingly exhaustive analyses of the games he covers on a conceptual and technical level; if he weren't my political enemy, I'd gladly hire him to make a game. Not satisfied with a basic 1-10 review scale, he created his own system (Game world, character creation and development, NPC interaction, encounters and foes, magic and combat, equipment, economy, quests, graphics/sound/interface, and overall gameplay) to cover the many aspects of RPGs, and RPGs alone (he might play other genres, but they aren't his obsession).
I tried to write video game reviews in the past, but if I had known about CRPG Addict, I wouldn't have even tried; he is clearly a superior reviewer than me or anyone I know. You can open any review he ever wrote, from a D&D clone in the 70s to a complex, multi-faceted game from the 90s, and he will delve its depths to find insights about a few lines of code that wouldn't even occur to most players. Just try clicking on a random entry; you could be stuck on his website for months.
https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/p/index-of-games-played-by-year.html
Also, his guest appearance on the DOS Game Club podcast was pleasant, and he was extremely knowledgeable. https://www.dosgameclub.com/ultima-underworld/
Reasons to dislike him: He has this snobbish Redditor atheist opinion of the lowly KKKristian plebs, whom he is so much better than. He has this absurd hatred of anime art styles and their big-eyed child heroes (it took years to get him to touch the original Legend of Zelda, despite its foundational state in the world of action RPGs). Stumped for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and let everyone know it. Bolingbrooke has to remind readers once in awhile that Orange Man is bad, "organized religion" (Christianity only) is bad, women are just as good as men at everything, including combat, and he will create teams and make decisions in video games to reflect this. Yes, Bolingbrooke is that petty.
If I met him IRL: He would have a sneering contempt for an uppity White male and would refuse to speak with me.
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4. Tim Kreider
Reasons to like him: He is bitter and angry and spiteful, but always in a profoundly dark way. He bitches endlessly about the horrendous state of US politics and targets specific politicians for his ire, and usually in a "dude's got a point" and hysterical manner. Kreider correctly identifies humans as being a species of stupid assholes, and America at the forefront of that stupid assholery.
During the height of the Iraq War, Kreider cut right through the sanctimonious bullshit about "supporting our troops" that other shitlibs often fell for and noted that "our troops" are a bunch of morons who willingly signed up for an unjust cause (https://web.archive.org/web/20240708022229fw_/http://thepaincomics.com/weekly030326a.htm).
He likes saying "fag" (https://web.archive.org/web/20240527225517fw_/http://thepaincomics.com/weekly090204.htm). He admits it's a funny word and he isn't a whiny fag about it.
Kreider worked tirelessly to preserve Pluto's status as a real planet (no shit, this was a futile pet project of his: https://web.archive.org/web/20240708023743fw_/http://thepaincomics.com/weekly050119a.htm and https://web.archive.org/web/20240724225050fw_/http://thepaincomics.com/weekly060816a.htm).
His anti-Ronald Reagan comic and accompanying essay (https://web.archive.org/web/20240620173140fw_/http://thepaincomics.com/weekly020417a.htm) is incredible in its sheer justified hatred of the whole rotten political system and the celebrities it promotes. It marks Kreider as one of the best political essayists to ever live.
His "It may not be the best system" comic (https://web.archive.org/web/20240620173100fw_/http://thepaincomics.com/weekly011212a.htm) still gets regularly reposted on the internet 20+ years later.
Kreider, despite all his grumbling, has a genuine fondness for his conservative friends, and will say nice things about them in his essays. He has mellowed out a bit in his old age, if his most recent book is anything to judge by.
Reasons to dislike him: He has this snobbish Redditor atheist opinion of the lowly KKKristian plebs, whom he is so much better than. He mentioned in his most recent book that he was dating a liberal "Christian" woman pastor who thinks Jesus would support open borders and buttsex. In 2008, he thought George W. Bush was going to declare himself dictator-for-life, which betrays a fundamental failure to understand how US politics works. Kreider thinks his beloved New York City is a paradise, even though it was clearly a grotesque nightmarish war zone even by the 00s when he was in his heyday and has gotten worse since then; he must enjoy the racial diversity, ethnic restaurants, and fag pride parades.
Said "gender dysphoria is not a slippery slope" in 2002 (https://web.archive.org/web/20240708021926fw_/http://thepaincomics.com/weekly020619a.htm) while supporting a lunatic "friend" who mutilated himself. Falsely portrayed the American South as being all-White, even though Mississippi is like 40% Black, and says he admires the Germans having 60 years of Holocaust guilt (https://web.archive.org/web/20240724224920fw_/http://thepaincomics.com/weekly060315a.htm). Repeated Noel Ignatiev's "the Irish used to be considered non-White" lie in what is probably the only "dear fellow Whites" article written by an actual White person (https://archive.is/URzrP).
If I met him IRL: He would listen to my opinions, hate everything I say, and draw a caricature of me in one of his comics. Actually, does he even draw comics anymore? Maybe he spends all his time with his Lesbyterian pastor girlfriend.