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Comment by spicyusername | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to me how Blow seems to ruffle so many feathers.

I don't really get it.

He's made two well received games, now a third one and an entire programming language, and anytime I tune in to his content he seems like a competent programmer with the kinds of opinions you'd expect from any kind of craftsman: sharp and borne out of their own personal experience. I never hear anything that strikes me as inflammatory.

What's there to fuss about? If you disagree with one of those opinions, great!

Maybe this is just what experiencing the world solely through the internet does to people. Makes them prickly and uncalibrated.

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He ruffles the very sensitive Internet dwellers who have all correct beliefs.

Many years ago, during the peak growth of internet cancel culture, Jon made the mistake of saying an uncontroversial truth about occupational interests heavily correlating with gender.

They took that and twisted it into “he thinks women are inferior.”

Since then, they look for any reason to hate on him. It’s political tribe brain rot as usual.

Check out The Witness subreddit. For a game those people claim to love, they seemed to have absorbed absolutely none of the narrative philosophy.

Apparently he's always had a pretty intense and acerbic personality. There's an article in The Atlantic from 2012 called The Most Dangerous Gamer that goes a bit into his character and history.

As far as politics go, in the past he mostly seemed kind of small business owner libertarian (which, fair enough, he's sunk a lot of his personal wealth into running a game studio). He's seemingly been getting increasingly grouchy about the e.g. state of software development and society in general for some time, and over the past year or so he's started expressing explicit Trump support/appreciation. Possibly exacerbated by the development of this game and Jai dragging on, apparently getting burned by what he considers bad hires (bet he's not easy to work for tho...), and such. Though I would say it feels like it's mostly hot takes on streams or X, not necessarily very coherent politics.

But the indie game scene and many of his former associates are very left wing, and with the political climate, esp. in the US, also being what it is he's quite the pariah in many places now.

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