in 2018, a K-pop group (that I had also never heard of before) sold 2.5 million tickets to a 7-city US/Canada tour.
For comparison:
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350k of those tickets were 2 shows in Texas, which has a total Korean population of 70k
-
Taylor Swift sold 250k tickets to 3 shows in Texas 2 weeks later
The K-pop invasion of the west was suspiciously closely preceded by the height of popularity of the competitive SC2 scene, which was of course extremely heavily Korean, with the most prestigious tournaments being Korean productions in Korea often with a heavy K-pop presence (most prominently a song that goes "GG GG baby baby baby").
I think this is underexplored.
Very low-hanging fruit, but here are Ian Miles Cheong and Tim Pool beclowning themselves in the face of this, and Elon Musk getting real close to it.
Piracy is good because digital media is a non-rivalrous good and the rights-holders in Movies and TV are almost universally bad: fuck them.
I try not to pirate things from people who aren't bad, usually small creators.
This should also apply to games, but as Gaben prophesized, Steam is just too convenient (there is also a higher proportion of rights-holders who aren't very bad in Gaming than in Movies/TV).
Is the new season of Star Trek: Picard worth watching?
For the type of curmudgeonly old trekkie who had to stop watching Discovery after 1 season because it was genuinely too hurtful to see that done to something he loves, and has only experienced any of Picard through the noble sacrifice of the Red Letter Media reviews?
I stopped watching the RLM reviews halfway through this season because it seemed like it might actually end up worth watching the show, but the problem is now I can't check in to see their final verdict without having it spoiled.
If you love The Operations Room, I would be extremely surprised if you did not find Montemayor's (very few but very good) videos worthwhile. They're quite similar, but Montemayor goes into more depth about who knew what when, and what big decisions looked like to the person making them, vs Operations Room's slightly more rote recounting of what happened from a god's eye view.
The explicit "fog-of-war from the personal perpective of the commander" approach that he takes in Midway and Eastern Solomons is absolutely incredible, I'm starving for more of it.
Very highly recommended. And if the YouTube algorithm has not also pointed you towards Eastory, Historigraph and Historia Civilis, I have no idea what it's doing. Also TIK, though he's slightly more of a stylistic divergence.
YouTuber Montemayor, one of the very best producers of the "battle told via map" genre who releases about 1 very high quality video per year, released Battle of the Eastern Solomons: Told from the American POV today. It's pretty good.
Check out his Midway from the Japanese Perspective first if you haven't.
It took having been reading every post of yours for like 3 months leading up to that one (sidenote: lol) to have had even the slightest chance of barely beginning to understand what the fuck you were talking about, at the time. 7 months of lost context and cognitive decay later, there is no chance I am ever getting there again. I'd need it spoonfed to me like an idiot.
It seems extremely implausible to me that the Yuddites are only pretending to be suicidally hopeless and their real motivating goal is eternal tyranny, rather than that, rightly or wrongly, eternal tyranny is sincerely the only alternative they see to certain doom.
I can assure you that there is a 0% chance that Kanye is just doing this as a stunt for publicity. The reported-on material consequences alone should get you down well below 10%. "What good is a publicity stunt when X", for about 15 different values of X. Following it unhealthily closely will get you all of the rest of the way to 0%.
And if your experience of this whole thing is primarily as an input into a Trump-DeSantis primary election horserace narrative, rather than both the Kanye-Fuentes axis and a Trump-DeSantis race being roughly equal inputs into what happens later, here's some light reading to start with.
bro
1yr ago
The war part of WWII is absolutely unbeatable, no other war can compete. I dare you as an autistic man to not enjoy this 29-hour, 41-part series on the Battle of Stalingrad told via map.
Rolling Stone lol
That really is the perfect source to use to accompany this take.
I don't even know where to start. The whole thing has been a fever dream. You will never be able to convince me that the last ~week especially hasn't been a simulation being fed into my brain as it's dissolved in a jar.
When [first-tier world-class sporting event] came to my much less contentious area, all reporting on "its costs" included all infrastructure spending that came anywhere near it.
Including "would have taken place regardless" stuff, which is not even close to a hard line (ie, based on other local infrastructure tendencies before and after it, "was going to happen anyways" can read as "within the next 60 years, maybe")
Ours was much less, but we had much less done than an entire city, an entire expressway system, a brand new airport, a port, etc.
I think your issue here is with a precedent that was set a long time ago, and that this does not seem inconsistent with. Of all the crimes of the media, I'm not going to get too worked up about this.
bro
1yr ago
my pick whenever I'm not using Mac
How are the bathhouses in Istanbul, I hear good things
Eigenrobot loves his illegibility, but I think if you were to really pin him down "far right" would be a nontrivial mischaracterization.
He's not especially anti-immigration, for example. And he considers "right wing" an outgroup. Among other things.
The absolutely fucking wild thing here is not that some particular group of policy wonks wrote a policy.
The absolutely fucking wild thing here is that what is potentially one of the most profoundly consequential geopolitical things to have happened in our lifetimes may have been done with any (much less a primary) influence from EAish concerns/panic over the risk of imminent human-extinction from out-of-control AI.
Also, putting the purported screenshot through another round of broken telephone for (what I'm fairly certain was also @DaseindustriesLtd's primary intended) emphasis:
[...]
-EAs wrote the semiconduct export controls
-this does slow down China, and many people think the point was just slowing down/winning an arms race with China
-that was not the primary aim in writing the semiconduct export controls, though slowing stuff down Generally Considered Good
-of at least equal and possibly greater importance was that a bunch of global governance stuff looks way easier if there is one chip supply chain and no alternatives
[...]
Uh...
Effective altruists wrote the semiconductor export restrictions
Is there anywhere else a public discussion of this is happening besides that impenetrable tumblr thread? This seems incredibly significant.
What an absolutely fucking wild thing to off-handedly drop as a polemical jab in an off-topic subthread lol
bro
1yr ago
Yes, undisputed. That is not the same thing as "jews are the one group that is off-limits to debate or criticism".
bro
1yr ago
If a non-black celebrity was robbed, then tweeted about how he's about to go DEFCON 3 on black people and gave multiple interviews about how he's not about to keep getting victimized by black criminals, would it go very differently?
biggest fan
My first gut reaction whenever I encounter him after having not for a while is "this guy's so fucking annoying, just stop", and the degree to which I ever read any further is out of a desire to see him slip up badly enough I can dismiss him altogether or see him definitively put in his place by someone who clearly knows better.
The problem is I haven't seen that yet.
Here's hoping I don't get so entangled this or any time that I can't return to not paying attention. There's enough other and more consequential shit where the same general dynamic that his claims point towards is ruining everything, that it would already be several full time jobs' worth of time and misery to attempt to follow it all.
But yes, unless he's been properly owned and continued anyway in purely ego-driven contrarianism-poisoned bad faith, god bless him for not dropping it despite it making him This Fucking Guy? Again?
I don't follow him that closely so maybe he has, but I haven't seen Marinos himself make anywhere near so strong a claim as "covering up hundreds of thousands of deaths, using bogus statistical analysis to fool everyone".
I think his thesis in all this has been "if you judge many accepted findings by the same standards by which plausibly-for-other-reasons-disfavored findings have been dismissed, a lot of it wouldn't hold up".
The furthest I've been able to trace this has been to an Intel Slava Z telegram post of the only screenshot of it that seems to exist (2 minutes before the Eva Bartlett tweet of the same screenshot, that Musk later responded to), and I'm not fluent enough in the russian side of the internet to look any further than that.
There are no public archives of it:
What specifically is the case against Bellingcat?
I've seen a lot of nonspecific innuendo about them especially since Elon Musk's "psyop" accusations, but then what seems like one of their main guys volunteers this apparently unprompted (which is the first I've heard about it despite following the Belgorod raid all day, including through pro-Russian sources), which seems at odds with the idea that they're so tied up with western intelligence agencies.
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