07mk
7d ago
I never understood the people calling AOC unattractive, and still don't.
It's the same phenomenon as calling Elon Musk "stupid," which is basically dogma in some parts of the country, including where I live. People, even educated, intelligent people who went to academic institutions purportedly meant specifically to disabuse people of that notion, really love the idea that people they disagree with also have other negative characteristics that realistically ought to have minimal - if any - correlation with conformity to one's own personal set of ethics or ideals. So damn physical reality, since I don't like AOC/Musk, then s/he is unattractive/stupid. To be fair, the latter set of people often openly admit to rejecting empiricism as a tool of oppression by White Supremacists, so they're living up to their stated principles there.
As an aside, I'm apparently in a tiny minority in considering Zendaya not only attractive, but one of the most attractive women in Hollywood right now, but also I do find the "Zendaya is ugly" thing not hard to understand. She has bodily and facial features which are not what I'd consider screaming in femininity.
07mk
7d ago
Wokeness is not extinct: wokeness is dormant, and AOC knows this better than anyone. If she really wanted to distance herself from a permanently radioactive ideology, she couldn't afford to be half this flippant.
Even calling it "dormant" seems to me to be far overselling the state of things. At best, I'd say it's baiting, by creating the appearance of weakness which allows it to gain an advantageous position such that it can impose even greater strength than before. Perhaps one can argue that a key component of what defined "woke" was the appearance of strength and so conceding that appearance is, in itself, a retreat, but I'd say that's pretty weaksauce compared to the very real policies that have been locked in and still influence people's everyday lives just as much in 2026 as in 2021.
07mk
7d ago
The talk about "peak woke" as if it was in the past or "woke 1" as if there was some sort of stopping of "woke" where it would make sense to say that some new "woke" thing is "woke 2" instead of "woke continued" reminds me of the 2024 POTUS election when people were breathlessly trying to establish consensus that there had been a "vibe shift" among Democrats who were finally getting excited again and lining up behind the young(er), energetic Harris compared to the decrepit Biden or calling Walz's insult of Vance as "weird" as some brilliant bit of marketing. I can understand both why people who dislike Woke would have wishful thinking that it has receded and why people who like Woke would want to act as if they're powerless, but I think the fact of the latter should make people in the former highly suspicious that they're falling into wishful thinking. From where I sit, there's more overt pushback to Woke than ever before, but that's akin to there being more pushback to Nazis in 1942 compared to in 1932. it's not an indication of the Nazis' lack of power, influence, harm; rather, it's the exact opposite.
07mk
7d ago
I see the tendency to group the Woke with such things like the 60s left or the French Revolution, but I don't think that quite captures it. Woke is actually just the latest iteration of identity-based tribalism. 10,000 years ago, it might have simply been "Grog looks like he's one of those guys from the tribe across the river; let's kill him and steal his stuff," and 300 years ago, it might have been "X people intrinsically belong in chains due to their nature, while Y people like me intrinsically belong to the ruling class above them due to our nature," and today, it's "X people have been oppressed by Y people throughout history; therefore, individuals who belong to groups X and Y deserve privileges/disadvantages to counteract this historical effect, which we know as a FACT had some unfair and unjust effect in the lives of these specific individuals." People have been coming up with rationales for why unfairly discriminating against people they dislike is actually virtuous and even obligatory forever, only changing up the rationales based on what the current population would be receptive to. Wokeness is the version that's been most perfectly evolved for modernity.
Things work in tendencies and on the margins. I thought that would be common sense for anyone here. If literature is marginally more entertaining to young males than they are now, then the boys for whom not-books was one epsilon more entertaining than books will shift over, this causing a higher proportion of boys to read. This is baseline for how ALL population-wide phenomena of personal choices works.
The fact that there are boys right now who read for fun and balance reading and video games for fun is about as strong proof as possible that there are boys on these margins. Resorting to some argument from personal incredulity of some version of "X can't POSSIBLY be made to tear kids away from Y due to A, B, C" when we currently see current versions of X doing just that - just to a lesser extent than would be equal - is a way of conceding the argument entirely.
Yes, as I said, I'm aware that's the one-size-fits-all prescription hereabouts. Similarly, I bet the tankies think flouting capitalism would solve the reading crisis and the NIMBYs think stricter zoning couldn't hurt. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
You make no point here, though. The point is that when you see a metal object with a flat head and a pointy end in a box that says "nails" on it, then you can most likely accurately call it a nail. The ideology in question has overtly taken over literature and other fictional media with the explicit intention of appealing more to females and less to males. Maybe they're so incompetent that all their efforts have no effect, but certainly just turning off their explicit pushing-away-males strategy is something one ought to consider when thinking about how to attract males.
More generally, if someone is failing to accomplish something, then the possibility of burning down whatever ideology got them there has to be considered a reasonable possibility. That this isn't one of the first thoughts to occur indicates a lack of desire to accomplish this. Which is also fine, but it's important to be clear that it's entirely due to a lack of desire, not due to a lack of ability (the ability might be lacking, but anyone who claims that we have meaningful evidence that it is is someone who hasn't been paying attention the last 20 years).
07mk
7d ago
I've always liked books, but looking at the younger guys and boys I know, it's mostly video games. Men want to act, and the medium of video games is just infinitely more appealing to them by its basic nature. Contrariwise, girls are really into the fantasy of being (and being seen as) an educated, classy lady, and reading books is a mandatory accessory.
This looks like a perfect opportunity for some synergy across different demographic lines. If all the people who loudly claim some version of "literature industry is catering to men just fine, men are simply choosing other things" decided to partner with the people who claim "video game industry is catering to women just fine, women are simply choosing other things" and shout down all the people demanding that any particular industry be gender-equalized by hook or by crook, it might actually have some effect!
If you honestly think it's those publishing Karens' fault that this boy didn't read, I'd be curious to hear exactly what print stories you think would compare favorably in attention-grabbing qualities to Brent Rivera or Five Nights at Freddy's. I suspect the Karens would love to know, as well.
Hard to say, but behavior by the "Karens" in other fictional media industries such as film, TV, and video games suggests that these Karens would prefer not to find out, even if it means paying a hefty financial penalty.
I'd say that a good start might be trying to appeal to boys by figuring out what appeals to them in literature by e.g. looking where there is a higher proportion of boys reading, such as, e.g. comic books (the actually successful ones from yesteryear) or visual novels or even light novels, and see what those have in common. I think one core part that would likely help is to make sure that the fiction specifically flouts ideals, concepts, principles, and such, of whatever name we're putting on the cluster of ideologies around feminism today. A lot of the male-successful VNs and LNs seem to have a significant wish-fulfillment portion, which, to young men, would certainly require things that would make the typical standard-issue liberal feminist at least cringe, if not faint; as such, a publisher aiming to appeal to young male readers ought to at least consider, if not prioritize, making literature that specifically offends their editors.
I also suspect that nerdy scifi or tech-oriented military thrillers like the stuff by Crichton and Clancy of yesteryear could find a decent male audience, though, like all literature, it's likely far less popular in 2026 than 1996. And it seems vanishingly unlikely that someone who's not a male autist or autist-adjacent could or would want to write a good book like that; as such, if the publishers made sure not to discriminate against males and possibly even sought out autists or autist-adjacents, with bonus points if their writings seemed to condone ideologies that would make their median editor ragequit and call for a boycott of the publisher, then that might also be a good step.
07mk
8d ago
You're just proving his point. All of these used to be, at some point in time, seen as technical limitations worthy of contempt. Now they're deliberate artistic choices.
This portends an interesting future where essayists, novelists, poets, and other professional writers intentionally make an LLM generate recognizable LLM-isms as a way to spruce up their writings, like how a rock guitarist might intentionally hold up his guitar to the speaker to generate feedback as an intentional part of the music they're making. Imagine an entire genre of writing where it's not surprising for the writer to paste in LLM generations without notifying the reader, but intentionally produced to appear overtly LLM-generated, communicating to the reader that it's LLM-generated without explicitly saying as such, in order for the reader to enjoy the text for its obviously LLM-generated qualities that the author intentionally wanted to add to his writing, like how, again, feedback is used in some musical performances.
And before someone argues "sure, but all those boys' books are stupid, formulaic and terrible," well, the girls' books very much are, too.
The girls' books seem stupid, formulaic, and terrible in a way that appeals to girls' interests, in a way that boys' books aren't. That's the interesting question here, why book publishers, despite their monetary incentives, seem immensely terrible at appealing to boys in a way that they aren't when it comes to appealing to girls. Why is it that they're publishing the kinds of stuff directed at boys that they are now and declaring that they've tried and just lack the ability to force boys to read, instead of analyzing whatever underlying assumptions and ideologies that are directing them towards making bad decisions when it comes to publishing books that are stupid, formulaic, and terrible in a way that appeals to boys, like they're successfully doing for girls now?
07mk
12d ago
I'm not sure if this is not also just an ideological commitment to "beauty" that goes the other way and therefore also kinda extreme.
Maybe! It sounds strange to say that liking beauty a lot is ideological, but I admit to being extreme in it. The longer I observe the world, the more beauty I think it could use.
Like even Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn who I think is the poster child for the outcry, she's fit, redhead, bright demeanor, instant top 10-5% if transported inside a train carriage in NYC during commute time.
I think that we're talking in top 10-5% numbers instead of "practically beyond top 0.00001%" like, e.g. the Dead or Alive girls or the aforementioned 2B/Eve, for the protagonist of a major AAA (AA?) Sony franchise is unfortunate.
Maybe we can think of it that attractiveness of characters is, like other aspects of any work of a video game, can also be a bar and once cleared, it's good enough and can move on to other things. TLOU definitely didn't need the characters to be top 5% pretty to sell itself in video games.
Indeed, no one needs these video games to be beautiful, or to have video games at all, or to have beauty at all. I haven't played most of these games, but I'm sure, e.g. TLOU2 is a very good game, thanks to its many positive qualities that have nothing to do with the (non-)beauty of its protagonist(s). I just think the world would be a better place if these video games had been more beautiful.
I suppose attractiveness is fluid and anime/catgirl/2B "shape" is not the only way for someone to be "attractive".
Indeed, and think of all the creative, varied, distinctive, never-before-seen ways of being attractive that we could have seen in this nearly limitless medium of video games if the character-design portion of the thousands of talented devs and billions of dollars that went into AAA games had been focused on exploring just how attractive they could make their characters, instead of meeting ideological commitments about challenging beauty norms or not appealing to the male gaze or etc. Losing out on that is what I find really sad.
07mk
12d ago
The problem is that the affordability crisis has been complained about, acknowledged, and attempted to be fixed for at least 2 decades now. I remember that the insane cost of housing and schooling were major political issues in the mid-2000s, and even after the 2008 crash, housing continuing to inflate to such an extent that they stayed flat instead of going down like most other things was basically common knowledge. The problem is multi-faceted, we have many people who have many theories and have tried many things. They could probably do better, but a generic "address the affordability crisis" gives little to work with, and it's like going to a medical research center and telling them to "address the death crisis." They're just as eager as you to fix it, and they've been trying very hard to fix it for a long time. It's just background noise at this point.
So that just leaves the other, more specific parts, which are comprised greatly (not your post, but certainly the posts you are alluding to) by complaints like the burrito thing. So that's what's being addressed. And I think it's especially valuable, because bad arguments in favor of good positions have a way of discrediting the good positions themselves if those bad arguments are left standing too long without being cut down by the people who have those good positions. And complaining about the cost of prepared food is a very bad argument when the affordability crisis is the topic.
07mk
13d ago
First dean of Cambridge would surely fit right in with his illustrious list of other accomplishments. Perhaps he could be the first king of the USA if Trump doesn't get there first.
07mk
13d ago
Also, how often would his father go for a burrito? Not in cases where it's logical (like when travelling, or something unexpected happened) or as a social occasion, but just "I don't feel like cooking, or I don't feel like eating what we have at home, I want a restaurant burrito"). Compared to OP himself. I dunno for him, but ordering or eating out due to simple laziness or "cravings" was something that happened on a yearly basis to my family growing up.
As a geriatric millennial, I feel like I saw a transition from restaurant/delivery-is-occasional-treat to restaurant/delivery-is-alternative-of-near-equal-stature-as-home-cooked in real-time growing up. Especially having spend much of my initial childhood in Korea, which was further back compared to America in development, especially in the 80s/90s. In Korea, we basically ate the same home cooked meals with very minor variations in side dishes every single day, and America was little different in the 90s. But as I grew up, getting takeout or delivery for dinners just seemed more and more common. Nowadays, I've seen people claiming that eating the same country's cuisine two days in a row - to say nothing of the same meal - is just unacceptably boring and a standard that no one should be subject to, which I find a ridiculous standard; a clean, warm, predictable, nutritious-enough, and fairly palatable meal every day is a standard I'd consider quite good enough for everyone of any class. Of course, most people don't go to such extremes, but I see that sort of attitude of bare-minimum-expectations-creep a lot.
07mk
13d ago
Does boiling actually kill nutrition? Haven't experienced that for flavor. I boil them because I can't be bothered to steam them, and boiling is one of the easiest ways to heat them up so that they're palatable.
07mk
13d ago
Frozen veggies are way underrated. As best as I can tell, there's nothing at all worse about frozen vegetables compared to fresh ones in terms of nutrition, and they tend to be significantly cheaper and easier to store. Different people have different tastes, of course, but personally, I find that the experience of eating boiled or even microwaved frozen vegetables is exactly equivalent to eating fresh ones that have been steamed or prepared in an equivalent way.
07mk
13d ago
Nice thing is, those 3 or more people could be the same one person, just time-shifted. Modern food storage technology is basically ubiquitous and relatively cheap, after all.
07mk
13d ago
Sure I can buy that, but can you go into a little more detail on why this is a travesty?
The loss of the sheer breadth and depth of beauty that could and would have been created by the immense amounts of resources and talent in the video game industry but for the choices we're talking about is hard to fathom. What truly are the limits of beauty that we could have created in this medium if the standard were such that the minimum acceptable standard for the least-attractive female character was "man walking into traffic while distracted by woman" level of beauty, then what would the median female protagonist of a AAA game look like right now? What about the most beautiful one? Like, we can appreciate the Eves and 2Bs of the industry for being beautiful, but we don't know what we're missing out on compared to a world where a character with Eve's looks is considered the "kinda homely NPC that hands you the occasional side quest" instead of "outlier sex symbol." All not for any good purpose, but only to feed some ideological delusions that were never on solid ground to begin with and which has been utterly discredited by reality.
And there is a charitable take where many of these games (TLOU, Horizon Zero Dawn, etc.) have a particular aesthetic (more photorealistic, more gritty, etc.) that benefits more from NOT having supernatural-level of beauty.
There's gritty and there's gritty. Video games, until recently (and arguably still now) couldn't do true photorealism, so "gritty" tended to mean "more photorealistic." But we have an example of a photorealistic medium where people tend(ed) to have top 5% beauty - Hollywood. Often, even grittier films like, e.g. Oldboy or No Country for Old Men tend to feature actresses (and actors) who are at the very top end of the beauty spectrum. A video game like TLOU or Horizon Zero Dawn could easily feel quite believable while still having characters with, e.g. Eve-level beauty. They'd just have to also be dirtied-up, with appropriately messy clothes and such.
When there are games that benefit from having characters that are supposed to be pretty look pretty they still look quite top 5% pretty (Dispatch, Tomb Raider, Clair Obscur, Witcher, etc.)
That these are the video games to point to, and that the standard is "top 5% pretty" for a medium aren't constrained by human biology or human existence (i.e. neither the theoretical genetic limits of human beauty nor the true real limit of real adult women who really came into existence IRL apply here) is what I think reflects the negative direction the video game industry went towards. If the basic minimum had been "top 5% pretty" with the median protagonist being "literally no human on Earth has ever looked this pretty," the world would have been a much more beautiful place.
07mk
13d ago
I saw on Twitter that Pangram judged his resignation letter as AI-generated. Can't verify the actual screenshot or that Pangram is credible, but it certainly would be expected of him. This adds a couple more culture war wrinkles, including differences in attitude towards using AI to generate letters, especially ones that are purportedly have deep personal meaning and expression, and the credibility of AI-detection. I've been skeptical of Pangram, though basically everyone who's casually tested it seems to speak to its competence, so I could believe there's something there. An AI certainly would be better at seeing signs in patterns of words and phrases used in a way beyond any human like me, after all.
07mk
13d ago
I think @Botond173 is going beyond that, I think they're arguing that "feminist-adjacent normie women" is policing US/Western media output so that the top 5% in attractiveness can't headline major works in fear of triggering "antics of the church ladies of the old days".
This doesn't match my perception of their argument, but they can speak for themselves.
Your argument of expansion of attractiveness representation is fair and I understand that, though I don't see that really being a problem that normie woman exercise their preferences. With enough economic cycles, an equilibrium will be found and like you summed it, I'm sure "someone being selected to feature in a major media product" will still land north of the median attractive person for the rest of time.
It's not that normie women are exercising their preferences, though. It's creators who overtly admit to buying into a particular ideology overtly designing women in a certain way that fits their ideology.
I do think that economic pressures (maybe it's cheaper to just take the real life mocap actresses and don't touch them up? idk)
Mocap is something else, having to do with animation, rather than scanning the person's likeness in. Mocap actors often don't look like the characters they're portraying. In terms of scanning real people in, I'm pretty sure it's more expensive to do that than just to create a model from scratch, especially the work involved in getting the specific details to match the actor just right. And certainly, the caliber of actors they're hiring (Hollywood-level actors, mostly B-list, but the occasional A-listers like Keanu Reeves or Idris Elba) are not known for being cheap - a cost that wouldn't exist at all from scratch. In the case of Stellar Blade, IIRC Shift Up hired some models who have some celebrity stature but are certainly far from Hollywood-level.
economic demands (female audience don't get jealous, female audience sees more representation of their level of attractiveness, etc. means more people buy the game or at least don't disparage it) leads to video games having an expansion in allowable female character attractiveness.
This was an argument made regularly 10-20 years ago about changing gaming. The argument was... questionable then, and today, after games have changed, it just doesn't hold any water, given the way the market has responded. Jealousy by female audiences or liking more representation or whatever simply aren't significant factors in the market for video games, particularly the mainstream AAA titles that people are mostly concerned with. Someone who believes that, by doing this, they can make their mainstream gamer-targeting game more economically successful is someone whose beliefs are defined by ideology, not by reality.
But then is it really that bad? it's not "man walking into traffic while distracted by woman" level of beauty but only "man would be down to bed her no alcohol required" level of beauty. Is this some danger to society?
It's only a danger to society like any other media like OnlyFans or Andrew Tate are: i.e. in some crazy Six-Degrees-of-Seven-Bacon way about various downstream effects with very questionable veracity. But in terms of it being really that bad, yes, it's really that bad. Denying the creation and dissemination of greater beauty when it would cost nothing more than less, just to feed some ideological commitments, is a travesty.
07mk
14d ago
I can also try to put myself in the shoes of a peer of Arday's who was skeptical of him, and I get why nobody inside the tent wanted to go for him. Massive risk of getting tagged with the racism/ableism brushes, none of Arday's science actually means anything so it's not like he's really setting back any field and all of his direct competitors for jobs would also need a long list of diversity dotpoints and 'senior white Cambridge Professor casts doubts on superstar Youngest Black Professor in Cambridge history' is not a headline that anybody's career would benefit from, even if they won the war.
There's a famous tweet that was made like 10 years ago that comes up every now and then, which seems appropriate for this. I don't have the tweet, but the text was something like:
William Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman. You might disagree. You might even have some evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my job over? William Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman.
07mk
14d ago
My local Walgreens regularly sells 10 inch frozen pepperoni pizzas at 2 for $12, so that's still more than 67% more expensive, before taking tips into account. And Walgreens is actually more expensive than Whole Foods which I don't go to as often because it's farther away, where they regularly do 2 for $10.
And that's considering a near-equivalent pre-packaged, ready-to-heat product. The cost savings tend to be far greater if you're willing to start from lower-level ingredients and if you're willing to accept food at merely high-quality, not restaurant-quality (which isn't necessarily high-quality, but certainly has certain qualities that home-cooked meals tend to lack).
07mk
14d ago
One thing about data centers I keep hearing is that they don't meaningfully contribute jobs to the local community, and I'm not sure why this would be, relative to any other commercial project of similar scale in a given community. Even if the compute on these servers are being used at some arbitrary location on Earth that's completely unrelated to the data center, that specific server needs to be installed, maintained, upgraded, replaced by someone who is physically there. In the long run, sufficiently cheap AI- or remote-controlled robots could replace this, but we're not there yet and I don't think that many people think it's around the corner either, like how so many people seem to believe AGI or even ASI is right around the corner. That person who physically checks on the servers and fixes or replaces it when something breaks or upgrades it just when faster hardware is sufficiently cheap and available to make economical sense would almost definitely live near their job at the data center, and so either that person would be a local or a local import who would spend the money the data center company pays them buying stuff and services from local shops. This seems exactly analogous to any other job of e.g. being a baseball stadium clerk or a warehouse worker.
Yet data centers get talked about as if they're just big slabs of compute that these AI companies build and just place somewhere for other people to be bothered by, never to require paying humans to actually maintain or upgrade the thing. Do these data centers require less jobs or less paying jobs on a per-dollar-invested basis than other similar commercial projects to such a great extent that they can be rounded down to zero? If so, what if we mandated that data centers provide make-work jobs to the local community where people are paid to stand watch to maintain computers that need 1000x less maintenance than they can provide? I've sometimes thought that, given the sheer complexity of the code and tools AI is capable of generating, which far outstrip the ability of any human or even possibly team of humans to understand, and the fact that AI lacks agency or the ability to be held responsible, every company in the future would eventually have precisely one and only one employee, whose job is just to sit around watching the AIs that are literally incomprehensible to them and be summarily fired and replaced if anything goes wrong as a result of AI behavior. Give them an official job title of "scapegoat." We could start doing something like that with AI data centers (give them all golden parachutes so that the money flows to the local economy regardless).
07mk
14d ago
Most female representation in Western/US male-oriented products are still "conventionally attractive" and "sexually alluring". Sex sells after all.
I think this is only true in the most vapid of ways, where we can say that someone being selected to feature in a major media product at all is almost definitely in the top 50% of attractiveness (probably top 20%), male or female. But this doesn't really touch on the phenomenon, where stars who headlined major works would often be in the top 5% of attractiveness, and this has expanded to something closer to top 20%, if not top 50%, and the gap between 95th and 80th - to say nothing of 50th - is absolutely ginormous.
And there's the phenomenon in video games, where, technologically, there's no technological reason why every female character can't have attractiveness that matches that of Eve from Stellar Blade or 2B from Nier: Automata, and yet devs insist on modeling many major ones after real-life actresses and capturing their looks in a rugged, gritty, realistic way like in recent God of War or Halo games, instead of sexifying them like with Eve and her (IIRC) 3 human models in Stellar Blade. Or just overtly choosing norm-defying types of characters like many of the woman characters from Sony's $100MM+ failure (as you write, sex sells; and some devs sometimes seem to have decided that not selling is worth the not sex) Concord or one of the protagonists of The Last of Us 2.
07mk
14d ago
I pay for Claude & ChatGPT $20/month, but both have free versions IIRC. I don't recall if the free versions have access to the latest models, though. I think they might allow signing up through Google account, but I don't recall if I used that or set up separate usernames/passwords.
Smart people can and do do very stupid things, sometimes quite often, to such an extent that they have a reputation for it. One could accurately say, e.g. Musk behaves very stupidly when it comes to certain things such as politics or ideology, and that he has a pattern of doing so. But to claim that he's stupid means something else, and it's to ignore all the other pieces of evidence around him. And, ironically, accurately noting his intelligence is a greater moral condemnation from anyone who confidently disagrees with his politics or ideals, because, unlike a stupid person, a smart person has no excuse for not reaching the correct conclusions.
More options
Context Copy link