@AnotherSiteAnotherName's banner p

AnotherSiteAnotherName


				

				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 September 05 00:50:11 UTC

				

User ID: 319

AnotherSiteAnotherName


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 00:50:11 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 319

Here's a question for you that is less war and more straight culture. What makes a piece of media truly inspiring? What qualities does something need to possess so that things based on it will be great? I don't mean this in the sense of expertly turning your IP into a multimedia franchise through judicious licensing or whatever. I want to know what happens in the case of something like Dune where licensing doesn't seemed to be handled well at all. Yet it still not only managed to spawn a great movie. It also inspired a legendary board game, hugely influential video game, etc.

What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?

So what do you think makes Dune so much more alien? It can't simply be cultural. Western fantasy, at least as an aesthetic, has certainly found fans in Asia. Is it the focus on politics and big, weird ideas like transhumanism? Is it the focus on the macro scale compared to LotR, which made it less character focused but better lent to the strategy games that I ended up having to talk to so much about?

Are you suggesting that people are prone to bias in favor of their pre-existing beliefs? ;)

Really? The guy coming from the religion that believes in Eruv wants to criticize intellectual nonsense?

Infinity can be divided into multiple sets, so the Trinity makes perfect sense. Hanging a line around a city to try and trick God is literal nonsense. Does God believe in the rules you have for the Sabbath or not?

On the one hand, I'd say this actually must be my fault in writing clearly because almost everyone is responding with a focus on the books themselves rather than the larger multimedia franchises.

On the other hand, I am mostly getting a lot of tears about how the Lord of the Rings trilogy is better and posters didn't even know that the board game existed so how impactful could it be? All without even engaging the question. High decouplers? Yeah, okay.

Right, but that is why I chose Lord of the Rings for comparison. For all of its impact, for all the media based on it directly and indirectly, it has a much worse pound for pound showing than Dune. Sure, it has a forgettable RTS, but Dune II practically invented the genre. Sure, one of the Lord of the Rings board games ended up being great, but Dune has, again, a hugely influential game that people loved so much they were still playing it when it had been print for nearly 30 years.

Was this just luck that Dune has such a stronger showing than a more popular, older IP? Or is there some quality that can be analyzed?

I don't dislike Lord of the Rings at all. I have read it four times. I'm rather disappointed by the trilogy next to Villeneuve's Dune, but only because I have high expectations for it. In fact, most Lord of the Rings media is underwhelming and forgettable. I tried a lot of Lord of the Rings media in the 90s and 2000s and most of it fell in that 3.5-6.5 range. It is so forgettable that (some) people disagreeing with me here didn't even know that Lord of the Rings branded media was being produced long before the movies. Compare that to most Dune media, which I have been very impressed by. Not because I prefer Dune, which I enjoy but have read half as many times, but because the media that is based on it is so consistently impressive by comparison to what Lord of the Rings has put out.

And while the board game is undoubtedly niche (as games that have been out of print since '84 tend to be), its impact upon board games is still huge. Unique, balanced faction powers are now common in board/strategy games.

Of course the others before it matter. It's an infinite monkeys on typewriters scenario. If you give enough people opportunities to make a game based on Lord of the Rings, one of them eventually is likely to be good.

And sure, on a technical level, Battle for Middle Earth is the more polished, later game. But that is sidestepping the most difficult part in creating, which is creating something new and dynamic. It is easy to make a similar game in hindsight, once it has already been done. And you are simply wrong when you say that there was no opportunity to make Tolkien-branded games while they were making Dune games. That just isn't true. They were making games. They even attempted a strategy game before Dune II. It is just forgettable.

It’s often paired with claims that females—not women—are the real hypergamists. Thus it becomes “sorry fellas, so long as society is willing to tolerate women acting like whores, your married/responsible/trad ass can’t expect fair treatment.”

Maybe we should look up a word before we write an analysis. Your search bar is right there. Type hypergamy into it.

that pretty clearly evinces some homosexual desire

Is that what it evinces in you, Dr. Freud? Just curious if your N=1 or 0 here.

Define "stuff."

these criticisms will absolutely never be levelled at neighbourhoods made up of black people or Hispanics

To be fair, these people never actually live in majority-minority places. I almost never see these people in places like the Bronx that are absolutely dominated by minorities. They just know places like Brooklyn or whatever. I might be damning them through faint praise here. I don't know.

Also, to be fair to these minorities, I actually have lived in the Bronx as a white person, and minorities are generally pretty nice to me. It's other minorities that they are biased against.

If anything, I'd say it's the opposite. The gameplay is a thin layer to make the subject matter feel more earned/discovered. It is supposed to be esoteric, after all, so simply giving you a textbook on the world would be counterproductive to the feeling the author is trying to cultivate. I suppose that you could describe much of the writing as thin. But that isn't because the subject matter is thin. That is because the writing is meant to obliquely reference things you have to cobble together for yourself. Again, this adds to the esoteric atmosphere.

I don't begrudge anyone who doesn't like that sort of thing, but let's be accurate about just what it is. Kennedy does a very good job at what he wants to do, but it certainly isn't for everyone.

Pretense is just the hater's word for atmospheric.

I wasn't even particularly looking for Dune-related insights, but this is definitely an interesting point. Thank you.

Saying that the rules are divine commands and then trying to hack them so that they are effectively rendered null is not believing in the rules.

Hanging a line around an area is purely a hack for convenience, not a principled distinction. Hanging a line around an entire city is a hack of a hack for convenience.

If the law is a divine mandate, you should actually follow it! Creating your own loopholes and then acting like observing the Sabbath is still somehow sacrosanct is pure intellectual nonsense

I didn't take your comment as serious, but I very much think that Xi is coming from a position of weakness hoping to get Biden to back off with some vague promises. China has enough systemic economic problems right now without the US making things significantly harder.

That almost certainly isn't true considering political patronage has been much more explicit in the past (e.g. prior to the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act).

one instead has to marginalize its importance.

A statement about Twitter's quality of discourse is very different than a statement about the importance of its discourse.

I suppose you do prove your own point, in a way, by demonstrating that stupid takes based on poor reading comprehension can be found here, not just Twitter. And I, in turn, will do my part by demonstrating that dunking on dumb posts can happen here, just like Twitter.

Go us. 👍

But this is just vague handwaving. I'm not arguing the popularity of Lord of the Rings or its cultural impact. I'm talking about the impact, in turn, of the licensed media that followed.

Lord of the Rings, as a book series, is hugely impactful on the culture. Lord of the Rings the multimedia franchise is, on average, middling and most of it will be forgotten. Dune, on the other hand, has been less impactful overall. Yet, despite having far less adaptations and licensed media (before the most recent movie. I'm not young and free enough to keep up with everything that is coming out now), what exists is both of a much higher average quality and often hugely impactful on their own mediums.

Just shrugging that off is simply being obtuse and ignoring the actual subject.

No, because I wanted a more universal examination. People just got really attached to the Lord of the Rings and Dune game comparison. Even the licensing aspect was less about importance for the principle and more about trying to head off nerdy arguments about what counts as influenced by these books. (E.G. how much inspiration does Star Wars take from Dune?)

I mean, if comparing Dune II to War in Middle Earth is a particularly useful comparison for insights, sure, compare away. But I was hoping for universalizable principles here, not just comparisons of these two franchises.

I didn't ask about number. I asked about quality. Sure, Lord of the Rings has a great board game. Some of the video games are even pretty decent. But I'm talking about percentage of hits here. Lord of the Rings, for all of its numbers and popularity, is comparatively underwhelming when you compare the average quality of what it gets in comparison to Dune. Sure, War of the Ring is considered a classic, but what about Lord of the Rings that came before it? Or the Lord of the Rings TCG? Etcetera.

You are describing a fairly anodyne observation, that women are more social status conscious and care more about that in their partners, and using Urban Dictionary's almost unrecognizable definition and describing them as whores, which conflates hypergamy with being sexually loose for money.

I don't think many of the people you are describing would primarily think of women as whores. They would describe them as gold diggers. Or maybe they would describe them as whores. But not because of hypergamy. They are very distinct traits, even if they are both leveraging sex appeal for personal benefit.

If Biden gives Xi Jinping anything, I will consider him a total failure as a president. The rise in hostile actions from China came entirely during Xi's regime, and they came amid reassurances that they wouldn't happen.

He is crawling back now because China is in a position of weakness, but things will go back to the way they were the moment he feels confident.

yes it is the same problem

No, it is a financially different problem for the exact same reason that hardware is different than software. Software has infinite do-overs at malleable speed. Hardware has to work in reality. Sure, after enough refining, ML will be able to manufacture a complete car. But how many attempts would it have to undergo first? Even ignoring the iterations on the manufacturing hardware itself, how much money would you have to spend on materials and energy in your tens of thousands of attempts to teach the ML how to manufacture a car? And then there is the political cost. What defect rate will people be willing to put up with from entirely autonomous robotic manufacturing? Almost certainly, it will be a lower rate than what we put up with from humans. Especially if it is from a black box like current ML.