Is there any reason to not forgo video games completely? Are they in a category with gummy candy, smoking, and lottery tickets - no benefit of any kind beyond a dopamine release - or more like classic movies, dime novels, and social media - escapism with some degree of social and intellectual benefit?
I’ve enjoyed my two-week trial run of Lex Fridman’s maximally productive daily schedule but do find myself missing my offline career-based sports games. How sturdy is the argument that “not everything has to be productive”? Are books and television and film so far above video games in the usefulness ranking (after all, they can confer knowledge and social benefits, if not maximally condensed) that it’s a no-brainer to stop gaming completely? Or should sedentary leisure as a whole be relegated to “break in case of emergency” status, never part of a daily routine but “around” when more productive options are not available, or only to be used in the company of others?
I’ve wrestled with this for every day of these two weeks and still see benefits of escapism, while simultaneously seeing the futility of time spent achieving nothing in the real world - even if only for an hour or two.
EDIT: I coincidentally just discovered the "End Poem" of Minecraft; a poignant take on this discussion:
[teal] and the universe said I love you because you are love.
[green] And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love.
[teal] You are the player.
[green] Wake up.
A literally incredible turn of events in the Jonathan Majors case.
His accuser, no doubt taking note from her many predecessors, had attempted a tamed rewrite of her accusations, reducing battery and restraint to Majors having “pushed her into a taxi” and “pulled her middle finger.”
Predictably, the NYPD soon thereafter uncovered solid evidence that she was, in fact, not only the perpetrator of the abuse, but a kleptomaniac to boot, taking souvenirs from Majors’ apartment after he had enjoyed her services as a (ahem) “dancer”* movement coaching.
One wonders if, among the few patches of the populace where the light of this truth will break through, there might be a few unexpected corners noticing (weaponized term intentionally deployed) this cascade of catty copyists. But the chances of even a hundred more such cases causing so much as a hint of open skepticism in the Dominant Cultural Ideology? Methinks the lady doth be wonderful too much.
*@ecgtheow rightly points out that this is the rare tabloid case where The New York Times is obligated to use a favorite euphemism for its literal definition.
Observations from a Visit to Walt Disney World
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I was aware of the "Disney Girl" stereotype; I wasn't aware how many middle-aged women treat Disney and its merchandise with a quasi-religious fervor. This seems to inhabit a different space from the mid-life-crisis buying frenzy in men, where guys purchase all the things they coveted in their youth but didn't have the means or freedom to buy then - with the ladies, it looks more like a deeper and deeper retreat into childish escapism, a desire to return to what the world - and the Disney company - once represented for them and no longer does: possibility and wonder. Whatever the reason, I couldn't help but look on these women as "failure to launch" types, and I wonder if this is the first generation appearing that way in the Disney parks - surely there weren't 40-year-old fanatical Disney moms in the 1980s or 90s.
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I had last visited WDW in 2006 and, by the look of things, that was also the last time the park had been properly maintained. Visiting the parks today as an admirer of Walt Disney The Man (TM) seems about as connected as watching modern-day Manchester United as a fan of Matt Busby - everything is a little more pathetic, a lot more expensive, and completely lost from its original intent. It's incredible how the parks had a reputation - not even twenty years ago - of being impeccably maintained experiences so detail-obsessed that even the smells were pumped in. Maybe I'm just older and seeing the things I couldn't have seen as a teenager, but the Disney World of today is about as magical as a Rainforest Café... "okay, I can see that this was probably cool when it actually worked and had a fresh coat of paint."
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It was nice to see the world coming together among the attendees and their many accents, but it only made more obvious that the Mexican Spanish accent really is the most annoying sound the human voice can produce. How did that nasal, reedy, words-strung-together-without-a-breath-for-not-even-exaggerating-five-minutes-or-more dialect come to exist? This must be how British people feel about my accent.
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With all of the... "cleansing"... the parks have undergone in recent years, I was surprised to still see a performing African "tribal band" in Animal Kingdom, complete with animal skins, grass anklets, and face paint. For what it's worth, they did appear to be real Africans and had a fantastic ensemble sound.
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Of Walt's many ambitions for his parks, most hit a high point in the 1990s under Eisner and have been in freefall ever since - the "escapist fantasy," the unrivaled excellence, the obsession with details. The one remaining quality is the melting pot; the mix of the richest and poorest demographics in one place (even if money gets you an "improved" experience). Though I had lost the magical curiosity once felt in Disney World, I did gaze in wonder at near-aristocratic families from Istanbul and Madrid stuck in line behind a family of 400-pound wheelchair-bound Floridians stained with turkey grease. And there are tons - let me make this clear - tons of wheelchairs in the park - like, to the point where the whole place now seems primarily built for the handicapped customer.
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You know that saying about Japan - that they've been stuck in the year 2000 for the last 40 years? There's something of that in Disney World too - they've been stuck in 1990 since 1970. For all their "innoventions" of the last thirty years, the greatest rides are still the original ones - It's a Small World, Space Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean - really all the dark rides still have a magical quality about them.
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The biggest detrimental change to Disney World (and the company at large) since my last visit in 2006 is the loss of the "Disney identity" or the "Disney feel" due to their acquisitions - and obsessive marketing - of Marvel and Star Wars. Those brands feel so cheap in Disney's hands when compared with what "Disney" used to represent - Mickey and friends, the idealism of a better tomorrow, the wonder of childhood. Every area, every store, every restaurant that used to have a magical aura about it now seems weighed down with sad Marvel gimmicks or flimsy Star Wars plasticware, and the homogeneity of the parks - a homogeneity that used to be so strong as to make Tower of Terror and Toontown both feel like two places in the same universe - is completely gone.
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One thing I was surprised to see thriving at Disney, given the changes in both the parks and the world over the years, was an excellent model of early fatherhood. Many new families still gravitate to the parks, and maybe it's just the now-higher ticket prices, but it seemed a majority of these had a two-parent model with fathers who were sincerely invested in their child's experience - and the wonder of a child at Disney World is really something to behold. I met and got to know a few of these families - many of the fathers were recent military veterans; maybe that has something to do with the demographic being represented.
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Finally, I understand that the Disney company of today is essentially a for-profit entertainment arm of the Democratic Party inhabiting the skin of a once-neutral (okay, right-leaning) organization, and therefore has felt it necessary to purge the shadows of the past. Even so, it was frustrating to me as a fan of Walt Disney The Man (TM) that there is no archival or historical experience within the parks as relates to the company itself. Surely there must be acres of warehouses with artifacts and curios and documents from the past 100 years of the company's existence - how is nothing exhibited in the parks? This is yet another area where I've likely completely misunderstood what the Disney experience is to the modern world.
In summary, a disappointing experience only in the sense that yet another thing that was awesome in my youth - that had the potential to only grow more awesome year-on-year - has instead disintegrated into a bland, sanitized, "globohomo" experience with nothing particularly special about it. If you find yourself in the Central Florida area, I highly recommend making the trip to see some of the real, unsanitized history in the region - Kennedy Space Center, the Spanish Forts, the Dali Museum, the Circus tributes in Sarasota - and to avoid that which was once-great.
Ex_Nihilo
7d ago
Two questions about American colleges:
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What are some societal roles universities are uniquely well-suited to fill but just… aren’t, for whatever reason? As someone in the arts, the committed development of new/avant-garde professional work comes to mind.
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Based on your moral values, where do you draw the line of how the various strata on a university campus (student, faculty, postgrad, admin, etc) can/should get romantically involved with each other? University dating policies have become vastly more restrictive/protective (based on your value system) in the last decade, especially those between the paying customers and the staff serving them. Is it simply a question of the power dynamic? Age of consent? Moral integrity?
Ex_Nihilo
1yr ago
Why do I find it so heartbreaking that so many 2022 FIFA World Cup commentators and panelists are women? I have a hard time articulating my justifications for these feelings, but there’s a weight in my chest as if I’ve lost a close friend or just discovered that my lover is cheating on me. One of those ideas that’s like seasickness - you feel like you’re going to die and everyone else thinks it’s pathetic and funny.
Working in Far-Left Environments; or, The Schindler-Bonhoeffer Spectrum
I (justly) don't tend to bring about much sympathy for being a logos-based rationalist in the overwhelming pathos of academia, which is why I have, on many occasions, mused to myself about why I legitimately desire to stay in a hostile environment as the very definition of The Enemy. The work is rich and fulfilling, the students are extraordinary and curious, and I have found a feeling of purpose that always eluded me in Industry.
And yet...
The feeling of being a "sheep in wolf's clothing" is ever-present, and the anxiety of "how long before I'm finally discovered" flashes constantly in the back of my mind.
To process this paradox, I have devised a system that helps justify and/or explain (to myself, if not to anyone else) what exactly I'm doing here:
I must choose a position somewhere between two polar opposites, both of which I have seen in others and one of which tends to work in the long term.
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BE A BONHOEFFER || Attempt to diligently do your work in your own little corner until you can no longer pretend that all is well. At the moment the Eye of Sauron finally scans your hiding place, don't let them get the first shot off. Strike before they understand your true belief system, with the full understanding that failure means it's all over, probably in the field as a whole, not just that one place of employment. Be viewed with respect by those on "your side," even if some people are saying your time and/or manner was all wrong.
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BE A SCHINDLER || Do everything in your power to appear the pristine model of their belief system, going to political functions, advocating for their causes, volunteering for all the seminars encouraging the community to smoke out the very thing you secretly are. Work diligently under the table to undermine their platform and save their targets of elimination. Survive and thrive as long as no one suspects that "there's something weird going on with that one wolf." Fall to the permanent blacklist if caught. Be viewed with reluctant respect by those on "your side" (after all, you did help to promote causes for the "other side"), even if those you "saved" don't fully realize what you put on the line for them.
My question: Is this a valid system of judgment? What have I neglected to think about? Can I really Schindler my way to retirement?
Four Questions of the Culture War After the Campaign Announcement of Dr. Cornell West
1. How viable is Dr. West as a third-party candidate?
I was fortunate to meet Cornell West when he visited Penn State around 2016; having known nothing about him at the time, I was struck by how viscerally he resurrected the images of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, effectively combining the biblical fire-and-brimstone tonality of the former and the political fire-and-brimstone of the latter. Yes, the black people of America are a uniquely oppressed people-group, he asserted, but they are not the only such group, and the Democratic Party is as a "Good Master," happy to have blacks in their company, but always keeping minorities in their proper place.
If I, not a person of recent African descent by any measure, could be emotionally captured and intellectually moved by his lectures, how much more must they work on his target audience? And if his many soapbox sermons which are undoubtedly to come gain a viral following among both the subjugated races and those true believers of the Woke Ideology who didn't realize they weren't actually supposed to believe what they were told, I wonder if we might see a percentile impact beyond that of any similar candidate in recent memory, perhaps even chipping at that of Ross Perot. After all, Black Americans make up (as many a rightist could tell you) more than twelve percent of the populace; even a minority of that minority could shift the movement of greater tides.
2. Are viral speeches still the greatest arm in an Outsider Politician's arsenal?
Much - indeed, maybe all - of West's power in the 2024 presidential race rides on his ability to create viral bits of speechmaking; neither his fame nor his name are quite potent enough to make up for the steep paths he will have to traverse. Trump's impact in 2016 certainly had something to do with him simply being famous and not an established party member of either warring titan, but the viral bits of speechmaking really made the difference; even the gaffes were proof that he was getting under the enemy's skin. Perot, Sanders, and Nader had the speechmaking, but not the fame, name, or party acclaim (or, I suppose, the luck of going up against a detested old-timer). If speaking is still powerful in the future we're living in, then I suspect that West will fly high. I wonder, though, if his ideology might be a tad too grand to fit into TikTok bites and YouTube got-'em compilations, too academic for the vox populi, too rooted in the real history of the Civil Rights Movement to swim in heavily-chlorinated intellectual waters.
3. Will this campaign introduce trepidation in the academic veneration of Black Americans?
The 2024 presidential race will put the Ivy League in the uncomfortable position of having trained two detractors of their party-ideology; one who could be seen, easily enough, as a mistake of the distant past that has been corrected and overcorrected for in DeSantis, but another who, very inconveniently, took advantage of the scales balanced in his favor for the express purpose that he would strengthen their cause, then turned around and had the gall to openly disagree with them in West. Their mistakes in McWhorter and Sowell were repressed and erased to the best of their cultural ability, but West presents a new problem: he could actually, really kneecap their cause on the scope of national humiliation, with the enemy in 2024 being potentially far more potent than they were in 2016. One wonders if, with language undoubtedly lacquered in a thick veneer of "continued anti-racism and justice," the idea of sola pellis might be modified into something with a smaller, controllable aperture.
4. What new ideological platforms will be introduced to navigate the thorny task of denigrating a formerly sacred opponent?
While the Ivy League merely finds themselves in an uncomfortable corner, the Woke-Liberal-Progressive alliance will again be forced to test the unquestioned ideological "upgrade-ability" of their constituents with West in the race. While this has been deftly executed in the past, and the /r/politics clan sees no paradox in throwing West overboard, none of Cain/Powell/Rice/etc. had a substantial black following, certainly nothing that would have caused a ripple in the enemy camp. How, though, will the left respond to a candidate that can't be dismissed as "ain't black" or "white supremacist" due to the risk such a claim would run in alienating one of their prized demographics? The "single vote away from losing to fascism" rhetoric doesn't hold up as well as it used to, and I'm genuinely curious at the language that will be contorted, revised, or invented to solve this problem.
Ex_Nihilo
3mo ago
A great story; I appreciate you recollecting it here.
A Christian-specific invocation is definitely a surprise (and, I imagine, will be “prepared for” in the future by the admins who were in attendance), even if it shouldn’t be given the fanbases and location. One of the most interesting dichotomies of the modern culture war is the differing reactions to public displays of Christianity based on whether the zealot in question is black or white.
Black Christianity, despite being far more charismatic, superstitious, and money-grubbing, gets a pass in the public sphere for two reasons: 1) soft bigotry of low expectations and 2) its platform elevates Blue Tribe politicians rather than Red ones (I’m reminded of Barack Obama putting on an AAVE affect on the few occasions when he discussed Christianity in a non-academic way).
But even the congregates of American Christianity seem to understand this dichotomy without the framework of PMC/Media Culture; Sunday mornings are one of the last remaining public displays of (voluntary) racial segregation. Indeed, I wonder if the Black Church (perhaps along with the leftist safeguarding of Islam) is the one poison pill guaranteeing the survival of White Christianity in a progressive society… at least until the day that the bold partisanship seen in the last week in the courts of Maine and Colorado finally feels confident enough to openly enforce racist practices limiting constitutionally-protected exercises of faith.
I give it a year.
sure.jpg
It's interesting; despite the "Sophia Loren" reputation attached to Italian women, imo most have the much more nuanced attractiveness of the girl in the video. While Eastern European and Scandinavian women have major surface appeal with relatively uninteresting/utilitarian minds, Italians are truly wild... manipulative, creative, unpredictable, and worldly-wise. The tradeoff occurs in their design - rarely gifted with golden-ratio faces and generally ambivalent to cosmetic surgery, with extreme ranges based on their ancestry (north vs. south vs. Sicily/Sardinia). In total, they're extraordinarily interesting but difficult to ever pin down (leading to the Italian society we see today - committed, married couples routinely engaging in "side quests").
Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
What a brilliant response. Your takedowns of the common "cop-outs" are of such an undeniable verity that, I think, you sufficiently lance any notion of video games as worthy of inclusion at all in a life not be wasted. Even cocaine seems to confer greater benefits - real productivity in the real world - albeit with much greater costs. Your hours-spent thesis is a fatal blow to simulated productivity, as even one minute of real productivity in those 50 hours is infinitely greater than the faux-accomplishments of a simulated world. Your last paragraph is a very clever retort to a common excuse that I'd neither heard nor considered before.
Ex_Nihilo
11mo ago
Is eating 100 calories and walking two miles (supposing that, at my height and weight, one mile walked burns an additional 50 calories above TDEE) chemically the same thing as eating nothing and doing nothing? I'm in the middle of a weight loss campaign and love to walk, but am continually baffled at the futility of "exercising to lose weight."
Welcome to the Venn crossing of sports and venerated subclasses; the scandals are made up and the truth doesn't matter. For additional interest, see this week's story of the Bay Area sports media losing their minds over a laughably overrated YoungBlackMan getting replaced at quarterback by a White dude working his ass off.
People (especially women being egged on by their friends) have easily-altered memories when they are either 1) socially pressured or 2) socially incentivized to reinterpret events they barely recall and barely care about outside of group status. Majors’ accusers, like many cascades of catty copyists before them, all suddenly remembered him being a very bad boy the second they saw another woman gain social status and the potential for a financial windfall from doing so. Majors’ “long-standing reputation” did not exist at all until our “dancer”* movement coach decided to create it, after which many women who had most likely bragged to their friends about having once known him (probably some, to be fair, in the biblical sense) turned toward the other endzone and joined the dogpile.
*see top post
Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
Most of what just about everyone does is just a thought inside their head and other people's heads.
But this phrase is not true of video games, specifically the thoughts in "other people's heads". Politics and sports and news are shared human experiences, and while many people have the shared experience of playing a game, they do not have the same experience of the game itself - that is the whole appeal of player-led video games. Even an unhealthy fixation on any of your three examples will still produce opinions and actions based on shared human experiences. They incentivize interaction with other human beings, whether positive (people who agree with you) or negative (people who can argue with you). Ultimately, the many adventures, lessons, trials, and triumphs of video games are solitary experiences curated for the player in a controlled environment in which even one's greatest accomplishments will always carry the tinge of having occurred on artificially fixed terms.
Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
I have found one of the strongest subtle clues to indicate that someone is a leftist (or mired in leftist ideology) is their use of the rhetorical “right?” to end statements of dubious fact, or just statements which they know are unacceptable to refute, mostly things “we all know, right?”. It’s like a tic where they can’t stop doing it even if they tried.
Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
When the President of the United States can hire a public employee to the highest court in the land with a brazen declaration that Progressive Racism will be followed to the exclusion of the majority of qualified candidates, it’s probably quixotic to imagine change in your local workplace. Consider Biden the alt-Woodrow Wilson and yourself the alt-target of Wilsonian federalized bigotry. Going by the original timeline, we’re 50 years off from civil rights.
Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
I don't see the relation between your first assertion and the quoted text. The quotation is referring to activities which have demonstrable benefits, and the author takes issue not with the idea that they're forms of leisure, but that they're unproductive forms of leisure, which they assume "hobby" to insinuate. Video games are absolutely unproductive in any real-world sense; music and reading are real-world activities in the actual, non-simulated world. The question is whether activities in the simulated world have any worth in our real one.
Ex_Nihilo
1yr ago
I love those types of shows too… I highly recommend Mad Men and The White Lotus if you haven’t watched either. Guessing you would also enjoy the BBC anthology series Inside No. 9 - there’s an episode called “Tom and Gerri” that’s pretty close to what you’re describing.
It’s a good video, but it unexpectedly reminded of the sad ways some of my past girlfriends were “gravely funny,” like they could come up with funny things and recognized when something was stupidly hilarious, but wouldn’t actually laugh at any of it… they were clever enough to see the opportunity for a joke but couldn’t enjoy the delivery, as if they had to be “corporate” or “grown up” all the time but still wanted to ensure they had a humor slider setting.
Ex_Nihilo
4mo ago
The degradation of Harvard won't begin on the side of the applicants, but with elite employers and the families who run them. Whether or not this week's scandal has any permanent effect, the headlines have absolutely put a microscopic chip in the edifice of Harvard's reputation. The failing is ultimately not the president herself nor the answers she gave, but instead the amount of criticism that has been able to exist without loud pushback from the Left. The fact that Progressive mouthpieces haven't gone full Propaganda Mode to defend the integrity of the Ivy League at all costs indicates something has already started to crumble in the Ivies-as-Progressive-Temples mindset. If any of this has long-term implications, it's likely toward the end of the current top post in this CWRoundup: to shave the wildest edges off of Wokeism in the interest of waterproofing Progressive positions (both professional and ideological) for the long haul.
Ex_Nihilo
5mo ago
I'll mention Thomas Merton as a (sort of unexpected) voice of spiritual clarity for the modern world. While a committed Catholic monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he pursued intellectual and theological connections with the world of Buddhism, spawning new ideas about both religions in the process. He's very candid and "human" in his writings (two qualities largely absent in theological treatises); while The Seven Storey Mountain is his best-known work (and his "official" autobiography), I prefer his smaller collections of essays titled Love and Living and Contemplative Prayer - they each approach the paradox of belief with honesty and open questions.
I’ll answer not just for the US, but for the world:
The FIFA WWC, like professional women’s leagues and the Paralympics, is an exercise in charity and post-Christian generosity.
If the question is the magnitude of the WWC on a financial scale:
While there are indeed some supporters of female athletes, none of them watch for the quality of the game. Some are interested in the few celebrity athletes like Marta, Rapinoe, Morgan, etc.; some are interested in the teams because the badge on their shirt matches that worn by great male athletes; some enjoy watching their respective national teams in everything from table tennis to water polo. The sum total of those viewership demographics doesn’t even justify FIFA’s broadcasting fees and advertiser dollars; add to that the many women footballers who wish to self-identify as millionaires and there’s a negative value in the pot. But the men’s game makes money on such an exponential scale that FIFA can rob Peter to pay Pauline without anyone raising an eyebrow.
If the question is the magnitude of the WWC on a sporting scale:
The only reason anyone is genuinely interested in a women’s football team is because the great men of history got them interested by playing the game at a superhuman level, and virtually no one is genuinely interested… especially women.
If I take an interest in my club or my nation’s U21 or B Team, there is at least a cohesive interest there: one of those seemingly unimportant names could one day become a legend. If I take an interest in my club or my nation’s women’s team, I’m cheering for the badge and supporting the name only because the men's badge is upon them, just as I might look more fondly on Miller Lite because they put the badge on their can… “well, it doesn’t really mean anything, but I like the men’s team and want to incentivize great things coming to them in any way, shape, or form.”
Indeed, it seems the women footballers themselves don’t care about the quality of the game… just a few hours ago the USWNT were laughing and enjoying themselves after embarrassing their national colors on a (paltry; see above) global scale. They know the real issue is the culture war, and they’ve already won a bigger prize than any silly gold cup in that arena… they forced the hand of their national federation, stole money from the men’s team, and persuaded PMC women that the boys were being big meanies… all over a completely fabricated issue in which they were the liars and the men were the victims.
And that’s the bigger point. Most “supporters” (can you be a supporter if you never watch the thing you support?) of women’s football support the idea of women’s football rather than the game itself, as part of the timeless playground tug of war between boys and girls (and, on the girls’ side, the white knights). In light of that tug of war, the WWC even existing is such a victory that the argument could have ended right there, except that, of course, there will never be an end and we will always be expected to give up more and more resources into the bottomless pit of women’s sports because it makes the people whose hands grasp the wrists of those in power feel good.
Fake Outrage for a Fake Crisis
In one of the most annoyingly misguided media crusades in recent memory, the soccer world (read: Reddit, PMC, sports media, and virtue-signaling athletes who are delighted to be out of the Sauronic Eye for once) has fixed its laser gaze on Luis Rubiales, head of the Spanish FA (the top soccer organization in Spain; representing all club and national teams in the country). His crime, for which he is demanded to give up everything he now has and ever had, was a kiss.
After the Spanish National Team won the Women's World Cup last week, a traditional trophy presentation was held. In his jubilation, Rubiales kissed player Jenni Hermoso, just as thousands of soccer personnel have done thousands of times in moments of great triumph. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath, Hermoso laughed it off on camera as a passing awkward moment. In the days following that recording, I assume Hermoso has come to see that one moment of blasé honesty as a crucial tactical mistake (not that it matters; the original video of her has yet to make an appearance in any of the numerous "j'accuse" incendiary articles).
What Hermoso failed to realize in that moment (but has very much seized upon since) is that she had been granted the gift of victimhood. Not just as a woman, not just as a woman at the hand of a man, but as a woman footballer (one of the venerated subclasses, as elaborated upon in one of my past comments) at the hands of T H E P A T R I A R C H Y.
This one meaningless moment flashed overnight into an international dogpile, with consequences as wild as Rubiales' mother enduring a hunger strike. Unfortunately, Rubiales is experiencing firsthand that racism is not the only demand in excess of its supply, and that even a hint of raw meat, especially in the entirely invented space of "women's sports" "inequality," will be devoured, even if it was just shoe leather all along.
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