HalloweenSnarry
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User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
There's Presidential and other government-given awards, though, no?
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
At this point, I wonder if we in the US could somehow shift our immigration strategy to target South Koreans. We receive people who will be good citizens and diligent workers, they get a society that isn't as insanely high-pressure.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
China can point to the Western university and say, "not only is this fundamentally less valid as a measurement than our traditional form of examination, but it is an affront to our socialist value of equality." And I'm sure they do. A lot.
Not to make a snide quip, but I doubt they do, because they seem fine with sending their kids to our colleges--because, for all of Western education's sins, there's still enough value in it for it to be a potential matter of geopolitical strategy.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I honestly thought a big chunk of the popularity was because it did the gun girl thing like the anime Upotte!, but also paired it with an interesting sci-fi story. Like, Arknights was made by some of the same devs, and that also caught on real good even though it mostly lacked gun girls. Interesting.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
MiHoYo's popular titles - Genshin, Honkai Star Rail, Zenless Zero - caught on in many ways because they just aped Japanese anime styling to the extent that initial players would have no idea they are Chinese made. I played a lot of Chinese gacha and other phone games in the past, and they were nowhere near as accessible as those titles.
Did those other titles include games like Girls' Frontline or Arknights? Those games also lean heavily on the anime style (even to the point of relying on Japanese VA), and also deemphasize Chinese-ness considerably.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
The insistence on neat systemic or material explanations for social phenomena is one of the terribly bad habits we inherited from the Rat community.
Because Scott put it best: society is fixed, biology is mutable. Dump $chemical into the water to improve things? Quite feasible! Contemplate modifying the human genome to improve humans in the womb? This isn't the 90's anymore, this isn't science-fiction! Create the Miracle Pill? Well, nowadays it feels like there's more candidates for the title than there were a decade ago!
Budge society into a healthier memeplex? You might as well ask for the sun to not rise.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I'll take a wi-fi chip, and eat it!
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I'd heard the reason was "to catch Trump off-guard," among others, but that simply turned out to be a grave miscalculation on the part of the Dems, which they might not repeat with Harris.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
Isn't Minnesota known for Swedish-Americans anyways, though?
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I, an atheist, went to a Christian college (as it seemed like a safer/saner choice than the local state school), and I wasn't required to make a faith statement (that I remember), though I was instead required to take a "Christian Worldview" class.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
Well, not follow, but YouTube has taught me more than I ever thought I wanted to learn about it.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
It does call to mind the comical depiction of the FBI in the movie Die Hard
Tropes often have a basis in real life, IMO. Much of the classic media we've grown up with was created by people who had the real-life experience to back up their storytelling, so it should figure that the trope of "fed-vs-non-fed tension" has very real roots in reality.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
Pfizer beat you to the punch (pun not intended) by about 22 years. It was in NASCAR, though.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
My naive impression is that boxing does have an element of attrition, and that after a few rounds of throwing and taking punches, your ability to continue doing so diminishes at a somewhat-more-than-linear rate.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I feel like the solution is usually to have a bunch of categories/divisions (see Le Mans racing and 2-Gun shooting), though maybe this doesn't work so well when it comes to humans vs. machines.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that some games let you call a team vote to concede, because if a game is going lopsided early enough, everyone involved might agree not to waste any more time.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
Hedging bets, perhaps, or maybe wanting a repeat of the hostage crisis that got Reagan elected?
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
Alas, we are a long ways away from the days of Postal Service Badassery.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
Are these actual categories of football equipment, or is this a metaphor? The usage here reminds me particularly of competitive shooting, or perhaps also auto racing.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
Carini's reason for giving up does remind me of certain forms of competition, but it reminds me specifically of competitive gaming, particularly speedrunning and e-sports. In speedrunning, resetting the moment you make one fairly significant mistake is normal (never mind that it could mean starting a whole run over if you aren't doing segments), and in e-sports-oriented games (like MOBAs or FPS games), the idea of ditching a ranked game when things go south early is common enough that many games have their matchmaking systems designed to punish early-leavers.
Perhaps to point out that we don't actually have that much logistical distance from the 15th Century? Our technology and our logistics support each other in an interlocking balance, and certain things cannot be sustained without other things.
ETA: That being said, if you put a gun to my head and asked me to answer where I think we'd end up in the event of a global collapse, I think our tech level might be dropped down to possibly 18th-century levels, assuming that electricity somehow becomes unreliable or scarce alongside fossil fuel.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I think this is a bit orthogonal to the topic, though. "Decapitating enemy leadership" has arguably always been a "legitimate" (insofar as such things can be "legitimate" when you go down to the level of primitive, tribal tit-for-tat) strategy in warfare. The rebel army seeks to overthrow the Emperor, killing him if necessary; the Emperor is in his right to demand the rebel leader's head on a pike; rival kingdoms are perfectly fine with the enemy bloodline being extirpated, and so on. Consider the Ferguson, the 18-Century rifle that could have been used to assassinate George Washington.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
A machete isn't terribly concealable either, though, I'd imagine.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
Not to get deeply entangled in this discussion, but I suppose the steelman to IGI is that the material improvements that we live under are far from permanent, and could well disappear before we realize it, and suddenly we find ourselves back to the brutal state of affairs known to the past.
Consider Mad Max, a media franchise that remains fairly popular today despite the original film being more obviously inspired by the Oil Crisis (a temporary shock that helped spur us into changing our ways), and the sequel defining the post-apocalypse tropes that made it so influential, despite it coming out at a time when the Oil Crisis was likely abating, if not already ended.
The Curse of Plenty, the thing that gives rise to the narrative of "good times create weak men," is a trope we see in fiction and in real life. We go from rags to riches and back again, just as ancient religions had ways of saying that we come from nothing and eventually return to nothing.
I do personally feel that we had a peak of "goodness" in recent decades that may well have been an anomaly, and that the "dreamtime"/whalefall (to borrow from Scott) is well coming to an end. We can only hope that things don't snap and break apart once all the slack is gone.
However your effortpost turns out, perhaps you should open it with "Call of Duty 4 and its consequences have been a disaster for the Gamer race."
Seriously, that game's progression system for multiplayer practically changed how games are built and designed, not to mention how many people wanted the COD crowd in its wake (which coined the Seven Words of Death for many a game: "we want the Call of Duty audience").
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