Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
All alliterations are accidental.
User ID: 83
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
17d ago
I think you touched upon one valid point, which is the size of projects, and that the man in charge is rarely the one with a comprehensive creative vision, and even if, has too much on his hands to see it through.
But as for generalized conclusions about the decline of culture at large - probably true, but on a longer time scale, and not the immediate cause of the sharp decline in video game writing quality.
I offer a different hypothesis: The game makers of old made games from first principles, the game makers of today make games that imitate the games they know. They have played games for decades now, since they were old enough, have consumed endlessly, and whatever unique creative ideas they might have had have since been sandblasted to dust by a thousand consumer products having gone throgh their brains. They think in terms of what they have experienced hitherto, which is games based on games based on games, and their writing likewise.
Nobody needs to explain or justify why games have hitpoints, third-person reticules, experience points and levels, ultimate abilities, hero classes, zombies, magic that produces differently colored fireballs, scientific anomalies that manifest as colorful particle systems, star lanes, energy shields...all of this is assumed away as the baseline stuff of our consumer experience, and it goes without saying that when something "new" is made, it is made out of all the old that constitutes the entirety of our experiences. And that old used to be from different media, and so had to be adapted to fit a creative vision that sprang form outside of the gaming world. But now the old is just well-trodden ground, trod again, and again, and again. I don't need to explain to you why you are the chosen one with quasi-magical powers who can slaughter hundreds of meaningless enemies - it's what you came here for. Whatever plot I provide to justify it is just background noise.
Southkraut
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6d ago
Well eat away then, champ.
Southkraut
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7d ago
Honestly, I found it thoroughly unremarkable.
Now, it's been a long while (20 years?) since I watched the old Shogun series, so I certainly have some rose-colored glasses on, but somehow I didn't really enjoy my the new one like I expected to based on my fondness for the old one.
The plot seemed to meander meaninglessly, with the intrigue too opaque to make sense to the viewer, and the characters too guarded and game-of-thronesy for their motivations to really shine through.
The visuals were...decent, I suppose, but the desaturated and heavily filtered appearance made it look unreal and cheap.
The characters, oof. Yabushige was fun but too cartoonish. Omi, Nagakado, Saeki, Hiromatsu, Buntaro, Tsuji and Fuji were enjoyable, relatable even, but seemed to have very limited agency. But ultimately the whole tale revolves around Toranaga, Mariko, Anjin and Ishido. Ishido, meh, good performance but is mostly just there to act as a less-competent foil to Toranaga. Toranaga I don't know about; I just greatly preferred the Mifune version. Mariko and the Anjin were outright painful to watch, with Mariko being so wooden her husband wanted to kill himself (I guess that's the point) and getting too much attention by half, and the Anjin just being an overdramatic clown.
At least the fight scenes were modestly decent.
Overall it's just...mediocre. There were production values, some decent performances, some that really missed the mark for me, but in the end it needs to measure up to Rome, and no, it's not Rome.
Southkraut
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8d ago
similar to how parents protect their children but expect their children to obey them.
Note that modern parenting does not expect this. Obedience is not demanded and disobedience is not punished.
I just finished watching Dune 2 and took some notes while doing so. Notes, not an essay, so what you get is a jumble of thoughts.
- The Director turned a fanciful book that made little sense into a visually impressive film that makes even less. All visual spectacle.
- Present-day politics clearly present and accounted for. White people bad, the whiter the worse. Paul and Jessica are presented as outright villains, and Chani is the moral center of the story.
- Soundtrack with people suddenly screaming in fantasy-arabic, ouch, my ears.
- Emperor: A fucking joke.
- Chani, if it weren't rude I'd say she's an ugly bitch.
- Irulan - the acting suited the character, the speech did not, the looks did not at all.
- Margot Fenring, Lady Jessica, Alia, pretty actresses, decent acting.
- Fight scenes: Absolute trash. Ridiculous acrobatics VS completely passive victim-badguys. Harkonnens, Sardaukar, no matter, they just stand around dumbfounded and do some slow-motion waving once per scene, while the Fremen breakdance all over the place. And of course the Fremen have regular guns and use them...from off-screen at impossible angles, but not when it would actually make sense. None of the fighting makes sense!
- Lasers and metal-storm like helicopter door guns looked nice though.
- Sardaukar standing around in the desert sun in triumph-of-the-will formation.
- Worst of all: The boots. Floppily open-topped boots in a sandy desert. Ouch. Luckily it wasn't all of the characters who wore them, but I still pitied the ones who did.
- The Fremen hideouts are...giant highly visible architecture. How stupid exactly were the Harkonnens? Do the people of the future just not believe in reconnaissance? Same for the Fremen having a massive but completely unnoticed troop buildup just around the corner from the Emperor's army. Everything is so damn visible! But then the Fedaykin just dig themselves out of the sand at the feet of the army, so I guess nothing needs to make sense anyways.
- Javier Bardem, I don't know if he's a good actor at all. I don't know. Feels like he's phoning it in, or was never much good to begin with and I overrated him so far because I'm a Cormac McCarthy fanboy. Or maybe he is good, but the movie is such overrated tripe that he falls flat.
- The final duel between Paul and Feyd-Rautha is...meh. Not as bad as the one-sided fights preceding it, but it looks like stage fighting 101, with nothing but flashy, highly-visible moves meant to be easy to counter. Makes sense for a movie, of course, but still looks something in between silly and boring.
- Now, to be fair, Dune is difficult material to work with, because it made little sense even as a book. But this is just...all shape, no substance.
A thousand apologies for a worthless post, worthlessly posted, but I needed to put it somewhere.
Southkraut
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21d ago
This. We're committed to insanity.
Southkraut
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1mo ago
No. I've spent several days in a state of unabating rage about her having strangled everyrhing positive out of our lives. I'm escalating. Today I dumped her, myself and our daughter at her parents' house and we'll live here for the indefinite future. If retvrn to the multigenerational family model doesn't help, then my next step will be to be a very bad parent and ask my daughter to choose either mom or dad.
Does she have any interest in changing?
Only if it happens without any effort on her part, or by her doing more of what she's been doing so far.
Hello The Motte, thanks for hosting my vent.
Southkraut
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1mo ago
That certainly fits my anecdotal experience. First-hand. Lots of it. My wife's an overtherapied wreck who spends every waking hour re-heating her anxieties. Only ever gets worse.
Real libertarian fascism has never been tried!
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Establish a militia. The militia is everyone. Each sunday hosts the neighborhood hand-to-hand picnic or the community rifle and machine gun competition or the regional anti-tank/artillery/anti-air/anti-drone festival. At least once a year, there will be vehicle competitions. Absence is excusable for anyone who is regularly present otherwise, but missing more than half of a year's events gets you fined. Refusal on ethical grounds get you reassigned to the mandatory neighborhood cleanup squads that are usually populated by chain-gangs of litterers. Medical waivers exist, but long-term ones are only given if you are too weak to hold a gun and also too frail to wear a bomb vest. The militia is funded through taxes.
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It is illegal to lie. A private citizen proven to have lied will be punished by a brief public shaming. Commercial entities will face heavy fines.
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There is public health care. And public housing. And public transport in the shape of taxis. There is public education and public insurance. There are all shades of public welfare. All of this is available free of charge for public servants, who are lifetime wards and servants of the state and must buy their freedom (their price being equivalent to the costs of the services they used) if they desire it. Others may also use these public services, but have to pay for them outright. No tax money goes into public services. Public servants are employed for the betterment of public services, and other tasks considered essential to the existence of the state. Low-grade public service comes with a starting debt to the state.
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There are no driving licenses, speed limits, or bans on drunk driving. Anyone proven to have caused an accident is liable to pay double for all damages caused. Failure to pay will get you a public shaming, caning and defenestration, and possibly mandatory public service of the lowest grade or else the fine will be extracted from any known associates.
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Children are the property of their parents, and parents are responsible for all their children's actions. Forever.
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The display of flags belonging to foreign polities is considered treason. Limited exceptions are possible for diplomats, consulates and other foreign functionaries on official business. Speaking foreign languages is permitted, but any citizen may request a transcript written in both languages, and failure to provide it may result in fines, shaming and/or expulsion from the country. Providing a false transcript will result in expulsion from the country, into the sea. Multiple citizenship is possible, but only for legal immigrants, and such passes are strictly limited - only a fixed and low number may exist in the entire country for any given foreign nationality.
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Legal immigration is permitted, illegal immigration is not, and the punishment for illegal immigration is variably expulsion into the sea or immediate public service of the lowest grade for yourself and all your descendants. Legal immigration requires learning the language in advance and swearing an oath of allegiance. Breaking the oath results in the immigrant being returned to their country of origin, with loud complaints and a request for a refund.
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The country shall protect all refugees, no matter their origin or cause of flight. This protection will take the shape of arming them to conquer their home countries or at least a small part of it. Where this is too unlikely to succeed or has demonstrably failed already, refugees may instead accept public service of the lowest grade. Refusal results in termination of their refugee status, and they are now illegal immigrants.
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There shall be nature preserves, equal in size to at least half the country's. It will be permissible for any citizen to use these for recreation and hunting, though hunters are required to eat what they kill. Exceptions are made for killings of humans, cannibalism is not permitted without consent. Murder and manslaughter remain crimes, and the nature preserves are populated by large numbers of cameras and drones. It is permitted to construct temporary shelters from locally available material, but cutting wood must be limited immediately needful quantities. Fouling waters, causing wildfires or exterminating entire species is punishable by public service of the lowest grade.
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Duelling is legal, but requires the written consent of all parties involved, including to the rules of the combat.
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The state shall not meddle in questions of sex, gender, religion, identity, elective surgery, pregnancy, sexual practices or marriage. Except for public servants, for whom there are only two genders, no abortions, no body modification except to enhance performance, and only approved religions subject to reexamination at any time. For private citizens, the state offers arbitration in custody conflicts.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
30d ago
the first thing
The first thing, or at least the earliest thing that comes to mind right now, was the gays. Slippery was the slope, and here we are with men pretending to be women and political activists wanting to force people to validate these delusions.
It's not much of an extrapolation to see where the wind is blowing from, and where to.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
Tangentially related.
I recently received a gift copy of Pacific Drive (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458140/Pacific_Drive/). Ostensibly a game about driving, scavenging, tinkering with the car, and uncovering the mysteries of its setting.
Well, at some point fairly early on, you unlock the ability to decorate your car...and the available decorations are a large assortment of "pride" flags, plus "black lives matter".
I searched and discovered a mod that removed all those, installed it, it worked, and so as to facilitate the same procedure for others I posted a guide on steam on how to remove those flags. Hardly a day later, the guide was banned. I asked Steam Support why this was, and they told me that it had violated the community guidelines. I asked which one exactly and how, and received a non-reply that simply gestured at the guidelines again, but also told me that I should not have included an obscured link the guide. I offered to remove the link and asked whether that would make the guide pass muster, and if not, what other rule remained broken. They finished up by telling me that the issue was resolved, and closed my ticket.
I wonder a little how people can stomach doing customer support in such a way.
Southkraut
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18d ago
Accuse them of not providing honest data, or of being too brainwashed to meaningfully answer relevant questions, or of the data being somehow low-quality?
Or bite the bullet, admit that they're better on those metrics, but stand fast and declare that it's not worth the restrictive gender roles and religious indoctrination.
IMO if it were as simple as choosing between strength and weakness as terminal social values, it's an obvious choice. And our societies have not chosen weakness, obviously - we just pretend, as an overreaction to the ostentatious pro-strength attitudes of mid-20th-century fascism, opposition to which has since been the West's moral compass needle (in combination with some lingering Christian ethics). But everyone and their dog knows, and knows either very consciously or deep in their bones, that strength is better than weakness. It's just become polite to act as if it weren't the case. But we know that we want to be strong, that it feels better, gets us better results, is seen as better by others. The ability to act, to do, to accomplish is praised, and even if not praised, is still obviously desirable in every way.
But one problem is that being strong is hard. Being weak is easy. And yes, western society has made it too comfortable to take the easy way out, both by raising the baseline level of comfort available even to abject failures, and by espousing pro-weakness rhetoric (that we then drag our heels to act on, because nobody sane really believes it, leading to more confusion).
Another problem is that even a society that openly praises strength and abhors weakness still has many failure modes, but arguably none worse than those of a society that pretends to love weakness.
Are we all just saying the same? I feel like we're beating a dead straw horse here.
I "have" to feel that the great sin of Germany was what it did to the Jews, Cripples and Gypsies. I do feel that the greatest sin of Germany back then was what it did to Germany and the Germans.
As for those WWI vets, you can validly suggest that they weren't all unhinged gangsters, but I will insist that more than enough of them in positions of great power were, and this includes big names like Himmler, Göring, the non-veteran Göbbles and Hitler himself, and a thousand lesser party barons who managed to escape post-war condemnation only because they lorded it over the Germans instead of bullying foreigners or minorities. Some more unhinged, some more gangster, some perhaps neither but alas the the party was top-heavy with unhinged gangsters and the top had the last word on acceptable behavior.
I'm fine with denouncing the common depiction of the Nazis as fundamentally evil, fine with admitting that they did some good, fine with any claim of there being worse things in the world than Nazis, fine with theories that posit that Fascism may have good points, but not fine with attempts to whitewash those particular Nazis as saviors of the Germany they destroyed in their mania and incompetence.
Look at their mismanagement, the purges, the wealth accumulated by party functionaries, and the ground-level stories of German peasants and tradespeople being bossed around and told to shut up and get with the program or else, and look at the total and utter catastrophe that was WW2. It takes a lot of revisionism to clear them of the blame for that. You can, if you like, completely ignore the horror stories of concentration camps and death squads or any principled objection to authoritarianism - there's still more than enough left to condemn the Nazis in general both for what they attempted and for what they ended up achieving.
And I honestly don't know enough about JFK to answer your question.
Southkraut
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19d ago
Yes, but you can clearly see a gradient of morality that's pretty much the gradient of skin darkness. From the very dark Liet-Kynes, practically a saint, to the darkish Chani, morally flawless except for her doing violence, to the lighter Stilgar, a fanatic blinded by propaganda, but at least on the right side, to the much lighter Atreides, greedy egoistical colonialists who exploit the natives for their political games and are nominal heroes only because they fight even worse people, to the almost-albino cartoon villain Harkonnens.
Southkraut
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19d ago
As dovetailing said, great circles. I once saw the Aurora Borealis on a night flight from Germany to Japan.
Southkraut
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1mo ago
The thought of having a viable insect population in my living quarters, nevermind of permitting its unchecked growth, gives me the twitchy eye and makes me mumble "Hans, get ze Flammenwerfer".
Beyond that, all I can see is "All quiet on the western front: effective altruists have their priorities backwards". Nothing new. Maybe touching grass would help those people, but I wonder about the mental ecosystem that produces such impossible notions of morality in the first place.
Southkraut
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24d ago
So... who were the peasants fighting?
If German history is anything to go by: Robbers, marauding soldiers, each other, their wives, their lord's enemies when something went very wrong in the levying process, and once every few generations, their social betters in some abortive peasant uprising.
Southkraut
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30d ago
I don't want to make this about semantics, so let's not. If you really want me to bite the biggest bullet available, then fine, what Americans count as "civil rights" is egalitarianism taken to excess and any society is better off throwing it all out than accepting it all without question. It's quite possibly better to make too many distinctions between people than to make too few. The optimum is likely neither 0 nor 100.
But we needn't go that far into the abstract. Concepts like slavery, race and marriage are tangibly real, universal and highly relevant to almost everyone in ways that transgenderism is not, and no amount of false equivalence will make the latter any more substantial than it clearly isn't.
Southkraut
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16d ago
I think he's implying you paid no attention to the Ukraine and Russia in the years leading up to the war.
Southkraut
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14d ago
In your imagination, sure. Just like imaginary monsters.
Southkraut
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26d ago
Well, the idea was more like "let's shut down all the bad energy (nuclear and fossil) and replace it with renewables".
The first was easy, the second was not, so here we are.
Southkraut
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1mo ago
While some of what you say may be correct, I feel the need to temper your enthusiasm.
German society had numerous problems in the 1920s. It was shaken up by the effects of industrialization, urbanization, unification and democracy, and even more badly so the first world war and the following economic crises. The country was very troubled and not at all self-sufficient. What the national socialists turned the country into in the 30s and 40s wasn't much better. Some problems were solved, yes, and maybe it even was the nazis' doing, but what they made of Germany wasn't a lasting high-trust society but a totalitarian shithole that steadily degraded its social capital - by replacing Germany's formerly durable culture with the artificial crackpot pseudo-culture invented by party ideologues, by pouring ever-more resources and manpower into military endeavors (one can make the case that this was justified, given the Bolschewist threat, but frankly I think a large degree of doubt is merited here), and finally by ruining what was left of the country's international standing and plunging it into the war that almost destroyed it at the time by the after-effects of which are slowly destroying it now.
For all that I know many at the time may have fought for the country proper, or against bolshevism, but on the whole the fight was corrupted in means and in goals and led to the worst possible outcome short of an actual Nazi victory, because let us recall for a moment that the people in power at the time weren't sagacious guardians of Germany's heritage and future but a bunch of unhinged gangsters high on their own supplies of ideology and drugs and intent on transforming Germany from a real country with a real society populated by real human beings into some nightmare caricature. They might have coasted for some time on the industry of the people and the military heritage of Prussia, but Nazi administrative competence was, frankly, not much to boast of. I have no doubts that whatever social and economic capital Germany had at the time, the political leadership would not have failed to destroy it in due time.
So, yes, I guess they wouldn't have suffered the cultural decay that comes with Stalinism or Capitalism...but instead we would've seen a third flavor of cultural self-destruction.
Southkraut
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1mo ago
The problem isn't that there are fewer people. That's the good part.
The problem is that there are fewer Europeans.
I spent a good part of saturday clearing dandelions out of my parents-in-law's small garden. Not a lot of surface area, but I ended up with buckets full of roots, stems and leaves, and my daughter got to play copiously with the white fluffy seed things. Dandelions are great. Fun to look at, fun to play with, fun to commit localized genocide upon, and they always come back.
So it's not just in the city.
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