Testing123
3mo ago
Contact with reality can, of course, teach you positive or negative things. I honestly don't know if I'd have the character or love of the game to suck a lot more than I do right now. I'm right at the limit where every few weeks I have a day or two where I'm a little down about it. But then I briefly read /r/bjj, and there are always posts from guys talking about being there for two or three years and still describing their experience as similar to mine, no advancement or improvement, and I feel like 100% I would quit at that point. There exist people who just aren't gonna make it, and the red pill of bjj exposes that too. And maybe that they keep going is admirable, they're more zen than I am at getting worked over and over, they're more humble. But I was about three weeks in and already impatient and saying to myself "Ok if I don't hit a single sub in open mat before the end of January, I have to think about quitting." I can't imagine waiting for that moment for another six months, another year, and still bothering to try.
This is very me right now. I have a few months more experience than you, but I have a bad feeling that I've plateaued. I knew from the start that I don't have any special aptitude, but I'm starting to feel like I'll never rise above "target a handful of submissions I know and improvise the rest with bad instincts." I think I'll give it another month and seriously consider stepping back if I don't see some sort of improvement, even gradual.
Honestly, learning ankle locks probably hurt too, because it was the one thing I was genuinely good at, so I started shifting my whole game around them to the point of letting the rest of my game atrophy.
Testing123
3mo ago
I agree with OP on cardio. If your cardio isn't good, your first few weeks of BJJ will be hell, but that's a great way to build cardio so it works out.
Beyond that, I'd recommend at least basic weight lifting or some other athletic thing that builds full body muscles (not just running). BJJ is famous for being the least-muscle dependent of the useful martial arts, but if you truly have no muscle, you'll just get overpowered and clobbered in fights unless your technique is amazing. For what it's worth, when I started BJJ I was a regular normie weightlifter, and that helped, but I was not used to hitting my muscles from 10,000 new directions, so there was a big adjustment period. I now lift about 1/3rd as much as I used to and focus mostly on BJJ.
BJJ is very red pilling, you've already alluded to a few ones:
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Women are ridiculously weak compared to men. I suck at BJJ and I can easily beat all the women in my gym except for the very best one who is arguably in the top 10 female BJJ fighters in the world. Even if their technique is far better than mine (and it often is), it's so easy to overpower them. I completely sympathize with your neuroses with BJJing with girls, I avoid them at all costs.
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People with no fighting experience really do completely suck at fighting. Even though I suck at BJJ, I have had the extremely gratifying experience of destroying a noob during their first week. One particular instance comes to where i fought this gym rat with easily 20+ pounds of muscle on me, and he completely gassed himself and I tapped him three times in five minutes. Again, I suck at BJJ, he just sucked way worse.
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People who are good at fighting ARE REALLY FUCKING GOOD AT FIGHTING. There's a guy at my gym who weighs maybe 130 pounds who can absolutely rock anyone under 200 pounds. It's an uncanny experience to fight someone who you can easily overpower but who has just enough strength to use their mastery of BJJ to twist you into pretzels. On the other end, black belts are basically invincible. I don't think there is any level of intoxication short of literally passing out that could let me beat a black belt.
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BJJ teaches you how much you suck. Like, you learn how easily other people can push you around, or how those fight moves you saw in movies either don't work in real life or are easily countered or require tremendous skill to actually use. It is extremely humbling to get your ass kicked over and over again by better fighters, and even more humbling to lose to a guy who has been training just as long as you and recognize that he has something you don't.
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Steroid use is shockingly common these days among casual athletes, especially in BJJ, and even at pro BJJ levels where real testing is almost nonexistent. But even in random BJJ gyms, you'll role with guys who are crazy strong for their size or have weirdly wide jaws or terrible skin, and it's super obvious once you know what to look for.
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Fitness and skill are correlated, but not super strongly. I almost think it's barbelled. The best BJJ guys I know are in insanely good shape, and a lot noobs still hit the regular weights a lot. But the guys in the middle, who are good but not great, often drop weightlifting to focus on BJJ, and they end up with athletic but not very aesthetic bodies, like big arms but underdeveloped chests and maybe even a bit of a belly.
Testing123
4mo ago
I do think that the logic of get on base any way you can makes sense and it has been proven that it can win ballgames but it has also created a brand of baseball that is just flat out boring to watch.
I'm starting to think this is an unfortunate reality of the nature of games. Any game, no matter how complex, can be quantified and refined strategically to squeeze the margins as much as possible to get a potential win. This seems to, by its nature, result inevitably in boring strategies. Examples:
Chess: The game has evolved tremendously over the last 50 years. We now have extremely long memorized set-ups, mechanical endgames, and tons of ties.
Super Smash Bros Ultimate: The Meta has converged on Steve and Sonic, objectively the two best characters, who both have extremely boring (albeit very different) play styles. Steve is an ultra-camper, Sonic just runs away until sudden death.
Basketball: Either move fast to get a dunk/lay up or just shoot 3s. Set-ups and plays for mid-range shots are a waste of time.
Debate: College and high school debate seems to be nothing but rules-lawyering gimmicks like talking extremely quickly or "spreading" among so many topics that your opponent cannot possibly defend against all of them
Testing123
4mo ago
The podcast idea is great. It makes perfect sense for a Vice President given that their official responsibilities are quite light but they have a lot of authority. Take two hours per week to go on Rogan or NPR or wherever and give a general update on what the administration is planning to do. Vance would be perfect for that.
Testing123
4mo ago
I'm still liking season 2 a lot, but it feels like a significant step down from season 1. I think the first season did a better job balancing the every day life of the severed workers against unfolding the plot mystery, whereas season 2 is a lot more focused on the mystery. Plus I find all the scenes with the bosses boring because the show won't reveal to us what their true motives/goals are, so it's always this cryptic emotionless stare-down with no context, and it gets old fast.
Testing123
4mo ago
I read that recently Scott prefers to put a ton of cameras at lots of different angles around a scene, which ostensibly lets the actors have more freedom to move around and not worry about blocking, but also gets so much coverage that he can do far fewer takes and then edit everything together in post. This makes his filmmaking super fast for the scale, but also renders a lot of his shots and scenes less interesting and well-crafted.
Emilia Perez and “Sacredness” of Concepts
I follow the film industry pretty closely, but like most other film buffs, I had never heard of the movie, Emilia Perez, until a few weeks ago when it was nominated for 13 Oscars, the most of any movie this year. For comparison, the Godfather got 11 Oscar nominations. For that, and many other reasons, it’s easily the most culture war controversial film of the year, and IMO, for pretty interesting reasons. If you want a truly unexpected Culture War punch in the face, then go watch it on Netflix. Otherwise, full plot SPOILERS ahead.
Emilia Perez is about a Mexican drug lord who undergoes a MTF gender transition. She fakes her death, leaves her wife and two kids behind, lives as a woman alone for a few years, but then tries to get them back in a somewhat Mrs. Doubtfire manner. Also, the film is a musical. Most infamously, there’s a song about getting gender reassignment surgery - https://youtube.com/watch?v=VHyPL2fBTHs.
I watched it and thought it was bad. I don’t like musicals to begin with, but I thought the musical sections in particular were terrible, boring, and didn’t further the plot. I thought the characterization was confusing and the plot really wacky and dumb. But in its favor, I admire the film’s ambition, and I think it has some occasionally interesting visuals and character dynamics. It’s not mindless streaming slop, it’s stupid auteur bullshit. 3/10.
The interesting culture war aspect is that Emilia Perez perfectly wedges itself between two broad factions on the left. Left-leaning liberals seem to love this movie. The Academy Award voters are mostly very old Hollywood lefties, and their 13 Oscar nominations seem to indicate that Emilia Perez says something culturally important and meaningful. But left wing progressives hate Emilia Perez. Just search for it on Reddit and you’ll find a million hate threads highly upvoted about how terrible and offensive it is.
The best comparison I’ve seen is to the film, Crash, which one the best picture Oscar in 2006. The same left wing cultural split applied, with the moderates thinking it was a brilliant film about the complexity of race relations and the progressives thinking it was nothing more than racial stereotypes and white savior narratives.
In Emilia Perez’s case, progressives think the film’s portrayals of transness and Mexico are offensive. A lot of the blame is put on the writer/director Jacques Audiard, a cis-gender white Frenchman, who in an interview I haven’t seen, admitted that he did almost no research into transness or Mexico for the film. He seems to be interested in the setting and ideas of the film in a generalized and aesthetic manner, not in any deep “I have to say something important about society” way.
Having watched Emilia Perez, I genuinely don’t get the claims that it’s offensive toward trans people. If anything, the film is way too nice to trans people. The movie expects us to immediately sympathize with Emilia Perez after her gender transition even though she has lived a life of carnage and mayhem and is implied to have killed tons of people. It’s not impossible to make a sympathetic character there, but IMO the film really doesn’t sell it. Her personality basically transforms from “crazy murderous psycho” into “standard Western educated progressive” overnight without justification. The Mexico complaints have a little more justification and are more complicated:
- The movie gets a bunch of details about Mexico blatantly wrong. For instance, there’s a scene early on in a court room where a lawyer talks to a jury, but there are no juries in the Mexican criminal justice system.
- None of the three main actors are native-born Mexican speakers. Zoe Saldana is Dominican and speaks with a Dominican accent. Selena Gomez is ethnically Mexican but US-born and speaks with a really terrible fake Mexican accent. Carla Sofia Gascon was born in Spain. The movie briefly inserts plot reasons for some of this, but Mexicans and Spanish speakers say it’s really jarring.
- Furthermore, Mexicans and Spanish speakers say a lot of the dialogue is just terrible and completely un-Mexican. Nobody talks the way Mexicans actually do.
- A lot of critics complain about the movie using Mexican stereotypes and treating serious issues in a flippant way, like cartels and drug violence.
I think some of these complaints are legit and some are typical progressive culture warring. I think a huge does of the criticism of Emilia Perez is that a white guy made a movie about a “Brown” country without being excessively apologetic, and if the nationalities were reversed (ie. a Mexican made a movie about France), no one would care. The best counter-example is Moulin Rouge. It’s a 2001 musical about a real French landmark in the French capital that deals with French culture (burlesque, bohemian lifestyles, etc.), but it was written and directed by Aussies, all the actors are from the Anglosphere, and all the music is American or British. Yet no one gave a shit about misrepresentation of French culture or thought it was offensive to French people.
What I find more interesting is that much of the criticism of Emilia Perez seems to come down to what I would call the “sacredness” of topics in popular culture. The progressive left tends to hold non-white cultures to be more sacred than white cultures, therefore Emilia Perez is offensive and Moulin Rouge is not. Similarly, Emilia Perez (a goofy musical soap opera) is offensive for not portraying Mexican cartels in a super serious way, but that same criticism isn’t applied toward movies that portray the American Italian Mafia as cool or goofy, like Goodfellas, Analyze This, Mickey Blue Eyes, Corky Romano, that episode in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, etc.
The phrase I've seen a lot in the criticisms is that Emilia Perez "uses Mexico and its culture as an aesthetic," to which I think the the director would YESChad. He doesn't think Mexico and its culture are so incredibly important and sacred that they are above being an aesthetic. The director also made a weird movie that used the Wild West as an aesthetic (The Sisters Brothers). I believe the progressive critics are fine with using France and its culture as an aesthetic. It all comes down to what people consider sacred or not.
Likewise, transness is such an intense and sacred topic on the left that many consider it offensive to put it in any film that doesn’t treat it with the utmost seriousness and deference. I’m pretty sure that’s the basis of the anti-trans claims against Emilia Perez. It doesn’t actually say anything bad about transness or trans women, it’s just inherently offensive to make a goofy movie that doesn’t take transness serious enough.
Prompt: what is a rational approach to assigning sacredness in society, especially when it comes to comedy? Is it ok to joke about the holocaust? Is it ok to joke about 9/11? Is it ok to joke about Muslims? If my best friend’s son dies in a horrible freak accident, is it ok to make a joke about that the very next day? Where should the lines be drawn? How do we distinguish between personal lines and broader societal lines? My sense is that the progressive left has conquered this space in the popular culture, but I haven’t seen a coherent alternative beyond 4chan “make fun of everything” culture. Are there better models out there?
Testing123
5mo ago
Yes! That's it, thank you.
Testing123
5mo ago
I'm looking for an online essay, I think from a blog. It was a criticism of the high-speed train in California. It received a lot of pushback in the comments on Hacker News but made a lot of interesting points. Anyone know what I'm talking about?
Testing123
5mo ago
Are you me? Errant Signal and Super Bunnyhop are classics, I've watched a bunch of SBH's videos a million times. It's kinda sad that he stopped doing mainstream game review/analyses and did more passion project topics and then everyone stopped watching his videos.
Testing123
5mo ago
The hotly anticipated Civilization VII continues to unveil its leaders, and they’re raising a few eyebrows. Full list - https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Leaders_(Civ7)
There are some classic heavy hitters: Augustus, Charlamagne, Xerxes, Napoleon, Hatshepsut, Queen Isabelle of Spain.
Then there some fairly obscure figures that even most history buffs probably don’t recognize: Trung Trac, Pachacuti, Queen Amina.
Then there are some odd choices that seem to indicate the series is being a bit more abstract as to what constitutes a civilizational “leader,” like Confucious and Benjamin Franklin. They were never heads-of-state, but they were extremely influential figures on states and societies.
But some of the leaders are real stretches: Machiavelli? Ibn Batutta? And most controversially of all… Harriet Tubman? She did great stuff, but she was nowhere close to being a national leader or a major cultural force. If they wanted a black American, why not go with MLK? Or at least Frederick Douglas?
It’s hard not to see woke forces at play. Back in the CIV 4 days, the vast majority of leaders were men and disproportionately white or Asian, and the game was politically insensitive enough to let you play as Stalin. Since then, the leader options have become far more diverse, especially in Civ VI. For instance, if you were to try to think of French leaders who embody the nation, who would come to mind? Probably Napoleon, Charles De Gaulle, Louis XIV, maybe Henri IV, Napoleon III, or if you wanted to stretch what “France” is, you could say Vercingetorix or one of the Merovingians. Instead, Civ 6’s French leaders were… Catherine De Medici and Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Who are some leaders that should be included in Civ VII that haven’t been in any previous games?
Testing123
7mo ago
One of the theories is that seed oils are more calorically dense and cheaper than traditional alternatives, so they encourage more eating.
Testing123
8mo ago
Can we see the answers without being a subscriber?
Testing123
8mo ago
Maybe this is a better fit for the Friday Fun Thread but IMO it’s culture war-y enough for here.
Here’s a thought experiment based on a thread that has popped up in /r/whowouldwin:
Imagine that every single person in Liberia gained a 180 IQ overnight. Also, they were imbued with an extraordinarily strong sense of patriotism such that they never wanted to move away from Liberia for more than a few years for school or special training. Could Liberia reach a GDP of $1 trillion by 2040?
Relevant stats: Liberia has a population of 5.3 million, a GDP of $4 billion, and a GDP per capita of $750.
Testing123
8mo ago
I absolutely loved it. IMO, the main culture war angle was that left-leaning critics desperately wanted it to be anti-Trump but the narrative is stubbornly a-political (or rather, the narrative and the characters treat politics as a meaningless game they indulge in for the sake of adrenaline rushes).
Testing123
10mo ago
Thanks for this, one of the best Motte posts I've read in awhile, and not just because I read Who's Your Caddy a million years ago and always wanted to go back to it during the Trump era. IIRC, Trump is the first chapter.
Testing123
11mo ago
https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-the-2024-US-presidential-election
Wow... Gavin Newsom is up 12 cents TO BECOME PRESIDENT.
I recently watched the so-bad-it's-good movie classic, Hard Ticket To Hawaii. It came out in 1987 and the two leads were Playboy bunnies (or at least appeared in Playboy) who are frequently nude in the film. And speaking as a modern man, it's amazing how terrible their fake boobs are. I think I actually have a high tolerance for cosmetic fakeness - I usually like fake boobs when I see them - but holy shit those boobs are awful. These girls were considered to be among the hottest women in America at the time, and their boobs were far worse than any random no-name pornstar's today. It really made me appreciate that cosmetic surgery has evolved by leaps and bounds over the last 30 years.
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