clo
14d ago
You're onto something. The goal of fiction isn't to recreate reality, but I think the further the creative class gets from the working class the worse mass-market entertainment gets. You have to really dig around or look at niche works, or be able to swallow pretentiousness that hasn't been eclipsed by the creator's ego.
Ghostbusters (1984) is a story about schlubby guys getting jobs as supernatural firefighters and pest control. The villain of that story isn't Gozer, it's the EPA inspector who has no clue what they actually do. More and more, the creative class seem to be EPA inspectors.
clo
1mo ago
We found out what other people really think and talk about, and the conclusion is intolerable. The internet's leveling effect meant that random nobodies could be signalboosted into the consciousness of the body politic.
Once undesirables were allowed an audience and became clearly visible, those who weren't undesirables wanted them destroyed, silenced, and removed from their public spaces.
Don't worry, there is an easy workaround for this mess. Just never be an undesirable in the eyes of those with power.
This is the most incredible thing I've ever read. I'm kind of amazed by it, honestly. Amazed and impressed.
I'm sorry because this really isn't the place to make assertions without evidence, but I don't believe you. I think you are a liar, and if people were this coldly utilitarian about their community, let alone their country, civilization might be at genuine risk of breaking down and the hardcore red-tribers who believe civilization is constantly inches from the precipice are not full of hyperbole and hot air.
To clarify, it's not the fact that you see the benefit in doing as you claim that impresses me so. It's the fact that you think not doing so is rational and pragmatic. The borders, rules, abstract nations of distinctions between nations and ethnic groups on any sort of ideological level that you claim to not respect are the very same rules that draw lines between you and others.
The house metaphor is overused, tired, but still apt. Do you respect fences, doors, barriers? Do you not understand, as a self-avowed rational actor, that if you show that living in this manner is possible for you, then others will realize the same thing and apply the same lack of respect to your fences, doors, and barriers?
And again, as a self-avowed rational actor, you are willing to say this out loud? Are you insane? In your own words, while you understand the benefits of America's relatively strong rule of law, you feel no obligation whatsoever to America as a legal entity? You realize that what you are claiming is that that you like it when the laws govern others to your benefit but don't intend on following the same laws. Leaving all questions of morality aside, I struggle to believe you genuinely think this is a position with any pragmatic value at all.
So I don't believe you. I do not believe you are a pragmatic or rational actor, I believe you are reveling in taking advantage of a system designed to benefit you while caring nothing for its maintenance, under the belief that this is rational and logical behavior. Do so at your own peril, there's enough people who do the same already, but crowing about it makes other people who maintain the system you benefit from and contribute nothing to feel like maintaining the system less every day.
Again, I am making assertions without evidence, but I am willing to make a guess that you do not have offspring. If I am wrong and you are not a liar, and you genuinely hold this opinion, I wonder if you have any goodwill for those who carry your genes into the world and have to live in the countries - yes, countries! - of the future.
To wit - I never thought I'd see the day where ignoring the phrase "don't shit where you eat" is treated as a rational belief.
As someone who was in the machine for a few years, you're correct in that the value is in the IP.
And they've trashed their IP.
The missing thing everyone tends to overlook is merchandising. Consumer Products was an extreme overperformer in Disney's catalog during the Marvel golden years and the first of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Add to the ocean of Frozen merchandise... Disney makes significant gains on both product and selling the license to produce product for their brands, backed by a minimum guarantee sales agreement. Their IP did so well that they basically bullied toy and product companies into accepting whatever terms they wanted in order for access to their properties.
This is why The Last Jedi was so significant for Disney. It was a movie where the demand for product basically imploded. Hasbro lost their ass on it, and due to the poor performance of that movie's products as well as the chaos of getting anything approved by Disney for that movie (and the increasingly short turnarounds for Marvel ones in time for movie releases), it basically heavily damaged Disney's relationship with a lot of the toy and product guys.
Bear in mind Consumer Products did so well that they merged it with Parks to try and hide the black hole of Parks spending, mostly driven by overspending on development of new attractions, construction and cost overruns in upkeep.
If your company's value is the value of your IP, the price going through the floor is indicative of how the company is doing at IP management. Faith in Disney's ability to effectively monetize the IPs they own is critically low.
clo
2mo ago
Truth in and of itself is never a good reason to talk about something. There are many facts nobody wants to discuss.
This sticks in my craw a fair bit because this is who, whom all over again. The truth will set you free, but point deer make horse is an easy way to tell who is on your side and who isn't.
In both his examples, the truth is not the problem - it's the very short men, women's sexual preferences, the severely handicapped, society, and resources that matter instead. You can crow in the streets all day about the emperor having no clothes, but that doesn't make him not the emperor, and if he can execute you and yours at will, you'd be damn certain that pretty much only the suicidal would say the quiet part out loud.
clo
14d ago
Oppenheimer was not evenly awful about this, which is the sadder part. A couple of the scientists (and notably Kitty) were fine. Oppenheimer was being portrayed as a weird autist. By far the worst thing about that movie was about how Nolan portrayed his relationship with Tatlock; it was like watching two wooden blocks rubbing together. The infamous Bhagavad Gita line is somehow... a seduction tactic? I vaguely remember some backlash over it.
clo
1mo ago
That's because this is what winning looks like.
Someone once said power is demonstrated by the ability to make outcomes that disadvantage people you don't like look like they occur naturally.
Here's my version: power is demonstrated by the ability to entirely avoid, or even remain entirely ignorant of, the negative consequences of your actions.
The losers have to eat shit. They also get to see the winners shovel it at them even if it is completely by accident.
clo
4mo ago
While I am not sure about the main body of your argument, I think that you are incredibly wrong on the China AI prediction and drastically wrong on the oil prediction. I've got skin in the game and am quite long on oil futures, specifically exploration and drilling. Whether you like it or not, fossil fuels are currently the lifeblood of civilization and we do not have any appreciable replacements - even if it could conceivably replace energy needs, which it won't, especially given the modernization, buildout and investment in Mexico, India, and a growing second world, hydrocarbons are used to make goddamn everything from aspirin to solar panels. The current dip in oil prices and subsequent resurgence of unsteadiness in the ME is caused more by US fracking than anything else, making them energy-independent and less interested in ME politics as a result. The smarter players in the ME know this and have tried their best to diversify their economies with mixed results, or alternatively are looking to allow countries to purchase oil in currencies other than USD (it was barely covered in the news but the UAE agreed to let China purchase oil with RMB recently).
China is already suffering because of a massive deficit in professional or service jobs. AI will make that worse. It's not an instability problem - the Party can levy pretty much everything under the sun to make sure they stay in power - but their internal governance, domestic market and stock market is quite weak and will take at least six to eight years to recover, let alone supercede their growth for the last decade. Their foreign policy is the wild card: it depends entirely on BRICS and how that shakes out. BRICS is considered a joke or a threat depending on who you talk to, the truth is probably somewhere in between. None of the BRICS nation really trust or like each other, they just want to form an alternative non-American power bloc in case America decides they don't like them all that much one day after a change in presidency.
I also think that progressive/liberal blue America is an opposition based party. They are anti-Israel because team Red is nominally pro-Israel and support for Israel has been the unstated government line for decades. Given that Team Blue is more about stomping Team Red into the dirt and laughing as they die of opioids and despair than it is about anything else, I think that their care-o-meter about Israel is entirely limited to the extent that Team Red is for it.
clo
6mo ago
Why are you shocked? Support for Israel is Team Red-coded in America.
American political theater is so polarized Blue team in America could ritualistically eat babies and people still wouldn't vote for Team Red.
I'd actually go so far as to say that in 2023, there are no non-fossil fuel power systems that can be run sustainably without government subsidies. And even then, governments are playing a global game where the flow of fossil fuels are tied to geopolitics.
I was working in China during the Great Solar Adoption. Endless fields of them, blanketing dozens upon dozens of factories. What they don't tell you is that photovoltaics are incredibly toxic to handle, dispose of, and manufacture, they require regular cleaning before the efficiency generation drops precipitously, they don't last anywhere near what they're supposed to and produce incredible amounts of dangerous e-waste. They were only adopted because of incredibly generous government tax benefits and subsidies, as well as awards for reaching a significant % of total power generation from solar, and kickbacks to companies manufacturing solar panels.
Current state of renewables simply don't scale, not if we want to maintain the same quality of life. Maintain, not improve. There is no solution. You can shit up people's quality of life, but you'll get pushback, especially as the shit won't be evenly applied.
Honestly the only energy sources I have hope for are geothermal and nuclear. And nuclear has a long list of caveats in that even in the face of overwhelming security precautions, black swan events can have outsized disparate impact. I hope we crack fusion regardless.
There is definitely a way to make our world much more ecologically sustainable - bomb all non-agrarian Third World countries to glass. If "degrowth mindset" is in vogue, might as well go all the way and yank the ladder out from countries seeking to take advantage of readily accessible cheap fuel to industrialize.
clo
3mo ago
As a neutral observer who just thinks it's fun to watch women destroy each other, the existence of TERFs strikes me as intuitively obvious.
If "what is a woman" is a fight worth fighting, women who have fought to advance the causes and benefits of women will see their work undone. They see what power they (believe) they've wrested from the men slipping through their factory-broken, labor-calloused fingers disintegrating, and they don't like it.
If even New-Labour-Government-neutered, "wizards invented magic to disintegrate their own shit" JK has figured it out, the midwits who haven't are really in for a rude awakening.
clo
4d ago
The two have different telos.
The goal of progressivism, in its maximalist form, is the creation of utopia on earth by human hands. It posits that not only is this possible, but that the 'long arc of history' is driven towards such ends. In its minimalist form, it attempts to improve the lot of all human beings.
Christianity emphasizes the immortal soul and considers this corrupted earth to be on a downward slide towards depravity and godlessness. Paradise is not possible outside the spiritual domain and the material world is considered transitory. In its minimalist form, it encourages the actions of its followers to mimic Christ in preparation for the next world.
clo
27d ago
I think this take and your favorite Soulslike being Sekiro are entirely at odds, which is what I don't get.
Souls, and to the greatest extent Elden Ring, allow you to use the game's systems, content and options to make the game as difficult or as easy as you want. Even in Demon's Souls, you could essentially powermax your character through repetitive soul farming until you trivialized a lot of the content, serving as a sort of soft difficulty modification depending on how the player wanted to play. There are options in the game that can make the majority of bosses a joke, and the oneshot magic spell is a meme in the Elden Ring community.
Sekiro is not like that. You either have reflexes or you don't. If you don't parry, you're dead. People who don't have the reflexes to accurately do so are never going to be able to complete Sekiro by design.
clo
1mo ago
I dispute your first point. The white liberal is still motivated by status seeking and dominance, but within their own ingroup. They are seeking status and dominance amongst other white liberals. They're not surrounded by non-whites and they see those people as powerless, what's the loss in status? As far as they're concerned, non-whites aren't even at the table, and they don't engage with them anyway so what's the point.
You can see this same phenomenon among Catholic flagellates who see it as a demonstration of piety and it was called out as status-seeking behavior among Jews in the Bible (Matt 6:2 - "when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so they may be seen by men").
White liberals self-select. Go to any woke convention or conference and it's as white as the driven snow - this is especially ironic when comparing to the rainbow of diversity seen at /pol/ meetups.
Men more than women are motivated by the pursuit of dominance, true. But social dominance is, and has been, historically the arena of women.
clo
7d ago
Life is a competition. You don't have to win, but you have to recognize that you are in it. The hardest thing to accept is that just because other people win simply by existing is not proof you can do the same.
Invest in yourself and in experiences, not things. Travel widely. Listen more than you speak.
People are terrible and great simultaneously. Don't let either one stop you from seeing the other half.
clo
1mo ago
Pokemon Unbound deserves all the accolades it gets. The game is so expansive, feature-rich and high quality that it begs the question what Game Freak have been doing all this time.
Enderal, for Skyrim. A passion project made by lunatics.
I hear some buzz about Dark Souls Archthrones recently.
clo
1mo ago
Good riddance. I have been reading Hlynka for years and while he had a lot to contribute and had a viewpoint very underrepresented and definitely worth having on this place, he got worse and worse as time went on.
The rule that I think is most important for this forum is listed immediately underneath "be kind". Make your point reasonably clear and plain.
The thing that I despise the most about this place is the weaselly nature of some posters on an anonymous forum on the internet. What is the point of implying something or putting words into other people's mouths? Hlynka went from contributing viewpoints and arguments to making poorly veiled sneers at other people, accusing them of believing things that they say they don't believe. In the worst cases, this came across as propping up the weakest version of opposing arguments and gaslighting behavior in the extreme. I lost count of how many times I saw him say something to the extent of "you say you believe one thing, but you actually believe another, I can tell." He should have the intelligence to know when he is being baited, and the ability to separate the bait from the true believers.
What are you supposed to say when he implies someone is an an anti-semite in response to a fairly well-reasoned argument about, I don't know, HBD? (To hell with the HBD argument, by the way, it's the same fights over and over.) Whether they're an anti-semite or not, the point of this place is to address the fucking argument instead of doing a snarky driveby. Who does he think he's convincing? If the person is a genuine anti-semite who believes in Jewish space lasers and Zionist control over America, what the fuck is the point of implying someone's an anti-semite out the sides of your mouth? Is it intended to make people discredit the argument because of who's making the argument? In which case, that behavior is well enough represented outside this place and I don't want to see any more of it.
The thing is, I don't know what he hated more, the people who baited him or the true believers he found abhorrent.
clo
1mo ago
It's not an euphemism for the rejection of individual justice and individual merit. When people reject individual justice and individual merit, they do so on the basis of it producing unequal outcomes, not because those differences exist.
As opposed to arguments as soldiers, surely if your soldiers as soldiers all belong from similar genetic stock, it would be beneficial to any militaristic society to make sure that your genetic stock of troops would be stronger, faster, smarter, and harder than any other. Similarly, your doctors, scientists, you would want to be significantly more intelligent etc.
HBD awareness is currently deeply unpopular amongst the general population. There was a time when it was not, and it was considered both fashionable and critically important to the future of a nation to guard one's genetic pool against undesirable elements. The unpopularity comes from the sectarian and ethnic demographics of the United States as well as the historical atrocities performed by those who believed themselves stewards of what was considered genetically more desirable. Evolution doesn't care who it kills, it just kills, and those that don't die get to carry on.
The strife comes from the issue that no human being is psychologically or otherwise adapted to being told that they are inferior, and that inferiority comes from something that they cannot change. They act out. They cause damage. And if they don't, they descend into learned helplessness.
clo
1mo ago
"We should consider the amount of harm done to unrelated parties before we consider banning a practice."
I don't think this has ever been anyone's position in the history of getting things banned by a government. A far more consistent way of understanding bans is that they are used as a way of hurting or disadvantaging people that they don't like, or social engineering attempts at removing undesirable behaviors.
People don't give a shit about harm, and when they do at all, it's often the point to maximize harm to the outgroup.
My understanding of why gay marriage was legalized is that it was a power and institutional flex by the ascendant progressive left as a way of hurting their outgroup, the religious right. They saw an opportunity to stamp on some faces after the religious right was used as a political force by Bush 2 to win his elections, and they did it. Had it been any other issue they could have hurt their political opponents on, they would have done it. Gay marriage was an easy low hanging fruit because it had little to no short term economic costs, there was little political capital used in getting it passed if you worked in a heavily urban area, it stimulated a lot of fervor in the voting base, and it expanded the marriage/divorce lawyer clientele.
clo
6mo ago
I think you are, unfortunately, very naive about the human condition.
People who strongly update their priors, beliefs, and are open to admitting that they are wrong tend to not make it very far socially, in elite circles, local or international politics.
clo
21d ago
If you can joke about it, and people get the joke, maybe you should reconsider your priors for 'manifestly untrue'.
clo
25d ago
I disagree so strongly with you and your point is so alien to me that I don't think it's possible we can have any realistic dialogue.
To quote a discussion further up the thread: what is the purpose of the game? Why is it a game? What comprises a game? What is the purpose of gameplay? To me, a game must have win state and lose state. Otherwise, it's not a video game. Otherwise you would have to expand the definition of 'gameplay' to include the act of turning a page in a book or hitting play on a media player for a movie. Winning has meaning because losing matters.
Have you ever interacted with a child and handed them something for free? Expecting them to value it at all is a joke. Make them earn something, something nontrivial, and they will treat it like a treasured heirloom.
The dialogue between the game designer and the player is the point of the game. You seem to be under the impression that the reason games are designed to be hard is to weed out players. I don't think any game designer thinks like this, especially as they are subject to financial incentives that explicitly want the game to find the widest possible audience.
This is because it's incentivized.
It's beneficial for business that capital, and labor, is fungible anywhere. Something something give me control of a something something money supply, and I care not who makes the laws, to that effect.
Place-rooted culture is a competitive weakness in a post Bretton Woods international order. Over time, of course the elite of this order would have no loyalty to place. They can move and spend their money anywhere they want.
clo
1mo ago
You'd get less pushback if you said this out loud. Especially since nothing about this argument you think is so difficult for people to understand is not regularly discussed on this forum and the limits of utilitarianism are commonly understood even by the people who espouse it depending on their utility functions.
Stop going after specific people and go after arguments. This passive-aggressive bullshit is something I expect from Americans, but as someone who tells us all frequently about how he is a member of the warrior caste, your snide jabs and thinly veiled sneers are irritating in the extreme. If you want a fight on the internet, you can get one quite easily without having to resort to these sneers where you pretend to hold yourself privy to some secret of the universe all the stupid rationalists don't get. Nothing is new under the sun, not least of which the things you think other people don't get or haven't considered.
I spoke plainly, before the server reset, about fighting ecological x-risk and climate change by nuking India, and by attachment, any other nation with significant growth potential, with the express goal of making sure that no country ever industrialized again. I was pilloried and given mod warnings, but I was still allowed to express my opinion.
By comparison, "cui bono" is barely even an argument. If you want to speak plainly, then you tell us. You tell us who benefits, and then we can see if that's true in the long or short term. Personally, I have little faith in the ability of anyone at all to plan for long term outcomes, especially if the outcomes are distributed over other people.
Video game writing is one thing. Have you seen Hollywood recently?
I went to the cinema recently and saw two movies. One is Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. It's Kaiju Wrestlemania, the monster fights are pretty fun, Kong at one point beats a monkey with another monkey. Entertainment. And in between it all is some of the most agonizing, painfully bad human-scale plots, characters and exposition I've seen. Granted, it's a movie about a nuclear dinosaur fighting a giant monkey, it's not exactly somewhere people look for good writing. It's going to make a lot of money.
The other was a matinee showing, I woke up early, offset a healthy morning walk with some unhealthy breakfast, went to an AM showing of the only flick that still had the discount pricing. Some anime flick called Haikyuu: The Dumpster Battle. It's an animated movie about high school volleyball featuring two teams playing a single best-of-3 match in the lower bracket of a tournament.
After finishing that movie, I came out of it gobsmacked. Not because it was great or anything, but because this nothing anime movie from a series I don't think is any good managed to clear the what seems like a ridiculous bar, these days, of being a human story about humans doing human things. You know, a story featuring characters who drink water and breathe air. Humans.
It's not that Japan is somehow exceptional at this, it just seems like Hollywood has entirely forgotten what humans are like. How they talk, how they think, how they react around other people. What they care about. It seems like the ability to model human beings, or write from their perspectives, is completely missing.
When Hollywood writes characters these days, they almost inevitably end up as one of the following:
Or some combination of the above.
To go back to GxK: the cast of characters in that movie exploring Hollow Earth are as follows. The adoptive mother of a mute child, who is having trouble connecting to her adoptive daughter (probably the closest to an actual person, cliche). Angry security man who is rough, tough, and angry at everyone for no apparent reason (cliche, cartoon character). Weird surfer Australian hippie kaiju vet heavily implied to be adoptive mother's ex boyfriend (cartoon character). Mute girl who can talk to Kong (plot device). Chubby black podcast conspiracy nerd trying to get views on a podcast and complaining about trolls (cartoon character, obnoxious, cliche).
None of these people are people. I don't know if they drink water or breathe air. The podcast guy looked and acted like if you cut him he'd bleed Monster Energy. None of them talk like human beings. Their dialogue is either snappy oneliners, built for movie trailers, or clunky exposition. It's telling that the movie's best sequences featured exclusively kaiju, had no dialogue whatsoever, and props to the special effects team - Kong was capable of emoting and communicating who he was and his thoughts and feelings to the audience far better than any of these cardboard cutouts in the shape of human actors.
Haikyuu: The Dumpster Battle opens with a slow, almost arthouse-movie-esque sequence, with things framed off center or slightly out of frame, where a dispassionate character who doesn't care about the sport of volleyball at all is lost on his way getting to a practice bootcamp and doesn't consider it a big deal. His phone is out of power. And instead of trying to find his way to bootcamp with any urgency, he sits down and we hear the sound of a handheld video game console powering up.
I almost wanted to jump up in my chair and point at the fucking screen, as if Hollywood were watching: It do be like that. In a sequence that's two minutes long at maximum we have established who this kid is, what he's like, his attitude, and what he cares about. Why does it seem impossible for Hollywood to write stories about people? Regular people, working-class salt-of-the-earth human beings? Are they just bad at modeling what those people are like? Do they know any? In lieu of this, I have to conclude that the writers genuinely do believe human beings are either cliches, cartoon characters, or obnoxious.
My working theory is that the ability of western writers to model other human beings seems stunted. The current crop are narcissists, incompetent, or incapable of basic human empathy. Either that, or whatever they put down doesn't survive peer and funding review.
Beyond that, the other takeaway I had is that Hollywood seems to have completely lost the ability to impose any sort of meaning on their stories. I don't mean in a didactic or parable like sense, but I mean in the sort of literal 'here are the story stakes' meaning.
GxK, spoilers, has stakes like the world ending in a new potential ice age. H:TDB is a sports movie about a single lower bracket game in a high school tournament. Somehow, the latter was a story that felt like it had higher stakes. Every hard rally meant something, every small micro-victory and every way characters and their ideologies were tested felt impactful and meaningful.
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