comicsansstein
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User ID: 582
comicsansstein
2mo ago
I think Rian Johnson did in the end consider making the hero of the story a white man a bit of a mistake, and the beginning of Glass Onion is partially an attempt to recitfy it.
(Blanc is revealed to be gay. So he's still whate, still male, but he's not all bad, see?)
comicsansstein
2mo ago
Do you know what was widely enjoyed by male audiences, with positive reviews, fond memories, and enough cultural cachet to spawn respectful memes and callbacks?
Jean Claude Van Damme movies
This is a vague statement about things from a quarter-century ago which sounds plausible and yet doesn't provide specific examples and so falls apart when you try to think about anything to back it up, a technique mastered by tumblr's Prokopetz.
(Wait... that's David Prokopetz... are you...?)
There is one Van Damme movie that still has any cultural relevance, and it's Street Fighter, and that is mostly because of a exceptional performance by the late Raul Julia. Nobody cares about Timecop, or Bloodsport, or Double something, or whatever else JCVD was up to in the 90s.
Today's equivalent of Van Damme movies are Jason Statham movies, and those are hardly the cultural juggernauts.
But a lot of similarly brainless beat-em-up action movies have been released with women leads over the years, often with better objective craft and quality overall, and male audiences have generally rejected all of them.
Once again, no examples. Let's try to provide some on our own, then.
2016, Ghostbusters - everything I've seen about this one leads me to believe that it's just not an engaging movie, with the plot strung together from unfunny improv sketches. The same would be true for a male-led movie, the level of contemporary standup and sketch comedy is just abysmal, SNL's material is so bad that being worth even a mild chuckle is a once-or-twice-a-year exception.
2017, Atomic Blonde - I'll give the screenwriters one thing, they understood that for the "female James Bond" to make sense the character needs to be at least bi, or otherwise the dynamic falls apart. Other that that and a nice Blue Monday remix, pretty boring movie. The villain had barely any sensible motivation, and the acclaimed oner action scene was a bit of form over function. Want to see a good oner? Watch the first 10 or so minutes of Climax.
2019, Birds of Prey, or a Fantabulous etc. etc. - Well this one was at least engaging. It was, however, absolutely murdered by marketing (title change), and was a followup to a flop, so it was dead on arrival. Again, the villain was a bit of a strawman, but at least there was scenery to chew. If you want female-led movies, I saw Underwater on the same day as this one and I liked it much better.
2019, Captain Marvel - this this the one that's usually talked about, isn't it? And it even made pretty enough money, I think? At that point, the MCU has been running for almost 11years, so people got tired of yet another origin story, an the main character is a flying brick whose only solution to a problem is "moar hand lazers", so the action scenes were so-so. Plus there was a weird undercurrent of... revanchism and spite in the marketing and interviews, so that would be a turnoff for the people who were on the fence (that last point is also true to a lesser degree for Ghostbusters and BoP, and to a greater degree for Battlefield V, a non-movie exmaple).
Black Widow, The Marvels - sorry, we're past the endgame, audiences are tired, everythings flopping now, Ant-Man flopped too.
Charlie's Angels - this one is was just straight up bad.
But all that enumeration in unnecessary in the face of the more important point - if I want to see a female-led and female-centric movie, I can just go see Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (shame that one of the lead actresses has quit acting since), I don't owe it to anyone to watch mediocre derivative capeshit. I don't watch Jason Statham movies either.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
The argument in a nutshell is: HBD -- they are poor because they are stupid; whereas the mainstream position is that they are stupid because they are poor and discriminated against both presently and historically.
I don't think that's the mainstream position. I think the mainstream position is a series of concentric lines of defense.
The first line of defense is "how dare you!?". The point and sputter, as Sailer calls it. An attempt to dissuade the opponent from even breaching the subject of whether different people have different aptitude, without addressing it. Might involve siccing the mods on the opponent, or arguing that Something Must Be Done abut the fact that such a discussion can even take place, on sites where mods aren't available or sympathetic (i.e. twitter).
The second line is to deny that measurement is possible, i.e. IQ denial. Expect deflections about multiple intelligences or street smarts here. Doesn't withstand much scrutiny but is still more a more poplar stance than you'd expect.
The two-and-a-half is to acknowledge that individual differences exist, but group differences don't or are irrelevant. Lewontin may be invoked.
Only after those we're approaching what you postulated as the mainstream position. Even then, the primary focus will be on present oppression, i.e. it will be argued that the result in education continue to diverge because the black students are underfunded or otherwise discriminated against. Only then, after it's shown that funding is often negatively correlated with test scores, it may be admitted that inherent group differences exist. Very cautiously and tacitly, as it may get the admitting party into hot water from the people who stopped at layer one.
comicsansstein
3mo ago
I don't use cloud saves for photos not because of privacy, but because I'm afraid that inevitably due to an error on either side an empty folder is going to get synced the wrong way and I'll lose five years' worth of photos. As for music, movies, and ebooks: lol lmao, as if I'm going to vendor-lock myself to a single storefront.
comicsansstein
4mo ago
Generally speaking, I think the hypothetical seems unappealing to a straight man because the kind of woman who would agree to this kind of scenario can, with high probability, turn your life into a nightmare.
comicsansstein
6mo ago
I am a very weird person so my feelings probably don't generalize, but for as long as I've remembered I've had the feeling of getting the implicit signal that "high" art is not for me.
Specifically, I've felt that one's supposed to interact with high art with preconceived notions of what's good and what's not, with the actual act of viewing/reading/listening to something being a bit of an afterthought. You're supposed to like the things that have been declared Good and Worthy, with little room for discussion. I'll take people slinging their personal flaming uninformed opinions about the latest vidya with great fervor over that consensus-driven stagnation every day.
Incidentally, there were attempt to bring that top-down consensus "its Art and it's Good" enforcement to the world of video games, but they failed miserably. Remember The Path, Graveyard, and Bientot l'ete? The auteurs that made them eventually quit game development after having a meltdown about the uncultured gamers. Meanwhile, people like Daniel Mullins prove that you can be high-concept without ghettoizing yourself.
comicsansstein
7mo ago
The business justification is that he current CEO of Unity formerly occupied a high position in Electronic Arts, and suggested that the publishers should experiment with e.g. charging players for reloading their guns past some point in a gameplay session, when they highly price-insensitive.
Single-player, paid (as in, you pay for them once) games are a rounding error to this kind of a business-brained person. The pricing was made with Genshin Impact in mind, in an attempt to extract more money from Mihoyo (sp?). In a mobile world of freemium games, using "installation" as a measure makes more sense because accounts are revenues are usually tied to that.
comicsansstein
10mo ago
See my other comment - I'd say that they are not superficial, but fanfic writers engage "across" the media, not "with" the media.
comicsansstein
10mo ago
My impression w/r/t fanfiction is that it runs kinda "orthogonally" to being a fan of a specific franchise: people doing it are fans of a specific modes of expression and specific story tropes, and they move across franchises an communities squashing the characters as they're actually written into their preferred archetypes, AUs and story beats. (As opposed, in the other extreme, to an obsessive curator on a spectrum who spend time cataloguing all eleventy gazillion kinds of spaceships that appeared tn the screen for 5 seconds in one episode in 1974.)
The publishing model of contemporary "young adult" book series and netflix shows seems to cater to such audience. I see it on my sister-in-law's tumblr - every other month there are new gifs with a new cast of completely interchangeable Blorbos, and the show inevitable won't be renewed for the 3rd season, but it doesn't matter, the viewers did their share of shipping and moved on. These days the viewers/readers don't even have to hallucinate homosexuality like they did in the case of Kirk, Frodo or Steve Rogers - the shows come with the batteries included, so to say.
comicsansstein
10mo ago
Idk, I'm quite fond of refrigerators and dishwashers myself.
comicsansstein
11mo ago
Do you believe the reports of mass repression happening in the Xinjiang region in the past decade+ to be exaggerated or fabricated from whole cloth? Do you expect a random Chinese expat (?) to have accurate knowledge about the inner workings of her country, and to share that knowledge publicly?
It's June 4th tomorrow, why don't you ask her about that on Monday to calibrate how much she's willing to say about China's recent history.
comicsansstein
11mo ago
To be honest, I just jumped at the opportunity to speak about something I have first-hand experience with, for a change ;)
comicsansstein
11mo ago
Somebody, representing "Polish fandom", even started a petition to rescind the invitation.
The letter/petition was issued by the Union of Polish Fandom Associations, i.e. a council of representatives from various cities' fadom organizations that has supervises the organization of Polcon conventions and the Janusz A. Zajdel Award. If someone has had their hand in organizing a non-manga convention in Poland in the past 20 years, they're probably one handshake from the letter's issuers. If one's been to a non-manga convention in Poland in the past 20 years, probably less than three handshakes away. So, I'd say that the claim to representation is accurate.
(I've been at the council meeting where a draft of that letter was first (?) proposed)
comicsansstein
11mo ago
It's what TVTropers of yore called a self-demonstrating example, I believe.
I am not necessarily against copyright in its entirety. I am against DMCA, Sonny Bono act, etc. etc. and I am excited for the blighted Mouse to start slipping from under copyright at the end of this year (250 days left as of today!). I think a base of ~7 years, with possible exponentially costed extensions, would be a good enough solution.
I don't pirate games - I probably would if I were more of a retro player, but these days I have over 800 titles on steam, and that would probably last me multiple lifetimes on its own. I don't pirate books - I have a library within walking distance, and I read less than I'd like to so I have a substantial reading backlog as well. I sometimes pirate movies, because I decide on what I want to see first, and only then check if it's on netflix, and pirate otherwise. I think this one is a generational divide, with most people younger than me launching $STREAMING_SERVICE first and then browsing and deciding. Which brings me to my main point: presentism.
A significant part of our shared culture, mostly form the XXth century, is under assault by a baptist and bootlegger coalition. The bootleggers are the megacorp copyright holders and streaming owners: Disney, Netflix, etc. They want you to not care about the things that are old, because the might have unprofitable or tangled licences for it. They want you to view Current Thing only, because that's how they make most of their profits. Don't ask questions, get attached to the brand not the specific story, consume product.
The baptists are the culture warriors. Sensitivity readers who strangle books in the crib. People who lobby for some Dr Seuss books removed from circulation, for Roald Dahl books to get bowdlerized. People who get into translating Japanese media to try to oust the current western anime audience from it. Simpsons episode getting removed because Michael Jackson had a minor voice role. And so on and so forth. The baptist wants you to watch and read only the Current Thing because only the Current Thing has the correct amount of representation, of course only until it's supplanted by the next Current Thing.
(And sometimes people get worse due to sheer incompetence, like old TV series getting cropped and zoomed in to fit widescreen, because someone along the chain of command thinks that zoomers will die of confusion if they encounter letterboxing).
With that in mind, even if pirates have ulterior motives, they offer a valuable service to the culture: media preservation in the face of encroaching censorship. If you don't want your children to live in eternal Year Zero of culture war full of extruded movielike product that makes current MCU look like Bergman, you should probably buy persistent physical media and/or pirate too.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
Oh okay, I consider 4K to be a meme and never looked into any tech adjacent to it, which explains why I haven't heard of this. Still bad for the future, I guess, but not immediately concerning.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
Can you elaborate on the HD signal?
comicsansstein
1yr ago
In 1939 Eastern Bloc was formed during the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. This possibly saved those countries from a worse fate.
As long as you weren't a Jew but an ethnic Pole, being invaded by USSR was the worse fate, both in 1939 (Katyń, to name one thing) and in the last phase of the war when the "liberating" red army was marching westward, raping and pillaging to its heart's content (estimating the number of rapes during that time in hundreds of thousands is possibly lowballing it, about 9% of the Polish population had syphilis after the war).
comicsansstein
1yr ago
It's been quite some time since I've seen it, so I may have forgotten some details, but I don't think the family elder is a good person. Yes, the movie wants us to see him in a sympathetic light, but why should I care about the authorial intent?
His children are portrayed as an ungrateful bunch yes, but as the meme goes "My brother in Christ, you raised the children". What I see here is a story of a man who lucked into having a world-class talent in something (writing), and when his kids turned out to be only ordinary people he used his status to instill lifelong inferiority complexes in all of them. Taunting them about how they didn't manage to escape the long shadow of his fame, and when they grew up resentful and bitter using that bitterness as a proof that he was right to taunt them in the first place.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
In Poland, they shifted to w Ukraine in the 90s.
No we didn't. Some people shifted from "na" to "w" this year, after the Russian invasion, but it's pure wordcelery, trying to justify word changes with sort of made up stories about prejudiced connotations you're describing, like how this week's document from Stanford (?) tries to connect "hip hip hooray" to the Holocaust. Somebody using "w" became a pretty good litmus test for determining if that person is a prog.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
Becky Chambers' books, that someone at the old motte described as "nothing happens to a very diverse crowd,"
Not on the old motte, it was kontextmaschine, back in 2015.
If you have any idea about how I can monetize near-perfect recall of who said what and where, I'm all ears ;)
comicsansstein
1yr ago
Why wouldn't the Yalta Treaty be condemned? My country was stuck on the wrong side of the curtain for 45 years because Roosevelt used us as a bargaining chip.
Edit: And before you answer, I would like you to think very carefully about the role the Red Army played in WWII, in the context of Poland.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
In the post above, you write
having just lived through the Canadian lockdowns
which implies that you're a Leaf, so I don't see how stealing USA's hypothetical 60s valor, or speaking about "average American's" horror is of any use here. But more to the point: how come you're still alive, then? Why didn't you live up to your proclaimed ideals, why didn't you take up arms against Trudeau regime, or died trying?
The difference between Vietnam and Russia's 'special military operation' is that the latter is fought on Ukraine's home soil. I thought that this was obvious, but apparently it needs pointing out. No western country had a war on their turf since 1945. If they did, the just-so-stories about how their superior civil liberties flow flow their citizens' moral superiority would melt rather quickly.
Also, there's no such thing as "Soviet Poland", Poland (along with Czechoslovakia, etc.) was not a soviet republic, but a separate state. Authoritarian, not totalitarian, and you having two factual errors in one sentence makes me think that you're getting it wrong on purpose, although I fail to imagine what it might be.
But it the American soul is truly as pained by my country's predecessor's existence as you claim, I'm afraid they have mostly their former president to blame. FD Roosevelt mad a deal with Stalin, and so the iron curtain landed to the west of Poland, instead of to the east. I guess "live free" only goes so far, and sacrificing entire countries' freedom as a bargaining chip was acceptable to 40s Americans.
Also, while great men theory of history is probably wrong. Thousands of above-average men can make a dent, at least in the short term. As it happens, some 22000 of Poland's cream of the crop were murdered in the early stage of WWII, which made mounting a successful resistance to the Soviets rather difficult. And the culprit was... would you look at that, Russians! I mean, Soviets! But surely, my antipathy towards Russia must only be because of the Western propaganda.
I tried to limit myself to the last decade, because that's when the complaining and metacomplaining really started.
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