jake
2d ago
The loss in quality in video games must also be mentioned. I don't know enough about the field to understand how improving technology has changed it; I assume as engines and graphics continue to improve, the demands for their effective functioning also rise, so studios, to a point, need to hire more people than teams of the past. At the same time the lovely little LOZ-riff indie title Tunic was mostly done by 1 guy, and while to modern standards for graphics and length it's unremarkable I do think its brilliance, and of course the other 1-guy masterclass of Stardew Valley reveal the core problem in the gaming industry: too many people.
Halo 3 to the day is one of the most technically impressive games ever made and compared with modern studios it was a skeleton crew of some dozens of staff. The campaign, though quite brief compared to CE and 2, is memorable, has excellent setpieces, and still holds up (just played through it again.) After the campaign, their attention was not spared when it came to the multiplayer. First was a robust replay system, it wasn't the first replay system, but it was fantastically done, I filled my 360 hard drive with noscope clips I was able to pull via downloading the replay at the end of a match, then cutting the segment from the replayed game, often recording at additional angles for pierce-through-multikills or sniper ricochet shots. Then there was the excellent map editor, allowing significant customization of what weapons and vehicles spawned on maps, where players spawned on maps, and the gameplay rules for those maps. Where Zombies had been a popular custom game mode in Halo 2, they gave it full support in the Halo 3 mode of infection and variants of maps designed to have fortified positions from which to mow down the endlessly-respawning zed team. The real meat of these were basically gone at the launch of Halo 4 despite it also being on the 360 and "despite" them having significantly more employees. Again I don't know the field, but I know enough to know about Brook's Law. What are all those extra hires really doing?
Overproduction of managers/elite is a known thing, I'm sure someone else has made the observation of this really seeming to be a problem in everything, overproduction of ostensibly qualified workers for every sector. Video games went from very niche to an industry where single companies could make a billion dollars per month, it's no wonder so many people started graduating after an education pipeline meant to get them in the industry, in whatever specialty. People who didn't really want to work on video games, but think it's something they could do because they like video games, or people who didn't think much of their options. A lot of them being "writers" who would prefer to be authors or working in Hollywood, but while they don't have the chops to do any of that, they have a degree and they know someone in the industry or especially they fill the right checkboxes, and they're hired in and their incompetence makes it into the game, either in the writing or downstream of their slow and low-quality asset/programmatic work on the game.
All that said, my GOAT stack is the probably-normiecore of Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, and Red Dead 2. It's a good time to be playing games, industry struggles ignored.
tl;dr: IMVHO, because of the size of the industry, too many people resort into working in video games rather than the earlier days of the field being mostly obsessive nerds powerfully driven to create
Also, AI is coming for video games just like it's coming for Hollywood. Bug testing and QA may never go away, but in our lives we will soon enough see a wide field of auteurs like Eric Barone and Andrew Shouldice, except they'll be putting out titles on the level of Deus Ex and Halo.
jake
2d ago
When I saw the second Dr. Strange movie and Benadryl's character was invited or spoke of the coming wedding of his former love interest played by Rachel McAdams I said to myself "He's gonna be black." He was. When I opened Helldivers for the first time and the cinematic played I didn't know the camera was going to shift to the spokesman's family, but if I did I would have correctly guessed his wife would be black. When the only information I had about the Fallout show was a white woman lead I knew she'd have a black love interest (if she wasn't gay). If I see a mom-coded woman in a commercial the expectation most congruent with reality is if there is a person also in the commercial coded as her partner they will not be white, and this is a pattern so frequent my normie Fox News father and even my normie-leftie brother have separately remarked to me about how all the media they consume, primarily sports so mostly advertising, features interracial couples, most commonly white-woman-black-man.
The Western institutional left is abundantly clear about their desire, intent and efforts to reduce and ideally ultimately eliminate white ethnicities. It is the most perfect case of denying out of one corner of their mouth and bragging out the other, they will not break stride as they say "It isn't happening, racist. It's great that it's happening." That intent is attempting to be realized in casting for shows and films and advertising. The interracial pairing is not "novel" but remarking on it being a thing that has happened is no response. Nobody's saying this has never happened before, what they're pointing out is the obvious politics behind the sudden preponderance in all media of one of the least common pairings in the real world.
Casting a woman to lead a television adaptation of a media franchise primarily consumed by men is a separate expression of the same thing. They are not attempting to meet the expectations and wants of their audience, they are attempting to be proscriptive, views and profits be damned.
I don't pay attention to admin actions here, I think you all do a good job, I say that because I don't know and I'm not suggesting you only replied because of reports. But if you did--someone downvoting these comments is hitting the user and not the substance. They are here in bad faith; if they report, they report in bad faith. They should be ignored.
But also, someone who reports because they care about this place and they're following the spirit of this place, they would have reported coffee. "I didn't read that but you're wrong" is the antithesis of the Motte. It's a violation so apparent it needs no context, but given context they might also note how his arguments were at best contrived and detached from my essay and at worst asked and answered by my essay. Such a user would have also seen how after my initial harshness I praised him and even agreed with him on certain points. I engaged, he didn't, but he's not here to engage. He saw "On Hip-Hop" and thought it would be a good place to opine, began reading my essay and realized he was profoundly out of depth but rather than the healthy behavior, not responding, he charged ahead to betray his ignorance; to act like he understands subjects he clearly doesn't. I think my essay should be treated as adequate support for my labeling someone in this manner.
As for "pissant": If someone new to this place came in and gave loud and wrong opinions it's possible they could be swayed from their arrogance by a particularly thorough teardown. A user who's been here for years and has over a thousand comments knows better than to respond how he did. It's a bad debt for the spirit of this place when the long-present, loudly wrong but ostensibly properly spoken can escape the criticism they deserve and need. Discourse cannot be good if it refuses to include just rebuke and I'm not talking about a modded "Don't do this."
The person who has succumbed to extreme hatred of jews isn't going to be swayed with even the greatest of otherwise and only tone-neutral arguments. Hard antisemitism is the final deviation from thought norms and it requires strong emotional impetus. They don't believe any experts or evidence against them; they're prepared for those arguments anyway and they have their "experts" and "evidence" to fall back to if their preparation fails. They become walking confirmation bias feedback loops and it's all cemented with hate. BAP's gotta be pretty smart but the rant I linked shows the guy operating multiple sigmas below his actual intellect as he expresses his hate. It makes him dumber, it makes them dumber. You have to engage and give good arguments, absolutely. You must also absolutely target them in the same place their hate dwells, and that means making them feel shame--the shame from recognition of the deep iniquity within themselves.
But for your purposes, I can say I don't anticipate responding to a user like I did to coffee again.
jake
1mo ago
the overriding component for most people is melody, which hip-hop lacks nearly entirely.
I'm not sure what you mean. My impression is you refer to the lack of singing; if someone said they found no melody in Hip-Hop I would think they had either truly never heard a single song from the genre and were describing only what others had told them, or they had some neurological inability to process melodies, or at worst they were being grossly reductive. The three tracks I linked from the genre should resolve that, as should literally any track with rapping unless it's purely verbal. And a lot of Hip-Hop includes singing, those three tracks being immediate examples. Same for harmonies, very present in those songs.
Melody and harmony aside, the idea of a lack of instruments is also curious; there is a lot of synth production involved, but these guys have musicians in the studios playing on their albums. Pharrell has been working with Brent Paschke, a phenomenal guitarist, for over 20 years. On Sooner or Later the last 2 minutes of the song is Paschke just wailing to Pharrell's occasional lyrics.
Maybe your angle is about the lack of bands when the artists perform live. I think this is about a half-fair criticism. Not having the musicians on stage who contributed to the tracks may give a false impression of the product and surely boosts the ego of the rappers, but lead singers of traditional bands are famously egomaniacal. To be "fair" to them, this no doubt has a lot to do with how fans of those bands give the singers most of the love and attention, but that just means if rappers had supporting musicians with them they'd still get all the real adoration.
There's also the idea of being a studio act. I think plenty of rappers would do this if they could, in that they would prefer to not be dependent on the tour, but that's the state of the record industry. Greed reduces royalties to such trivial amounts most bands and artists can only make money by touring. When a dozen musicians are credited on an album that's a hard group to tour with, though if those musicians are getting royalties from airtime they're generally getting royalties from their work being played at those concerts, so at most it's an image thing.
jake
1mo ago
Why are you responding to the volume of reports from the black-and-jew-haters I have correctly identified and criticized in this essay? @coffee_enjoyer, after the jew-hate he doesn't remotely hide in his commenting here, has shown an astonishing lack of knowledge given the arrogance with which he writes; he doesn't know a goddamn thing about Hip-Hop or clearly anything more than some very basic sociology of black culture yet he gets no ding for making this discussion immeasurably worse. Every comment he has on this post is immediately disprovable and he started off with "Too long didn't read lol."
jake
1mo ago
I can see how I came across as saying great music needs lyrics, but to clear that up I know it doesn't. Much as I like Hip-Hop, I listen to electronic more than anything, and of that I'd say half is pure instrumental. So if there's any bit of objectivity in music it's that music doesn't need lyrics to be good. The point I was working from is the idea of calling any music bad. Calling it bad invokes a standard, for lyrics and production.
jake
1mo ago
If it's a matter of a deep attribution of the pioneering of sound then we just fall back to Tomorrow Never Knows and A Day in the Life and Come Together and everything since 1966 is just riffing on the Beatles. Except, what about their inspirations? At what point are we just falling back to the guys who invented the piano, the guitar, the violin?
I didn't say Kanye invented it, I said "figured out," as in he figured out how to bring those techniques together in a way nobody had before him, or at least nobody since Lennon-McCartney. This is a fact, it's why everybody knows who Kanye is and the recognition falls precipitously for every artist you've named. Kanye knows them, surely loves their work, but the relationship is this: Kanye heard elements in songs he enjoyed, he put those elements in his music, and he experienced incomparably greater success than those who inspired him because he did it better than any of them. Kanye's peers and especially the young musically aspirant, heard what Kanye did and they wanted to do it too.
But you don't have to take my word for it, you can just look up all the artists who've named Kanye as their inspiration.
jake
1mo ago
Kanye's sampling and genre-bending. Acts were doing these in pieces, ATCQ, De La Soul, J Dilla (Ye fav) and Outkast among them. Kanye brought everything together, he was the fusion point. College Dropout showed the sampling all across the album, Jesus Walks as the notable genre bend with Southern Gospel. Late Registration with the incorporation of a full orchestra. Graduation with its use of electronic. Daft Punk-sampling Stronger was a huge hit, but Flashing Lights is also very good and prominently features electronic and it also had several violinists play on the production. And 808s is the reason most people, directly or by-effect, know what autotune is. It's trite now, it didn't start trite.
I can't help but feel that this perspective is, for lack of a better word, basic. Who cares about arena acts?
It wasn't an appeal to popularity. For artists in most genres, when they achieve the level of success where they can do arena shows, they lock-in, their sound at that point is their sound from then-on. Multiple Hip-Hop artists have reached that level but have continued to deeply experiment as they search for new and better sound. It would be a mind-blowing difference to go from a Kanye Graduation concert to one of the concerts Kanye put on for Donda. Elsewhere, unless Taylor Swift takes a hard genre pivot into more experimental work, I doubt there will be a meaningful difference between a 1989 concert and whatever her album concert is in 2027. It's that drive and willingness to change in pursuit of greatness I find so admirable, it's part of why I love Twenty One Pilots. Through Scaled & Icy every TOP album has been a different dominant genre. There is a core sound, but take a dozen of their songs at random and there's a pretty good chance you'll find those songs belong to a dozen different genres. Hip-Hop most definitely included.
jake
1mo ago
Who in this coomer era jacks off to images of any celebrity but teen boys who somehow can't access internet porn? Sure, I'd imagine not many guys jack off to Beyoncé, I'd imagine not many jack it to Sydney Sweeney either relative to the eyes on endless free porn. Also it's not top 1%, it's top <.0001%, and here you may find a useful rule: most of the women in that top .0001% have remarkably few Instagram followers.
Furthermore, there's a key difference between The Gallic Wars and US gang violence: sovereignty.
Ah man, if Caesar looked at the United States, he would be most confused by the "sovereign" and least confused by the gangs. Gangs occupy the exact social niche once filled by the warlord and his brigands; modern organized and disorganized gang crime is just modernized brigandage. It's actually a perfect example, we think there's something strange or novel about this crime, the tolerance of it is, but its existence runs deep in our history. Caesar would instantly recognize the phenomenon and understand exactly the gang's cause and purpose. Caesar would also get the incredible things Bukele has achieved, though he would wonder why Bukele didn't just kill every Salvadoran with MS-13 tattoos.
I don't attribute honor or anything else admirable to the gang, but I also wouldn't to raider bands of Vikings. Nevertheless I understand why these groups exist and existed. Violence is our history, we became "more civilized" but we didn't change. In many ways the peak of civilization, certainly at its time, was the tremendous effort American men spent to incinerate 100,000 Japanese civilians. The bombings were in equal parts absolutely necessary and the least honorable actions ever committed by man. It would have been honorable to march on Honshu and pile their bodies in the millions. Some honor.
What kind of man has his wife wearing a whorish 'outfit' like this, out in public for the world to see?
Clearly a guy who gets to fuck women like that, ie Kanye and never BAP.
jake
1mo ago
I was clear. I don't consider the average Hip-Hop "unenjoyer" racist. I know for a good number of them they haven't listened to good Hip-Hop and they would like it if they did, I know for another good number of them it's just not their taste, like yourself and that is the most fair, I would never criticize anyone for simply not liking a kind of music. I also specifically said I'm not criticizing BAP and those like him for racism itself, I consider his transgression becoming a fool for his racism. Hating Hip-Hop because he hates blacks and jews is fucking stupid.
Saying that contemporary pop owes its style to hiphop may be a bit of an own goal, as I haven't heard a pop song released in the past decade that I would call "good".
If you enjoyed Lady Gaga then I have no doubt there are albums released after ARTPOP you would enjoy. I think you may underestimate and definitely limit yourself, there's a world of wonderful recently-released music. On the other hand you could choose to only listen to stuff released before 2000 and you'd never run dry for incredible music, so maybe I'm being a bit unfair.
jake
1mo ago
Someone who thinks this music is good is as tasteless as a foodie who tells you sugar is the most exquisite because it makes his mouth feel the best . . . The lyrics are only one aspect of music. The BPM and rhythm can also induce in a person a sense of patient thought or a sense of urgency. Rap combines sin with urgency.
It is a bad idea generally but especially in this place to speak confidently while betraying such ignorance on a matter. How do we have discourse on a topic you show you know nothing about?
Your pissant bit of writing was addressed in full in the essay, read it or don't, I wasn't addressing you. I understand your being and I know what's above can't crack your animus. You hate jews and viewing Hip-Hop as a tool of jews--it's been one moneymaking tool of many in the legendarily corrupt profiteering of the jew-dominated record industry, certainly--you hate Hip-Hop.
If you actually understood the problems of today you would laugh at calling Hip-Hop a problem. You bring up the Beach Boys? They were unique in how they were fairly uncontroversial to the conservative establishment of their era but who do you think the hippies were listening to during the Summer of Love? Yeah I think Good Vibrations got bit of airtime. Shit man, seems like their music wasn't particularly edifying after all. But you should know this, you see through the excess of modernity, you're not unimpacted because it impacts us all, but you remain yourself. You are authentic, and my respect for authenticity is a major theme of the essay.
The spirit is sick and there are places the music certainly reflects it; music as symptomatic would be fair so Hip-Hop as symptomatic is obviously fair. The disease is elsewhere, and this is what you surely understand. Like how these problems would still exist if Hip-Hop never emerged because the major points of shift in this country occurred long before Hip-Hop led in just black culture. The great disaster of our age is social medial and veritable epochs in internet time passed between [epoch] Facebook/Twitter, [epoch]Instagram/Twitter, [epoch]the preeminence of smartphones, [epoch] the explosion in Hip-Hop's popularity. Without Hip-Hop's dominance TikTok would still exist and still fill the internet with the shittiest, most cognitively degradative content yet devised and the laziest rap wouldn't be clipped a million times but there'd still be the million clips of the laziest rock and pop and country. Videos would still be plentiful of shitty shows where hundreds of girls dance while being recorded for their instagrams by others and righty commentators would still bemoan the state of the western woman. Even if you weren't wrong about the quality, on this matter you still would only be decrying the trappings rather than the thing itself: a thing that existed before ¥ was even born.
My children will be homeschooled and I will curate their exposure to culture but I will eventually show them everything--given, with my description and guidance on certain subjects rather than graphic depiction---because I will not be able to to guide my children at every moment in their lives, nor should I want to (beyond the father's healthy wish to always be there for his children). They will need to become adults and make good judgments on their own, so if my daughter at any time in her life were at risk in being negatively affected by hearing that music I will have failed as a father. This is something modern fatherhood has failed at and continues to fail at so often, but even recognizing that as an issue I'm still in the trappings. Far closer to the source, but still the trappings.
jake
1mo ago
Just a small thing, Donald Glover was poor growing up. Not quite hard poverty but poor, he had both parents in the home, no gang shit, theatre magnet program in high school and from there New York. What hurt his cred more than anything was 30 Rock and Community, not his upbringing, and he still definitely has more cred than Canadian-child-actor Aubrey Graham.
jake
1mo ago
I'm receptive to the brilliance of Jazz, I just don't know it well enough.
Otherwise I disagree, I think I can be simple, I think if anything I used too much detail.
What constitutes the (non-instrumental) "song"? Lyrics and production. What genre is most represented in interesting lyricism? Hip-Hop. What genre is most represented in brilliant production? Hip-Hop. Do you like Daft Punk? They love Hip-Hop. Do you like Trent Reznor? He loves Hip-Hop. Do you like The Mandalorian theme? That guy got the job because of his work in Hip-Hop. Do you like anything in modern pop? You know where so much of that sound came from? The producers having worked on or been inspired by Hip-Hop. Take it away and music would be immeasurably worse. Of course it's the same for Jazz, since what I do know is Jazz led to Disco led to Hip-Hop and Hip-Hop samples Jazz and completes the circle.
Timeframe also matters here, I'm not comparing Hip-Hop to all music ever made, but since its emergence its impact on music has been uniquely profound.
I know there are people on the right who enjoy Hip-Hop, plenty of them. Kanye was pretty much unpersoned for so typically being ahead of the curve in voicing views he'd probably skate by voicing now, views those sufficiently familiar with Hip-Hop will know range from being the norm among black artists to comparatively tame. That's part of why what BAP wrote came across to me as so laughable, BAP, man, blacks really don't like jews. They just know better than saying it outside of friendly confines, they don't have Kanye's instability, they also don't have his genius.
The King of Hip-Hop released in summer 2021 Donda, what I would argue is not only his best record but one of the greatest ever produced. As-released Donda is 27 tracks running 109 minutes, the last 4 are alternate versions of previous songs on the record so ignoring those it's 87 minutes (if you're going to listen, change it to play Jail pt 2 instead of Jail as track 2). It's a record where the many artists Kanye featured included profanity in their verses, but in final editing the profanity is censored and there is no explicit variant of the album. There is no fucking hoes content and no shooting thugs content, in part because the album's tribute and namesake is Kanye's mother Donda West. Because of her, appropriately its genre is in fact primarily Gospel (And while Heaven and Hell is not progressive Hip-Hop, multiple other tracks show Kanye's continuing prog innovativeness.) Its religious genre is not something read into it by fans, not like Christians once arguing U2 is secretly religious, not Tyler Joseph where he's open about his faith and has spoken of Christian themes in his songwriting. Donda is purposefully Gospel. The most influential musician since Michael Jackson released an album that is arguably his best, and it's Gospel. I said it already, Kanye's a genius.
Music has been subject to repeated moral panics. There are targets of justified moral concern that were and are deliberately slandered as moral panics, but not music. There were panics about the Beatles and the Stones, Marilyn Manson and "Satanic Death Metal" and Hip-Hop and "Rap." Suburban mom WASPs blaming ills again and again on the Other rather than grappling with their inability to raise their children. Physician, heal thyself.
When the clueless blame Hip-Hop for hood culture, they are blaming rock for the decline in lasting relationships and the rise in casual sex and they are blaming GTA and Call of Duty and 2A for Sandy Hook. In Hip-Hop it is that most classic mistaking of cause for effect: Hip-Hop didn't cause hood culture, hood culture caused Hip-Hop. If it never emerged, black musicians would be singing about money, women and gang violence in Rock & Roll. If Rock never emerged and the most popular music in the ghetto was Yo-Yo Ma on Bach there'd still be drugs, tricks and drivebys. If that slice of ability in the community suddenly lost or never had that outlet, do you think those communities would be better or worse? Worse, obviously. Some of those artists, the few who did grow up in the shit, who do have a real brilliance, they'd have fallen into crime and not gotten out. They would have done very well. More crime, more violence, more kids, more deaths.
"That's their problem"? No shit, it's their problem right now. One of the reasons Kanye turned so hard, after either his instability or the people around him who actually seem to have been handlers and controllers engaged in constant psychic sabotage, is because he had so much hope for Obama helping Chicago and it didn't fucking happen. The hood already suffers in silence. What'd BLM do? Yeah, Black Lives really fucking Matter to the the movement that resulted in so sharp a spike upward in post-Floyd homicides and premature deaths.
Hip-Hop, good? I said I don't call music bad, so should I call it good? I enjoy it, I think its best has beauty in a way precious little other music captures. And I like that the best rappers and best producers are known. There's this French DJ who goes by Thylacine, he just released an album called "and 74 musicians", so it's "Thylacine and 74 musicians" (Spotify). It's an album of wonderful electronic-orchestral arrangements by an artist with under 80K subscribers on YouTube and not even an English Wikipedia page. How many of you have heard of him? People know Kanye, people know Jay-Z, people know Pharrell. I love Pharrell, for a decade before he made it as a white American household name he was doing some of the best production work in the business with Chad Hugo as The Neptunes. Then Daft Punk. I also love saying this in the rare times I get the chance: The song everybody knows by Pharrell called Happy isn't his best song called Happy. Seeing Sounds drags at points but Happy, Sooner or Later, and You Know What are phenomenal. It might seem like I'm arguing against my own point by highlighting obscurities of Pharrell's discography but no this guy is one of the best, and people know him, and he puts his best in the music he brings to them. The guys who break in and last make the music they want to make, they don't stay still, they're always moving. That is admirable.
And while Hip-Hop itself being good music I won't "answer" (I spent several thousand words saying it is). I will say with moral certainty the world would be less and worse without it. It is a good thing that Hip-Hop exists. It uplifts more than it degrades.
jake
1mo ago
Sorry for killing the mood /s
This comment has good points, the base idea is good and I'd have read more if you'd elaborated more, but including this last bit of snark hurt you.
jake
1mo ago
... but it creates extremely entertaining and compelling movies and stories that actually have plausible deniability, such that you seem like a madman if you perceive an agenda aligning the content in such a way.
I have different but kind of parallel thoughts on this.
The first is in how the Left is critical of I'll say older standards of beauty and the "male-gaze" side of female sexualization. I won't say this as as categorical, but within the Left some do have a clear interest in putting characters in TV and film and also major studio video games who would not traditionally be considered attractive enough for mass media. In the Tolkien Rings of Power, the mightiest and fairest of the Elves remaining in Middle-Earth, Galadriel, is played by Morfyyd Clark. There are poor style choices here, keeping her pristine amidst battle would emphasize her otherworldliness. There is also an unfairness in comparing Clark, and almost any woman in Hollywood, to Cate Blanchett. But I seriously doubt casting took a hard pivot because they didn't even want to try competing with Blanchett. I am certain they had better options they forewent because Clark is "mid" for Hollywood. Film is full of more examples by the day; Halle Bailey would rightly be a model, she has incredibly striking features that would make her fashion advertising gold but she is so far on the "alien" side of model-alien-androgyny (as an aside, "androgynous", when you really evaluate those it describes, really just means "girlish") that ignoring other perceived issues with the film, the sharp features of her face hurt interest In The Little Mermaid. What helps I'm sure with Anya Taylor-Joy's success is not just her skill at picking roles in good films, but specifically films that benefit from a kind-of alien looking actor like herself.
In video games, there's Aloy in the Horizon series, Abby in TLOUP2, MJ in Insomniac's Spider-Man 2, and The Hero in Fable 4 (or Fable not-4, I don't know and I'm not bothering with the articles elaborating on it.) I think they accurately recreated the face model for Aloy, but in Fable, and I won't be surprised if there are changes, they made the character uglier than her model.
Given there is some political interest, and again I'm not painting with a wide brush, but given there is some clear interest in subversion of traditional beauty and traditional relationships, the most powerful content-producing AI couldn't produce subversive content on these lines because it isn't logically possible. If a person wants to look at beautiful women then ugly women, no matter how otherwise compelling the setting, won't light up those biological hardwires. If they want a story of that great man hero, "actually male heroes suck" in the most otherwise beautiful setting won't do anything for them. If they want a story with the traditional nuclear family, the great story around the queer poly cell isn't going to do anything for them. Of course harems might, and the terminal diagnosis for this poly fad is the most terrible return of the harem, but harem stories are eminently male-gaze, so that's not happening.
My other thought, my original thought, is on the technology. If the technology of AI-generated shows and films reaches the hands of the people, their cultural output will blot out the sun. The entertainment industry, in its current state, will be utterly incapable of competing in a world where random creatives can generate compelling television as quickly as they can write it. The Nolans, the Villeuneuves, the Mendeses, they'll still have success, but when John McCrae can put out himself Worm and Pact as shows, or when the many successful Royal Road writers can make shows of their works, or when some guy in his basement can produce Peter Jackson's Rise and Fall of Gondolin, when Orson Scott Card (who I hope will leap at the tech) can make adaptations of the Speaker and Shadows Saga. When fans in places western copyright law can't reach can use this to make a 100% book-accurate show of Harry Potter, Hollywood is fucking over.
Will they let this happen? I think Sora was the canary, the final warning. I think if they aren't having all-legal-hands 24/7 (in spirit if not actual) from now to Inauguration Day 2025 they too will have a terminal diagnosis. But I think, and I dearly pray, the tech will go too far too fast and it will reach the people before Hollywood even realizes they should be planning to stop it.
jake
1mo ago
Determined patients could break a robot, but it's just a robot. Better that than maiming or killing a human. As for the humans currently working in those environments, some are in places where they have a prudent fear of injury or death and I'm sure that informs their interactions with some patients. Simulacras won't fear anything, so their interactions won't be tinged by fear.
More than 90% of labor will be automated in our lifetime. Simulacra will improve, the human facsimile will become seamless and their fine articulation and strength will first match and then permanently exceed humans, or at least those non-cybernetically-augmented. They will be tremendously cost-superior as their minimum effort in work will be better than many humans giving their utmost. So while fears of institutions being black pits for the dregs is valid today, in 30 years a largely simulacra-staffed institution will have patients receiving a higher standard of care than what premium specialized multi-patient care facilities deliver right now.
Some homeless need the hard support of institutions right now. The problem I have with mass institutionalizing advocacy today is I don't trust such institutions to not become abyssal places bereft of human dignity. The government could probably run a non-terrible pilot, but it would be a handful of the homeless and so not solve anything, but run in mass, and especially if turned to privatization, they will become hellish. And some might say, these people are already making cities hellish; they might argue their lives are already hellish, a warm place to sleep, food, and the removal of narcotics would be better; or they might argue the institutions would be hellish because such people inhabit them. To all of these, yeah maybe. But if the perception is these places are worse than prison there will be powerful opposition from the lowest of the individual homeless who fights at being sent, up to well-funded, organized actors working against it.
With the mass automation of labor and comparable-in-impact breakthroughs in other industries, costs of many products will spiral downward. Inflation is a motherfucker but things will either stabilize by the end of the decade or the country will start burning. I choose to believe the former will happen. The robots will look like humans, they sound like humans, they will feel like humans. The reason it will work so well when it's implemented is because that obstacle of "this thing isn't human" will be brief; we can't help but humanize that which isn't human. Look at the affinity for animals. The simulacra will be capable, they will be pleasant, they will remember everything but not hold to particular memories in spite for later cruelty. They will just be better. Not in the transcendent, infinite worth of the human, but as the continued demonstration of the spirit of man in improving the human condition. They are the next great step. On a long enough timeline, a healthy capitalism will compete itself into being socialism. Costs will be so cheap, quality will be so high, so many industries will just cease to exist as some breakthrough renders them entirely obsolete. Food, healthcare and pharma, energy, housing and construction, clothing, entertainment, automation comes for it all. Eventually these institutions will be able to provide what the patients need at the highest quality for a pittance of what it once cost and this is why I know I will eventually support such measures.
I don't see dregs being shoved in capsules and fed bugs. I see the indigent being, yes forcefully, put in institutions where not their wants but their true needs are addressed. Where they eat good food, where they have good rooms, where they have access to education and entertainment, where they receive the medical care they need. Where they have interactions with simulacra that are in the meaningful sense absolutely real, real relationships with simulacra who might be programmed to care but do it so well the patients feel truly cared for, which they will be.
It's utopian, so it's naive and dumb. What future is the alternative? Throw them all in a pit? Might as well send vans around for them to be shot and taken to crematoriums. I know that's reductive, there's an adequate middle ground, but why stop at hoping for a solution that's only adequate? The technology for the best swiftly approaches, why not hope for it in everything? I don't ascribe an unreasonable negativity to you, the concerns you raise of terrible conditions are entirely valid, and if that were the proposal or what ended up actually happening after the ostensibly good proposal, I'd oppose them. But at a certain point in the endless march of technological progress it will take more effort to poorly deliver such a service, it will take actual malice rather than simple avarice, because the avaricious option will so fortunately be the best option for the patients.
The solution is institutionalizing the indigent homeless population. Not all of them, not the outlier hobo wandering-workers, the homeless who are principally unable to work. The state running such institutions, or paying for private administration, does open the door to abuses. One is financial, with taxpayer money footing the bill they're incentivizing bad actors who will profit in their delivery of a poor service. Bigger is employment, hiring caring or at least competent staff who aren't sociopaths, something we see facilities in the US failing at pretty regularly. Still, some significant number of the homeless should be institutionalized because they need a level of hard support the church and private charity is no longer equipped to handle, and really it's the domain of the state anyway.
I'm not the first to bring this up, but I don't think I've seen anyone explain why it will be possible in our generation. Changing political sentiment will help, it'll probably be necessary so that people who shouldn't be on the streets stay off them, but technology in that of the human automata, the simulacra, will be the lever. By 2035, wide-production probably 2040, simulacra will exist that are capable of acting as orderlies in healthcare settings. Some successor to GPT or whatever, after direction from the human overseer they are accountable to, will run their scheduling, their pathing, their tasks, the conversing with and monitoring of patients that they can then provide to those human physicians and overseers.
These simulacra will be perfect orderlies: they don't need to sleep, they don't need to fear (in once high-risk settings) a patient sneaking something sharp to shiv them, they won't make mistakes, or they will but certainly fewer by-the-day and more minor than humans make. Patients meanwhile won't have to be afraid of simulacra verbally abusing them or stealing from them or beating them or raping them or killing them. They won't have to fear and suffer from the petty tyrannies of spite, or even just a bad interaction as the brunt of annoyance on a bad day. With time, simulacra will be integral to the delivery of an undeviatingly high standard of care.
I've always assumed Japan will use them first because of their inverse population pyramid. Lots of old people, not enough people to care for them: okay, robots. The success, the quality, the savings, these will see varyingly immediate success and that will spread. Private healthcare in the US first, but there will be policymakers who will be aware of the applications of simulacra in facilities like psychiatric institutions. When it is a guarantee those institutions' patients will be free from the debasing of their humanity (beyond that from being institutionalized) the philosophic argument against becomes very difficult, and then financials get their say. Massive savings for effectiveness in care humans will quickly be incapable of providing, at least in multi-patient environments, will be the big push.
jake
2mo ago
I don't remember who linked this--"Automatic Language Growth", link: https://mandarinfromscratch.wordpress.com/automatic-language-growth/
ALG argues children learn new languages better because they listen better, rather than an age-waning ability to acquire the languages spoken around them.
Hanania is known for being known. Known, quoted, known more. His writing is bad and his reasoning is worse. His best piece wouldn't get an AAQC, or wouldn't deserve if it I missed his time mostly lurking here ahead of just lifting ideas from his intellectual betters--a descriptor that applies to every regular Motte commenter. That said there is a niceness to his name in this discussion because Taylor Swift is also--in a real but not total measure--popular for being popular
It's not her music. It's not bad, I don't call music bad, but I can name individual songs in her discography I like. There are artists with categorically superior lyricism and vocals and production who don't have her success. Unappreciated or especially fan-asserted "underrated" acts are the nature of music but where artists might have solid radio play, single and album sales, merch and ticket sales, it's not the music that results in an Instagram with close to 300 million followers. Swift is a saint next to Whore of Babylon Kylie Jenner who sells makeup, filters and utterly disastrous self-concern and narcissism to her 400 million followers. It's because winners win. The perception of being popular makes a thing more popular. Swift has been on the literal side of "highly newsworthy" this year, and that attention brings more attention, young people, especially women, seeing her popularity become interested if not before and/or more interested in her for that popularity. Her endorsement will produce votes, I don't think many, but any is bad. Those not at consequence for their politics should not be listened to about politics. You gotta have skin in the game or your ideas will become informed by privilege and what ought to be rather than what is.
My only skin in this game is living in Chiefs country, Missouri. I know a lot of people who I saw wearing Chiefs gear 10 years ago, 20 years ago, who were hoping for the success they now enjoy. I'm happy for them, I don't give a shit about the Chiefs but there's always a bit of a pleasant feeling with the local team winning the big game. I also know people who never said a thing about the Chiefs, not after two Super Bowl wins, not until Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift became a thing. I've seen them gleefully posting "I wouldn't care about the Chiefs otherwise but go Taylor Swift's team." Same sans Swift, I was rooting hard for Tom Brady to get his 7th when the Bucs thrashed KC in 2021.
So what I've been thinking about for the last week or two, what's missed by Hanania (no surprise) and also commenters here, is the timeline:
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Swift and Kelce couple; stories come out of Swift at Chiefs games
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The season goes on, more and more Swift at Chiefs games; Mahomes has the worst season of his career (still ending in a Super Bowl lol); some memeing about the Swift Effect
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At this point the only grousing I've heard from Chiefs fans is "please just let us watch football"
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Chiefs in the playoffs, they keep winning
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~3 weeks ago stories start rolling out about Swift's presidential endorsement and how she's "Biden's best hope"
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I hear political grousing from some Chiefs fans / Swift, once again a political target, is attacked by twitter righties
Swift is being attacked by righties because of politicization from lefties. The animus was preexisting sure but it only emerged because of the "Swift-Biden endorsement" articles. Assuming her guaranteed endorsement of whoever's going against Trump in November, there are people who will vote, and shouldn't be allowed to, because Swift told them to. Attacking her is a reasonable move for the right, but I agree head-on is a bad angle: 4chan-style trolling I've begun to see of /pol/tard Tay is a better angle, though still maybe not the smart one.
Such Texas Sharpshooter energy. I predict that the team that won last year’s Super Bowl will win this year’s super bowl, and that Taylor Swift will endorse the same person she endorsed in 2020 in the same race. But if the obvious happens, it’s a CONSPIRACY!
Mahomes is superb and as long as he maintains form KC will compete, but football is a terrifically easy game to rig. One no-call or flag can be the game. It's exactly what happened in Super Bowl LVI. 4th quarter, under 2 minutes, 3rd & Goal, Rams down by 4. Holding: Half distance to goal, automatic 1st down. On the same play, the Rams had a false start (5 yard penalty) that went uncalled. At the critical moment a bad flag gave LA a touchdown and the Super Bowl.
Aw man bummed I missed this. Almost a month late to the comment, a week late for Christmas. Don't care, call it long-prep for next Christmas.
King of citypop Tatsuro Yamashita's 1983 Christmas Eve. His most famous track, the easy listening better-of-muzak with Christmas vibe layered on perfectly. A fundamentally pleasant, hopeful song that even being of secular Japan feels Christian.
Out of Norway, Röyksopp's 2010 Le Cantique de Noël. A thoroughly unexpected given-their-discography, ethereal instrumental of Adolphe Adam's Cantique de Noël, which American listeners who would know would know as "O Holy Night."
The first Tyler Joseph song on the list and the first sung Christian carol, 2014 O Come, O come, Emmanuel. The emcee comes back out to say "Wow, that was dark." Dark and beautiful it is, like Carol of the Bells.
As for Carol of the Bells, composer Calvin Jones' 2022 arrangement of the original Ukrainian Shcedryk. While full of liberties in Jones' interpretation it's replaced the Mormon Tabernacle Choir as my favorite version.
Tyler Joseph again for Twenty One Pilot's 2021 Christmas Saves the Year. Lighter lyrical fare than Joseph's usual writing but certainly still meaningful to the spirit of the holiday.
Kaskade, who I'd think most people outside of Utah don't know is Mormon, appropriately released his second Christmas album last month. As a fan of electronic music and particularly his work in house and its subgenres I've quite enjoyed both albums, with my favorite off the latter as Angels We Have Heard. (Off-Christmas music, Kaskade previously worked with The Moth & The Flame on the excellent Haunt Me)
aaaand oh I gotta round off with Carly Rae Jepsen since she covered Last Christmas. I think Jepsen's at her best on higher BPM and-so higher energy tracks, but it's still good.
jake
3mo ago
The Booker's had a string of weak winners since George Saunders' deserved win for Lincoln in the Bardo. The best of the stack is Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida but read it vs the last South Asian winner, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.
Karunatilaka:
The memories come to you with pain. The pain has many shades. Sometimes, it arrives with sweat and itches and rashes. At other times, it comes with nausea and headaches. Perhaps like amputees feeling absent limbs, you still hold the illusion of your decaying corpse. One minute you are retching, the next you are reeling, the next you are remembering.
You met Jaki five years ago in the Casino at Hotel Leo. She was twenty, just out of school, and losing pathetically at baccarat. You were back from a torrid tour of the Vanni, unhinged by the slaughter, breaking bread with shady people, seeing the bad wherever you looked, and wearing your notorious red bandanna. You had sold the photos to Jonny at the Associated Press and cashed a welcome six-figure cheque. Even in Lankan rupees, six figures are better than five.
You had outplayed the house at blackjack, whacked the crab at the buffet and washed it down with some free gin. A regular day at the office.
‘Don’t bet on ties, sister,’ you said to the strange girl with frizzy hair and black make-up. She looked at you and rolled her eyes, which you found strange. Women usually like the look of you, not knowing that you prefer cock to cooch. A trimmed beard, an ironed shirt and a bit of deodorant will elevate you above a herd of sweaty Lankan hetero males.
Adiga:
. . . That's why I want to ask you directly if you really are coming to Bangalore. Because if you are, I have something important to tell you. See, the lady on the radio said, "Mr. Jiabao is on a mission: he wants to know the truth about Bangalore."
My blood froze. If anyone knows the truth about Bangalore, it's me.
Next, the lady announcer said, "Mr. Jiabao wants to meet some Indian entrepreneurs and hear the story of their success from their own lips."
She explained a little. Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs -- we entrepreneurs -- have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.
You hope to learn how to make a few Chinese entrepreneurs, that's why you're visiting. That made me feel good. But then it hit me that in keeping with international protocol, the prime minister and foreign minister of my country will meet you at the airport with garlands, small take-home sandalwood statues of Gandhi, and a booklet full of information about India's past, present, and future.
That's when I had to say that thing in English, sir. Out loud . . .
(that thing is "Fuck!/Motherfucker!")
Adiga's a natural, Karunatilaka's a purply tryhard.
2019 was the most transparently political of all the recent transparently political awards. It was a double winner despite the rule against it, Margaret Atwood won (her writing is excellent, but it was for a Handmaiden's Tale sequel) and Bernadine Evaristo became the first black woman to win for Girl, Woman, Other. I'd rate GWO above most of the other recent winners but that's not really praise. The others all do this varying combination of purple prose, idiosyncratic writing, and "unconventional structure." They might not be consciously or even unconsciously trying to be Cormac McCarthy but there's a shitty sameness of what reads as McCarthy wannabe-ism from writers who don't understand the great works succeed in spite of such style because of masters who know when and how to break the rules.
Milkman
"My poor deprived class!" cried teacher and gain she was bluffing, pretending sorrow about our lack of color, our hampered horizons, our mental landscapes, when it was obvious she was a person too defined within herself to be long perturbed by anything at all. And how come she was this? How come she was doing this antagonizing, this presenting of an anti-culture to our culture when she herself was of our culture, where the same rules of consciousness regarding the likes of color – regardless too, of church affiliation – as applied to us ought equally to have applied to her? But she was laughing again. "There is no blue in the whole of the window," she said. "Look again please. Try again please – and, class" – here she paused and, for a moment, did become serious – "although there's no lack of color out there really – there's nothing out there really. But for temporal purposes please note – the sky that seems to be out there can be any color that there is."
"Testicles!" cried some ladies and gentlemen and a frisson – the only French of the evening apart from "le ciel est bleu" and that literary guff the guy in the book had been posturing –went through us. It seemed to our minds that no, what she was saying could not ever be true. If what she was saying was true, that the sky – out there –not out there – whatever –could be any color, that meant anything could be any color, that anything could be anything, that anything could happen, at any time, at any place, in the whole of the world, and to anybody – probably had too, only we just hadn't noticed. So no. After generation upon generation, fathers upon forefathers, mothers upon foremothers, centuries and millennia of being one color officially and three colors unofficially, a colorful sky, just like that, could not be allowed to be.
Jesus Christ, editor totally MIA.
The Promise
I should have been there. So Astrid thinks. That she was flirting with Dean instead only adds to her guilt. She believes, wrongly, that her younger sister knows the truth about her. Not only this truth, others too. For example, that she vomited up her lunch half an hour ago, as she regularly does, in order to stay slim. She is prone to paranoid fears like these, suspecting sometimes that her mind can be secretly read by people around her, or that life is an elaborate performance in which everybody else is acting and she alone is not. Astrid is a fearful person. Among other things, she's afraid of the dark, poverty, thunderstorms, getting fat, earthquakes, tidal waves, crocodiles, the blacks, the future, the orderly structures of society coming undone. Of being unloved. Of always having been that way.
Shit editing again.
Prophet Song
You were supposed to bring Molly to practice, Larry, I had to cancel another call with our partners, I have only just returned back to work after maternity leave, how do you think this looks? He stands by the door with a foot half-pulled from his boot and then he lowers his eyes like some abject and beaten dog, he shakes his head and looks her full in the eye and she sees a change come over him, his voice an angry whisper. They are trying to disrupt us, Eilish, they are spreading lies within the union, you will not believe what I heard today — His voice falters before her narrowed gaze and then his eyes seek the floor again. Look, he says, I hear what you're saying and I'm sorry. He shows her a small pay-as-you-go phone, a burner phone he calls it. Even if they wanted to listen in, they could not know the number. She watches him thinking of the children listening to them whispering in the hall. You are behaving like some criminal, Larry, listen, it looks like Bailey is coming down with a virus, he's gone upstairs.
Now Prophet Song, which maybe I should have started with because that's what you wrote about. There are weak Booker winners but the writers still show some skill. Burns and Galgut have chops they just had shitty editors. Prophet Song is the first Booker winner I've read I would call a bad book. I felt less disgust after finishing Hank Green's "I can do it too" YA trash than that shit. Lynch is a shitty writer, this is a particularly shitty piece of his overall shitty submission. I've read significantly better from anons on /lit/ and if someone posted this to a /wg/ thread they would have been mocked relentlessly for being so far up their own ass without even having something good to show for it. The book is poorly conceived, poorly written, and that's besides the terrible structure that should have magnified the shittiness to everyone judging but for some reason put it on track for the preeminent English literary award.
Coetzee's Booker-winning Life & Times of Michael K is unconventional structure, no chapters but three sections, set in South Africa during a civil war the novel implies the whites are losing. The book is rich with commentary, but being Coetzee who can actually write, it's usually subtle and beautifully so. There's an idea in this space; still set in Ireland, a revisiting of the Troubles where the racial line is Irish and not. A story of a person who keeps experiencing events and actions against them beyond their control. Proper punctuation and structure but like Coetzee with very long sections instead of chapters. But all of this would require an intelligence and thoughtfulness and above all skill in prose Lynch does not possess.
A woman won the second Booker, a Trinidad-born Indian Brit the third. This stuff is such a bummer, and it's also insulting because writing might be the purest meritocracy. If someone could write like Rushdie they could look like anything, be anything, believe anything, and they'd succeed, because his lower peers have for decades. Wherever there is a "lack of representation" it's because there's a lack of skill. You can take the angle of social and economic factors keeping that writing skill from being developed, but that's the only angle there is. If it's good enough, people will read it. Political awardings do nothing, they aren't incentivizing anyone to pick up the pen who wouldn't so they're not bringing anything new and good into the field, they're just making the brand worse and the field worse as they further encourage publishers to keep facilitating this bullshit.
Getting into the weeds of English, "justified" most literally means "to make right." Deontologically, evil deeds cannot ever be right. My usage of "necessary" was deliberate. Murdering a hundred thousand Japanese civilians in two flashes was necessary to prevent a million from dying in a war on Honshu but it wasn't right. Tyranny can be necessary but it is most philanthropic to understand it as always evil lest we put ourselves on the path to endless destruction as we think we can do evil that good may result. The Nazis, Soviets, and Mao China (and still Xi China) were evil for what they did, not who they did it to or why.
The second part of the issue of Carlson was in my original comment. The right would be ecstatic if every grifter had his competence. As for "be afraid", it's me trying to subtly make people recognize calling him a grifter isn't the criticism they think it is. If he can explicitly say "I hate Trump" and then be welcomed in their circle and eyed for VP, his having ulterior motives would mean he's playing a vastly different game than simple profiteering and that would make him the most terrifying political actor in this country.
Finally, I said in my original postulation many months back I'm not certain of what happened, I'm only certain elections would be stolen if possible. Because of that the burden of proof rationally falls on those conducting the elections. As elected officials and public bureaucrats vested with certain powers of the people, they are specifically bereft of the right to claim a presumption of their acting in good faith (this even before but obviously intensified by the rampant corruption and general criminality), they must be able to prove it; so if they can't prove they didn't cheat, the presumption is they did.
150 million people could have died and the measures would still be tyranny.
A government's mass seizure of power from the people, for any reason, is evil. Governments can do evil things from necessity, using nuclear weapons against Japan was evil even as it saved millions of lives. The failure in discourse is people who either downplay the tyranny of coronavirus policy or else employ the non sequitur of "It was necessary, so it wasn't tyranny." The relevance here is the usage of terms: they care about tyranny when convenient; they care about the constitution when convenient; they care about the law when convenient.
As for Carlson, this picture does some heavy lifting. What we have came via Dominion who had Carlson fired as part of their settlement, they're untrustworthy. If the full communications are available in raw I'd read them to see what he actually said, and if what Dominion released was fair enough it'd ratchet up "Carlson's a grifter." But first, the Trump circle still looks highly on him so they clearly don't consider the communications meaningful, and second, he's the most effective individual political commentator in the US, if this is his "grift", be afraid of when he plays the game for real.
... are they? I know some people in the Democrat Establishment. Mostly, they follow the law and the rules and try to do what's right. I don't think this is good evidence against election fraud, but it is strong evidence against them being moral mutants who hate truth and all that is good. Are my enemies innately evil?
So do I. I like them and I care about them but I wouldn't call them "good" except in the sense of the greengrocer. They do what is expected of them, they are obedient. They are not specifically righteous or moral as their morals are not meaningfully distinct from or independent to their political alignment. They're good members of the herd, just like pretty much everybody who's ever lived. They aren't deliberately seeking ill ends, but they believe what their superiors want them to believe and so they think they're being moral and philanthropic when they don't truly know what good is or what it means to love their fellow. As to their superiors, the politicians, just about all of them are moral mutants. Bernie Sanders probably not, Thomas Massie probably not. Exceptions otherwise few and prove the rule. The desire to have power over people, from the pettiest internet bureaucrat to highest office, is intrinsically inhuman and necessarily evil. It's pretty ancient wisdom that nobody who wants power should be allowed to have it, and equally how the best leaders never want power and are often only spurred to taking it to fight against the former. Or to directly answer your rhetorical question: bureaucrats and politicians are my enemy, for they are innately evil.
Probably generally fair but as Fred Brooks wrote the Mythical Man-Month in 1975 it seems appropriate in talking about overstaffing issues in software projects nearly 50 years later.
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