madeofmeat
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User ID: 1063
madeofmeat
1d ago
People wouldn't want to communally praise the gods, have organized teaching about them, have a profession to serve as intermediaries for them or ask them for help and guidance in their everyday affairs and troubles if they were certain they did exist?
Why do people engage in culture war though?
Because I think every side is wrong. We don't actually know how to organize society right now and need to figure it out. We also don't seem to be smart enough to figure it out theoretically, so we're stuck doing live cultural evolution. Liberalism is a loosening of cultural norms, and you can read two purposes to it. One is that it gives space for figuring things out when you have big changes in material circumstances, like mass literacy, the industrial revolution or social media. The other is that the lack of oppressive norms is an end in itself and the way to the good life. The first one makes sense, the second one is quite a bit iffier, but the second one is also a simpler idea and if things get vulgarized it's a tempting hole to fall into. Things seemed to work pretty well up until around 2010 when social media showed up and broke some invisible precondition for 20th century liberalism. The message then quickly morphed into one where we have figured things out, just don't be a dick, only bad people are disagreeing. We need to wind down this whole free speech nonsense since we know what's right and what's wrong already. Oh, and we're totally going to be explicitly racist from now on. I'm not buying this as the end of history, and I'm not sure the system would self-correct on its own.
Outside pressure will force the sides stay sharp, adapt to their terrain and come up with new ways to act, instead of everyone ending up chasing the same bureaucratically assigned goal and stagnating. The multipolar world also keeps bringing attention to the pain points of each faction, like Catholic sex abuse scandals, immigrant crime in Europe or the crippling lack of human capital in current US right wing, when the factions themselves would prefer to just suppress discussion of the matter and leave the problem to fester. I'm hoping that poking at these will eventually build up to a broader understanding of what works and what doesn't and what can be changed to improve things in the future.
madeofmeat
3d ago
The guy who was a monk and mastered himself and then was able to get anyone to do anything he wanted by psychological manipulation, able to learn other languages in hours of listening to someone speak it. That guy. Who then also psychologically manipulated the rape victim.
I think the bit with Kellhus was great. He starts out set up as the protagonist and it slowly dawns on you that he's completely inhuman on the inside and closer to the Lovecraftian horrors of the setting than a person. And it feels like the book's aware of this, the whole thing is a send-off of the whole ultracompetent fantasy protagonist trope, someone set out to actually engineer one and created a walking nightmare.
madeofmeat
3d ago
Nope, still doesn't work for me. Historical people had regular everyday religious practice with forms (who are the priests, what do we believe?) and regularity (church every Sunday). Everyday people want to commune with the gods, ask them for help, and worship them, and knowing that there's this bearded clever guy, alien hippie or demon warlord out there somewhere who can kinda maybe do some magic doesn't change this. But people in Middle-Earth don't seem to ever do this or have any sort of traditions or institutions for it.
madeofmeat
4d ago
Religion is so touchy. Tolkien got it perfect, everyone else tends to either make religion too immanent and just another magical mechanic
Tolkien had a supernatural cosmology he'd put a lot of thought in, sure, but he has very little in-universe religion. As far as we can tell from The Lord of the Rings, there's no clergy in Middle-Earth and the people don't have any particular religious beliefs they could explain or religious practices and traditions they follow. This was intentional, but it makes everyone feel like 20th century WEIRD people who cringe from espousing the actual metaphysical claims of their local traditional religion even when they don't want to outright denounce it as false.
madeofmeat
4d ago
But you wouldn't normally expect an imbecile to be able to do anything like this. That's why it's something to note.
Martin Bryant of Port Arthur massacre fame was in special education and was estimated to have IQ 66 as an adult.
madeofmeat
7d ago
I only want to contest part of your first point here. Maybe we just disagree on this or have radically different experiences but a lot of FOSS that I’ve used over the years is straight dogshit. Granted not all of it but a damn good amount of it. Libre Office in contrast with Microsoft? Yeah, you’ve lost me there.
The office suite is an interesting example because for non-programmer computer users it's probably the main point of doing work on the computer, while programmers can go for years without touching it at all, and FOSS builders are all programmers. Need a document? Markdown and Pandoc so you don't need to worry about the janky wysiwyg editor. Need to calculate something complex? Spreadsheets are a fragile mess, anything more complex than a shopping list might as well be a quick Python program and anything with a whole bunch of data should go in an actual database. LibreOffice specifically is going to stay bad because the people who could improve it don't care about office suites and won't dogfood one.
madeofmeat
25d ago
If this happened, it wasn't at LessWrong. EY got frustrated with LWs moderation capabilities and culture in the early 2010s, decamped to Facebook and Twitter where he could freely block anyone who annoyed him and never really returned to LessWrong for anything other than occasional drive-by comments. Meanwhile LessWrong generally doesn't delete the publicly visible user accounts when someone is banned, and there's no user account page for qntm.
madeofmeat
25d ago
You were talking about a LessWrong purge, but I can't find these people's LW accounts that have gone quiet. David Friedman has an active one that advertises meetups and doesn't seem to have ever participated in comments. He's been a regular commenter over at slatestarcodex and seems to always have been received well there. I don't know who Baaj, Barnaby or Paniookah are and google didn't find any comments by these names in LessWrong or SSC. I'm not aware of QNTM ever interacting much directly with the LessWrong sphere.
madeofmeat
26d ago
That said, in 2014 - 2015 LessWrong saw a purge of long time commentors and contributors for their refusal to get on board with Wild Animal suffering or all the trans/poly stuff. If you were to ask me, I would tell you that this purge was a significant contributing factor to the decline of LessWrong 1.0 and the subsequent relaunch of LW 2.0 as a more explicitly MIRI-oriented activist space.
I don't remember anything like this. If they were long time commentors, you can surely name some of them.
madeofmeat
1mo ago
The Reddit I'm thinking of with multiple Lisp programming posts on the front page is older than the /r/jailbait Reddit. It's the Reddit that didn't have subreddits yet. I think I first became aware of it when Paul Graham gushed about it in 2005. Like, "the front page of the internet" has been something between a joke and an empty slogan for very long now, but in 2005 that actually made sense, and Reddit did get established as the main option for an open, vote-based non-topic-restricted link aggregator like that very early. Digg.com was an earlier incumbent, but then there was the 2007 shakeup where Digg censored frontpage posts about people discovering how to crack BluRay encryption and Reddit didn't, and Reddit got established as the cool site and Digg started spiraling into obscurity.
I'm less clear on what the early history of porn on Reddit was. Subreddit creation opened up in 2008 and the jailbait controversy started up in 2011, so it went pretty fast once you could have porn subreddits. But how porny was the pre-subreddit era?
madeofmeat
3mo ago
I initially thought this sounds doomed, but thinking it a bit more, I'm not sure. Reddit feels like it has gone from being worse than it used to be but still the incumbent so what are you gonna do, to something that has very little resemblance to what it originally was. A thing like that doesn't really exist now, and it doesn't need to be immediately huge to get going, so maybe there is a chance.
Stuff I'm roughly thinking, how did the original Reddit get to be like that? Why did it go bad? What's different now? The internet circa 2005 still operated on some sort of naive emergent elitism just on account of normies mostly not being there. The optimistic story in my head is that there's still a cohort of the sort of people who populated early Reddit around, but they don't have the internet in general as their watering hole anymore, so if you somehow got a critical mass of them in one place that could actually kickstart things. The optimistic story for Reddit going bad was that the owners sold out and had to grow the site and throw the original values overboard, so a replacement could keep its soul longer by staying a boutique operation.
What's going on now, you have a lot more bad actors around, and AI is likely to make things even worse. I'm pretty sure something is lost from the idealism from 25 years ago when people figured they can solve the software crisis by writing more Lisp. So one angle is defense. You can expect hacking and entryists, and if you get big enough, lawfare. And then you want to get the sorts of people you do want contributing to learn about the site and join. The tricky thing is that you want some kind of elitism filter that gets you smart people writing quality content and keeps you from getting swamped with Reddit normies, but also doesn't get you into the Voat failure mode of pulling in mostly crazy people and bad actors. The Motte had a pretty solid niche during the 2010s culture war, which was pretty visible for a circa 2018 misfit grey tribe university freshman, but I'm not sure how much of a going concern it is today. I guess in 2008 there were still stronger remnants of the US religious right around and free software was more of a scrappy underdog than the infrastructure of the entire Web 2.0, and those were relevant things for the original Redditors. So what's the zeitgeist going to be for a 2028 misfit grey tribe university freshman and what will they be looking to escape from or stand against?
The big thing Motte has going for it is hands-on moderation by people who actually have an idea what the site is about and will engage with users pretty far. A big part of what happened to Reddit is that Reddit moderation absolutely isn't this, and at the size of the site cannot be it. So if you can grow, the question is how the moderation can keep up. I guess ideally you'd have subcommunities around the size of the Motte with their own moderators, and some kind of higher-level system. AI might actually help here, if you know what you're looking for when moderating, you could have AI crunch a large volume of comments and look for patterns and summaries, even when you can't read all the volume by yourself.
Thinking about how people manage their identities and what kind of visibility they can expect is obviously a bigger concern than people thought back in the day. Reddit has the blocking thing, but it also recently added a tag to turn profiles private so you can't read through people's comments. The feature is also around here, apparently inherited from rdrama, and a lot of people are ambivalent about it, since there's the perception that people who turn it on are more likely to be bad actors. I'm of the "assume anything you put on the internet will be there forever because chances are it will be" school here, but aren't really in touch with a lot of modern social media. The whole dark forest theory is another modern thing you probably want to think about when designing a brand new Reddit, and for extra fun we're looking at comments being possibly batch-deanonymizable with AI in the very near future for anyone who hasn't kept all their publicly visible writing pseudonymous.
madeofmeat
4mo ago
Please don't use shortened archive.today links as the only source. Archive.today's maintainer has become erratic and is just geoblocking some countries entirely now, and if the site goes dead the links can't be followed anymore. You can make non-shortened links by adding the URL of the (already snapshotted at least once) site to https://archive.today/timegate/:
https://archive.md/20251104045709/https://nationalpost.com/opinion/secret-rcmp-report-warns-canadians-may-revolt-once-they-realize-how-broke-they-are
https://archive.md/20260501111553/https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jamie-sarkonak-non-citizens-in-canadian-forces-struggling-to-treat-women-as-their-peers
https://archive.md/20260618215504/https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/canada-revises-express-entry-immigration-rules-adds-military-roles-2026-02-18/
madeofmeat
5mo ago
What I am more skeptical of is that any such simulation works in the same way that a person does. (I am also skeptical that you'd be able to create a perfect simulation in the sense that it would be able to predict a human with unerring accuracy, but if your algorithm was stochastic then of course you wouldn't be able to predict a simulated human with unerring accuracy, either). This matters because people have a tendency to think that something capable of (or surpassing) human behavior must have other human characteristics. But I don't think this follows. We don't fool ourselves into thinking that AlphaGo or Claude need to eat, and we should be wary of ideas that cross in the other direction, too, even if our simulations are really good!
Yeah, actually predicting live humans is a whole another ballgame. It's a very important question if you're looking for something like digital uploads of live humans, but matters much less for the job replacement question with AIs. What matters for the human replacement question is being able to do economically valuable actions skillfully and purposefully. Many different people can learn to do these. If you need to run a waste disposal plant effectively, you don't specifically need John Smith from Glendale, Arizona to do it. If it's a managerial position, you don't need a person physically present even. The manager needs to have the ability, intent, and awareness to perform their job, but from there on they can then pretty much do it by closely monitoring how things are going and sending emails, and it's a job any reasonably intelligent adult human can learn to do in time.
The economic human replacement question isn't about humans being exchanged with drop-in androids who look indistinguishable from live humans. It's about possibly quite non-human AIs being nevertheless able to learn and do economically valued work cheaper and better than humans, and what humans will do now. Used to be that humans would learn some new job and do that when specific machines automated the old one, but if it's general-purpose AIs replacing jobs instead of special-purpose machines, with any new job you have the question of why not have AIs learn that job as well and start doing it cheaper and better than humans.
madeofmeat
5mo ago
This is a possible explanation, but as far as I can tell, not a necessary one, except inasmuch as one could stretch the word algorithm - which carries a connotation (or perhaps definition, if you cherry-pick one) of precision and repeatability - to encompass any process - although perhaps we are talking past each other here.
No, I think this makes sense. But it's not the crux of the argument. The virtual machine approach comes down to something like chaos theory. You can have a fully deterministic system, like a mathematical model of the weather, and still can't predict where it ends up without running a simulation. The inputs and inner workings of a mind-like system are so high-volume that you don't get clean and complete predictability at the high level where you deal with things like everyday concepts and decisions. There's noise. Humans err and LLMs hallucinate. But the system substrate is still fully deterministic for LLMs, and neurons firing for humans might doesn't need any inherent fudge factor for humans either for the firings to add up to doing stupid or confused stuff for the human.
The interesting arguments for human specialness usually postulate some sort of qualitative difference for humans and the people who posit them tend to not sound like they'd agree that you could run something that behaves more or less exactly like a live human in a large enough computer simulation. Nobody is arguing that humans are algorithm-like in that they don't make sloppy errors when responding to high-level stimuli. People are arguing that humans are simulatable given a big enough simulation, which means that replacing humans doesn't require God's divine power to imbue an immortal soul in crude matter that allows it to sense and reason, but might instead be done just by coming up with a clever way to compute a very large number.
My personal take is that AIs are likely to continue to be "spiky" in their intelligence for the near future but that's not because of abstract beliefs so much as it is just observing their overall trajectory and what I know about how they work. There will probably always be things that humans are better at doing, but I think that is a claim I can make with some confidence because humans like doing things like procreating, not because of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
Humans are going to keep being better at conceiving babies and nursing them, sure. But will they stay better at something that keeps them from being killed by Skynet or being reduced to animals who mostly just eat, shit and fuck because all productive work and scientific thinking is being done much better by machines?
madeofmeat
5mo ago
The Aeon author did tackle the idea that the mind is an algorithm, which is, as I understand it, part of the theory of computation.
Yep, this is a much less prone to confusion way of saying it than "the mind is a computer".
We have good reasons to think the brain does not run on an algorithm; as the author of the piece I linked to points out, memory is extremely inexact, which is the opposite of what we would expect if the brain operated in an algorithmic manner.
And this is utterly confused. Douglas Hofstadter's cartoon illustrated the error pithily way back in Gödel, Escher, Bach. The algorithm is exact (the small, correct sums in the Hofstadter cartoon), but it's also too precise and constrained to do mind-like stuff directly in the small. Instead, the mind runs on a sort of virtual machine (big numbers built from the small sums in the cartoon) built up by the algorithm that can do complex pattern recognition and creative solutions, but is also constantly getting things wrong. As we see from AIs, virtual machines like this can be implemented on silicon just fine and they exhibit the same behavior of being able to do difficult useful stuff but also constantly getting details wrong on their own.
In short, the idea that the mind is a computer is a sloppy one even if the motte is more defensible than the bailey by far precisely because the word "computer" makes it inherently a metaphor that yields a motte-and-bailey, even subconsciously.
I sorta agree here. It's basically an accident of history that "computers", things with hard drives, keyboards, operating systems, files, RAM and CPUs, and "computation", the evaluation of primitive recursive mathematical functions which matches what a Turing machine (which, again, isn't a "machine" that you build from wires and bolts, but a mathematical construct), ended up using the same terminology up to "computer" being right there in the name "computer science". This is why the cognitive science school is called "computationalism" instead of "computerism" and the practitioners optimistically thought that given a name like that, obviously people would think Turing machines, not quad core Mac Pros.
As I understand it, it works something like this. Gödel's incompleteness theorem says you can't algorithmically "solve" math (in the sense that there's not a super-algorithm that can do all mathematics). Penrose said "aha but humans can so we're BETTER THAN TURING MACHINES." The skepticism of Penrose isn't that Gödel is wrong, it's about whether or not humans can do that. If Gödel's incompleteness theorems suggest that our universe isn't a simulation, that's a different line of argument.
The problem with Penrose's argument is that humans are doing math pretty much as you'd expect if constrained by Gödel. By stumbling into theorems, working hard trying to prove them, and sometimes finding themselves stuck and unable to show something as either true or untrue. The crackpot smell with the physics paper is that Gödel's theorem is ultimately pretty limited. It says that any formal system powerful enough to do any sort of interesting math in allows stating the equivalent of the liar's paradox, which cannot logically resolve to be either true or false, therefore you can't have a mechanism for determining the truth of any proposition because you have liar's paradox propositions floating around. The equivalent impossibility theorem for computer science is the halting problem, you can't write a program that looks at the source code of any program and tells whether the program will terminate. For simulations, this would be saying something like that you need to actually run the simulation to see what kind of state it ultimately ends up in (and whether it stops at a steady state or goes on forever), and can't just look at the simulation's source code and figure it out. But it doesn't prohibit running the simulation and looking at what happens in it while it's running.
Even assuming the article is correct, I'm not sure it'll tell us anything useful about human capabilities versus silicon. Halting problem style arguments do claim that we can't build a literal machine-god that can figure out the exact trajectory of our universe ahead of time just by thinking hard. But that's not necessary to have machines that are better at doing everything humans value doing.
madeofmeat
5mo ago
Perhaps the human mind is a computer in the sense that everything is, but there doesn't seem to be good evidence that it is a computer in the sense that the metaphor is helpful to understanding the human mind.
That's the thing. People didn't decide a priori that "everything is a computer". People just went looking for things that can't be mapped into computers all over nature and never found one.
Perhaps the human mind can't perform any mathematical calculations that cannot be performed by a Turing machine, but that doesn't mean that saying it is a computer is a helpful analogy.
This is pretty much what the debate comes down to though, remember the original argument was about whether we should expect AIs to surpass humans in everything humans can do. People keep trying to claim that humans have some magical domains of competence that will remain out of reach of AIs. For this to be an useful argument against claims of AI doom, it needs to cash out as the human mind doing some sort of work that shows up as output in the world, like a symphony or a beautiful masterpiece on a canvas. The theory of computation is very different from actual computer engineering, and the Aeon magazine writer seems to not understand this. It doesn't say anything about bytes, files, subroutines, operating systems, databases, images or buffers, just that there is some finite-length (but probably very long) lawful process that generates the speech or movement that shows that the thinking happened, and that the process could be translated to be run by a Turing machine.
While I am sure that "not everyone agrees" my understanding is that it seems pretty clear that the universe, itself, is not simulable.
I'm not a theoretical physicist but I'm pretty willing to bet that a physics paper that appeals to Gödel's incompleteness theorem for wide-ranging claims about the ultimate nature of reality will not end up receiving wide scientific agreement. The Gödel argument is basically the same thing Roger Penrose goes on about, and it goes back to John Lucas in 1959. It's had plenty of time to convince people and as far as I understand it by and large hasn't done that.
madeofmeat
5mo ago
The thing is, I can’t code. I rely mainly on vuln scanning and static code testing, with a little bit of pen testing knowledge thrown in. Any advice on where I should start if I want to learn more about app development and coding?
Learn C to the point where you understand how to work with pointers and the whole business of a function receiving the pointer of a memory region and doing stuff to it. This is old-school, there's little new programming that should be done with C because of how hard it is to write secure programs in it. But it's great as a model that fits in your head for how the ground floor works in an actual computer program. Doubly so if you're interested in infosec, since a lot of attacks involve impendance mismatch between the conceptual idea of a program and the boots-on-ground reality of its runtime that's probably dealing with something written in C near the bottom.
You'll want to learn another programming language to write actual software in, but whatever you pick, if you know C, you now have the mental tool of asking "what kind of C program does this weird thing this programming language does reduce to?", which will hopefully help you see it as more of a useful tool than an inscrutable black box.
madeofmeat
5mo ago
Neuroscience still has a lot of ground to cover, but we already know the brain isn't a binary computer. It seems to me that one very easily could be a materialist and think that the brain is not a computer and I've always been a bit puzzled by the consistent tendency to equivocate them.
The claim isn't that the brain is a "binary computer", it's that it's that however the brain works, it does not have computational capabilities that go beyond what is expressible by a Turing machine. So far we haven't been able to come up with a physical system of whatever sort that everyone agrees is able to come up with results that something like a digital computer can not even in principle. Roger Penrose does think that the human brain is one of those, and some mathematical insights humans can have are literally examples of super-Turing computation, but most everyone else thinks he's being a crank about this.
madeofmeat
5mo ago
What, on God's green earth, would make you think that people want things to be fair or consistent? This is something you want, this is something autistic people want, this is something scientists want when running experiments and even then you'd need something to act as a control. The state of the world is not fair; this is the way of the world. Nature is red in tooth and claw, the systems we build around her as superior broken apes who are above it all are designed around it and the more of us there are the more you have to design for edge cases.
What do you think laws are for?
madeofmeat
5mo ago
I feel like the current discourse advocating religion is pretty similar to the current discourse advocating wokeness. People probably know it's bullshit, but push it anyway because they think lying the right way will bring us a better world. A type of person thinks that sure, it's bullshit, but it's our good sort of bullshit that keeps the queers and the degenerates down instead of elevating them and will lead to prosperity and clean cities. Only you're still lying about important things, you know you are, and the same dynamics that broke down the consensus religion of previous generations will hit you as well.
What do you make of God not being a viable concept to appeal to in public discourse? We're living in a sort of mixed postmodern picture where everything is real and truths don't matter when it's about the dignity of religious people, but then if there is a global pandemic the alternative truth that microbes don't exist and sickness arises from peoples' chakras being spiritually misaligned will not be given equal hearing. Right now metaphysical beliefs from any religion seem to have no purchase in the sort of consensus reality discourse that says things like "our ongoing pandemic is caused by contagious microbes". If the place of religion in society is that the secular morlocks go "that's very nice dear, now go play in the corner, we've got three nuclear power plants to build and an mRNA vaccine to sequence against the latest pandemic", how does that look for religion's claimed capability to ascertain very important things about existence? People who like religions seem to want to generally to downplay this instead of honestly thinking what it entails. Fighting science hasn't gone very well, religious people enthusiastically tried, got trounced, and then developed sophisticated ideas about "separate magisteria" and coexisting with science. Coexisting with science is tricky as well, since science keeps moving. You can go "but consciousness!" today, but what if we get a broadly accepted scientific theory of consciousness in 2038? People who wanted to keep space for religion could go "but élan vital!" in 1910 but that one was doing significantly worse 50 years later. Doesn't stop people from still trying though.
The public discourse thing seems to not be just about the rise of science, it's also about the rise of cosmopolitanism. It's hard to ignore that there have been multiple very different world religions that all have had significant civilizations associated with them. "Why are you convinced it's specifically the religion you were raised in that's right" is a tough question. It's not a question asking you to tell you what you like specifically about your own religion. It's asking that if you think your own religion gets something specifically right that other religions don't, isn't it a bit suspicious it's mostly people who were raised in that religion who think so, and people who were raised with other world religions by and large happy there. If you take the consciousness and quantum physics thing seriously instead of just dishonestly dishing it out as apologetics for your pre-existing bottom line, this is a problem, because you're fishing for something that's the same in everyone's reality, not just a nice story of cultural tradition. Even if you think something like a first mover argument is convincing, it doesn't specify the God of Abraham who is particularly disgusted by the sight of human feces. If you take religions at face value, at most one can be right, but religious people who claim inner conviction of the truth of their own religion specifically seem to be happy with their own thing and there's no widespread movement of Sikhs, Shintoists, Catholics, Orthodox Zoroastrians and Jains going "so I looked into this American Mormonism thing and turns out my inner conviction of the truth of God now feels like the Mormons got a better picture of things than the thing I was raised with." So if there's one correct religion, religious people seem to not be very good at discovering it, and if you want to think that the religions all point to the same thing, then you run afoul with many religions themselves saying, nope, our specific picture is correct, people who think otherwise are damned heathens. If you think the first mover is valid but are agnostic about everything past that, you can't very honestly commit to an existing religion like Christianity that demands adherence to all sorts of specific things beyond that, and you lose the social cohesion angle. And if you want to stick with your one specific religion while ignoring this part, you've sunken pretty well into the woke-equivalent "we know it's bullshit but we'll lie to everyone that it's true to reap social benefits" thing again.
madeofmeat
5mo ago
The idea that anyone would discuss their favorite 80s movie is equally absurd. First, nobody really thought of 80s movies as a distinct category. A more accurate description would have been asking about movies shown on cable ad nauseum. And the only 80s movies with any purchase among high school kids at the time would have been kids stuff like the Goonies or ET, or maybe comedies like Ghostbusters. Nobody was discussing something as obviously dated as Aliens. And nobody was certainly seeking out movies from the 80s as an exercise in nostalgia.
I was a kid in the 80s and I remember thinking about 80s movies as a distinct category in the 90s. I'd imprinted on the specifically 80s thing where movies had a central scifi or supernatural premise, took it reasonably seriously and had plenty of practical special effects. Aliens and Blade Runner were ten years old but they still had huge cultural cachet, as did the Star Wars movies with the newest one being from 1983. I remember wondering what happened to 80s moviemaking and why new movies in the 90s didn't feel the same anymore. I still feel like there were clear inflection points in movies around 1980 (maybe because Star Wars introduced the scifi blockbuster concept) and then again around 1990 (maybe CGI effects changed the aesthetics and cheap direct-to-video stuff started eating the market of the expensive tentpole films?)
madeofmeat
5mo ago
There was some dark humor in Dishonored in that the nonlethal ways to eliminate your targets were stuff like them being sold as slaves with their tongues cut out or getting locked in a rape dungeon for life, that quite possibly left them wishing you'd just killed them instead.
madeofmeat
5mo ago
Alexander Wales wasn't impressed by the quality of the worldbuilding.
I really wish there was a convention to make the paywalled Substack articles public after two years or something. We have a few people writing on Substack whose stuff might actually be historically interesting, like Dominic Cummings, and it's quite possible the paywalled articles will be permanently lost if Substack goes out of business or suffers data loss, since they're not captured on any archive sites.
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