problem_redditor
No bio...
User ID: 1083
problem_redditor
1d ago
Not OP, but I imagine there are two reasons why not: Time and anhedonia.
These types of oddly existential/cosmic horror-laced memes are basically 90% of the videos on burialgoods' channel. Pretty sure he has actually done a voiceover of the processed ham meme at one point.
In most cases I definitely would not have enjoyed them as much, no. Even I would say it would likely have taken away from the product - I do agree with you that AI art for the most part isn't inspiring to me, and there's a lot of noticeable artifacting in AI generations. Used as is, it's very immersion-breaking.
However, I'm not so sure it's likely to stay that way, and even in its current incarnation I can see very many use-cases for it. As an example there are many highly pixelated/low fidelity/dithered indie games which rely on the style precisely because of its simplicity, and it's not that difficult to selectively crop and edit AI image outputs in such a way where it's not recognisable as AI. You're still going to need to do a lot of work to make it look good and fit within the game's intended aesthetic, for sure, but it cuts down on time significantly when you're comparing against doing it by hand. Producing novel textures for 3d models are yet another possible situation where it could be quite helpful, I imagine. Its output usually isn't good enough to just use verbatim, but it can help speed up the process of game development and that's where I think its true utility lies at the moment.
problem_redditor
2mo ago
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
The key difference being that a lot of these #girlboss movies include lines like that essentially as fanservice for the audience and the creators don't really mean it
Not entirely sure that's the case, really. In general, I think the percentage of ideologues in Hollywood is higher than people think it is, and that these pieces of "fanservice" for the audience are actually the stated beliefs of many of those involved (see: the clip of the Disney executive producer effectively stating she had a not-so secret gay agenda which she inserted into films wherever she could). The ratio of true believers to cynical grifters is probably much higher than is usually acknowledged, especially once taking into account the fact that truly believing something is a great way to gain the corresponding benefits of that belief system without bearing the costs of deception. Even when they conduct fanservice, they are basing it on what they would personally want to see.
Whereas The Room is such a painfully honest, unvarnished expression of its creator's worldview and wish-fulfilment fantasy - it seems reasonable to conclude that the worldview the movie espouses is literally that of its creator.
That's odd because I view The Room as a bit of a nonsensical Rorschach test of a film where you could pick out any number of statements to prove any number of things. There are a number of scenes which try to model differing worldviews, I think, and there are even some hackneyed attempts to try and deepen Lisa's character a bit (e.g. introducing her mother Claudette, who pressures Lisa to stay in a relationship for money against her stated wishes, causing the affair in the first place). Wiseau is not very good at trying to represent these other perspectives, but the point he wanted to convey is also incoherent enough that it's difficult to tease out exactly what it is. Pretty much the only larger-scale point I can glean from the entire thing is that Tommy Wiseau is amazing and he should never have been betrayed, and if he had killed himself that would have truly shown Lisa/the actual real-life girlfriend she represents.
It feels a little voyeuristic, honestly. Like watching someone have a low-level mental breakdown over the deterioration of their relationship.
With regards to The Room itself: Lisa is such a uniquely selfish, manipulative and conniving character with no redeeming traits to speak of, who is pointlessly cruel and vicious to everyone around her just for her own amusement.
In general this is true of the majority of badly written films with badly written antagonists. I'm less convinced Lisa in specific is meant to be a stand-in for women and more an aggressive subtweet of an ex-girlfriend. "According to Sestero, the character of Lisa is based on a former lover of Wiseau's to whom he intended to propose marriage with a US$1,500 diamond engagement ring, but because she "betray[ed] him multiple times", their relationship ended in a break-up."
Coupled with Tommy Wiseau's self-insert character laughing uproariously when his friend tells him a story about an unfaithful woman he knew who got beaten up by her boyfriend so badly that she was hospitalised
See above; this is not surprising given the context of who Lisa is meant to represent. Yes, the movie is self-pitying and half-autobiographical, but I'm not so sure it's supposed to be an expression of hatred for all women.
The other quote you linked seems to be a... not abnormal thing to think after being screwed over during dating and relationships, so I'm not surprised one would put it in a script. In a similar vein many films have "I'm done with men, they're rapacious bastards"-style quotes by female characters who you are supposed to sympathise with, so I suppose I can say that if you contextualise those as making the films inherently anti-male, I suppose you're consistent.
Since @aqouta said he went to Sun Yat-Sen's mausoleum, I assume he's talking about Linggu Temple's nine-story pagoda instead, which is nearby said mausoleum in the Zhongshan park.
Working right now so I'll keep this short - if you're in Nanjing, have you yet seen the Chaotian Palace, Jiming Temple and Nanjing Fuzimiao (Confucius Temple)? If you're interested in the historic stuff these all seem like no-brainers. Also might be fun to walk on the Nanjing city wall.
but unlike @problem_redditor I don't think it gets away with anything, for the past decade it's been my go to 'this is why you need at least some direction in video games' example.
Proteus is a game that's certainly not for most people and I think it could absolutely grate on a player (it's not my preferred style of game either, I'm a very extrinsically-motivated player); it's just fine-tuned to a hyper-specific target audience which it seems @coffee_enjoyer falls into, which is what made me recommend it.
In general I’m just a fan of very targeted experiences that don’t reek of overengineering. From the start there are no pretensions that it's going for any kind of mass appeal, and I respect a game that firmly markets itself to a specialised niche without compromise, far more than I do a game that seems to be trying to achieve several mutually exclusive goals in an attempt to be a widely acclaimed hit. Most open world games in my opinion are juggling contradictory goals of telling a linear story and maintaining a constant stream of content while at the same time still trying to maximise player freedom, and as a result they very rarely deliver on most of what they promise. At the very least Proteus actually does successfully achieve what it is going for, whether the experience it's optimising for appeals to you or not is a different question. There's a difference between a bad game (i.e. one that doesn't achieve what it intended to) and a game that does what it set out to do but isn't catering to you.
Yume Nikki is actually another great example of an exploration-based game without any clear direction, can't believe I forgot that one. I can't say I like that game, but I certainly appreciate it.
Different strokes I guess. I'm also not primarily evaluating if the exhibited technical/music theory prowess of the songs in question are particularly impressive - most music isn't particularly rich in complex composition, and mediocre music is inevitably going to represent a large part of Udio's dataset. I consider all of the linked songs to be about on par with a lot of the music that gets released. Instead, I’m evaluating on the basis of “could this be a song that I’d hear out in the wild?”
I'm more interested in including music (notation) and getting music (notation) back.
Ideally, that'd be the goal of a machine learning-driven plugin. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any notation-producing ones worth their salt yet, but I do know that there are a number of very competent plugins which have focused on the generation of sound design.
Is your plan to refrain from watching on the weekly episode release dates and wait for the whole thing to release before consuming it? Because I actually think that might be a good idea (if you're confident about not stumbling upon spoilers). One of my biggest gripes about this show is the way Apple TV has decided to release it - I find Severance hugely benefits from being able to build momentum through a couple of episodes, and watching episodically is a good bit more disjointed than having an experience where one episode dovetails into the next. I watched S1 in one go and prefer that experience, as opposed to S2 which I'm watching as the episodes are being released.
Honestly, I would probably have DNF'd the first season if I had been forced to consume it episodically. This season, in contrast with the previous, seems like it's trying to mess with your head every episode - the weekly instalments feel much more idea-rich and complete narratively, and I still feel slightly frustrated with having to wait through a week-long break every single time.
problem_redditor
5mo ago
Just from this alone, you would probably enjoy what they're doing in S2 far more. Most of S1 is setup, whereas S2 dives into far more of the lingering questions that were set up in previous episodes (and in doing so creates more questions than before). The pacing feels much faster in this one, significantly so, and several things have already happened within the first couple episodes of the season that I only expected to happen in the season finale.
I won't say they never string the audience along with plot points, but there's certainly a lot more moving parts in this season than in the deliberately slow pacing of the previous one.
Yeah, that makes some sense and is consistent with the behaviour of many vacationers I see. I'm not someone who does well doing nothing and being catered to for too long; the idea of relaxing on a beach also sounds suboptimal. I quickly go stir-crazy when presented with a dearth of things to do.
Shikoku in particular should also satisfy @jeroboam. I'd hazard a guess that it's probably the main Japanese island that sees least tourists. In terms of places to see, there's quite a bit; perhaps visiting a handful out of the 88 temples on the Shikoku pilgrimage route might appeal. There's also Dogo Onsen, the oldest operating onsen in Japan, and Kochi Castle, an actually non-tourist-trap Japanese castle - many of the extant structures were rebuilt last in the 1700s and it is considered one of the last twelve original castles in Japan with an intact main keep. Much more authentic than the ever-so-famous Osaka Castle, I'd say.
Yeah, sure thing. I don't know which genres you're most partial to, but here are some games I think are particularly well done, along with a short description of what they're about.
1: SOMA (2015)
SOMA is a horror game by Frictional Games, a studio best known for pioneering a game mechanic where you can essentially only run and hide from enemies. They primarily broke out with the game Amnesia: The Dark Descent which blew up on Youtube everywhere in the heyday of Let's Plays. Ever since then, they've mostly tried to recapture the pure horror vibes of Amnesia, but there was a brief moment where they decided to make a horror title with more existential sci-fi leanings.
Frictional's game designer, Thomas Grip, has stated that SOMA was hugely inspired by hard sci-fi authors such as Peter Watts and Greg Egan, and it really shows. It's by far my favourite game of theirs, and if you're playing one game on this list, make it this one. Go in completely blind. You won't find a better game narrative anywhere.
2: Baba Is You (2019)
I feel like Baba Is You is one of these indie titles I don't have to say too much about because of its ubiquity, but Baba Is You is a sokoban puzzle game where you push statements around an endlessly manipulable game world in order to satisfy a win condition. The game allows for constructing statements that allow the player to change the very characteristics of the level, to the point that you can yourself define the win condition of many levels.
It is not easy, and is one of these sadistically difficult puzzle games which you'll find yourself banging your head against for hours. According to Steam I've wasted 47.5 hours of my life on this game's puzzles alone.
3: Growing My Grandpa! (2022)
Now this is a weird one. Growing My Grandpa! is a short game by up-and-coming indie creator Yames that exhibits a strange hybrid of influences coming from Virtual Pet games, 90s adventure/edutainment games and Cronenbergian body horror alike, and the result is an extremely surreal and unique game that has absolutely no parallel elsewhere. The gameplay is fairly sparse, innocuous and repetitive, as is par for the course for a game based around a virtual pet-like mechanic - but it gets contrasted against an increasingly eerie, grotesque and uncanny plot, a dichotomy that's exploited as both a source of humour and horror in the game.
This game is very esoteric. It's not for everyone, and I can imagine people being really put off by any combination of the mechanics, the visual style, or the writing. In my case, I think his work is enticing enough to want to donate to his Patreon, which is fairly unusual for me.
4: INSIDE (2016)
INSIDE is a dark, cryptic platformer from developer Playdead. It draws many elements from their breakout hit Limbo - child protagonist, bleak atmosphere, abstract plot, many ways to die in bloody fashion - except it's executed better in virtually every way. As is usual from this developer, there's not a single line of dialogue and there isn't too much explanation provided to contextualise the events of the game, and much of the story is told through the environment.
A major draw of INSIDE is the art direction and music, which is executed beautifully throughout - it's a very atmospheric and potent game, and despite the lack of a clear through-line for the situations the game throws at you there is always a sense of intentionality behind every design decision that keeps it coherent.
5: Inscryption (2021)
This is a roguelike deck-building card game from Pony Island creator Daniel Mullins, and it's yet another title where it's best to know as little as possible about the game gong in, because suffice to say, it does not stay in that genre for very long. Despite appearances in the beginning, it is a plot heavy game - while the story is certainly a (I'd say intentionally) campy one, it provides the framework for a lot of very interesting genre-bending that gets executed quite smoothly and cleverly.
The element of surprise is crucial in this game, and the only reason I'm giving this much away about it is that I am aware of people who completely didn't anticipate the later shifts in the game, and were fairly disappointed by it since they went in expecting one thing and got another.
Forget everything you just read. This is a perfectly normal game.
There are many more quality games that have been released over the past few years, but these are the ones that currently come to mind which I actually think try to do something really interesting and intriguing with their setup, even if sometimes they are a little rough around the edges. Note I have a bit of a bias towards plot-focused, generally bleak games (with the exception of Baba Is You), these are my own genre preferences showing through and they might not align with yours.
As I understand it, in the West that practice is primarily concentrated in the American South, isn’t it? The general concept exists in multiple places, but my impression is that in many of these areas it’s not exactly accepted across the board - many people think it’s weird, and it’s certainly not entrenched enough for fruit vendors to serve a packet of salt, let alone shichimi, alongside it (maybe in Japan they do). There’s a real difference in acceptability and uptake.
@srf0638, @self_made_human, point taken on Mexico and India; I’ve never travelled to either of these countries so I don’t have much context for their culinary preferences (though I am considering visiting the latter someday; Kailasa Temple alone would justify the entire trip).
I didn't take any notes as I went, I wrote the entire thing after the fact. It was just rather memorable. Going from swimming under a subterranean waterfall to having cookies and tea with the grandson of a feudal mandarin within the span of a few days was insane and felt like a weird fever dream.
I dunno, I actually have a very high regard for Koreans and their mindset. This is just an anecdote but I did visit South Korea a while back and left with a very positive opinion of the people there - in fact they're the loveliest people I've ever met in any country, the hospitality they showed us travellers was just overwhelming. So many of the locals there actually went out of their way to help us and make our experience better, I wasn't expecting it at all. They weren't too hung up on social propriety like the Japanese sometimes are and they didn't help in a way where they were just politely showing service to foreigners, they did so as if they actually wanted to make sure we were safe and comfortable. It may well be my fondest travel experience, and part of the reason why is that it just felt so genuinely welcoming.
Regarding the Japanese and their "belief in Japan", I'm not exactly sure this is a positive - I get the sense they do so by ignoring all the warts and all in their own country out of a sense of nationalism, somewhat similar to how Chinese nationalists do so. This is exemplified in their treatment of WW2, where much of the country prefers to ignore it in stark contrast to other Axis powers like Germany. Koreans seem to be more self-critical and this is reflected in their media, but I think in some ways this is a good thing.
I'm not going to disagree with you. Thing is, labels such as "progressivism" and "social conservatism" are constantly-shifting categories that get defined in relation to the norm, and the agreed-on societal starting point for debate has shifted left to the point that the social conservatives of today are liberals driving the speed limit and the social conservatives of yore are just horrible alt-righter fascists. The conservatism that many espouse over here is no longer inside the Overton Window.
Sorry for the late reply, been flat out.
I don't think they're exceptionally common here - really this forum's social conservatives are not representative of "social conservatives" in general, but there are a couple of users who are more adjacent to it and have opinions on sex and gender which basically justify displacing disproportionate amounts of responsibility to men. This part of their belief system is often not stated outright since TheMotte is generally hostile to this brand of thinking, but it's noticeable that they will shift between an "equality-of-opportunity" standard when it comes to discussions about what rights men should be granted over women (if they don't just elide that entire discussion entirely), while at the same time invoking men's supposed degenerate nature and women's inherent vulnerability in ways which would justify placing extra responsibility and deference on the part of men towards women. There is also a noticeable amount of focus on female safety sometimes in spite of women being a demographic that's far less likely to face violence than men. Especially when it allows them to pull one over on groups like the homeless or foreigners.
Probably not going to @ anyone here, but an example of a well-known social conservative with some appeal to younger men who I appreciate and yet who I think goes much harder on men than on women is Jordan Peterson (granted, his popularity has subsided recently and I haven't kept up with the newer popular conservative commentators). I do appreciate his commentary, I think he gets many things right, and I appreciate his critiques of feminist patriarchy theory. At the same time, his assignment of responsibility is highly directed toward men. As an example of this much of his dating philosophy centers around the idea that women should be picky, and men should adapt to their demands. He says about as much here in this clip, and asserts that if men aren't having success in the dating market, it can never be overly high or unreasonable female demands that are the issue. Women by definition cannot be the problem, and sexually unsuccessful men are at fault for not adapting to their preferences (this despite the fact that male status and attractiveness to women is relative, not absolute, so there will always be a group of men who are shafted by the 80/20 rule). So, men are to be the responsible adults yoked to meet their wants and needs, and this attitude towards men's role in society can be seen in his opinions on many topics. Men are conceptualised primarily through the lens of duty.
When asked "should women, in relationships, submit to men", OTOH, his assertion is that no, they should not. His philosophy on the role of the sexes in society often places obligations on men to cater to the wants and needs of women, children and society, and doesn't really impose very many sex-specific obligations on women in return. I've never seen him say anything even slightly similar to women in general, with the harsh tone of "Improve yourselves, buckettes, because you're shitting society up." Nor, apparently, should women surrender rights for the state of eternal childhood and lack of responsibility they enjoy. It's traditionalism for men and liberation for women, part 3000.
I believe what you are looking for is the 2013 indie game Proteus. There is no extrinsic goal or gamification at all, and the entire point of the game is to wander around a large procedurally generated world with strange fauna and sights to see. It's a world made solely so the player can explore it.
I share your sentiments about this by the way - I find that many open worlds have so many gamified elements and nudge you in the right direction so much that it barely even feels free anymore. Sure, you can deviate from the main quest markers if you want to have some fun, but you always know you're going to be returning to the main story, and the world is generally such a content desert that it barely gives incentive to explore. Sure, you can circumvent the quest markers and skip major sections of the story, but you'd only do that on a first playthrough if you want to have a significantly worse experience and miss most of the properly fleshed-out content in the game. This was my exact issue with Breath of the Wild - it felt very gamified and on-rails, and the open world not only seemed irrelevant but was also fairly unrewarding. And don't even get me started on the goddamn weapon durability system.
Games like Proteus are also empty. But games that are explicitly all about exploration and vibes get away with liminality and emptiness better than stuff that tries to meld it with a plot and a combat system and collectibles does. The latter frames itself in a goal-driven way which leads you to approach its open world in the same manner, the former does not. This is why "gamifying" open worlds barely ever works.
People are emotionally primed to associate particular styles with particular positive or negative things. If you see something in a tudor style you probably think of a wealthy old neighborhood or a european tourist trap-- both of which would be pleasant places to exist in regardless of what architectural style they were built in. If we built all our prisons, hospitals, and corporate offices in the same style it would take a bit of the shine off of it.
I think you've got the causality here entirely backwards - the reason why traditional architecture is associated with wealthy old neighbourhoods or European tourist traps is because traditional-style properties are capable of commanding high prices and/or an influx of tourist money, resulting in them being high-SES neighbourhoods. That association can only exist, however, because people like these buildings in the first place.
Furthermore in Sweden many towns are built in traditional style, and there have been a few studies evaluating architectural preferences in such places, and the overwhelming majority still prefers older buildings. The study I linked in Part 1 of my post on the preferences of Karlshamn residents is one such example; it evaluates the residents of a town that is primarily traditional in style - you can look up photos of the town - and finds that they also prefer traditional small-town architecture. There is also the fact that scenes that deviate far from the rule of nature are literally harder for the visual cortex to process and cause more discomfort as a result, and modern buildings are less naturalistic and more unpleasant (as noted by that very same study).
On a personal note I can say I very much enjoy all traditional vernacular architectural styles, even those I've only recently stumbled upon - for example I like Korea's hanok and temple architecture, Vietnam's Nguyen Dynasty palaces and tombs, and India's Himalayan kath-kuni buildings, they are not represented very widely and you don't come across them often, but even on first glance they were hugely pleasing to me in a way modern architecture has never been. I suppose you can add an epicycle and say they recall other forms of architecture I have positive associations with, but taken alongside the above reasons for skepticism I think this fails as an explanation.
Old styles haven't stayed static-- they've been constantly improved on. The apartment complex I live in probably would have looked like a set of hideous industrial buildings when they were built in the first half of the 20th century. But since then, they've been decorated and improved in a variety of little ways-- decorative green window shutters, trees that have grown to maturity, tasteful black railings on staircases, etc. All of those things were technically possible to do when the property was first built, but it took time for people to understand how best to work with that style and incorporate the most effective decorative elements. We're not just seeing the prettiest old buildings, we're seeing the prettiest versions of old buildings.
I don't really understand how this is relevant to an argument regarding aesthetic merit though. Yes, old styles of architecture have been constantly iterated on and improved overtime, and modernist styles could in theory be prettier if we changed all kinds of things about it. But as they currently stand, these buildings are evaluated as less pleasing by the public compared to traditional architecture. How long these respective styles took to develop is not what's in question here. I mean, if you turn the clock forward 200 years perhaps modernism will have mutated into something people really enjoy, but that timeframe isn't necessarily relevant to your average urban-dweller today who will live and die in one of these blocks. All it means is “hey, maybe we shouldn’t have thrown out literal thousands of years of accumulated wisdom in a poor attempt to implement the design equivalent of Year Zero”.
problem_redditor
3mo ago
The answer is that my partner studied design, and given how much he's talked about Bauhaus in the past I'm trying to see if his positive view of them is warranted.
I am quickly discovering that the emperor has no clothes.
I know of continental philosophy and have read some of it; I just don't like or assign any weight to that philosophical tradition at all. Frankly it comes off to me as consisting of a lot of very broad and often borderline metaphysical statements made without any empirical or logical basis, and their philosophy almost feels completely arbitrary, with their terms being so poorly defined that interpretations of their texts bifurcate depending on one's reading of them. Many philosophers from the analytic tradition had a habit of defending claims and properly defining terms so as to minimise uncertainty, I wouldn't say that is the case with prominent continental philosophers like Hegel or Heidegger. Much of it falls into the category of not even wrong.
The concept of being (sein) is just the word for the concept of existence and presence in the world. Becoming (werden) is the state of constant change. Being and becoming are related in the sense that being is a point in, or snapshot of, the state of becoming. Heidegger's Lichtung, the "clearing", elucidates the concept of ontological Being through an analogy of a light in a clearing where beings are revealed as beings, where beings nevertheless obscure each other leading to concealment which results in the ability to form misconception and self-deception. I don't feel like I learn anything particularly meaningful about being through this, I feel as if I'm hearing somebody's kooky unfalsifiable ruminations about what it means to exist, and to extend these concepts to design (e.g. calling grey "the fateful point between coming-into-being and passing-away" because it is in between white and black) elevates the whole endeavour to monumental levels of meaninglessness. There is no lens through which these statements can even be whatsoever critically appraised or evaluated.
Oh, yeah I did, thanks for the heads up.
More options
Context Copy link