titivate
7mo ago
I'm not sure how to word this, but I have a poor impression of Japanese people's intellect that contradicts their reported mean IQ, which is supposed to be among the highest. Trying to find counterexamples among translated works seems futile, it's all swill for the masses. Even the old stuff, like the tale of genji, or esoteric buddhist writings, don't seem worth diving into. There seems to be no demand for heavier intellectual content beyond cheap existentialism. For instance, the 3-body problem would have never been published in Japan. Am I the only one puzzled by their stunted level of content production? I get reminded of this contradiction every time I read comments from Japanese people on quora or elsewhere. Maybe something is lost in translation, but they commonly come across as substantially and consistently dumber than other ESLs.
titivate
1yr ago
Does ignoring my questions by accusing me of cynicism make you the mistake theorist? Forget I asked, I thought you were interested in honing your thesis.
titivate
1yr ago
Back in the good old days when stuff like race and gender didn't matter, was it just coincidence that things always ended up in one group's favor? Has the game really been changed, or is it a change from unipolarity to multipolarity? If the naysayers didn't protest so much about the black little mermaid, would you consider it non-political? And why should losers of the previous status quo care about your ten commandments? To them, it probably sounds as convincing as a trust fund baby waxing about how his work ethic got him to where he is.
titivate
5mo ago
Why are people ignoring the blatant example of this parent post sitting at -22 as the case in point?
titivate
1yr ago
Are you surprised the other side is punching back in a cultural fistfight, or disputing it was ever a fight, or surprised that there hasn't been a detente after the tides started turning?
Japan's first forced cultural exchange with the Americans started with Perry putting on a minstrel show. Hasn't entertainment always served dual purposes?
titivate
7mo ago
Those are fine points for pre-modernity but these days Japan is more or less secular and one of the most west-adjacent countries you can get. And moreover, not only were they the West's most diligent student, but they were high tech much earlier, and a co-founder of several genres like cyberpunk and arguably spaghetti westerns. The purpose of bringing up the 3-body franchise was to allude to the subverted expectation of it being written by a chinese author, instead, who are even less likely to ape Western genres. Meanwhile the japanese made ghost in the shell which asks a question and that was that. The japanese smartphone industry went thru a similar divergent trajectory. Anyways to your point about lack of historical continuity for Japan to be writing modern science fiction, I respond then there is no reason for Murakami either.
But this is getting away from my primary confusion, which is regardless of the path Japanese cultural output takes, you would expect a smarter audience to yield more intellectual works than a handful of "really makes you think" or otaku-bait stories. I'm still looking but all I see is a trend toward lowest common denominator twitter comics and animated avatar personalities.
titivate
7mo ago
I'm glad you brought up gundam to compare with 40k because despite gundam having the clearly better designed robot toys, 40k runs circles around gundam in every other aspect. The fact that there's no definitive gundam series and only a score of unrelated kids anime that range from bad to okay (I haven't watched but reviews and spoilers indicate none of the shows get more complex than navel-gazing on the pilot vs robot relationship) aligns with my view. The franchise begins and ends with the robot, and there's probably halo spin off novels or fanfiction with more ambitious scope than gundam writing. Maybe all the hardcore fan talent is being tied up by highly detailed model building, which would be very stereotypical.
titivate
3d ago
I got a fitness tracker and it confirmed I tend to shallow breathe when awake. Has anyone successfully dealt with this?
titivate
18d ago
Well, there's no section dedicated to the positive reviews from Nazis on the Mein Kampf article either.
titivate
4mo ago
At least one of the replies below asking for examples were posted after the score was already revealed.
titivate
6mo ago
Yes I see it here too, so came the thought that coming up with some shorthand names to acknowledge what was happening would appear more toothless.
titivate
7mo ago
What I'm trying to scratch at is why a big country of ostensibly smart people who are industrious and diligent in everything they pursue, with a large publishing market and average age of 48, so easily satiated with low ceiling entertainment? Are they so burnt out they want nothing more than to read light novels on the train, wage-slave the day away, pick up some takeout from 7-11, put on the latest CGDCT anime and veg out? I don't find that explanation satisfactory because the same applies to their neighbors. Some say they are not living to their full potential because of linguistic determinism. It could also be kawaii culture* that dictates everything must be dumbed down and stylized for aesthetics, which explains why their actors are so bad compared to korean ones. But if they're so smart, why do they willingly submit to the self-infantilization, wouldn't they be bored of it already?
*On a side note I think American culture definitely veers in the opposite way resulting in every tom, dick and harry to enthusiastically offer his original thoughts, before aping what he heard on a podcast one time. But fraudulent intellectualism at least provides enough pushback to prevent the 1000th isekai power fantasy from being written.
titivate
1yr ago
Posting only a handful of comments in the last week and taking so long to get to double digit karma is unbelievable too. Unless its behavior changes drastically I don't see how it can be worth selling or scalable as that would definitely attract notice.
titivate
6mo ago
some player who does reactions.
Why would 12yos perceive someone who does reaction videos as being cool?
titivate
1yr ago
It's so inefficient at increasing karma I had ruled out that possibility.
titivate
19d ago
In fact, this doc comes across as a rhyme to the 1933 anti-china exposé. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ways_That_Are_Dark
titivate
26d ago
One day in high school, we had a random assembly during classes. It seemed pretty insignificant at the time. Someone was giving a talk about some humanitarian crisis going on in the middle east, some country I wasn't even aware of. It was kind of weird and I didn't really get the point. One thing the speaker, an ex-soldier if I recall, kept reiterating was "we're just like you, we watch the same movies, listen to the same music," and so on.
After we shuffled back to class, I distinctively remember someone asking the (history) teacher about the context and they mumbled something about how the speaker wasn't exactly both sides of the story. When I asked what he meant, he clammed up and I forgot all about the day until many years later.
Now it seems like a fever dream. I polled a couple of HS friends and only one of them remembers it. Did anyone else experience zionist PR speeches at their secondary school?
titivate
7mo ago
Well compare nerds with nerds. What are the premier otaku-traps in Japanese fiction? Fate? Eva? Time has not been kind to those franchises. Gwern's review recording his disenchantment with later Eva summed it up nicely, and Fate these days is a waifu gacha game before all else. Western nerd franchises like 40k or mtg or game of thrones take themselves more seriously. I believe even in pokemon, it was the western fandom that developed the competitive scene and made nuzlocke (where pokemon being beaten = perma-death) playthrus a thing. You wouldn't think it with their famous otaku and people who spend decades mastering a craft, but Japanese nerd fandoms are surprisingly casual. It's not that western appetite for gritty realism is more high-brow per se, but that does retard the rate franchises are dumbed down.
titivate
10mo ago
Anybody sleep in a hammock? I always wanted to give it a go, and pulled the trigger on a hammock stand deal I couldn't pass up. Now I'm just waiting for the hammock itself to arrive, right in time for the hot summer nights.
titivate
11mo ago
It means moving on with my day without buying anything at the marketplace of ideas. I'll set up my own stall when the opportunity arises, but I'm in no rush.
titivate
11mo ago
be the change you want to see
Aren't I already doing so by not participating? I've contributed a parent level post twice on the old site when I thought I had something good for show and tell.
titivate
11mo ago
It's actually tough to answer for me. I had a very undeveloped sense of self, and vividly remember looking in the mirror when I was 8 and thinking I had no discernible features. It was only around the age of 10, I "woke up" and started taking agentic action and doing well in school (the academic part apparently mirrors my mom's development). I had multiple personality shifts over puberty and always thought past me to be naive, but current me doesn't consider that cringe, just slow learning, and to be fair I always craved for a mentor. If I could transchronal converse like @cae_jones imagines, past me would be highly impressionable and malleable until age 20, which is when I experienced depression and stopped thinking past me was strictly inferior.
I decided to ask here for largely unrelated reasons; someone I know is close to college age and I was wondering if he'd ever regret his cavalier attitude to everything, but then I started suspecting the age other people would respond with would be all over the place.
titivate
1yr ago
When I first downloaded the app to try it, it showed me some MILF bikini reveals
I have a tiktok account following a handful of models I find attractive, but it doesn't seem to do anything with that info? I check in maybe once a month, scrolling without interacting, at first on purpose to see what it would show, but it never deviated from feeding me random content in english except adding random content in french, spanish, russian, etc, so now I have even less reason to interact.
I have been thoroughly unimpressed with its continued spaghetti against the wall approach so I imagine people must actively cooperate to get addicted to their feed.
Suppose your tastes change fairly consistently, or you have poor long term memory, or you've an elven lifespan. How would you approach flavor of the year fascinations? You read a book, watch a movie, travel to a new place. You evaluate, catalogue, and collect experiences and memorabilia. Maybe you write notes, scrapbook, keep top 10 lists, create customized setups suited exactly to you, and so on. But, in a few years, you'll have inherited someone else's belongings. Baggage, filled with clothes that no longer fit you, nor spark any feelings of nostalgia.
So what do you do? With the films that no longer move you, the playlists you won't put on again? Archive them away like your parents did with your drawings from second grade art class? Build a mini museum into your man-cave, a shrine dedicated to reminding yourself who you once were? Or make a clean break with the past, get rid of that outdated junk, and appreciate that you still have whims to give?
It seems to me the ball is still in Israel's court, and they're fumbling. The longer time goes on without a highly visible and high Δp response, the more appetizing they appear to sharks. It's not about 4d chess, it's about sending a message.
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