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
5mo ago
Why are people ignoring the blatant example of this parent post sitting at -22 as the case in point?
titivate
18d ago
Well, there's no section dedicated to the positive reviews from Nazis on the Mein Kampf article either.
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
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
6mo ago
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.
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
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
18d 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
3d ago
I got a fitness tracker and it confirmed I tend to shallow breathe when awake. Has anyone successfully dealt with this?
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
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
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
I rewatched the first two terminators in honor of our new overlords, and I really wished they'd focused on Skynet instead of its dumb agents. There is a massive void in pop culture in the shape of a modern 1984 that exploits our AI fears and mercilessly twists that knife. The Matrix was also too fixated on the physical struggle despite taking place... in the matrix.
I want to see humanity's strongest put up against a pan-omni AI God, watch them get outplayed in slow motion at every turn, baited into having some hope, before realizing they were getting hustled, and end buck-broken. None of that limpwristed shit like Ex Machina.
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
1mo ago
If tiktok is forced to sell, that would legitimize China's stance against facebook and google years ago, which wasn't a ban either. The million dollar question is how much American soft power will the move cost? What will be the new equilibrium on foreign-aligned social media in all the other countries once the dust settles?
My point was disproportionate punishment for minor transgressions results in a pro-social society, not specifically violence, not homogeneity. Like recently there was that principal that lost his 130k pension because he stole $5 worth of coffee in Japan. I brought up Singapore because it is also an engineered rule-obeying society despite its obvious heterogeneity, and they mete out all sorts of "draconian" punishments. And another example is 1600s Taiwan, where the locals were observed by the Qing to be extremely Japan-like despite the mix of chinese settlers and aboriginals because it had been previously ruled for decades by a Ming warlord who would do stuff like cut peoples arms off if they chopped down certain bamboo.
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.
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.
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