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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34948 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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VisionOS and the Future of Input


Ever since the computer first arrived, keyboard and mouse has been the standard. You have a flat surface with raised little squares that you smack with your fingers. You have another little rounded shape with a flat bottom you move around, and click with.

This awkward, clunky interface has significant culture war elements, in that an entire class of powerful people arose - specifically people who didn't have traditional status markers like height, strength, or indomitable physical presence. Instead these 'nerds' or 'geeks' or whatever you want to call them specialized themselves in the digital realm. Now, the Zuckerburgs and Musks of the prior generation rule the world. Or if they don't, they soon will.

These outdated interfaces seem perfectly normal to everyone who has only used them. Sure many people have used a controller for video games, and may think that controllers are superior for some cases, but not others. Keyboard and mouse is the only way to operate when it comes to a computer, most people surely imagine.

That being said, it's actually quite easy to dip your toes into alternate input methods. Talon is a system that utilizes voice to let you do practically anything on a computer. You can move the mouse, click on any object on your screen, dictate, edit text, and you can even code quite well. Talon's system even supports mapping operations, sometimes very complex ones, to custom noises you record on your own.

On top of that you can integrate eye tracking, using a relatively inexpensive device. If you've ever used voice control combined with eye tracking, you can operate around as fast as someone who is decent at using a keyboard and mouse.

If you have ever used these systems, you probably know that because most digital setups are built for keyboard and mouse, it's not necessarily perfect. Keyboard and mouse still hold the crown.

But. There is a certain magic to controlling a computer through your voice, or your eyes. It begins to open your mind to new possibilities, the idea that there are better, faster, easier, more natural ways of interfacing with a computer than the defaults we have been stuck with.


Enter Apple's VisionOS.

If you haven't seen the recent demo of Apple's new VisionOS they're breaking brand new ground. The entire OS is built around looking at things, and making minute hand motions to control the icons you're looking at. There are no controllers, no physical interfaces whatsoever besides your eyes and your hands. It's breathtaking to watch.

In a review from John Gruber, a well respected old head in the VR space and a creator of markdown, the possibilities behind this new technology are apparent. Gruber describes how

First: the overall technology is extraordinary, and far better than I expected. And like my friend and Dithering co-host Ben Thompson, my expectations were high. Apple exceeded them. Vision Pro and VisionOS feel like they’ve been pulled forward in time from the future. I haven’t had that feeling about a new product since the original iPhone in 2007. There are several aspects of the experience that felt impossible.

Now Apple does tend to get a ton of hype, but this reaction of being amazed by the experience is surprisingly common among earlier reviewers:

Similarly, Apple’s ability to do mixed reality is seriously impressive. At one point in a full VR Avatar demo I raised my hands to gesture at something, and the headset automatically detected my hands and overlaid them on the screen, then noticed I was talking to someone and had them appear as well. Reader, I gasped.

The implications of this 'spatial operating system' are varied and multitudinous, of course. There will be all sorts of productivity gains, and new ways of interacting with the digital world, and fun new apps. However I'm most interested in how this innovation could shift the balance of power back to the strong and physically capable, away from the nerds.

No longer will clunky interfaces make sense - instead computers will be optimized around healthy, fully functional humans. Ideally the most intuitive and common control schemes will reward physical fitness and coordination. Traits which nerds lack in droves.

Will we see a reversal of the popularity that being a nerd or geek has gained in the past few decades? Only time will tell.

Ever since the computer first arrived, keyboard and mouse has been the standard. You have a flat surface with raised little squares that you smack with your fingers. You have another little rounded shape with a flat bottom you move around, and click with.

my fingers are not exactly small, and this has not been a problem. every few years a company tries to reinvent the keyboard and mouse, and it never catches on. the Logitech trackball mouse is one such example. or ergonomic non-QUERTY keyboards, Wacom tablets, or touchpads (except for laptops).

If you haven't seen the recent demo of Apple's new VisionOS they're breaking brand new ground. The entire OS is built around looking at things, and making minute hand motions to control the icons you're looking at. There are no controllers, no physical interfaces whatsoever besides your eyes and your hands. It's breathtaking to watch.

for one, it costs a lot. Full-immersion headsets have been around for decades and never caught on due to causing nausea or other problems.

This awkward, clunky interface has significant culture war elements, in that an entire class of powerful people arose - specifically people who didn't have traditional status markers like height, strength, or indomitable physical presence. Instead these 'nerds' or 'geeks' or whatever you want to call them specialized themselves in the digital realm. Now, the Zuckerburgs and Musks of the prior generation rule the world. Or if they don't, they soon will.

i dunno where this notion of high-iq people or 'nerds' being small and diminutive came from. it's not backed by evidence either scientific or empirical. given the positive correlation between IQ and height ,we would expect the opposite --for smarter people to be taller, bigger, and heavier. Zuck is short, but Elon and Marc Andreessen are 6'2 and 6'4 respectively. . when i am walking down the street, the people doing construction/road work, by in large, are really short but stocky, but shorter and lighter than businessmen for sure, who i can presume to be higher IQ . same for people at cashiers or other retail or homeless or mentally ill people.

or ergonomic non-QUERTY keyboards, Wacom tablets, or touchpads (except for laptops).

Ahh I forgot to mention this - the QWERTY keyboard is a perfect example of pointless and inefficient input tech.

Can you please stop just saying ridiculous shit without even attempting to justify it?

I realize that I may be outside of the context window of the Motte on this post. I thought folks here would be more familiar with keyboard/mouse history, I was wrong.

Here's a decent writeup of how QWERTY is essentially an anachronistic mistake.

Familiarity with the topic doesn't make it more relevant to your thesis. Dvorak is exactly as arbitrary and hard to learn as Qwerty. The relative efficiency of touch-typing english text matters when you're already doing 100+ wpm and type regularly as part of your job or something. Most people don't touch type, a different layout wouldn't help them any.

Of course, I don't think your thesis has any basis in reality anyway. The average person these days is quite proficient with phone onscreen keyboards, which are vastly worse interfaces than physical keyboards.

And, as with dictation, if you want to do your text input with eyetracking, you've been able to do that on existing computers for years. People keep using keyboards because they are in fact quite good at what they do.

Okay, this is one I’ll back up. I thought it was commonly accepted.

The QWERTY design was intended to minimize typewriter jams. Hitting two adjacent keys too fast tended to jam, because each letter swung a tiny arm. So the design placed common consonant pairs fair apart, maximizing clearance.

In grade school, this was glossed as “intentionally arranged to slow the user down.” I don’t think this is accurate. But there are definitely some features that come straight from the 1870s. Without tiny arms to jam, they’re pure, “pointless” technical debt.

On the other hand, the evidence for any particular replacement isn’t very good. A skilled typist works around the nonsense just fine. So the “inefficiency” is minimal at best. It certainly doesn’t favor nerds! Still, we could in theory benefit more from a different standard.

It isn't efficient (although as you say, it's not less efficient than most other keyboard layouts we've tried) and if he'd just said that I wouldn't have said anything. But calling it pointless is just wrong - there was a point to its design, and the point to it now is that all of the world's fastest typists are fluent in it and converting them would be a monumental task.

That said, we could definitely do better if we could start over. There was a keyboard design for thumbsticks I used to have on the psp that I reached 68wpm on after only a month's usage for example.

i dunno where this notion of high-iq people or 'nerds' being small and diminutive came from. it's not backed by evidence either scientific or empirical. given the positive correlation between IQ and height ,we would expect the opposite --for smarter people to be taller, bigger, and heavier. Zuck is short, but Elon and Marc Andreessen are 6'2 and 6'4 respectively.

Some combination of latent Just World and egalitarian fallacy, that individuals have the same amount of attribute points, just distributed differently.

It’s also sad and darkly hilarious how men can’t escape their height. Men like Cruise and Zuckerberg will forever get clowned for being short, regardless of how rich, famous, and successful they are.

Law of the jungle. You can look at a guy and tell with 90% confidence whether you can kick his ass or not. At some point in prehistory, this mattered a lot. The alpha chimp in "Chimp Empire" had 8 biological children.

Height is one of the biggest factors in this ass-kicking calculation. If I look at a guy like Zuckerburg, my gut says I could kick his ass and steal his girlfriend. (Note: my gut is wrong in this case).

Men will never escape their height. Women will never escape their youth.

Full-immersion headsets have been around for decades and never caught on due to causing nausea or other problems

To put it bluntly, full immersion VR headsets from before the Oculus era (circa 2013) were rather shite.

They had poor software support, terrible displays, and overall were useful for very little indeed.

The hardware has massively improved, especially for any given price point.

Microsoft demonstrated the same capabilities with Hololens several years ago, so this is not technically groundbreaking. I think Apple will need its usual refinement but also to reduce the cost by about an order of magnitude for this to be a world changing product.

No, Hololens seems positively quaint in comparison to the Vision Pro.

Most damningly, it had a projected FOV of 52 degrees diagonally.

That's like trying to use a large living room TV as a window into the interface, as opposed to Apple who are around 110 degrees from what I've heard.

I suspect the UX is significantly better for Apple, even if both have eye and hand tracking.

I do agree that the price needs to drop, by at least 2/3rds before it becomes a common sight.

I didn't dispute it was better. Hololens 2 was like 5 years ago. I'm just saying it's not groundbreaking, it's Apple doing what they do, letting groundbreaking technology mature and then refining it.

Fascinating tech.

I'll take your bet on the "balance of power," though. Why would you think having a better OS would punish the physically weak?

Actually, what is it about current interfaces that you think favors the unhealthy or the dysfunctional? Nerds aren't weedy as an adaptation to crawling around in the code mines. They're spending time hacking and playing video games instead of working out. Or sitting at a desk instead of lifting boxes. Augmented reality isn't going to bridge that gap any more than standing desks.

Outside of competitive e-sports, I struggle to see how physical fitness would come to play a significant role in outcomes.

Even in VR/AR, the best way to input text is either speech or typing on a virtual keyboard, or even a real one if the system supports it.

Add in eventual brain-machine interfaces and you won't even need to do anything at all beyond think.

If the latter sounds speculative, the Vision Pro is already a crude BCI, its developers have boasted about being able to track dozens of metrics through cameras and other sensors, especially the anticipatory dilation of the pupil, to predict user input before it's made. It literally reads your mind, albeit imperfectly.

And then there's more explicit stuff that Valve is cooking in the oven, I suspect the successor to the Index will display some.

At any rate, Apple is one of the few companies capable of dragging the future into existence, kicking and screaming in the process, and with a massive price tag attached. Nobody else had the chutzpah to offer a mass market product at 3.5k, even if mainly for businesses and developers, and know the latter are immediately preparing for the consumer version that's going to come out in a year or two. The Hololens never stood a chance, it was born too early with too little to show for it.

Now, I've gone from being a massive VR enthusiast, from the old Oculus prototype days, to being mildly jaded about VR as it currently stands.

I bought a Quest 2, and use it primarily tethered, and have found it's a fun toy worth using for maybe an hour at a stretch before it becomes uncomfortable. In fact, I mainly play a single video game, H3VR, and leave a dozen titles I picked up on sale languishing there because I simply can't be arsed.

I have discovered I am simply too lazy to enjoy most VR, and I prefer playing seated when possible.

In order for me to invest further into the tech, the optics need to get a lot better and the headsets a lot lighter. Perhaps some advancement in peripherals, in addition to hand tracking.

I am aware that most of those things exist, but not all once in a convenient form factor.

In this sense, Apple's product is heartening for the slumbering evangelist in me, as it shows that we'll get there sooner or later. Of course, I'm still terminally lazy, so I'm hoping for BCIs to just let me play by thinking instead of something so quaint as physical motion. Still 5 or 6 years away from that at a minimum.

Add in eventual brain-machine interfaces and you won't even need to do anything at all beyond think.

If the latter sounds speculative, the Vision Pro is already a crude BCI, its developers have boasted about being able to track dozens of metrics through cameras and other sensors, especially the anticipatory dilation of the pupil, to predict user input before it's made. It literally reads your mind, albeit imperfectly.

Yep I strongly agree with this, I see the VisionOS as the first step in the move towards BCI. I just think we already have the technology to at least augment KB+M input in specific areas, so I'm excited to see it happening.

In this sense, Apple's product is heartening for the slumbering evangelist in me, as it shows that we'll get there sooner or later. Of course, I'm still terminally lazy, so I'm hoping for BCIs to just let me play by thinking instead of something so quaint as physical motion. Still 5 or 6 years away from that at a minimum.

Keep that sleeping evangelist alive! If anyone can do it, it's Apple.

Apple only does (good) things years after they've been done by others. They still don't have a foldable, for example. They will not be the ones to first do BCI, if they ever do it.

If I wanted to talk to my goddamn machinery, I'd have a microphone. I don't. I don't want to tell the computer "move here, do that, turn on this, type out the other thing". I can do that quicker with my fingers, and I can type and think at the same time, rather than having to stop and work out what I want the thing to do.

Eye movement control sounds even more hideous: so blink at the wrong time, and you just deleted all that hour's work.

fun new apps

KILL IT WITH FIRE is my immediate reaction. I don't want "fun new apps", I want the apps I'm already using to work for me, not for the company using them to data scrape every millisecond of my life.

If you haven't seen the recent demo of Apple's new VisionOS they're breaking brand new ground. The entire OS is built around looking at things, and making minute hand motions to control the icons you're looking at

And how do they pick up on the "minute hand motions"? I am always sceptical of demos because they are so curated and cherrypicked and then polished up later to produce the best looking experience (that may not be the correct one; how many hours of messing around with the headset did they edit down to that ten minute demo?)

If I'm wearing only a headset and "navigating with my eyes", how does the headset pick up that I'm pinching my fingers? I get the impression that you have to hold your hand in a particular way in a particular field of motion or else it won't work. I'm dubious. EDIT: Ah right, the thing is ringed with cameras that can see all. Now I'm even more dubious about what those cameras are looking at and recording and sending back to Apple when I'm wearing my snazzy headset so I can work on a spreadsheet without typing, just pinching my finger and thumb like crab claws.

Now if all you have to work with is your voice and/or eyes, sure, this is great, now you can use the computer. But I'm going to dinosaur on with my keyboard for now.

No longer will clunky interfaces make sense - instead computers will be optimized around healthy, fully functional humans.

Not necessarily, both reviews mentioned that the person wears glasses/uses contact lenses, so the headset was calibrated with their prescription (since you can't wear glasses and the headset at once). So they're already accommodating people with less than perfect eyesight, and if you have some mobility problem that you can't pinch your fingers, they'll probably invent something to adjust for that as well.

Eye movement control sounds even more hideous: so blink at the wrong time, and you just deleted all that hour's work.

Hah, this is so hidebound and backward I can't tell if you're being serious. I could just as easily say "click at the wrong time, you just deleted an hours work!" Get real.

KILL IT WITH FIRE is my immediate reaction. I don't want "fun new apps", I want the apps I'm already using to work for me, not for the company using them to data scrape every millisecond of my life.

Unfortunately technology doesn't sit stagnant for long, as much as you want it to. Sorry to break it to you friend.

And how do they pick up on the "minute hand motions"? I am always sceptical of demos because they are so curated and cherrypicked and then polished up later to produce the best looking experience

Not sure, but I linked two in-depth reviews from fairly popular writers that gush over it. There are far more people who have used it and find the control scheme incredibly intuitive and easy to pick up. That's with usually 30min - 1 hour demos.

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I could just as easily say "click at the wrong time, you just deleted an hours work!" Get real.

Bunky, I just deleted a long-ass comment elsewhere because I hit the wrong key by accident. I am not going to rely on "move your left pupil a nanometer to the left" as a control function and be confident "oh crap, I moved two nanometers and that is the delete!" won't happen.

They do gush over it, they also mention that the headset was personalised to them by a person measuring and fitting it and tutoring them in how to use it, that one of the control features was disabled, and that the entire experience took place in the setting provided by and set up by Apple.

How the kit works in the wild when it's your sitting room and you're trying to follow along to a Youtube tutorial is a different kettle of fish.

Hah, this is so hidebound and backward I can't tell if you're being serious. I could just as easily say "click at the wrong time, you just deleted an hours work!" Get real.

You aren't forced to twitch your finger regularly. Get real. Sorry to break it to you friend.

Hah, this is so hidebound and backward I can't tell if you're being serious. I could just as easily say "click at the wrong time, you just deleted an hours work!" Get real.

The difference is that in one case there's a bright line distinction between when you are and are not using the interface. Which becomes more pronounced in real world use vs tech demos. A gesture system that's comfortable when it's what you're focusing on can become much less so when you're casually using it and want to combine it with eating, drinking or just scratching your nose without accidentally triggering a gesture.

I could just as easily say "click at the wrong time, you just deleted an hours work!"

There are clear and obvious differences between "blink" and "click".

FWIW most vision based interfaces (including Apple's new headset) still use clicking precisely because of that reason, touch is much more intentional.

Nerds have become common enough that they are no longer relegated to the fat out of shape basement dwellers of lore. Plenty of them are health obsessed or in shape. Zuckerberg is an example of this. I think if this interface change happens it will not impact their social status.

I also find it interesting that you claim eye tracking will benefit the in shape people. Do you know where this technology was originally developed? For helping paraplegics interface with computers.

I think this technology will find some traction. There has been a trend towards minimizing movement and effort to get more out of our computer interactions. However it's only going to be a temporary stop. The end goal is direct brain to computer interfaces. Why fire signals to tell your body to do something that tells a computer to do something? Why not just fire signals to tell the computer directly to do the thing? Elon Musk is trying to skip to that end goal with neuralink.

However I'm most interested in how this innovation could shift the balance of power back to the strong and physically capable, away from the nerds.

There's been some amount of this in VR already: BeatSaber is one of the more famous VR games as a whole and can be surprisingly calisthenic (cw: flashing colors), and games like Rumble take that further to a point that can interact with your proprioception.

But there are ultimately games. There are definite advantages to Apple's handsetless approach -- dumbest side, you actually do lose track of where your real hands are when using a lot of VR handsets! ((Though I'm not sure handsetless is the right answer. Lucas's LucidVR tech has that bulky jank only DIY can provide, but cheap haptic feedback allows a lot of things that handsetless can't.)) But it's not immediately obvious that these would have any implications on a 'balance of power' any deeper than the next generation of MMORPGs, or perhaps some corny Pokemon Go-style things.

It's imaginable to see something with broader implications. You don't need to be physically strong to build a house in Minecraft, and you're not doing much more to build a house in VR-Minecraft (though your noodly arms will get a workout!), but there's at least a plausible scenario where XR/AR-HouseBuilding Assistant ends up being a thing. Given the current state of recruiting for the trades (and the people who are recruited often doing awful at it) that's potentially a pretty lucrative design space.

But the reason Software Ate The World isn't that it was something you did with computers; it's that it's something you did once and it applied ten thousand or ten million times without having to redo each one. There are a few places where that matters with just physical strength or dexterity, but most of those spaces are very well-explored.

But if you suppose that a lot of the reason past-gen tech focused on us noodly-armed people was because the active and energetic don't enjoy sitting down at a computer when thinking hard, then maybe that's a different matter.

No longer will clunky interfaces make sense - instead computers will be optimized around healthy, fully functional humans. Ideally the most intuitive and common control schemes will reward physical fitness and coordination. Traits which nerds lack in droves.

Have you ever watched a high-level FPS tournament? I'm a weakling but I swear I can type circles around most bodybuilders and sportsmen, much less normies. "We" are going to have significant advantages if the system rewards precision and reflexes.

Unless we integrate force-feedback exoskeletons into this visionOS, the death of the nerd's advantage is not yet neigh.

I’m willing to bet that precision and reflexes are heavily correlated with grip strength.

I think there might be a major confounder there. Drop that one and I'd guess the correlation is far less clear.

To clarify, is the confounder sex differences in reflexes and grip strength?

EG: the best esports players are almost all AMAB.

Yes.

Most of what you're saying is a nonsensical reach; a sci-fi user interface with gestures and blink-clicking doesn't favor anyone in particular. Mouse and keyboard wasn't invented to bypass jock physical superiority.

I've messed about with Windows Mixed Reality, doing basic computer tasks in VR, and it's kinda fun for the novelty, and allows for as many monitors as you want, but the idea that it will give jocks an advantage is (thanks for giving me an opportunity to use this word) Asinine.

No longer will clunky interfaces make sense… Ideally the most intuitive and common control schemes will reward physical fitness and coordination.

Do you have any examples that you could share? It’s hard for me to visualize what you’re thinking of here.

I think existing computer interfaces are pretty good. I wouldn’t call them clunky. The vast majority of what most people do with computers involves reading and writing text, and watching video. It seems to me that those interfaces are already pretty optimized and there isn’t much more utility that you could squeeze out of them. I don’t think people think “this is clunky” when they’re reading (old.) reddit or watching youtube.

The vast majority of what most people do with computers involves reading and writing text, and watching video.

Thinking about my own habits, this is true for me. I consume a lot of text. That process includes a lot of detailed reading, skimming, and skipping over sections. The pace at which I scroll is highly variable, depending on the source material and the layout of the site/document in question. To me, I think the key question would be the extent to which I can replicate this process (to at least make VisionOS not worse) or somehow improve upon it.

I'm breaking my self-imposed Motte break to link this Ross Scott video about OS GUI design. We could already improve regular "flatscreen"/"pancake" UI without needing to go all-in on AR/VR, though I suppose the temptation of Apple is "why not go all the way?"

I'm not seeing this at all. First off, while the VisionOS sounds really cool, fundamentally it sounds pretty similar to the iPad - a device for consuming content, not creating it. Sure the interface is cool, movies look nice, and properly recorded immersive experiences are super awesome. But I don't see how it's a significant advantage in any type of content creation. For writing text and creating graphics, it's pretty much the same interface you can use now, except with a bigger virtual screen. You're going to be entering text by typing on a real or virtual keyboard I guess, or maybe speaking, either of which you can already do. If you want to do something more technical like writing code or system admin, it doesn't seem super well suited to the precision required. Sure it can do it, but it'll be emulating a conventional 2D UI with keyboard, so not really doing anything that you couldn't already do with any regular computer.

I guess you could also code by voice, per the video. But 1. I don't get that at all. Maybe you can type up some basic code if you know the special words and phrases, but it doesn't seem very practical to me to maintain or debug a large complex program. And 2. even if you could, you can already do that with a regular computer with a microphone and that software.

I don't see the supposed culture war impact at all either. First, I don't buy that "nerds" / tech workers are significantly less fit as a whole than the general population. I'm a developer and have worked with hundreds of others, they seem pretty average to me - a few are more muscular or athletic than usual, most have pretty standard office worker physique, a relative few look a bit more like the stereotypical nerd but are still perfectly capable physically. Next, even if that was the case, I don't see what VisionOS and related technologies would have to do with it - nothing about it is more physically intense than walking around a room. The number of people of all walks of life who would find anything about it the least bit physically challenging is probably effectively zero. Finally, as far as physical prowess being less important for societal status, that goes back at least to the start of the Industrial Revolution, if not further. Blame the backhoe, not the PC. A new user interface for PCs that may or may not make any difference in how they're effectively used won't make any difference at all.

I'm not seeing this at all. First off, while the VisionOS sounds really cool, fundamentally it sounds pretty similar to the iPad - a device for consuming content, not creating it

Do you not think people could dictate essays, draw with their hands, edit music, etc with this tool? Why does this entire OS seem fundamentally based on consumption to you?

Next, even if that was the case, I don't see what VisionOS and related technologies would have to do with it - nothing about it is more physically intense than walking around a room. The number of people of all walks of life who would find anything about it the least bit physically challenging is probably effectively zero.

It's not necessarily about physical intensity - it's about ease of use. Clearly I could expand on this point since many others seem confused as well. I'm betting that right now many people who would otherwise be more economically useful are not because they don't have the temperament, ability, or inclination to learn how to type quickly or move a mouse around quickly. With VisionOS and later generations, we'll see much more 'natural' inputs, or at least have a lower barrier to entry than, say, learning to type at 100 wpm.

Do you not think people could dictate essays, draw with their hands, edit music, etc with this tool? Why does this entire OS seem fundamentally based on consumption to you?

Sure, you could do that, but what's the advantage over conventional hardware? I can do all of those things just fine with any ordinary computer and off-the-shelf accessories and software that has been available for years. The only really new thing that this device has is the immersive VR experience. That's cool, but I don't see how that gets you anything for creating content.

I'm betting that right now many people who would otherwise be more economically useful are not because they don't have the temperament, ability, or inclination to learn how to type quickly or move a mouse around quickly. With VisionOS and later generations, we'll see much more 'natural' inputs, or at least have a lower barrier to entry than, say, learning to type at 100 wpm.

I don't think that's the case. Keyboards and mice have been dominant because they are very easy to use. Sure, it's not easy to type 100wpm with good accuracy, but pretty much everyone can type 10wpm. Typing 100wpm isn't that useful outside of stenography anyways. Typically the limiting factor is how fast you can think of more meaningful words of text or working lines of code to type, not how fast you can physically type them. In fact, I'd bet that whatever the solution VisionOS uses for typing (we haven't seen that yet, gee I wonder why that is, you'd think if they have an awesome solution to getting text from the user's mind to the device they'd have shown us), it's less intuitive than a keyboard. How much skill does it take to get 10 correct wpm into a VisionOS document versus a regular computer with a regular keyboard?

And that's before we get into things like, how easy is it to read text or data off of a physical page while typing it or something loosely based on it into a VisionOS document?

First off, you're massively overstating the unnaturalness of the mouse. It's already fully proportional movement pointing, with the added advantages of not obstructing your view with your own hand and being able to rest your hand on a supporting surface instead of having to flail around.

Second, you can already dictate essays, most people don't do that because it's a pain in the ass compared to typing. Drawing is either highly technical detail work which massively benefits from the exact precision inputs of a mouse, or largely about muscle memory which is why artists already draw on high precision pressure sensitive tablets, benefiting from practice in drawing on paper. You're proposing they remove the tablets for no real benefit.

Third, music editing, like programming, if fundamentally a fiddly task requiring talent, practice and an understanding of the field. Both already have a billion different approaches available, someone will probably hack something together for this and someone else will have it as their favorite editor. But on the margin it will turn out that no, in fact there wasn't a massive pool people who are naturals at programming or editing except for the pesky detail of having to learn one of the billion existing options.

I guess you could also code by voice, per the video.

The reason people don't code by voice is that it sucks so many levels of hell. Siri (and other voice recognition agents) can't even get normal text 100% correct right now, what makes them think that shitty voice recognition is going to work properly when I tell it to open and close 5 levels of brackets, use a bunch of non-words like 'var', 'const', 'LazyVStack', 'NSString', and expressions that have non-letter characters in them like '@escaping' and '$0'? Imagine trying to make a regular expression in that and trying to read in "^(+\d{1,2}\s)?(?\d{3})?[\s.-]\d{3}[\s.-]\d{4}$" over voice, or trying to browse the method names in a file like you do with the arrow keys when you briefly forgot what that call and its arguments were (again). Fuck no.

Even that Talon example sounds as incomprehensible as the mouth noises a Vim user emits when they try to describe how having to make 10 different keystrokes is clearly better and so much faster than just selecting the text with the mouse.

Now, this isn't to say that you couldn't do an IDE in VR- in fact, having infinite screen real estate means that you can more easily trace a program's logic down 5 levels where with standard monitors you can only fit 2 or 3 at the same time and the Vision Pro's ability to actually display readable text (I still question that they've actually succeeded- all other headsets except maybe the PiMax just don't have the resolution to do this because a combination of head tilt + low resolution per eye means that text is fundamentally unreadable unless it's so large as to be pointless- so I'd have to see a physical demo of it to fully understand its liimtations).

But considering just how much Vision Pro depends on being a bigger screen with a couple of interesting telepresence applications baked in I really don't think this is going to be as transformative as some might otherwise think, but industry and military applications where you need to keep track of a bunch of interacting systems at once are going to be interested in where this goes since this is kind of just a better Hololens (and those customers are who MS was actually marketing that thing to). I could see a store using these things for "where's this item on the shelf?", an factory providing an auditable inspection pipeline for guaranteeing the condition of a product before it leaves (provided they're dirt cheap to make and replace), and so on and so forth.

Humorously, this is also going to be a test of how well AI does when it comes to adopting a new language- yeah, Swift has some existing support, but the toolkits for visionOS and its UI/UX paradigms sure don't! I guess developers will be learning this one the old fashioned way.

keyboard and mouse ... This awkward, clunky interface ... These outdated interfaces

This is an interesting opinion. One I certainly don't agree with and seems in need of justification.

Mouse and keyboard work great. For getting work done they are vastly superior to xbox controllers and Wii style motion controllers. The mouse gives extremely rapid pixel precise selection and movement of graphical objects.

This new Apple tech needs to be jaw droppingly amazing to stand up to the extremely capable mouse and keyboard.

Ever since the computer first arrived, keyboard and mouse has been the standard. You have a flat surface with raised little squares that you smack with your fingers. You have another little rounded shape with a flat bottom you move around, and click with.

I mean... no? The first computer was the ENIAC, and it didn't even have programmable memory, it has to be hard-wired and manually changed every time you want it to do something different. You didn't interact via keyboard, you interacted via pulling wires.

And the mouse isn't until ~20 years later in the mid 60s. So far as I'm aware, it's first demo'd publicly during the mother of all demos

I mean... no? The first computer was the ENIAC, and it didn't even have programmable memory, it has to be hard-wired and manually changed every time you want it to do something different. You didn't interact via keyboard, you interacted via pulling wires.

Ok fair, this was a bit sloppy I'll admit.

I'm not saying it won't augment the current toolset in new ways I can't well predict. But, the nice thing about mice and keyboards is that, when I want the computer to respond, I touch them. When I'm not touching them, the computer isn't responding. I can do whatever I want with my hands and eyes, and they computer isn't trying to figure out whether I'm asking something of it. There's an inherent limitation with asking the entire attention of your eyes and hands or trying to constantly double task the input devices.

There an analogy with voice-to-text on phones. It may be easier or more convenient at times, but when you are also using your mouth to have an in-person conversation, it's worse.

While I appreciate a top-level post talking about VisionOS, you seem to be claiming that keyboard/mouse is the moat around high-income tech jobs that keeps out "the strong and physically capable", which seems crazy to me.

Typing speed doesn't meaningfully affect an engineer's productivity (except maybe in the low-complexity world of undergraduate projects). A new operating system isn't going to increase the percent of people who can use threads.

What stops more people from becoming software engineers is that it's hard.

Keyboard and mouse still hold the crown.

It’s shocking to you and me, but most people spend more time using a touch screen than using a mouse and keyboard. Modern UX prioritizes mobile experiences over mouse/keyboard.

Typing speed doesn't meaningfully affect an engineer's productivity (except maybe in the low-complexity world of undergraduate projects). A new operating system isn't going to increase the percent of people who can use threads.

I don't have research or anything on this, but I'd be willing to bet it's a massive barrier to entry. In programming yes, but most jobs are 'email jobs' where a ton of what you're doing is tying natural language sentences to other people. In those jobs, and pretty much any white collar job that requires communicating, typing speed is important.

Not just typing speed, but the ability to quickly and easily synthesize and write down a chain of thought. I know many people who can speak brilliantly and eloquently, but when it comes to writing or typing down their insights they struggle mightily. Here on the Motte I'd imagine we're heavily biased towards typists and writecels.

What stops more people from becoming software engineers is that it's hard.

Specifically, it's not ability to type, it's having the vision and creativity to actually know how to conceive of something in the first place that most people lack. And neither AI nor fancy headsets can really help with this. Yes, the AI can write code for you, but you need to know what to tell it to write first. You still need to spot pitfalls with its interconnectivity with other parts of the project and know how to smooth them out. Typing faster similarly won't help you if you don't know what you should be typing in the first place.

A machine can assemble a car. But humans still design the cars.

Typing speed doesn't meaningfully affect an engineer's productivity

Past some threshold, no. But low typing speed (slower than even your system 2 thinking) certainly impedes productivity. I have a junior in my team who drives me up the wall during 1:1s with her typing speed or rather lack thereof.

I sit on the couch. There's a glass of tea (yes, a glass) to the left; hopefully I won't hit it with my elbow and send into the stone floor again. Not wearing a blindfold certainly helps in this regard. I put laptop on, well, my lap, open The Motte, scroll to the end of your post, think a second, click «reply».

What, if anything, in all of this could have been improved by Vision Pro? Adding a dancing Mickey Mouse (partnership with Disney, wooo!) to the periphery? Fitting the website into a circular window superimposed on the room? Strapping the same laptop's motherboard to my forehead? Replacing touch typing with tiny finger gestures that are picked up by the IR sensor array under my nose?

Actually there are some ideas here. I expect great things to come of augmented reality. I envision a future of uncompromising transparency and sovereignty, with tastefully minimal HUDs and AI digital assistants that stay well out of the way while brutally suppressing incoming noise; athletic young people with 20/20 vision and perfect innocence about «dark patterns» who walk in the sunlight and look with concern and pity at hunchbacked millenials and zoomers squinting into their pocket surveillance devices. This can be done. Contra Strugatsky brothers, we don't need communism to get to see the brightest parts of the Noon.

But as roon convincingly argues, text is the universal interface and it is primarily the inherent power of text, not technical limits of the age, that decided the shape of The Mother of All Demos and the hardware paradigm that we're still living in. Why do you think large language models get almost no benefit from multimodality? Because nothing has more meaningful dimensions than a text string. Tablets and smartphones, this great civilizational achievement of Apple, offer a strictly lesser channel than text – beloved by people who'd never have a clue what to do with CLI. Now, I suppose there are designers and architects, and surgeons and such, and all those colorful applications from WWDC will truly shine. But… rotating a 3D model of a Zahi Hadid-esque building in a teleconference? Is this what the digital era is about? I guess PowerPoint will add some zany VR features soon and they'll be adored by the same type of person who inserted WordArt into business presentations in the 90s, but… really?

This reminds me again of that epiphany I had while watching Alita: Battle Angel, particularly the scene where Alita dodges an aesthetic chain attack (admittedly, under a certain influence that brings out visual elaboration): What waste! The CG artists could have gone so much wilder, added complex patterns of acceleration and inertia and homing; but viewers won't perceive such detail. We're long in the regime where our tools let us depict actions of posthumans, but our merely human brains make that power sterile.

It is a nontrivial undertaking to find a paradigm that in practice does better than an IDE, or CLI, or even the humble chat window – when you're limited by the user on the other side. Almost everything of worth that we do is text and ways to manipulate and chain and condition its blocks on different scales. Skeuomorphic gimmicks, graphs, trees, mindmaps, desks with sticky notes, kanbans – frankly, all either collapses into unwieldy mess while text keeps going, or is as close to vanilla text in spirit as to make no difference and not benefit from new peripherals whatsoever. Many have tried. Yet here we still are. When some of us will get Vision Pros and ability to render arbitrary shapes, they'll still be peering into a rectangular website with an input box and a button to send comment.

I hope people with better imaginations than mine will prove me wrong. I'm pretty fed up with our interfaces, as well as with the human condition in general. But gimmicks and fetishes, exciting and novel as they can be, are no more the answer than frivolous surgery. Another, genuinely superior way has to be found and explored.

Strapping the same laptop's motherboard to my forehead?

This would be amusing at least...

Replacing touch typing with tiny finger gestures that are picked up by the IR sensor array under my nose?

Yes, this is actually incredibly useful. For instance even with a limited interface like Talon, I will map certain phrases or words I use frequently in my job to a keyboard shortcut, or a noise. This mapping means that I save probably ~5 minutes of work per day. Over time if we can map more of these things to even more minute/simple actions, we are looking at serious efficiency gains.

When some of us will get Vision Pros and ability to render arbitrary shapes, they'll still be peering into a rectangular website with an input box and a button to send comment.

I disagree here, it may be a while coming but I do think we're in for a paradigm shift with regards to input.

Yes, this is actually incredibly useful. For instance even with a limited interface like Talon, I will map certain phrases or words I use frequently in my job to a keyboard shortcut, or a noise. This mapping means that I save probably ~5 minutes of work per day. Over time if we can map more of these things to even more minute/simple actions, we are looking at serious efficiency gains.

Not only is this something you can do right now on existing computers, it's much easier to do than with a noise/gesture system where the need for disambiguation makes custom definitions a much harder proposition.

Unless you're the sort of person who already has a bunch of autohotkey scripts for those tasks set up, you sure as hell aren't going to do that in a worse interface.

text is the universal interface

I have often assumed that you are the reincarnation of Erik Naggum:

The natural urge of people is to point, the mouse is the interaction tool that allows the user to do this.

do you actually believe this "natural urge" stuff? my "natural urge" (if I have any that exceed sex and hunger in complexity) is to speak or write. [...]

you live in your graphical user interface world with colors and idiots for users. I prefer people who can communicate and think in words. I have been to France once (Aix-en-Provence, a lovely little town, and Marseilles, a not so lovely city). I had to point at things because my French wasn't up to speed. I made an intense effort to learn to speak French, and after two weeks, I could speak it well enough to discuss the best packaging to send home a bunch of books I had bought in one of the excellent bookstores in Aix, after having spent a day in delighted (albeit patient) discussion with the bookstore owner. the thrill of being able to speak a new language was just exhilarating. unfortunately, I can't speak French, I can't even write French, anymore, but I can still read French, and I read German, as well. reduced to pointing, I feel like an illiterate moron. that feeling carries over into computing. pointing is for people who have yet to discover thought. in my view. you obviously disagree, but you won't see me agree to your "natural urge" bullshit any time sooner than you stop universalizing that bullshit to include me and millions of other people who feel disenfranchised by the now point-and-click "interaction" you want to make the universal mode of communication with a computer.

this has nothing to do with any Emacsen, anymore, but I just want you (and others) to know your "natural urge" nonsense is disputed by individuals who don't actually like your "interaction for dummies". and for those who are inclined to point and not think: this is an example of how one person (namely, I) think and have preferences, not a universalizable argument about what Emacs users prefer over what XEmacs users prefer. however, I'm still inclined to believe that XEmacs users (not the least after reviewing the comments I have received), are less verbal and more visual than Emacs users, are less interested in studying manuals and learning languages (case in point: XEmacs calls its Lisp an "API", Emacs calls its Lisp a programming language). David Hughes felt insulted by this, for God knows what reason. observation it is, and it has been confirmed by this debate, and in no way disputed.

a word says more than a thousand images.

exercises for the visually inclined: illustrate "appreciation", "humor", "software", "education", "inalienable rights", "elegance", "fact".

(Er, well the timeline doesn't match up at all for you to be his reincarnation, but you could be his brother or something.)

This strikes me as yet more technology for the "smart home enthusiast" type of person.

I look down on such people who fawn over their nonsense gadgets and have the gall to call themselves "tech people". All that rubbish does is introduce many more points of failure (both human, in the case of Amazon destroying a guy's smart home for an imagined slur, and technological) for extremely minor or questionable fringe benefits. Great, I can pre-heat my oven remotely on my way back from work, but it can also sometimes also decide to blaze to 400 degrees F in the middle of the night on its own.

Technophiles have all the latest privacy invading smart home rubbish that will brick itself within a year when the company either goes bust or decides to start charging you for features that previously were standard.

People who actually understand and work in technology have exactly one mid-2000s printer.

Technology is like karate; you ideally want to use it as little as possible. Over-engineered smartrubbish either breaks, bricks or takes 2 hours on the phone to tech support to make work in the first place... before it breaks or bricks anyway.

Technology is like karate; you ideally want to use it as little as possible.

I like this take. That being said, without the crazy technophiles how would boundaries be broken? How would we advance the state of the art, to let people like you get even more out of your tiny piece of technology?

I suppose in that sense they do serve a purpose.

See also: Hypebeasts as Honeybees, a post exploring the topic of bleeding-edge adoption, albeit from the firearms-and-accessories perspective.

What are you even on about with this nerds vs jocks schtik. Anything that gives you "power over the digital realm" is not limited by your physical prowess or lack of it. Its limited primarily by your brain !!!

Nerds are high status (the ones that make bank) not for knowing how to use keyboards, but for knowing what to write!!

Its the artists hand that has the magic, not the paintbrush.

Come back when a UI comes out that... doesnt reward higher IQ.

I suspect Vladimir Putin is dead. I think the man in charge of the country is a double. World leaders are known to have body doubles, often multiples. For clarity, I'm going to introduce "Vlad", a person who resembles Putin and was recruited into performing as a double, likely after some cosmetic surgeries to tighten up the image. Putin has reportedly had some nasty health problems over the last 3 years or so, and I have seen multiple articles suspecting a double acting in certain capacities, with side by sides of Putin and "Vlad". I found this reporting credibly speculative, and I felt that I could reliably and consistently distinguish "Vlad" from Putin, particularly over time.

There is a problem of course: if "Vlad" exists, how can we be sure any particular Putin photo is actually of Putin?

Here is some evidence I've found, and I did not look very hard. I was reading https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12231813/Prepare-deeply-dangerous-unpredictable-Russia-Putin-replaced-says-security-expert.html and happened to notice "Vlad", and scrolled down further to find what appeared to be an older photo of Putin.

"Vlad": https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/06/25/15/72511321-12231813-Russian_President_Vladimir_Putin_on_state_television_today_said_-a-9_1687704720258.jpg

Putin: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/06/25/15/72483879-12231813-Out_of_jail_and_free_to_run_his_large_mercenary_army_Prigozhin_l-a-16_1687704764143.jpg

Note, I am not saying that these are great examples. If someone looked much harder, they could make a stronger case. "Vlad" to me looks softer and smoother, without the hardness or sharpness that I've come to associate with Putin's gaze.

My best guess at a narrative, if Vladimir Putin is in fact dead at this moment:

Putin probably has a double even before he gets sick. This may or may not be the current "Vlad". I think Putin realizes he has a likely terminal disease before the Ukraine invasion. As he gets sicker, the need for the double increases, both in terms of scheduling around illness and heightened scrutiny. Perhaps there is additional recruitment or cosmetic procedures. Putin invades Ukraine. Perhaps within a year of the invasion, he becomes incapacitated, and the double takes over, likely with the assistance of high level FSB.

  • -11

This conspiracy theory is very popular in Russia. In fact, it posits not that there is a single double, but that there are several: "The banqueting one" ("Банкетный"), "the Udmurt", "the Talking One" ("Говорун"). It's a fun theory, but the Western intelligence services would have known (as they knew about Prigozhin preparing his putsch even though Russian services completely missed it). And they would have leaked this, I think.

Putin taking a break from the public isn't actually new. IIRC when other members of his inner circle had issues with Kadyrov (who then fled went to Dubai for a bit) he took his sweet time coming out despite Kadyrov clearly trying to feel him out and get his attention via social media.

It has precedent.

EDIT: Looked it up to confirm I wasn't crazy, it was in 2015 after the murder of Nemtsov.

No, sorry. You can't simulate the voice and little mannerisms he had and still has, quite clearly. Maybe it's not as clear if you don't speak russian natively, but he has quite a distinctive voice and the way of speaking. And I don't have any internal protests against discussing this theory seriously even though it sounds ridiculous. It is in fact ridiculous unfortunately.

Not even arguing about his doubles, it's irrelevant.

I don't think Putin is dead and has a body double, but ML could simulate those voices and mannerisms (certainly in audio, video is harder). Compare to the tom cruise lookalike who used ML to make it more convincing. edit: Yeah, I agree with below comment, also I'm pretty sure there are things like phone camera recordings of him

I'm sure it can be done, but his talks aren't rare and often they're taken with other people in various natural situations. So while it's not completely eliminating the scenario the op is talking about, it reduces the plausibility of that theory to something similar to the flat earth.

Worth noting that the body double theory is much more plausible, not to the level when I personally think it's likely, but there's a lot of "research" done there by various autistic people (anons mostly to my knowledge, also by Ukrainian low-iq propaganda outlets understandably).

something similar to the flat earth.

This theory is orders of magnitudes more probable than the flat earth, there is no comparison.

In fact, Putin himself said they considered to use doubles at the start of his presidency:

https://meduza.io/short/2020/02/27/putin-skazal-chto-on-nastoyaschiy-udmurta-i-banketnogo-ne-suschestvuet

something similar to the flat earth.

I was saying that about the theory that the real Putin is dead. The theory that Putin has doubles is indeed much more plausible, as i was saying.

So…how does this make any more sense? Looks like a bunch of extra complexity—coordination, secrecy, motivation—for no actual benefit. It doesn’t explain any of Wagner’s actions, let alone the MoD.

It's unmistakeable, Vlad has less hair, and it's almost completely grey, that's sloppy doublesmanship.... Another hypothesis would be that Vlad is merely an older incarnation of the entity previously known as Putin, which itself once appeared as Vova, a cute child full of life. Are you the same person you were yesterday?

Also, a double doesn't make sense. If Putin is alive, he can credibly threaten, as well as lead, his inner circle. A double can't, while still making negotiations with the west much more difficult.

I think storytellers in general have always been very fond of “the king is actually dead” tropes (list) because they serve to make things interesting, but real life examples are very much rare.

The big problem is that the inner circle who actually do encounter and know the leader personally (and who would therefore know he was dead) also stand to benefit the most from his death, and so are the least likely to maintain the veil of secrecy.

Putin’s death is a great opportunity for Medvedev or whoever else to clean house, declare the invasion a mistake made by idiots, and to focus on the old pastime of personal enrichment and kleptocracy. For nobody in the inner circle to do it would take the genuine and sincere ideological commitment to the Ukrainian war as a national project that I suspect is lacking in the Kremlin.

I’ve sometimes heard that the left wing takeover of corporate America is a hollow one - they don’t REALLY cars about minorities, just look at umm their Middle East twitter accounts! They care about $$$ and aren’t true believers

I found an interesting counter point recently.

https://upstreamreviews.substack.com/p/high-republic-low-sales

This is what a corporation that has no idea what their audience is about, but does in fact know clearly what it’s ideology is about.

I’ll summarize the link but you really should read it for yourself, it’s astounding how bad Disney gets the Star Wars franchise: for instance, the books need to be (in addition to all the old touchstones of diversity etc) ANTI WAR. And then there’s the characters, who are somehow all androgynous.

The sales figures reflect an enormous lack of interest of enthusiasm. But it doesn’t matter for Disney - they get to spread the Good Word of gender ideology and anti fascism/anti traditionalism.

So, two years on, how are things going for the galaxy’s least heteronormative entry in the franchise after a BILLION dollar marketing campaign?

We’ll let the Bookscan figures speak for themselves:

If it weren't for the alleged billion dollar marketing campaign those would be decent sales for these books. Like, what figures were they expecting? The average traditionally published book gets in the low thousands of sales (and the median, worse). All the books listed here range from very good sales to mediocre but still acceptable sales. We can't tell the exact deals offered, but at a fairly typical 10% royalty per book, Daniel José Older would have gotten $39k from Midnight Horizon, and at the rate he writes he'll be making a fairly decent income from this. (I don't know the exact details of what sort of contract you'd get for this work, however. I imagine writing books for an established franchise like this will involve more payment up front, less royalties.)

Like, what figures were they expecting?

I guess you missed the part where the previous expanded universe series sold TENS OF MILLIONS of copies.

And no, selling a few thousand books isn’t “very good”. Like, cmon.

alleged billion dollar marketing campaign

“Alleged”. This isn’t a law court, this is just a fact.

If it’s a fact, perhaps you can prove it, then?

100,000 books sold is very good. 2000 is mediocre. That's the range of the books discussed in the article. For reference any book that sells a million copies is going to likely land in the top 10 most sold books in a given year.

If the billion dollar marketting for these books is a fact, then the article fails to explain where that number comes from. That's why I've said it's alledged.

Even the good stuff in legends wasn’t exactly household names.

Funny. I’m a regular /r/MawInstallation participant, and I’ve mostly heard good things about the High Republic. Sure, a niche fan group isn’t going to generate the sales Disney expects. But wouldn’t the anti-war message annoy them first? The sub is literally themed around Imperial military research!

Reading the article, it starts to make a little more sense. The first section is all about how woke the buildup was, based largely on a screencap of a whiteboard. Plus some tea-leaf interpretation on character designs. By his standards Maya here is far too androgynous to be, uh, a good character. If the tits aren’t out, she can’t be a good Jedi, hmm?But I digress.

The follow-up to this condemnation of the rollout is…an argument that the first book was actually successful. Which segues smoothly into all the reasons High Republic sucks. There’s no self-awareness in sight. This author started from the premise that Star Wars was woke badthink, and by the Force, he’s going to see it through.

Here we get to another shocking claim: Zahn did it right. Truly the hottest take in this article. I suppose it demonstrates better taste than the Rabid Puppies whom this author so openly apes.

Never mind the graveyard of non-Zahn Star Wars projects. Media tie-ins are a crapshoot. If we weren’t lucky enough to get Zahn, we’d have been stuck with Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. I’m sure the author was aware of melodramatic runs like Dark Empire or Legacy of the Force. Not to mention multimedia projects like Shadows of the Empire. More successful than High Republic, surely. But it’s easier to say “member Zahn? I ‘member.”

Could there be another reason than a woke mind virus? Maybe writing a decent novel is tough, and even tougher if you’re stupid. Er, third-rate talent operating on a budget. Maybe it gets worse when there is stifling corporate oversight. (Hey, I hear Marvel has multimedia projects. And is owned by Disney. And has a plan with similar Phases…) Maybe 2021 wasn’t the best time to release half a dozen books. How’s the hardback market looking, in this era of streaming services and Fortnite tie-ins?

I shouldn’t be surprised that the pseudo-review ends with a Joker quote. Censored, too. How fitting for an article which regurgitates so much else.

I’ve already drawn your series as the soyjak, and my series as the chad!

Funny. I’m a regular /r/MawInstallation participant, and I’ve mostly heard good things about the High Republic.

Yeah, Redditors don’t really reflect the true fan base for, well, anything anymore. surprised someone still thinks that, especially in this space.

The follow-up to this condemnation of the rollout is…an argument that the first book was actually successful.

Successful? It merely is the best selling of the bunch, which is….not high praise given the pathetic numbers on display:

Maybe 2021 wasn’t the best time to release half a dozen books.

Yeah, why would the middle of a pandemic when everyone is stuck at home be a bad time to sell books?

According to the fans, yes, Zahn “did it right”. Money talks. Shit walks.

  • If the tits aren’t out, she can’t be a good Jedi, hmm?

Judging by the fact no one knows who this character is, yes. Correct.

Er, third-rate talent operating on a budget.

Lol, Disney is operating “on a budget”. Yeah, a billion dollar marketing budget.

This article has made you really angry. Why? Did you enjoy the new Star Wars and it’s abject commercial and cultural failure feel invalidating to you?

I think the author of this piece is a hack, and that you’ll accept anything for evidence so long as it flatters your worldview.

Sales figures are pretty good evidence of quality of product, but go off I guess

Are you sure about that?

Was Fifty Shades of Grey a well written product?

Was Jersey Shore a well produced TV show?

I'd never suggest the quality of the product and the sales figures are anything but loosely correlated.

I'd never suggest the quality of the product and the sales figures are anything but loosely correlated.

Perhaps quality assures sales but sales are affected by much more than quality, so looking at good sales as indicative of quality is a sketchy metric but poor sales is a much better metric of poor quality?

Though I can think of examples here that buck the trend as well. Bach wasn't well known during his lifetime, after all.

This article has made you really angry. Why? Did you enjoy the new Star Wars and it’s abject commercial and cultural failure feel invalidating to you?

Less sarcasm and psychoanalyzing the person you are responding to, please.

Never mind the graveyard of non-Zahn Star Wars projects. Media tie-ins are a crapshoot. If we weren’t lucky enough to get Zahn, we’d have been stuck with Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. I’m sure the author was aware of melodramatic runs like Dark Empire or Legacy of the Force. Not to mention multimedia projects like Shadows of the Empire. More successful than High Republic, surely.

While I agree that the author is overlooking a lot of Legends stinkers (why do people keep hiring Kevin J Anderson?!), I think the old EU had a lot more than just Zahn and Splinter. I love Zahn's work, warts and all, including a lot of the lesser-known stuff (eg, Quadrail, Dragonback, Icarus Hunt), but Allston, Stackpole, Stove, Denning all had some good works with significant success. Even a lot of the marginal stuff wasn't as bad as Splinter; Truce at Bakura or the Junior Jedi Knight septology didn't age well and were a little formulaic, but they were pretty reasonable works of fiction with decent sales numbers.

No objections here.

I will report my personal satisfaction with Robert Allen Macbride’s Corellian Trilogy (for operatic adventure) and L. Neil Young’s Lando Calrissian Adventures (for weird, if rather off-genre, world building). It was a wild universe of fiction, both fantastical and militarist.

Splinter was meant as an example rather than a rule. Actually, I was going to use Zorba the Hutt’s Revenge, but settled on one from before any Zahn influence. The graveyard is clearly smaller than the list of successes!

Junior Jedi Knight

It's actually hilarious to think that that series introduced Tahiri as a character before NJO kicked off. And also reminded me of the absolutely off the rails Galaxy of Fear goosebumps knock-off series.

God I loved Galaxy of Fear as a kid. I always thought Uncle Hoole was one of the more interesting characters introduced in Legends canon. I'd love to see another book take a crack at him in a less "for kids" narrative, or really any of the Shi'ido.

Fuck Zahn, with all due respect. Stackpole is what's missing. Warlord era world building was the real skeleton of the EU before NJO. And it's what missing in the Sequels where the backdrop is either nonexistent or makes no sense. Who the fuck decided Mon would just disband the Navy after a full on civil war? Who the fuck thought of operation cinder? Nothing that makes any sense could come out of this nonsensical universe.

Only Andor got this and way late, which is why it's the only decent part of Disneywars and has actual characters who actually do human things for human reasons instead of political statements and author pets.

instead of political statements and author pets

Dunno, that mousy looking commie in the parka was extremely blatant and offputting.

Who? Space Ted Kaczynski? The whole show is about ways people end up as dissidents, and his sort of nerdy naive idealism is a very real thing, and it's challenged by the plot.

I got real Les Justes vives from him. There's an interesting thing going with his character which is sort of reversed in Saul Gerera's Anarchist cynicism.

If you're talking about Mon's lesbian cousin, I reserve judgement until S2 where she surely will get some more characterization before getting murdered by Cassian or something.

I'd take Allston's ensemble approach in the XWing run over Stackpole's few special characters deeply tied to the meta plot approach. It works better in his other books though.

Could there be another reason than a woke mind virus? Maybe writing a decent novel is tough, and even tougher if you’re stupid

The EU has also been wiped once - which makes it hard to justify investment - and the "lead in" from the new mainline SW stuff is...not as good as in the past.

But the writing is also probably bad.

Agreed. There are plenty of reasons to pick at HR. I was tempted to go through more of them. The one paragraph spent on how banal the villains are is legitimate criticism.

Ironically, delving into an expanded, effective Jedi Order is one of the oldest fantasies of the fanbase. Hence all the New Jedi Order material, the Old Republic, and so on. What does the galaxy look like when the space monks are everywhere? Authors keep trying to make this work with varying degrees of success. It’s possible “you think you know what you want, but you don’t.” Is any work featuring a monk police force doomed to silliness?

But delving into that would be the work of a fan, and this author was more interested in scoring political points.

The High Republic was Disney’s latest attempt to monetize that concept. Possibly to Marvelize it, too, and launch an ongoing setting for tie-ins and merch. I absolutely believe that it’s been a nonstarter. Perhaps that’s down to bowdlerization! Personally, I suspect Zahn was tapping into an underserved market which, today, is already satisfied.

Zahn was able to deliver a competent sequel trilogy to Star Wars fans who were hungry for just that and provide a framework for much of the rest of the post-ROTJ EU. That was never going to work with Disney because their plan for a sequel trilogy was the Sequel Trilogy. And while that wasn't the abject failure its detractors sometimes think, it underperformed and (perhaps more critically) failed to generate much enthusiasm or provide room for growth. Even people I know who like the sequels aren't particularly excited about them. Say what you will about the Prequels, they managed to hang a lot of stuff on that framework and the camp element makes the PT very memeable even if it isn't necessarily good.

On the other hand, Zahn is pretty close to the peak of the old EU. There were a lot of baaaaad Star Wars books that are mostly (justifiably) forgotten. I've noticed when people talk about the NJO, they tend to talk about a couple of high-point books like Traitor and not the chaff that fills out the series.

And while that wasn't the abject failure its detractors sometimes think, it underperformed and (perhaps more critically) failed to generate much enthusiasm or provide room for growth.

I think that this actually does mark it down as an abject failure. Look at the original star wars movies and both the massive cultural impact and the galaxy of commercially successful properties that came out of it - games, books, toys, etc. When you compare each member of the trilogy of trilogies on a broader scale it becomes immediately obvious that the sequel trilogy has been a huge failure. The individual films underperforming might not be an abject failure when compared to a new property, but when compared to their immediate predecessors the difference is starkly obvious. I can remember countless lines and moments from the original trilogy, but what new ideas and characters have the sequel trilogy produced which had anywhere near that impact?

Tbh this seems utterly pointless for judging anything about the wider "left-wing takeover" or even Disney. We have a list of declining book sales for Disney in a medium overwhelmingly known for movies. We have no comparisons to other books released at a similar time. We do have a comparison to a book series released decades ago, which is likely irrelevant in the current market. We have no analysis of anything else Disney does with the property, or Disney's own success.

You say this:

But it doesn’t matter for Disney

No shit it doesn't matter. Even if sales of the book series blew away the Thrawn trilogy that the author cites, it wouldn't even make a dent in Disney's P&L. Where's the look at Disney's overall financial health?

Every large corporation has issues with "fiefdoms" forming: is there any evidence that Disney is worse than, say, Ford? Or P&G or Salesforce or Shell or Walmart or Apple? Any evidence that left-wing or "woke" politics is causing particular problems for Disney over the pet issues of other large corporations

If you want to complain about a book series, go ahead. But I think you need to bring much more evidence to link this to any kind of issue with major corporations

We have no comparisons to other books released at a similar time.

Ah so you didn’t bother reading the article. Cool.

The original Thrawn Trilogy sold 15 million as of 2014. And then, after the Star Wars Extended Universe was jettisoned by Disney and Kathleen Kennedy, it went on to sell five million more copies. A new boxed set of the original Thrawn Trilogy released in May 2022 has sold 13,031 copies by itself.

A new release sold 13000 copies, much lower than the figures for some of the other books.

Why would you post something that harms your own argument? Or are you saying that the 15million figure is the comparison? Except that's not the same time at all, those books were released in 1991 and that's 20+ years of sales, not to mention a massively book industry

Wow, 13,000 copies? A veritable Harry Potter indeed.

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That’s for a newly released box set for a book trilogy written in 1991. So, yeah. Better numbers for the newly minted woke novels

By modern SFF standards, 13,000 copies is actually respectable numbers. Not bestseller numbers or "Could become an HBO series" numbers, but you might be surprised how few copies most books sell. And as @Magusoflight pointed out, this is for a 30 year old set.

We have a list of declining book sales for Disney in a medium overwhelmingly known for movies.

Star Wars is the epitome of nerd franchise. Nerds buy books. Now, if the books had broken into the mainstream (say, like Harry Potter), it would have blown all of the previous entries away. But even if they didn't, nerds still buy books. If these books were appealing to the traditional Star Wars demographic, 6 figure sales wouldn't be a problem.

It's not necessarily irrational for Disney to blow some money on a gamble like that, but that they keep putting them out does imply something about Disney's internal politics.

I'm realizing slowly but surely that most of what is afflicting Disney isn't ideology itself but sheer incompetence of people that run the company, they just get to use the ideology as a shield for their inability. Also because of the mechanics of ESG(so they are funded on arbitrary ideological metrics) and bad media analyst company like Parrot Analytics using social media "engagement" as a success metric not the sentiment. So Disney can shove ideology to pump the ESG numbers and when the audience notices the bullshit they go on social media complain about it, we get response from culture warriors calling them everything bad under the sun, and Parrot Analytics claims it a success because people talking about it. So the incompetent people that decides on all of this get to keep their job because it doesn't affect the investments and they have an analytics company claiming success on something else than if they audience actually liked the content or not.

I suggest an amendment to a popular adage :

Malice is often mistaken for sufficiently advanced incompetence.

It is not incompetent of Disney middle-managers to care about DEI and ESG. It is intentional. It is as malicious as any well-intentioned actions that constitute the road to hell. "It's not malice when the good guys do it", sounds fairly close to what a Tankie might say. And you never want to start sounding like a Tankie.

I have no claim of speaking for ordinary people. But in light of recent events DEI and ESG is failing the messaging for ordinary people. Nobody is watching new star wars except for notable exceptions that have good story telling in it. Like the two first seasons of The Mandalorian and now recently Andor. Like the rest of it could be "making money hand over fist" too, but they insist on weird messaging instead so people don't watch it! That is the only incompetence that I'm talking about. According to meager public data on viewership and online sentiment they are not being watched, and it is possible that it would be so much better without the "weird stuff".

I'm realizing slowly but surely

Oh come on! Your whole shtick here from the start, including your username, was "it's all just incompetence and mundane market forces, guys!"

I'm realizing slowly but surely that most of what is afflicting Disney isn't ideology itself but sheer incompetence of people that run the company, they just get to use the ideology as a shield for their inability.

The ideology creates incompetence though. One of the culture war fronts was woke culture's hostility to meritocracy.

and bad media analyst company like Parrot Analytics using social media "engagement" as a success metric not the sentiment. So Disney can shove ideology to pump the ESG numbers

It's almost like this is exactly what ESG was specifically designed for.

Oh come on! Your whole shtick here from the start, including your username, was "it's all just incompetence and mundane market forces, guys!"

Yes that is the shtick, give me an example where is there more to it then! I want to have the shtick tested, it is the point of me having it! But it is not only mundane market forces, there is a bit of corruption and dare I say conspiracies there, the reason why I'm claiming the incompetence angle here is that it is obvious in income of the company that there is no customers for what they are selling, why are they still persisting with it?

The ideology creates incompetence though. One of the culture war fronts was woke culture's hostility to meritocracy.

So the incompetent don't join the ideology because they see that it hostile to meritocracy and use it to avoid becoming competent? Can we reverse the cause and effect of your statement?

It's almost like this is exactly what ESG was specifically designed for.

So if we have a sketch on how the ESG system is designed: Who benefits if they aren't making profits by doing this?

Yes that is the shtick, give me an example where is there more to it then! I want to have the shtick tested, it is the point of me having it!

Right, that's fine, but my point is that it's not "realizing slowly but surely", it's just your initial assumption.

the reason why I'm claiming the incompetence angle here is that it is obvious in income of the company that there is no customers for what they are selling, why are they still persisting with it?

Maybe they only care about profit as a means to an end, and one of the ends is pushing these messages. After all, what's the point of having money and influence, if you can't spend it on anything?

OTOH, if it's incompetence, how did all these people end up on the top of all these companies at the same time? They are all incompetent, and never got weeded out?

So the incompetent don't join the ideology because they see that it hostile to meritocracy and use it to avoid becoming competent? Can we reverse the cause and effect of your statement?

That sort of works too, but at some point you have to ask - if the incompetent are able to push through against everyone's wishes an ideology that will shield them against meritocracy, are they still incompetent?

So if we have a sketch on how the ESG system is designed: Who benefits if they aren't making profits by doing this?

People who want to use ESG to reshape the world according to their vision.

Right, that's fine, but my point is that it's not "realizing slowly but surely", it's just your initial assumption.

Well almost. My username is based on how the COVID response was handled and listening to conspiracy theorists talking about it, like there is no conspiracy there... politicians just were incompetent and large corporations(e.g. amazon and pfizer) took advantage of to increase their profits of the cost of the citizens. So I'm just reprogramming my brain from thinking that it is grand conspiracy by changing from the first thought what is going on from that someone is puppeteering the masses in the background to trying to identify who knows what they are doing and those who don't. So the initial assumption here is Disney don't know what they are doing, so who knows what they are doing, takes advantage of it and why. I'm being honest here, it is a long slow process for me.

Maybe they only care about profit as a means to an end, and one of the ends is pushing these messages. After all, what's the point of having money and influence, if you can't spend it on anything?

Yeah but they are spending the money to send message in media that no one is looking at? So if nobody is paying for it or even looking at it, isn't it a failure in activism too when nobody wants to hear the message?

OTOH, if it's incompetence, how did all these people end up on the top of all these companies at the same time? They are all incompetent, and never got weeded out?

Well that is the little flaw in my theories, that is why I discuss it at all I'm trying to find out! I found partial explanations in Stupidity Paradox and Bullshit Jobs but it is not covering all the holes.

That sort of works too, but at some point you have to ask - if the incompetent are able to push through against everyone's wishes an ideology that will shield them against meritocracy, are they still incompetent?

Well it is assuming that the incompetence is on all areas. They are maybe more competent on keeping their job and blaming it on bigots but not competent on producing mass market media. Like I'm fairly competent at my job but I suck at organizational politics so it has hurt my career.

People who want to use ESG to reshape the world according to their vision.

So if ESG is fighting against climate change why does Shell have a higher ESG score than e.g. Tesla that is more inline with the current ideas on how to reach the vision on climate change?

So the initial assumption here is Disney don't know what they are doing, so who knows what they are doing, takes advantage of it and why. I'm being honest here, it is a long slow process for me.

Fair enough, in my defense, this side of you is all that I've seen.

Yeah but they are spending the money to send message in media that no one is looking at? So if nobody is paying for it or even looking at it, isn't it a failure in activism too when nobody wants to hear the message?

Not necessarily, it's all a question of relative to what. If you're doing your activism with full knowledge of how unpopular your views are, having your message pushed through Disney is still a win, relative to it never making it out of the fringes of society.

Well that is the little flaw in my theories, that is why I discuss it at all I'm trying to find out! I found partial explanations in Stupidity Paradox and Bullshit Jobs but it is not covering all the holes.

Bullshit Jobs feels to me like kicking the can down the road. Yeah, it's not the fault of an individual bad actor, or even a group of bad actors working together, it's... that our system maintains legions upon legions of workers that bring absolutely nothing? I'm not against the theory, but the magnitude of the systemic failure is about as mind-boggling to me as an outright global conspiracy.

Well it is assuming that the incompetence is on all areas. They are maybe more competent on keeping their job and blaming it on bigots but not competent on producing mass market media. Like I'm fairly competent at my job but I suck at organizational politics so it has hurt my career.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Though with that phrasing it becomes less distinguishable from my theory. Is a conspiracy to push an ideology all that different from a conspiracy of incompetent people using an ideology to cover their asses?

So if ESG is fighting against climate change why does Shell have a higher ESG score than e.g. Tesla that is more inline with the current ideas on how to reach the vision on climate change?

Others pointed it out already, but the whole idea is that ESG is not about fighting climate change, but about propping up political/ideological allies and punishing enemies. Under this view, their decisions re: Tesla are a lot easier to explain.

Fair enough, in my defense, this side of you is all that I've seen.

It is a online persona that I use only here where I want to discuss semi controversial views. It is the only side you are going to see. And for the first time it is working.

Not necessarily, it's all a question of relative to what. If you're doing your activism with full knowledge of how unpopular your views are, having your message pushed through Disney is still a win, relative to it never making it out of the fringes of society.

In many ways the culture war is virtual where they consider themselves as being mainstream and not at the fringes of society. In many ways it could be considered the mainstream views, that the majority of people that is not on Twitter and so on(i.e. virtual milieus) don't think it should be in their entertainment.

Bullshit Jobs feels to me like kicking the can down the road. Yeah, it's not the fault of an individual bad actor, or even a group of bad actors working together, it's... that our system maintains legions upon legions of workers that bring absolutely nothing? I'm not against the theory, but the magnitude of the systemic failure is about as mind-boggling to me as an outright global conspiracy.

Yeah welcome to my world view.... the stupidity paradox comes into play with that maybe the systemic failure is because of a reason, some mechanism in our world makes it necessary. Even if the book about stupidity paradox only talk about organization, my synthesis of the two essentially touches there is a reason for Bullshit Jobs is that there is a functional reason for them to exists which Graeber only touches upon but don't delve into deeper. The mind-boggling nature of it validates is a "incompetence theory" akin to "conspiracy theory". On the other hand the question is though if the framework of "incompetence theory" is useful for me, I haven't decided that yet. Also it all could be wrong and useless and then I'll invent a new persona instead.

Though with that phrasing it becomes less distinguishable from my theory. Is a conspiracy to push an ideology all that different from a conspiracy of incompetent people using an ideology to cover their asses?

Well it is a question if they are true believers or if they are adherents of practicality. So if it is practical adherence when the ideology is not useful for them anymore they dump it and move on to the next thing to cover their asses. True believers would stick to it unless they end up in a crisis of faith which is a higher bar for change. So I'm just speculating about the future of the ideology, that when reality strikes and how high the bar is for them to change. Much of the culture war is just virtue signaling for status and if the number of true believers are low then the shift might be faster when people break ranks around the issues.

Others pointed it out already, but the whole idea is that ESG is not about fighting climate change, but about propping up political/ideological allies and punishing enemies. Under this view, their decisions re: Tesla are a lot easier to explain.

So it is corporatism where corporations dictate the state and politics?

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” — Benito Mussolini (although disputed if he really said it)

So if ESG is fighting against climate change why does Shell have a higher ESG score than e.g. Tesla that is more inline with the current ideas on how to reach the vision on climate change?

Not who you're arguing with but Tesla gets a low ESG score because Elon Musk runs twitter, and that allows for problematic badthink to spread. It wouldn't even matter if Tesla had a factory that converted greenhouse gases directly into electric cars and food for the poor - Elon Musk is on the wrong side of the culture war and so his company is Bad.

Not who you're arguing with

It is a forum with a discussion in the open so feel free to chime in.

but Tesla gets a low ESG score because Elon Musk runs Twitter, and that allows for problematic badthink to spread.

Yeah so we can change the climate of the planet(If I personally believe or not doesn't matter, it is the mainstream narrative) so the most marginalized people are impacted by various ways all over the world, but that doesn't take precedence over hate speech for a minority of people that we would classify as twitter users and a minority of that reading it and an even smaller piece(if any at all) of it enacting that speech in the world.

It's not incompetence at all. Disney has portions of the company which are basically money printers, and this money is deliberately used in service of pushing the ideology of the woke culture warriors controlling the company.

Where does it make money? They are in discussions on selling theme parks outside of the US, toy licensing is cratering because the action figures are collecting dust on the shelves, they picked a fight with the UK over the terms of Disney+ streaming (which is not profitable btw) and the box office keeps on bombing.

https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/app/uploads/2023/02/2022-Annual-Report.pdf

Starting page 67. Revenue of $82.7 billion, net income of $3.5 billion. They are making money hand over fist.

That's about a 4% annualized return, only 'good' because the stock market tanked that year. But it's still not terribly exciting given the built-in risk of losing your shirt running any sort of entertainment company, even a tbtf one like Disney, and given their relative box-office dominance it seems beyond underwhelming. If I was a major shareholder in a the titan of the industry, I'd want to know why they weren't crushing it!

4% net profit. It's only ~2% annual return. Even after their share price tanked, $DIS market cap is still $160B.

Why did they layoff staff then? https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/disney-layoffs-end-7000-1235629809/ to make more money so they can fund more activism?

Why did they layoff staff then?

presumably their costs were greater than loss of profits

(or it was a bad idea but some manager benefitted personally)

Yeah but the point I'm trying to make is that it isn't what was on the books in 2022 but what is going to be on the books now. We don't know how the annual report for 2023 is going to look like but if the headlines and layoffs are any indication it is not going to be as good as 2022.

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They're making money somewhere. A few billion dollars a year net income currently, on 80 billion a year revenue.

But that's not to say there's nothing for them to worry about. Going into 2019 they were topping $10B/y income, which had been smoothly climbing for a decade, on $60B/y revenue. They had a shock during the pandemic, but it doesn't seem to have been the initial problem and they don't seem to be recovering any further from it. They're making a fifth of what they'd have hoped for from a straight extrapolation of 2018 numbers, and they've got to be freaking out about whatever's gone awry.

I don't know if "money printers ... deliberately used in service of pushing the ideology" is the right explanation. I suppose it would fit the "revenues and gross profits are still fine; operating income tanked" data, if ideology-pushing-overhead metastasized somehow? But accounting is trickier than you'd think, especially at this scale. I'd be unsurprised to find out there was just something that went wonky in their depreciation/amortization numbers. The most interesting thing is the timing, I think.

Everything since the pandemic might be explained by the worldwide roller coaster of consumption and interest rate changes ... but Disney's operating income started to flatten out as early as 2016 and started to clearly decline in 2019...

Accounting can be tricky and if it comes from Hollywood it is Hollywood accounting where surprisingly many movies are booked as losses in the books. It is not as cut and dry that is why I use examples from headlines rather than the annual report, there is trouble brewing in the horizon... especially from the stuff that cost a lot of money that nobody watches! There is an accounting reason for pulling Willow of Disney+ so shortly after the premier, but the exact reason for it well... I'm not an accountant. Disneys troubles has been a constant in the headlines recent months and I'm trying to speculate on it.

Corporations unlike academia are not a monolith. I believe marginal revolution ran a post a while ago showing within firm executive teams are either now all GOP or all Democrat. They are all now like Founders Fund where if your working with Thiel your going to be in his specific ideology.

A decade ago it was definitely just about the money. One thing in their public persona and something else in their private lives.

Disney is likely one of the more extreme versions of woke capture so highlighting Disney is a bit like low manning where you pick the most extreme version. But it’s also the corporation that was the story teller for America so a smart one to have fully infiltrated.

Hbo though somehow seems to be finding their groove. I’m fairly certain Idol is going to have a black man do something very violent.

I don’t disagree that New Star Wars is pretty bad, but is it any worse than Marvel garbage, than Amazon’s Lord of the Rings, than the awful three Fantastic Beasts / Harry Potter movies, or than countless other recent bad genre fiction media? I don’t really think so.

And I’ll say something - Andor was one of the best shows I watched last year, and that was ‘Kathleen Kennedy Disney Star Wars’. As for the garbage, well, I don’t have to watch it. Andor’s existence is good enough.

I feel like I'm the only one who doesn't really like that scene. It's so incredibly overwritten. He just keeps saying the same thing using increasingly grandiose metaphors. People don't talk like that. Luthen, outside of this one scene, doesn't talk like that. It was the one piece of dialogue in Andor that felt artificial to me. Especially when you compare it to Andy Serkis' wonderfully understated monologue almost immediately preceding it.

I've got to be honest, I was fully expecting this to be yet another "trust me bro, it's good I swear", but that was actually great.

I might actually give this show a watch now and I watch damn little TV.

Be prepared to give it a little investment; IMHO it doesn't get good until episode 3 and it doesn't get consistently good until episode 6. But the whole back half of the season makes the uneven start worth it.

The first couple episodes start a little slow but it definitely ramps into a very emotionally intense show, where on one hand the stakes are very low for a Star Wars series(no planets getting blown up, no last surviving Jedi is on the run), but on the other hand the stakes feel the highest they've ever been because the viewers know the later success of the Rebellion depends entirely on what happens with these early Rebels.

I don’t disagree that New Star Wars is pretty bad, but is it any worse than Marvel garbage, than Amazon’s Lord of the Rings, than the awful three Fantastic Beasts / Harry Potter movies, or than countless other recent bad genre fiction media? I don’t really think so.

That might have been a good argument, if all those other franchises haven't gone woke themselves.

that was ‘Kathleen Kennedy Disney Star Wars’.

Was it? Or did she finally let people who love Star Wars, and are still employed in Lucasfilm do their jobs?

Or did she finally let people who love Star Wars, and are still employed in Lucasfilm do their jobs?

Is there any way to tell? Look at her IMDB page, and sure she's produced some dreck recently, but she's also been a producer on some of the most beloved movies in history, not just Andor. (The most damning pattern I can see is that she was a producer for Indy 2,4, and 5 but was just listed as "associate" and "production executive" on 1 and 3...) But if she ruined Obi-Wan (somehow trampling over the objections of the other 5 executive producers) whereas she just let people do their jobs on Back to the Future (thanks to the other 2 executive producers) and Andor, what's the evidence for that?

There are 16 total producer credits on The Last Jedi, 10 on The Rise of Skywalker, and yet somehow they managed to create a trilogy that was a damn tug-of-war between incompatible-to-the-point-of-incoherency visions from each movie to the next. I don't see how that can be easily blamed on just one person. Maybe George Lucas pulled off the "flying by the seat of his pants" style of writing well enough that his successors actually didn't realize they needed a plan? Maybe the fact that audiences keep watching J.J. Abrams' "mystery box" setups expecting a decent resolution, like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, is the root failure? Oscar Isaac may be a great actor (his performance was such a pleasant surprise in Moon Knight...) but even he wasn't able to read the line "Somehow, Palpatine returned" without his face betraying that he was dying a little inside.

Saying anything along the lines of "The corporation wants/cares/etc about $foo" is always going to run into trouble. Individual people continuously fail to have coherent desires. Companies (at least, companies with 10+ people) are always going to be worse.

Here's what seems like a pretty sensible framing to me:

I'd be surprised if Bob Iger (or Mark Zuckerberg, or Sundar Pichai, etc.) were "true believers" in identity politics -- if nothing else, consider what Wikipedia has to say:

Iger has described himself as a political centrist, while he has publicly identified with the Democratic Party.

...

In 2016, Iger switched his party registration from Democratic to independent.[1]

(For full disclosure, Wikipedia also mentions

Iger considered running for president as a Democrat in the 2020 election, however ultimately decided against running.

though I don't think that's a good signal of whether he's woke).

At the same time this doesn't say very much about what their companies will or won't do. I'm sure there are woke decisions that get made to maximize revenue. Similarly there are woke decisions that get made because some random person in middle or upper management is a true believer and nobody wants to be "that guy" who says "no, we're not going to make the next main character a woman/black/etc.".

I still don't think it's meaningful to say Disney "really cares", since I'm still skeptical that the CEO and/or most of the employees care. At the same time I'm sure some percentage of employees are genuinely woke, including some of the leadership.

Personally I think that SBF summed it up the best if you want to hear what the people actually promulgating and implementing ESG think about it:

Kelsey Piper: so the ethics stuff - mostly a front? people will like you if you win and hate you if you lose and that's how it all really works?

Sam Bankman-Fried: yeah

SBF: I mean that's not all of it

SBF: but it's a lot

...

KP: you were really good at talking about ethics, for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers

SBF: ya

SBF: hehe

SBF: I had to be

SBF: it's what reputations are made of, to some extent

SBF: I feel bad for those who get f***** by it

SBF: by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths [sic] and so everyone likes us

I've only read one High Republic novel (Light of the Jedi). It wasn't particularly good, but it wasn't particular woke, either. It was fairly androgynous, though more in the sense of being sexless and sterilized (but hey, most of the characters are celibate monks, so what can you expect) rather than embracing the post-gender future.

Perhaps more damningly, it felt like bad Star Trek.

I've listened to a YouTuber reviewing some of the books, though I haven't read them myself. What leaps out to me is a near-complete lack of creative passion and vision. No one in the writer's room felt the burning desire to tell these stories with these characters. The whole project smacks of corporate quadrant marketing and revenue stream diversification - not authors writing stories, but committees assembling them from a word cloud.

I’ll summarize the link but you really should read it for yourself, it’s astounding how bad Disney gets the Star Wars franchise: for instance, the books need to be (in addition to all the old touchstones of diversity etc) ANTI WAR. And then there’s the characters, who are somehow all androgynous.

You know, the idiocy of Disney's "The Force is Female" push doesn't take a genius to figure out. I was talking to my wife about it, and I just asked:

"When we were kids, how many little boys did you know who liked Star Wars?"

"Tons."

"Did you know a single girl who liked Star Wars?"

"No."

It's the absolute height of fart huffing retardation to literally jettison your entire built in audience for an IP, and try to replace it with an audience that never cared about it one iota. Like I get the typical neoliberal line of "They're just trying to expand their market". Except now the experiment has been run, and they've wound up appealing to less people than before.

It was literally inconceivable to me, if you'd asked me 10 years ago, that I could stop loving Star Wars. I dragged my poor not-yet-wife to a midnight screen of The Force Awakens, well past her bed time. And she went with me because she knew how much it meant to me, god bless her.

And yet here I am. I fucking hate Star Wars now.

The ways they've seemingly purposely spit in the eye of every fan of the original Trilogy and EU is insane. Between turning all the legacy characters into beaten down pieces of shit, killing them off ignominiously and denying fans the reunions they desperately wanted. Putting aside all the glaring technical issues with the craftsmanship of the films, like poor writing, poor characterization, completely nonsensical plot contortions, etc. I forget where I heard it, but someone joked that all new Lucas Films are made for an audience of one, Kathleen Kennedy. Every film has to be about a stand in for how Kathleen Kennedy views herself, replacing a character that is a stand in for how Kathleen Kennedy views George Lucas. Once I heard that, suddenly it all made sense.

God I hope Disney sells it all back to Lucas at half the price.

My understanding is that the shift away from legacy fans was largely encouraged by economic incentives and has only lately been rationalized with politically-charged calls for diversity and inclusion. Essentially, legacy (read: stale pale male) fans were tapped out and unlikely to deliver the kinds of quarterly sales growth that investors were demanding. The allure of youthful demographics and especially women was simply too great to resist. If you weren't going to even try to capture that, you'd be swiftly replaced by someone who would. Star Wars might be foundering, but D&D has seen tremendous growth even as it has distanced itself from and even alienated many in its traditional audience.

My understanding is that the shift away from legacy fans was largely encouraged by economic incentives and has only lately been rationalized with politically-charged calls for diversity and inclusion.

Other way around. The shift away from legacy fans was desired for political reasons and then rationalized with dubious economic incentives.

What makes you think that George Lucas, a consummate progressive in every way, the man building a huge museum filled to the brim with progressive ideological messaging in Los Angeles, the man married to a lifelong activist for black female representation in business (and black women are America’s most politically progressive demographic), the man who funded an entire $60m progressive movie (which bombed) out of his own pocket after the studios refused to fund it, is in any way less progressive than Kathleen Kennedy?

Because absolutely nothing about Lucas’ person suggests that to me. George Lucas is about as progressive as Chesa Boudin. His first choice for his ‘museum of narrative art’ was, of course, San Francisco. And, also of course, he hand-picked Kennedy as his successor.

an entire $60m progressive movie (which bombed) out of his own pocket after the studios refused to fund it

Which was that? Strange Magic? Admittedly I'd never heard of it before going looking.

Redtails. I heard it was bad, but I really like war machines and thought "how bad could it be?"

unbelievably, cringe-inducingly awful, is the answer. I've seen worse movies, but not many.

Because he's old, and progressivism has been racing to the left faster than he can catch up.

For the purposes of business, ‘fan’ is someone who consooms a lot of product. The male autist who spends all day discussing deep lore on MawInstallation is not consooming a lot of product doing so. Disney is not making any money from him.

Most Star Wars fans I know who buy merch (Baby Yoda) are women. I would also guess that adult, childless Disney+ subscribers are highly disproportionately women.

This is a great point. I consider myself a huge Star Wars fan, but you just made me realize that if you don't count my half of a shared Disney+ subscription, I haven't spent a dime on anything Star Wars related in at least four years. Maybe I don't really have a claim to being the "core audience" anymore...

The male autist who spends all day discussing deep lore on MawInstallation is not consooming a lot of product doing so.

They used to. Who else do you think dozens of source books for a Star Wars RPG appeals to? Or dozens, if not hundreds, of books that take the canon seriously? If Disney cared at all about giving those people material they could meaningfully engage with, they'd lap it up like the paypigs they are. They certainly used to, and are more or less the only reason Star Wars had any cultural relevance 20 years after it first came out.

You know, the idiocy of Disney's "The Force is Female" push doesn't take a genius to figure out. I was talking to my wife about it, and I just asked:

"When we were kids, how many little boys did you know who liked Star Wars?"

"Tons."

"Did you know a single girl who liked Star Wars?"

"No."

It'd be nice to have some stats on this, and I'm not broadly in contact with teenage girls but interacting with the younger generation of women in my family (nieces and some considerably younger cousins) I was taken aback by the interest in "nerd culture". There was always a contingent of women into anime and they're into the cosplay scene a bit, but the rise of D&D youtube/podcasts seems to have gotten a couple of them playing 5th edition. The mainstreaming of nerd culture and a good representation of nerd IP like Dune means that a lot of them went out and gave Dune or Lord of the Rings a read even if none of them read the Silmarillion or the Dune sequels.

There was always a contingent of women into anime and they're into the cosplay scene a bit

It's just finding their niche as a large fish in a small foul fond. The quality of the men simping over them is abysmal, but the sheer quantity per one woman does translate into a quality of its own. I don't think I've ever seen female enjoyment of a hobby disentangled from social and status reasons.

Kids like wearing costumes. People who start cosplaying at like 11 or 12 because they like the costumes in the manga they read in the school library aren't in it to get simps.

It's difficult to fully disentangle any human behavior from social and status reasons, and anyone who has a hobby that's more popular with the opposite sex will have some dating advantages. Asserting women have no intrinsic enjoyment of hobbies is a misogynistic generalization.

Asserting women have no intrinsic enjoyment of hobbies is a misogynistic generalization.

I try very hard to bring my empathy for the opposite sex to the level they have for mine, thank you for noticing!

Low effort, not really an argument, excessively sarcistic

I'm pretty young, clearly younger than @WhiningCoil and probably younger than most people here. I know like maybe three actual Star Wars fans, as in, are genuinely fans of the series, read fanfiction and expanded universe books, name their pets after characters from the films, not just 'oh yeah I watched it when I was a kid, it's cool', and all of them are girls. There are also tens of thousands of pieces of Star Wars fanfiction on archiveofourown.org and I think probably 80% of it is written by women and girls. I did just make that number up, but it feels right and there's absolutely no way it's less than 50%.

Entirely possible, even likely, that this was not the case a few decades ago.

There are also tens of thousands of pieces of Star Wars fanfiction on archiveofourown.org and I think probably 80% of it is written by women and girls.

  1. This is distorted by the fact that most fanfiction period is written by women and girls, so it's not evidence of the gender ratio for the fandom itself.

  2. I wouldn't count "Anakin thinks it's a great idea to spend the day at an amusement park, also having something else up his sleeve. Confessing his love to Obi-Wan!" as being genuinely a fan of the series.

  3. The woke trend is clearly not what appeals to them about Star Wars. Look how few of them have Rey as a main character, for instance.

  4. Since many of the writers are kids, "I watched it as a kid" isn't ruled out. Are they still going to be fans come next year?

The point isn’t the proportion of fanfic writers but that there is a lot of SW fanfiction and the majority of it is written by women, so clearly there are a lot of female SW fans.

I don’t see how writing Anakin/Obi Wan fanfiction makes one not a real fan. Elsewhere you call it a superficial engagement with the series but I’m not sure what a non-superficial engagement with Star Wars looks like. SW is about the good guys beating the bad guys with lasers, it’s not exactly Tolstoy.

Also, I think you picked the least ‘Star Wars-y’ story on the front page of Ao3 as an example.

I don’t see how writing Anakin/Obi Wan fanfiction makes one not a real fan. Elsewhere you call it a superficial engagement with the series but I’m not sure what a non-superficial engagement with Star Wars looks like. SW is about the good guys beating the bad guys with lasers, it’s not exactly Tolstoy.

Star Wars also isn't about hot young men having romantic relationships with each other. For most of the fanfiction that's being talked about here, someone who enjoys such fanfiction might be equivalent to someone who produces or consumes a porn parody featuring actors who look like Carrie Fischer or Mark Hamill boning each other while wearing costumes while being on sets that look like Star Wars. Producing or enjoying such films doesn't preclude one from being a "real" Star Wars fan for whatever "real" means (or more broadly fan of any particular franchise, with Star Wars just being the example here), but it's also not what I'd consider a particularly meaningful indication of being one, either. Particularly if it's their primary interaction with the Star Wars franchise - it's impossible to know how much this applies to fans of Star Wars fanfiction, though, of course.

Elsewhere in the thread people have talked about the SW fandom as people who play X-wing flight simulators or game out whether this or that piece of fictional tech would beat this or that piece of fictional tech. This sort of hard, numbers-crunching stuff may be more masculine-coded, but it isn't really any more Star Wars than writing about Luke and Han Solo making out. SW isn't a hard sci-fi pseudo documentary about Imperial military hardware. Nobody would have gone to see that movie. Lucas and his crew didn't put a fraction of the thought that 90s teenagers did into the actual mechanics of an AT-AT or the military doctrine of the 501st Legion. All that matters is that the empire are scary bad guys with big scary weapons. The fans have made that stuff up, as much as the fans have made up romances between Anakin and Obi Wan.

I'd argue that since space battles are a central theme to Star Wars while romantic or sexual relationships are, at best, tangential, that there's actually something more Star Wars about obsessing about power levels of fictional space fighter tech than about writing slash fiction of 2 or more of its characters. That said, indeed Star Wars isn't hard scifi, and I'd also argue that delving into the hard scifi aspects that it does have isn't automatically a meaningful indicator of being a "real" fan for whatever "real" means. If there were some massively popular website that hosted millions of fictional diagrams and spec sheets of fictional tech from thousands of fictional franchises, which catered to people who get great enjoyment out of seeing carefully laid out diagrams and pictures of screws and circuit boards and tables of numbers, then I'd argue that the being a consumer of Star Wars content in such a website doesn't meaningfully indicate being a Star Wars fan; rather, it'd be a greater indication of being a diagram fan. It could be either for any individual case, of course, and whatever website like this might exist, there isn't nearly the same volume of fans of fictional diagrams as fans of slash fiction, and as such the route that almost everyone will follow that ends with them obsessing over X-Wing fuel tanks or whatever is through being fans of Star Wars itself. The world of fanfiction, like with porn parodies, lends itself better to people who enjoy the genre of fanwork for its intrinsic qualities, with the specific franchise being spice that adds extra flavoring.

My impression w/r/t fanfiction is that it runs kinda "orthogonally" to being a fan of a specific franchise: people doing it are fans of a specific modes of expression and specific story tropes, and they move across franchises an communities squashing the characters as they're actually written into their preferred archetypes, AUs and story beats. (As opposed, in the other extreme, to an obsessive curator on a spectrum who spend time cataloguing all eleventy gazillion kinds of spaceships that appeared tn the screen for 5 seconds in one episode in 1974.)

The publishing model of contemporary "young adult" book series and netflix shows seems to cater to such audience. I see it on my sister-in-law's tumblr - every other month there are new gifs with a new cast of completely interchangeable Blorbos, and the show inevitable won't be renewed for the 3rd season, but it doesn't matter, the viewers did their share of shipping and moved on. These days the viewers/readers don't even have to hallucinate homosexuality like they did in the case of Kirk, Frodo or Steve Rogers - the shows come with the batteries included, so to say.

I don't know if I agree with this. Now it's true that people who write fanfiction for one thing probably also like other things, and if they're the type of person who likes to write and read fanfiction then they will probably also write and read fanfiction about the other things they like, but that doesn't make them fans of fanfiction rather than fans of those particular stories. Obviously it varies from person to person, and some people have a deeper attachment than others, but my experience is that people who write fanfiction do it because they genuinely love the story and the characters, they've seen all the episodes/movies several times, they want to see those characters in new situations. Some people just move on when the show doesn't get renewed, but some people complain about the cancellation for months and years and keep watching the old episodes over and over.

My impression w/r/t fanfiction is that it runs kinda "orthogonally" to being a fan of a specific franchise: people doing it are fans of a specific modes of expression and specific story tropes, and they move across franchises an communities squashing the characters as they're actually written into their preferred archetypes, AUs and story beats.

That probably heavily depends on the type of fanfiction, and that depends on the audience and the series.

I actually write for Worm, which as fanfiction is very unusual. It has a majority male fandom doing the writing and even though there's a noncanon (female) gay couple that appears in a lot of fanfic, I've never seen a fic which is mainly based around shipping them.

Out of curiosity, what is the general direction/thrust of Worm fanfic?

  • "author did it wrong, I'll fix it"?

  • "explore another character's perspective"

  • "I just want to play with these toys some more"?

Recommend any high quality ones?

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I wouldn't count "Anakin thinks it's a great idea to spend the day at an amusement park, also having something else up his sleeve. Confessing his love to Obi-Wan!" as being genuinely a fan of the series.

Why not?

Granted it's not absolute proof that someone is a "real" fan of the series - they could just be using the characters without knowing much about the wider series itself - but it certainly doesn't count against them being a real fan either. In general I'd say that writing fanfic about a series does count as evidence for being a fan of the series.

Why not?

Because it's inherently engaging with the series on a very superficial level.

Is it possible that they're a fan of the series anyway? Sure, but it's not the way to bet.

The girls who write that stuff have pored over thousands of Star Wars Wiki articles, watched every show and movie and combed through comics and books to get even the most obscure incidental backstory elements of their fanfic correct.

There's a spectrum. On the other end of that spectrum are those who put generic yaoi characters into SW skinsuits.

It happens with straight porn writing too and I don't assume that gay porn fics are any better about it.

Because it's inherently engaging with the series on a very superficial level.

I'd say if you're at the point of writing fan fiction about a setting you're past the point of being "superficially" a fan of something.

A fan is not defined by how much they "get" their chosen obsession, it is defined by the level of enthusiasm/passion for it.

Being moved to write gay fanfiction that completely misses the point of the setting makes someone as much a fan as a person that memorises pointless trivia (who also misses the point of the setting, but in a male way rather than a female way).

Are they fans of Star Wars or are they fans of romance between attractive famous male actors that take place in an exotic setting? Star Wars, or any other IP, may be the vehicle here, rather than the object.

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See my other comment - I'd say that they are not superficial, but fanfic writers engage "across" the media, not "with" the media.

I wouldn't count "Anakin thinks it's a great idea to spend the day at an amusement park, also having something else up his sleeve. Confessing his love to Obi-Wan!" as being genuinely a fan of the series.

They are now. Which is why I'm not.

Back in my day, Star Wars fans played the West End Games version of the Star Wars RPG, the miniatures game, and fantasized over the source books. The latest and greatest Star Wars video games were X-Wing and Tie Fighter, which were super nerdy and demanding flight sims. Dark Forces had just come out too, and was super heavily teen boy coded. It was a 90's FPS after all.

That was the fandom.

Funnily enough, all the source material written for West End Games Star Wars RPG was sent to Zahn, and he used it to bootstrap his Thrawn trilogy.

So yeah, there was no "slash fiction". A lot of the creativity of the young fans I interacted with as a young fan myself was spent coming up with RPG ideas, sharing Star Wars total conversion WADs for Doom, using the source books to try to game out if a Wampa could defeat an AT-ST walker, etc. Or, since nobody had read all the EU fiction because there were no online book stores, or ebooks, or even a wikipedia of what all the EU books even were, we'd hear tales of this or that awesome droid or alien from the random jumble of EU books our parents had haphazardly found on a shelf for one of us.

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Young men are more into computers and video games, where there is much less female interest although there is some.

Latest scientific studies indicate that the share of gaming consoles owned by women (PDF, page 9) ranges from 42% to 52%. If companies take such data seriously, it seems reasonable that they would alter their artistic products for this seemingly new demographic.

I would like to read that study in detail, but lets say a large amount of switch are purchased and played by women. Does it really make sense for game company to change strategy for the new release of fps/stategy/rpg game to appease (seemingly large) audience that just bought nintendo switch to play Animal Crossing 24/7?

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Most core WoW players (ie players who subscribe permanently rather than only for expansions, and who play many hours a week) don’t raid. Many levels alts, collect outfits/play Barbie, farm old instances for rare mounts, socialize, play minigames, do PvP or mythic dungeons, participate in the endgame single player treadmill (ie world quests or whatever they’re called now) etc etc.

who plays WoW but is far from a core player of that game (she never raids)

MMOs used to and still can have large female audiences. Pre-WoW days it was more common but you still see it in places that are more virtual worlds rather than focused on gear/grind/raids. Raiding especially the WoW flavor of it heavily gamified and tuned for a particular experience was a quirk of development/guild/recruiting interaction. Community content, roleplay, player housing/customization, cosmetics tend to be less of a boys club. FF14 is sometimes called an rpgmmo and seems like it has a much more balanced ratio.

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Interestingly, I feel like game studios have not been as catastrophically bad about this as hollywood. Generally the "audience shifting" controversies are pretty mild and course corrected quickly compared to Star Wars, Ghostbusters etc. It's funny because it seems like this whole thing got started with GamerGate but overall the big studios never totally lost their head, and I think nothing nearly as devastating as new Star Wars has happened to any IP. EA is the one company that I think has made the most missteps, but they were voted the worst company in the world so what do you expect.

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Latest scientific studies indicate that the share of gaming consoles owned by women (PDF, page 9) ranges from 42% to 52%.

I checked that PDF link and the data was 86% male which completely contradicts what you claimed.

Not sure if that was your point and you were trying to set up a contrast between "the science" and Nintendo's actual sales figures, but if so that didn't come through in the post.

Methodology: Circana conducts a monthly survey of US active gamers over the age of 13. Surveys are fielded online, via PC and mobile devices, drawing from a nationally representative pool.

Respondents qualify on the basis of having played games in the past month (30 days).

To ensure consistency across samples and correct for any biases/errors, Circana implements a weighting system for each monthly dataset based on representative distributions of platform use and platform investment.

This is quite consistent with them forcing the survey to be 50% female.

The mainstreaming of nerd culture and a good representation of nerd IP like Dune means that a lot of them went out and gave Dune or Lord of the Rings a read even if none of them read the Silmarillion or the Dune sequels.

When they read such things, did they like them?

With enough pressure, you can attract audiences to lots of things that they don't like... once. Then they try them, decide they don't like them, and go away.

They liked them but didn't obsess over them, but the Tolkein legendarium became a sort of quasi sacred text for a generation of nerds and it doesn't feel like it is on that level of significance to them. The movies they're pretty obsessed with, and Harry Potter and animes I don't keep track of are pretty big with them.

I actually think the gender split is how the ideologues convinced the capitalists to buy into the change in direction. If you already dominate 50% of the market with the boys then the best path for growth could be to go after the girls. Obviously the risk with this is you don’t get the girls and alienate the boys. Bud light is the best recent example of this strategy backfiring spectacularly.

Bud light was trying to sell to the underage drinking market that they already did ok in for it being a declining market, though. Not quite the same thing.

Bud light was trying to expand their market away from just “fratty white guys” to include progressive younger drinkers who might be drinking white claws (or god forbid not drinking at all) instead of mass market beer.

Perhaps that strategy was claimed to be what Bud Light was after to placate a few ABInbev dinosaurs. But everything since has confirmed that the real strategy was (and IS) not to widen their customer base but to replace it. Unfortunately their old customer base realized they were obsolete before the new one was ready, but that's often the way things go.

Even though I agree that it was done for ideological reasons, I don’t think there was any intention to “replace” the customer base by the marketing executives, they’re not complete imbeciles in that specific way. They wanted to maintain the ‘legacy’ audience (and I guarantee that word was used) while attracting other people.

They're not imbeciles, but like the Admiral executives in Mad Men, they don't want to sell to those people.

I know people who used to work in video game marketing. The general idea was the fans will buy anything with halo (or whatever) on the box; So marketing to girls will only have upside.

Why try to make the star wars fan happy? They're going to wait in line to buy a ticket/product anyway. Trying to appeal to a new demographic can only increase sales.

What's funny to me is that; When the sales didn't increase, they blamed the fans.

Object lesson: blizzard entertainment.

“You guys have phones, right?”

... context?

A couple years back, Blizzard teased that they'd be announcing a new diablo game at Blizzcon, something like a decade after the release of diablo III. Fans were extremely excited, slavering for a new entry in the series. So they get up on stage and announce a new diablo game... for phones. It's a mobile game. One of the fans comes up to the microphone and asks if this is actually an april fool's joke or something. The Devs start laughing sorta nervously, and one of them asks the audience "you guys have phones, right?", as though that's the problem people are having.

It did not go over well.

Has Diablo Immortal ended as profitable product?

They made an absolutely absurd amount of money off it, billions at least. I'd say they also "damaged their brand", but people are still buying diablo IV, and honestly Immortal probably will make more money in any case. If your question is "was this a bad decision, in a strictly monetary sense", almost certainly not.

"Billions" seemed implausible to me, but looking it up, I see numbers from 300M to 750M. Absolutely insane.

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I've worked in Sports betting marketing, and it's very much a similar thing. Women, largely, do not punt on sports. That is essentially an unalterable physical law of the universe, and yet I've seen a series of hare-brained schemes to 'double the market'

Women, largely, do not punt on sports. That is essentially an unalterable physical law of the universe

Should go the torches of freedom route... Make betting on sports a feminist act.

Women like social standing competitions and people and relation things. Find a way to incorporate social status signaling into your betting games or whatever and you'll get that audience.

And yet here I am. I fucking hate Star Wars now.

I can't quite hate Star Trek, it meant too much to me for too long, but I'm at the same point now with it. I thought Enterprise was awful and bailed on it about midway into the second season. I had no idea how awful they could go. Disco. Oh dear God, DISCOVERY. The epitome of "girlboss" and stupid crap. So effin' stupid, they had to introduce the Mirror Universe from the start in the first season. You don't do that! You wait a couple of seasons so you have your original characters established and familiar to the audience, then go Mirror!

They went so bad they had to drag Spock and then Pike in to save the thing, even though their initial boasting was that this would be all new Trek with no old favourites. But I couldn't even make it past the pilot episode, I hated Michael so much.

So I haven't watched anything since, no matter how good the reviews: not Lower Decks, not Picard, not Strange New Worlds, nuffin'. And I'm someone who, as a seven year old, cut out a picture of Spock from a magazine and brought it into school.

Our tastes are probably different and I sort of liked Enterprise. You should really give Strange New Worlds a spin, Picard is god awful, except the 3rd season which is somewhat manageable. Discovery is a crime against humanity and Lower Decks is fine-ish.

Oh, I wanted to like Enterprise so badly. I saw they cast Scott Bakula as Archer and I was "yippee! a good actor with a broad range who can do emotional and quiet scenes!"

I should have known from the title theme music it would go badly.

The sexy Vulcan. Writing it into canon that no, this is not a terrible joke, Vulcans do think Humans are literally stinky and smell bad. Archer's balanced set of chips on both shoulders. The Vulcans being the bad guys always (apart from Sexy Vulcan). The de-contamination gel scene (oh God, the dreadful attempts to be raunchy yet censor-friendly, the joke about the prostitute that was straight up lifted from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). That bloody beagle and Archer willing to smash the Prime Directive into pieces and start an interplanetary diplomatic incident because he couldn't keep his damn dog on a leash and a race of beings who had never even seen a dog before had no idea how to treat it. Trip and his 'aw shucks' Good Ole Boy schtick. I liked Malcolm and that was the only thing really I did like. Doctor Phlox who is as funny as toothache and can't they just get a first aid kit instead? Then they had to turn Archer into Action Hero Kick-ass Archer with the time travel arc and I waved bye-bye and never went back, even as people said "no, it does get better in later seasons!"

I watched most of Season one of Strange New Worlds. It's bad. Mostly in that it contradicts original Star Trek while depending on it -- no, Spock and Christine Chapel and Uhura are NOT those characters, nor will those characters plausibly become the ones we see later (well, MAYBE Uhura, but I don't think so). Also in the TOS Season 3 sense of "Boy is this a stupid problem, and why are all those smart people carrying the idiot ball around?". Also borrowing some elements from "The Orville" doesn't help. Annoying wokeness is there too, but not the worst of the problems.

I particularly despise the “quippy” dialogue of Strange New Worlds.

I think it's a mistake to analyze this so broadly, the people making decisions based on money and the people making decisions based on ideology are not the same, despite both being part of this conglomerate called Disney.

You can't conclude woke capital cares more about woke than capital from the sole observation of it's inability to pander to it's ennemies. What Disney really wants isn't for grognards like me to buy their shitty Tumblr version of the old republic. What they want is for me to go away and for the mythical broader audience to replace me as a customer so they can escape being a niche product and become some broad appeal product.

This is the political formula of this alliance. All that you're noticing here is that it isn't working. But this won't lead to change unless two things are true: the capital faction still has enough power to challenge the ideological faction and they notice and care about the loss enough that they're willing to dissolve the alliance.

The former I don't really know, the latter I'm fairly confident will not happen.

I've commented on this before. I work for a company that's core market is pure Red Tribe. Our headquarters is in a very red state, pre-Trump I am confident that vast majority of executives voted Republican. Execs bought the bailey of wokeness hook, line, and sinker. Wokeness is just being a good moral person and taking action against evil. There is real, malicious racism in much of society and we all have problematic unconscious bias. Fascism is on the rise, we need to take to heart the lessons of World War 2 and never let it happen again. Pride is about not torturing people to death, DEI is not not hiring someone because they are black, or not trying to sleep with a subordinate. They got confused when our pride line went over like a lead balloon, or we host events at organizations that teach CRT. Now think how it all goes at corps where the execs were Democrats or even progressives before Trump's presidency.

or not trying to sleep with a subordinate

One of the reasons I gave up on any career is the realization that no amount of status will compensate for my enormous unattractiveness. If one can't screw young pretty interns, why even bother doing even the bare minimum?

If one can't screw young pretty interns, why even bother doing even the bare minimum?

I'm sure you can think of a couple reasons.

I actually can't. I have no rent or mortgage and I provably can survive on ramen and cheap vodka. I'm against travel on ideological grounds. Entertainment can be pirated. Any other I'm missing?

Any idea what you want out of life?

What could you do to be happy 20 years from now with how the last 20 years have been spent?

20 years from now I'm dead. Even 2 seem dicey. And I'm not going to spend them working more than the barest minimum if I can't even get hot sex from it.

Whatever ideology it is you care so much about could use a competent champion. To be honest you don't seem like a very happy person to me. If you don't know what it is that will make you happy, giving up and refusing to even search for it hardly seems like the solution.

Going against the juggernaut of an ideology that is progressivism/woke/whatever you want to call it? No thanks. It can make transnational corporations jump. (As an aside, I wish we lived in a cyberpunk world, that'd be an improvement.) I'm deeply unhappy, that's an astute observation. The world is rapidly going to shit, people en masse are espousing something that to me sounds profoundly insane, and something or other is going to kill me soon.

All you do by giving up is guarantee that nothing will change. Pick something small to work on and I'm confident you'll be happier and more satisfied with your life, even if that thing has nothing to do with status or money.

This forum is not a personal blog, but we're low and deep enough by now. There is a feature usually only seen in books and games that I've always wanted in my home. After boozing enough over the course of a week or two I implemented that home “improvement” project. The satisfaction afterwards? Less than an hour total, there are some bottles and some porn I've thought back to for longer by now.

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I don't think the interns were put there as a last-ditch motivation attempt for otherwise-NEETs.

No, of course not, they're there for the dirty old men (and women today I suppose) in management.

Are you uglier than Weinstein?

Ok, you got me there, no amount of status I can achieve without breaking into the upper strata, which requires more politics than straightforward work, with that being something we all motte autists are ill-equipped for. You in particular should know the importance of the right location of a summer house.

Because there are plenty of women who are not young pretty interns who are attracted to money and status.

I’ve sometimes heard that the left wing takeover of corporate America is a hollow one - they don’t REALLY cars about minorities, just look at umm their Middle East twitter accounts! They care about $$$ and aren’t true believers

The whole thing about the corporations not really caring about these ideologies but are just mouthing the words is what always struck me as hollow. Given that their actions and words are indistinguishable from that of a true believer, why does it matter the true content of their heart of hearts? In terms of consequential actions and decisions, they might as well be true believers, and that's really what matters.

In terms of the actual question of whether they really are or aren't, I think one can make the case that they really are true believers who are willing to sacrifice $ for ideology, but I think it's also likely that they care about $ but are mistaken about how effective the ideology would be for getting them more $. Where things can get messy is that the ideology itself also posits that following the ideology is a route towards more $ and all the other backwards companies that haven't bought into the ideology are leaving $ on the table (implying those backwards companies are the ones prioritizing their status-quo/"regressive"/"conservative" ideology in favor of $). So it could be that they're true believers who got fooled into believing that this was how to make $, or they're profit-hungry cynical capitalists who were misled by the ideology's claims that it will bring in $.

Obviously, any set of decision makers in a large company like Disney is likely to have plenty of both. What's notable is that there seem to have been no decision maker (with enough power, anyway) who was enough of a cynical profit maximizer to actually properly analyze the ideology's claims of profitability and to put a stop to this kind of ideology-prioritizing behavior. I think the way the ideology discourages skepticism and critical analysis of its claims - in fact, encouraging the coercive suppression of such things - could have played a part in the lack of such decision makers being present or being emboldened enough to push back.

why does it matter the true content of their heart of hearts?

Chance of it dying down naturally without direct action of economic or physical nature.

Well, Budweiser has suddenly rediscovered patriotism.

What's notable is that there seem to have been no decision maker (with enough power, anyway) who was enough of a cynical profit maximizer to actually properly analyze the ideology's claims of profitability and to put a stop to this kind of ideology-prioritizing behavior.

Anyone that's much of a profit maximizer is maximizing their own profit. And it may very well be that defecting from the woke pattern would be detrimental to their own pay, rather than the corporation itself. It really depends on the internal politics of the organization, and if political rivals can use that defection against them.


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