domain:nfinf.substack.com
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
8m ago
My dream video game is to get a Final Fantasy VII remake which is actually good. :(
Actually, this is why I'm hoping AI gets good enough to build complex software. I can never build something like that myself (I can program but I can't do music, 3D modeling, etc), but it would be neat if I can have AI build something like that for me someday.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
10m ago
The problem is that States are also extremely risk averse, and therefore terrible as shareholders in anything that requires flexibility and innovation.
Semiconductors are hard because you need levels of investment similar to large civil projects and that flexibility to be successful.
However USG is uniquely good at throwing money at zany things for long term strategic gains as States go, so maybe it will work out .
If in the future politicians start telling you we need to use the dividends of this ownership for social programs, that's your signal that Intel will become irrelevant.
KingOfTheBailey
15m ago
@self_made_human's recent posts about the pretty-but-dim model from this week's thread are a sad counterexample. You might get no shortage of men wanting to sleep with you, but it was the social technology of enforced monogamy that made them commit. Identifying who will stick is a prerequisite to choosing a suitor, and seems like a much harder question.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
19m ago
IMO these companies would benefit from having shareholders with very long-term focused horizons like governments.
It's not too unusual in Europe for strategic companies like Airbus and VW to have this.
KingOfTheBailey
19m ago
The show bible for My Little Pony is on archive.org, and it has some interesting things to say about how they positioned the world. It's also from 2009 so it predates the woke spillover:
What does it take to make someone fall in love with a brand? What makes a series of stories you heard in your childhood memorable for you entire life, so much so that you want to share them with your children once you become an adult? Think of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter. These brands settle into the hearts and memories of their audience and remain there. Why? These brands are worlds. The possibilities within these worlds are vast, yet there is a defined logic and structure to these alternate realities, making them highly believable. Moving more inwardly, these worlds have limitless lands where limitless types of beings and characters can live in them. You see, it is not just the world that the audience loves, but mostly the characters that live within them and the different, yet somehow similar trials they must face in their lives.
This approach has been utilized for countless intellectual properties, including Transformers and G.I. Joe, with much success, but has fallen short when attempted with girl properties. Perhaps this is because the softer gentler nature of girl properties felt limiting to those who would try. And all too often the worlds created for girl properties are left vague, ambiguous and generic. But I do not think this has to be so. A girl world can be set up the in the same manner, it is the intentions that must be different.
Rather than set the stage for epic, dramatic adventure stories like the examples above, a girl world should set the stage for friendship, heart and laughter as well as adventure--- adventure that is more fun and exciting than dramatic and epic, but adventure nonetheless. With only that alternate intention, the same strong history, mythology, back story and even the alternate logic and physics of an alternate world will serve the same purpose to endear you to the characters and make the stories memorable.
This sounds right to me, though the contrast between the corpospeak and the graphic design is certainly pretty jarring. I never watched it (not even when it was big), but there's a richness to the detail of the world and characters. Contrary to modern female character design, every character page has a "bad points" section as long as her "good points" section, and this is probably one of the reasons it had such a strong following in its heyday. Characters' bad points cause conflicts or avoidable problems, creating room for the ponies' good points to shine and resolve them.
The target audience was very carefully designed, and they knew they were targeting boys too (given the bronies of the 2010s, perhaps it worked a little too well). Some cut-down quotes from p65, if you want to read it in detail:
- Girls (6–11): My Little Pony offers 2 elements that are very important and popular to girls: relationships and fantasy. (Snipped much more from this point.)
- Preschool (3–6): The ponies are cute. Preschoolers own ponies. The stories and morals within are nice enough for parents. Little kids want to watch big kid stuff. They'll watch.
- Boys (believe it or not): They won't admit it, but they'll watch. When their sister’s watching it, they'll balk and act like it’s dumb, then they'll sit down and watch it. For the same reason Moms will find My Little Pony interesting enough to happily share with their daughters, the compelling conflicts, the strong characterizations, the silly humor and (most importantly for boys) the ADVENTURE, the boys will watch, too. Really
- Moms: We've got a few good points going for us when it comes to Moms. First, the original buyers of My Little Ponies are in their late twenties to mid-thirties and are likely to have daughters within the target age range, 3-11. Bringing back elements of the original ponies from the 80's ... will nurture a sense of nostalgia, something that is not difficult to do with Gen-Xers. Second, compelling storylines (ie: truly engaging conflicts, both external adventure and internal relationships,) characters with depth and complexity, clever and silly humor that doesn’t talk down to kids and even a few jokes that might go over the kids’ heads will all engage Mom enough that watching My Little Pony will become a fun thing for Mom to do with her daughter. Not only will Mom be sharing her favorite childhood toy with her little girl, but she may actually enjoy watching, too!
While MLP was a breakout exception, it's an existence proof that the suits used to know how to make girl shows that that boys could watch. But all we have now are the corpses of old franchises going to resyk to be turned into slop. Why haven't we seen other major media cater to girls-but-also-boys in this way, instead of the torrent of flawless mean-spirited girlbosses that we did get?
DiscourseMagnus
31m ago
There are so many layers of doublethink about it, but like many other bits of feminist media criticism, "men writing women" complaints are fundamentally horror at the thought that a man might ever have sexual thoughts about a woman without permission (both her permission and the permission of You, The Female Observer). Any realism concerns are a fig leaf. All of this is trivially revealed, say, when women make a "men writing women" complaint and are then embarrassed to discover that the writer was a woman writing for women about her real nigh-universal woman experiences which they already knew they shared when making the complaint.
Closely related: women policing "unrealistically" attractive female characters as a crude disguise for envy that they're prettier than them.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
36m ago
It's kino. Best show in years. Never mind best starwars show.
Take it from an old expanded universe grognard.
Quantumfreakonomics
41m ago
You’re overestimating the effect weight has on a woman’s desirability. The most unattractive aspects of the median secular modern woman are tattoos and piercings, which are things she had to actively do to herself.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
42m ago
No, there is a female version of the hero's journey. It is not quite the same, notably the struggle tends to be more internal, but it exists.
Women have recurring mythic structures based on their own experiences too.
The recent feminist attempts to associate a queer style rejection of all structure and in particular of the causality structure of storytelling is not a woman thing, it is a feminist thing. And it's not even really that popular in its own circles.
Labyrinth starring David Bowie.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman starring Jane Seymour.
Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth.
There are plenty of high quality stories exploring the feminine side of the human condition. They're just a bit hard to find because you have to dig past the propaganda lists of explicitly ideologically feminist works. Not that those are necessarily bad, but they do hog the spotlight to a pretty insane degree.
Dream game recently has been something I've thought about making.
A mix between the Wuxia genre and the Heroes of Might and Magic overworld mechanics. Instead of controlling a civilization and multiple heroes. Its just one hero, or not really a hero, but a cultivator. The cultivator you control is trying to advance in realms. An end goal of true immortality and full unkillability. Massive world to explore.
Thoughts on fun/cool features:
I just have this feeling that the lore of such a game could be like Dwarf Fortress adventure mode. A kind of cool organic story telling. I've thought about making the game as a dwarf fortress mod rather than its own standalone thing.
Its one of those true dream game ideas where it just keeps growing way out of proportion and obviously its a pipe dream cuz I just keep stuffing so many features in it. I likely wouldn't even be able to enjoy it that much if I made it, because someone would have to know the secrets. But part of me wants to find a way to use AI in the creation of it, and have it modable enough that I could build the system of the game, and then just input an AI mod folder that makes everything new and fresh for me.
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