domain:web.law.duke.edu
Tenaz
19hr ago
"Going for a run, he showers off the sweat" is no more correct, so it's not really about the tense here. "Going for a run, he listens to music" is only very slightly better. The issue isn't actually that the latter action has to take place during the former; it's that "going for a run" is actually a description of a static event, describing the start of the run.
So I'd say that "going for a run, he stepped out the door" is actually more correct than either of the other two, and also more in-line with the original example. It's an odd case where the sentence structure only works if the latter action is somewhat taken while the start of the former action is happening.
"Starting his run, he stepped out the door" is best of all. Or "Following the man, he stepped through the door behind him." In both cases the former action sort of describes and informs the latter but is also an action in its own right. I'd argue this is precisely what's happening in the sentence you described too. "Hefting" isn't actually separate from swinging the mace; it's a description that informs the swinging of the mace, similar to "Using all his strength, he swung the mace."
I don't know that it's about wanting to make franchises appeal to women over men, even if Kathleen Kennedy liked implying this. I think Disney just has serious cultural problems with telling stories that men like.
In contrast to you, I think the ideological reason is very important here - it's not the only problem, but ignoring it brushes over a big part of the picture.
I doubt their explicit goal was to alienate men, but there's an exceptionally female-biased undercurrent behind a lot of Disney's decisions that can't be ignored - see: Star Wars, She-Hulk, Captain Marvel, etc. They certainly believed they were regressive franchises that alienated women due to their supposed focus on male characters and upheld harmful stereotypes by failing to depict strong female heroes the way they wanted. As such they were very intent on portraying "powerful and strong women", and creating storylines which preached to men about their supposed privilege and shoved women in their faces which were ostensibly supposed to be admirable but just ended up being odious. Hell they placed ideological messages in media for female audiences too - see: the Snow White reboot. But these narratives are particularly repulsive to men due to the consistent portrayal of them as incompetent, oppressors, or dutiful little allies whose only role within the story is to lift up the strong female Mary Sue. They chose to belittle their male audience instead of appeal to them. You get what you deserve.
I think what happened here is that once they acquired Star Wars and Marvel properties, many of the creatives behind the scenes saw the opportunity created by the fact that these were primarily male-dominated IPs which they could use to incalculate the existing male fanbase into feminism while bringing in a fresh crop of female viewers. They assumed they had a lock on the existing fanbase due to their significant legacy power. When that didn't succeed, and their audience then went on to complain about the fact that they were being forcibly shut out of cultural properties that they were patrons of in the beginning, the answer was always to double down with something along the lines of "If you're not progressive enough to get with the times, you deserve to be alienated. How sad for you to live in a world where men aren't catered to all the time, you misogynist". Then the original audience left and Disney panicked. In practice, they did in fact "alienate them by pandering to girls", and some of that was intentional on Disney's end.
What really gets me is that Disney is actually capable of creating pieces of media that are worth watching if they didn't prioritise progressivism over actually good storytelling (in practice, this does end up being a tradeoff; if you prioritise irrelevant metrics of success, that will sometimes come at the cost of other considerations, especially when it means your main female character might need to fail and be very imperfect in order to be a realistic and relatable character). Andor is a sterling example of this, with a grounded premise, nuanced character writing and believable portrayals of the banal nature of evil that resonated with mostly everyone. Disney's not entirely incompetent and are actually capable of creating properties that cater to the original fanbase, they have just chosen not to in favour of other considerations due to heavy ideological capture.
Until they learn to stop doing this and openly issue a grovelling apology for the last decade, I hope they keep losing their male audience. Vote with your feet.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
20hr ago
Hmmm, street walking, were you? (Scribbles note)
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
20hr ago
What's strange is I've known many women who are into Star Wars. It's basically a tentpole franchise, at least before Disney bought it. My mom loves Star Wars -- even was on Star Wars fan forums back in the 2000s. I almost dated a girl back in high school who was really into me; I met her in school, and we flirted (to really date myself) at a Star Wars premiere, which she was really excited to go to. I don't think Disney needed any help making Star Wars appealing to women.
I don't know that it's about wanting to make franchises appeal to women over men, even if Kathleen Kennedy liked implying this. I think Disney just has serious cultural problems with telling stories that men like. Too many creative leaders at the company have spent too long telling stories that women like, that they don't have experience telling stories that men do. This applies to their parks as well: long before lightsabers were the hot Disneyland souvenir, Davy Crockett coonskin hats were the big seller in the 1950s. Walt Disney was a man who loved cowboys-and-indians stories and trains: Disney was a children's brand, not a girls' brand. There are plenty of heterosexual male fans of theme parks, but show me a straight man who likes EPCOT and I will show you a man who is incredibly angry at the Disney company. They took a park about science, technology, and cultural awareness -- a "permanent world's fair", as it was described -- and turned it into a place to get drunk and ride rollercoasters.
Once upon a time, Disneyland was a place about exploring the frontier, riding canoes, riding on a train, riding on a space-age train, there was a show where they simulated going to space on a rocket... the Disneyland of the 1950s and 60s was a respectable place for a little boy to be into. But more and more Disney's parks feel like places for little girls to wear dresses, women to go on a "girls' trip", and gay men to be Disney adults. They've lost touch with what boys are into, and have gotten stuck in a rut of being a "girl's place." I genuinely blame the introduction of the Disney princess dress -- which, surprisingly, dates back only to the late 90s -- as the beginning of Disney as a brand being wildly associated with girls and not boys. (Disney Channel basically being "dumb sitcoms for preteen girls" probably didn't help.)
That said, I don't believe girl-power storylines are the problem with Marvel. I also don't think it's "franchise fatigue." I think the problem with Marvel is that the early MCU films had a kind of grounding in the real world: Iron Man had war on terror connections (and got worse over time), Thor was relatively grounded and intimate for a story about a norse god and at least had the real-world mythology connection, Captain America had the historical fiction angle and the connection to fighting pseudo-Nazis (which they later handwaived away as villains because ???). Avengers feels realistic compared to what comes out of Marvel these days.
Guardians of the Galaxy was wildly successful, but I guess I'm in the minority who didn't like the first film and preferred the second, and especially the third. I actually fell asleep at the theater watching the first Guardians, the only time I've ever done that. Marvel seriously overreacted to that success, and took everything in a cosmic, ungrounded, fantastical direction. The early Avengers films earned their cosmic dimensions. The recent films ask viewers to accept a lot of wild and unbelievable stuff without earning it. Time travel! Multiverse! Alligator Loki! Wanda creating an entire fictional town! Apparently Kang (and Loki?) has the ability to CONTROL ALL OF TIME now? Or he did, because Kang is no more.
Really, the problem with Marvel is that they're running into the limits of comic book stories trying to reach general audiences. I don't read a lot of comic books, and generally don't care for superheroes. But I liked Iron Man 1; it didn't feel like a comic book story. It felt grounded and human, and was more like a science fiction film than a comic book movie. The real problem with Marvel is baked in: most of their stories are about fantastical, ungrounded, space events involving mutants and aliens, and this quickly becomes confusing and alienating for general audiences. There's a reason comic books aren't considered hard sci-fi.
There are lots of complaints from comics fans about what they did to MODOK in Ant-Man, but my response is always that MODOK as a concept looks hilarious and stupid, like something a child would design. There was no way to translate this into live-action in a way that general audiences wouldn't find ridiculous. Making it a joke was inevitable.
(And the new Fantastic Four felt genuinely AI-generated to me, all of the effects had a ludicrious quality and the soft, undefined edges I associate with AI video. I don't think they used AI to create it, but dang if they didn't create a great imitation of AI art.)
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
20hr ago
Sequel trilogy merchandise was also a complete dud from what I remember. So where the theme parks (which themselves cost billions to build).
DiscourseMagnus
20hr ago
...that's eerie. I feel like this detail does actually enhance the narrative, and somehow the fact that you chose to leave it out of your initial telling actually further enhances it.
YE_GUILTY
20hr ago
Maybe not by box office receipts alone, but counting other revenue streams like merchandise, I wouldn't be surprised.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
20hr ago
So they bought Marvel and Lucasfilm and, over the 2010s, got a good many billions of dollars in box office returns from them both.
Did they actually get a return on Lucasfilm? I know they made a decent profit on the first few films, but Lucasfilm cost them 6 billion, IIRC, I don't know if they managed to net that much across all their SW projects.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
20hr ago
I mean, reliability level of "some dude on the internet" but, I can tell you I saw a mountain lion about 20 feet from me hiking in Central VA last year. It was slinking up a not-human-navigable trail on a hillside, stopped, looked at me. I looked at it. It walked away.
YE_GUILTY
20hr ago
Disney is back where it started:
But we've been here before. Around the late '00s, Disney felt that it was shackled by its perception as a girl brand, and needed some boy-friendly properties. There were some that had had some success - Pirates of the Caribbean, Cars - but it wanted more. (Article 1, article 2 on marketing research in 2009 about this.)
They took a few gambles on intellectual property they already owned (or at least that wasn't too expensive) - Tron, The Lone Ranger, John Carter of Mars and so forth - but those didn't give them the wins they wanted.
So they bought Marvel and Lucasfilm and, over the 2010s, got a good many billions of dollars in box office returns from them both. But now both Marvel and Star Wars are sputtering at best, so it seems they think it's time to start up the search anew.
The obvious question is what happened to their last investments. The polite answer is that they stopped producing acceptable stories, or overexposed or overextended their franchises with TV shows and the like beyond general audiences' interest. But is that all? "To lose one strategic franchise may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness." What's to say that they won't make the same mistake again, whatever it was?
So there are less polite answers. That link leads to the /r/saltierthancrait discussion of the article (taken down now, by the looks of things. Too impolite even there!) where the poster summarizes their take on the story as "1. Buy new IP to have something for boys 2. Alienate them by pandering to girls 3. Repeat."
And even if it's so that both franchises' declines followed girl-power (or other identity-politics) pushes, that's still not a correlation that one's supposed to draw in polite company, not without a lot of throat-clearing. And true: the orthodox explanation of quality decline and overextension has much truth to it, and it's even possible to explain any alienation of target demographics as being due to such overextension: the same ambition that led Disney to want to give itself some appeal to boys also could lead it to try to make Marvel or Star Wars appeal more to girls. Maybe pure greed is the only explanatory factor needed.
Still, though, I have my doubts. I feel like there's a cultural undercurrent, much broader than just Disney, that it's a problem whenever anything is enjoyed by boys(/men) and not girls(/women). Perhaps there's an element of blank-slatism here: the belief that gender differences are all due to socialization, and in a perfect, prejudice-free world, male and female tastes would be the same.
That is: if there were any value to [something], then girls would see it. If they're not there with the boys, then either they're being kept away by something toxic or exclusionary, or there isn't any value to the thing and the boys shouldn't be having fun with it, either. Anything with predominantly male enthusiasts therefore should be either integrated or banned. (Going the other way, it seems much more easily accepted that boys are at fault for not being interested in something that girls are, for example.)
But if it's not true that, but for patriarchy, boys and girls would have the same interests, then the pursuit of this equalization can result in feeding a whole lot of interests or fields or value in general into the void. If lightsabers and starfighters appealing more to boys than to girls was not a problem that needed fixing, and Disney doesn't realize this, then they'll slide right back into this pit every time they try to escape. And if it is true, well - they'd better hope that they can somehow find fixes that work.
On point three, I completely agree that America has/had a unique "secret sauce" for getting things done. My contention is that it's part of a feedback loop.
I'm not sure if we're talking about the same secret sauce. The feedback loop idea makes sense to me if the process is: America gets things done -> this attracts people from other countries who want to get things done -> they get things done -> it attracts more people who want to get things done... but what I meant was America's culture being the infrastructure enabling things getting done. "The best and the brightest" don't enter into the picture here, honestly my view of the average IRL American's intellect has been rather dim (and I'm far from the only one)... and yet, when I witnessed their ability to coordinate when a problem arose, it was uncanny, almost like telepathy. Apparently de Tocqueville had a whole bit about that, so it's a phenomenon that's been observed for quite a while.
Under my model immigration might be a force multiplier, but not a feedback loop. You can point to me at all the wonderful goods being transported by trains and trucks, and indeed if they stop coming, my standard of living might decline, but my point is that they're driving over a bridge, which doesn't seem to be doing so well. Halting the traffic to do maintenance might not be pleasant, but far less so than exploiting the bridge to the point of collapse.
If you want to show that your feedback model is more accurate than my base infrastructure model, you'd need to show how immigrants are feeding back into, and maintaining that culture of getting things done, because it's not obvious to me at all. Sure, they can integrate and assimilate, but even in the optimistic "magical dirt" model, first-generation immigrants are usually written off, and it's their children who are expected to integrate. Personally I'm not so optimistic, and I think it's a process that needs to be promoted actively, or else the native culture will become gradually diluted. On top of that, "assimilation" has become a bit of a dirty word to begin with, making it all the harder.
I visited Guangzhou about 10 years ago and saw the opposite problem. Their immigrant population comes largely from very poor areas in Africa. They're treated like second-class citizens, are watched constantly, and frankly, fit Trump’s language about immigrants more than the hard-working people in America.
Doesn't that throw a bit of a wrench in your argument? Of all the countries in the world, China seems to have the best chance for potentially overtaking America,
lagrangian
20hr ago
I enjoyed it thoroughly, thanks for posting. I don't think it fits better in any other thread. All the sentences to me are "welp, probably time to kill myself." It's fascinating that they try that hard to tweak the sentences those little bits.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
21hr ago
Actual dream I had, virtually exactly as I had it. The only thing I left out was I vaguely remember an abstract third person who also went in with me, who was a nondescript "friend" who got lost even faster than my wife? But my dream seemed to forget he even existed, so I left him out of my telling.
GBRK
21hr ago
Trad pub has a much higher risk of failure, but if you pick the right lottery numbers it massively magnifies your success. That's why even the most popular selfpublished works eventually get aquired and sent down the traditional route-- because they know they'll benefit from the investment of institutional resources.
If I wanted side-hustle money, selfpub would be better. But I'm aiming, however foolishly, for quit-your-job money, which is a much higher bar since I'm already well renumerated. To that end, I'd much rather have 10 trunk books or flops trying to pen a bestseller than 10 books that get a modest audience but require a permanent time commitment for marketing, events, merch, kickstarter, etcetera. I'm not interested in the fate of all selfpublishing authors I know in my local writer's groups. Death or glory. Nothing else.
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
The issue here is that it's not aggravated assault. New Jersey, like most other states, defines serious bodily injury as
"Serious bodily injury" means bodily injury which creates a substantial risk of death or which causes serious, permanent disfigurement, or protracted loss or impairment of the function of any bodily member or organ
While the injuries in the above case were serious by any casual definition, they don't meet the high bar required to upgrade the charge.
TIRM
21hr ago
Very roughly: If there is an opportunity to give black people a majority black district, then it is required to do so. The American south has lots of black people. Some of whom packed into gerrymandered districts giving them black congressional representatives. This is “good” gerrymandering required by law.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
21hr ago
Self publishing is much more profitable:
My old publisher pays me 10% royalties on net profit of books sold, which ends up being more like 5% of the sale price. Leanpub is paying 80% on sticker price as royalties. One copy of LfP sold nets me about as much as 15 copies of Practical TLA+.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
22hr ago
Right, there's the classic "I don't know who the woman was, but I can tell you that she wasn't my mother!"
But my dreams (insofar as I can remember them anyway) are rarely even complex enough to have much of a "telling". I was walking down a street in my neighborhood. Bam that's it that's the dream. Rather uninteresting! (I suppose even that little bit is still a "telling" though.)
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
22hr ago
It's typically the telling as much as the content itself that provides insight n Freudian dream analysis.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
22hr ago
There's your issue, you should have taken me replying under Corvus' response as endoraement of his explanation.
Tiber727
22hr ago
What's interesting to me is the latter argument. Putting political advantage aside, an ideal district would be not competitive in the slightest. The reason being that districts exist to serve the needs of the local, and a politician with 100% of the vote is perfectly representing everyone in the district rather than half.
Throwaway05
22hr ago
If something has changed in the modern era, I would argue that it stems from the welfare state.
I am amenable to data that shows otherwise, but it seems to be that in ye olde days you came to America assimilated and depending on who and where you were you might be prevented from doing so by disgruntled locals.
Today the (hispanic at least) immigrants make no effort and seem to have no interest in assimilation. Even outside of Texas and California you see signs in Spanish everywhere, official governmental communication in Spanish and so on.
This is a huge difference in character of immigration with respect to previous waves of it.
kky
22hr ago
No, it could certainly be vote manipulation of some sort (I think Singapore did it effectively by importing a lot of Chinese), but it’s not gerrymandering. That term is fairly precisely about redistricting.
Tiber727
22hr ago
That does not compute. Protesting is by definition controversial - if it weren't, it's not a protest, it's at most solidarity march.
Oh, I know. I was deliberately stating it in a way to show the absurdity. My impression of progressives is that if you asked them what the median person believes on X, Y, and Z issues, they would describe a progressive. They think their belief system is so normal that they see themselves less as attempting to move the needle and more trying to keep the needle from moving away from them. Or at least they think that the culture is aligned with them and they only need to get the government to recognize it. That doesn't mean it's true. It's just an observation about many members of a group that I believe I'm seeing.
From there I am saying that there's a sort of discrepancy - the right frames the last 20 years as if the left sat in a war room and planned out a list of slow, coordinated encroachments meant to erode the status of any right-leaning beliefs. The left acts as if they were going about their normal daily routine, dealing with the occasional asshole as one does, and then the assholes came back with a mob.
My model is that the left is an uncoordinated mob that isn't even really paying attention to all those other encroachments because journalism, left or right, mostly focuses on whatever bad thing the other side did. Everyone has a point where they will try to completely shun someone else. Finding out that someone supports pedophilia is an easy example. The progressive left has calibrated their "cut all contact with someone" threshold to be extremely low.
Only now, finally, the right starts to wake up and wonder "oh, they are trying to crush us, maybe we should push back?" And then we hear the complaints "how undignified, you are fighting back, people would think you are the same! They will reject you for stooping so low as to fight back! You should just roll over and take it, then you'd have all our sympathies - everybody loves losers!"
That's one way to frame it.
The left and the right have fought for public support since the beginning of democracy. I might disagree with the rules of war the left plays by, but the right, collectively speaking, were not passive bystanders minding their own business either. "We didn't start the fire" after all. The problem is, in real life there are laws that allow anyone to use the public square. When it comes to both businesses and the internet, every part of it belongs to somebody, and with that comes the ability to remove someone for any reason. They're nowhere near as culturally dominant, but there are certainly places that ban left-leaning opinions. If you'd like to change that, well that's certainly an opinion but it's one at odds with the libertarian beliefs many on this forum claim to possess.
Let me ask you this - how can an outside observer tell the difference between someone "pushed to their limit" and someone who never had principles in the first place? Surely the left would tell a similar story about how they were all for free expression until the mean old right wouldn't leave them alone. I'm obviously biased, but many on the right seem positively giddy about all the things they want to accomplish. And they only clues I have on what they would consider "too far" are the things they've already done and now tell me are completely reasonable.
I've been going back and rewatching some anime from my childhood. Currently, I'm rewatching Bobobo-bo-bobobo. It's one of the only anime in my mind that has a dub that's superior than the original sub. The plot is translated well, but some of the jokes are actually better when translated. The narrator, for example, is much superior in the dub. This brought to mind an interesting question: Which anime dubs are actually superior to the originals? Bobobo and Ghost Stories are the only two that come to mind. Bobobo being true to the original and Ghost Stories being completely different.
What are you guys' picks for anime that have superior dubs?
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