domain:web.law.duke.edu
PreformancePertension
21hr ago
I guess that's a valid question these days - do we even want national legislators to represent a specific geography? My big-city House rep I can see is a party line liberal; that represents the district and I don't begrudge it, but when I look up her votes the single thing she broke with the party on was HR3633 (cryptocurrency regulation framework). I look up her social media, and 90% of her posting is on national issues, boosting other national politicians, Gaza, etc. My impression is that the idea of truly local representation has been broken for a while and that this dates back to the late 00s with the start of political nationalization and the decade-long earmark ban.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
21hr ago
Could a similar line of expectations dissuade other prospective male readers?
The last major intended-for-girls cartoon that didn't have this, that being MLP G4, had an absurdly large male following precisely because it lacked this.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
21hr ago
Lol. Those were jokes, not serious statements of analysis. The crocodile penis thing was a riff on a silly joke I myself made -- she works in science, and understands very well that this was not how taxonomy works.
NewCharlesInCharge
21hr ago
Young boys also enjoy Bluey.
gattsuru
21hr ago
Sounds a bit like Bujingai or Asura's Wrath? Sounds like worth looking into.
Crowstep
21hr ago
Age of Empires II, except terrain matters, troops don't immediately break rank and jump into a mosh pit when you click attack and walls are both tougher and more expensive, so you have to put your farms outside the city.
gattsuru
21hr ago
I'd argue vanilla WoW is pretty unserious (and willing to throw random stuff that wasn't there historically, from goblins to kobolds). But to answer the question:
Fauns and satyrs, harpies and sirens, sphinx. The dog-headed ones were kinda universal myths in the Old World, but they existed long enough ago in European mythology that Augustine debated their historical existence. If you throw in shapeshifters, kelpies and selkies. If you include mere behavioral anthropomorphism, Reynard the Fox (and his whole company) and Puss-in-Boots, arguably Br'ers Rabbit Fox and Bear (1880s) -- which makes the 20th Century Disney variant more of a conversation with folk legends than you'd expect from first glance.
Some of these have Warcraft equivalents, but very few are furry bait even where they're fan bait (eg, there's a lot more Draenai fandom than burning-legion-proper-as-a-whole fandom).
Thoroughlygruntled
21hr ago
And judging by the size of the Star Wars toys section at Target compared to 10 years ago (or even when I was growing up in the mid-90s, more than a decade since the last Star Wars movie came out), it seems the golden goose is well and truly dead. When I was a kid, Star Wars had an entite aisle all to itself, literally every boy I knew had a lightsaber and dozens of action figures. I can't remember the last time I saw a kid playing with a Star Wars toy.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
21hr ago
like the heroine actually had the power to solve all the problems in her if only she realised her own worth
Evolutionarily speaking, a woman's worth is largely dependent on immutable physical characteristics (modulo things like plastic surgery), so these sorts of stories tend to psychologically resonate with women. They don't have to go wrest their value from the external world like men do.
I once asked my mother why so many Hallmark movies copy the "It's a Wonderful Life" plot where a woman makes a life-altering wish, gets transported to another timeline, and then realizes she doesn't like it and has to find a way back. She responded, "oh, the movie is telling you that actually everything is great for you already, and you're just too stupid to realize it!"
or there was a solution that involves using emotional intelligence and likeableness to dissuade the villain from his villainous ways instead of defeating him
That one strikes me as perfectly reasonable and not necessarily anticlimactic...
What are some examples of "girl" stories that aren't cringe pandering softcore-relationship-porn wish fulfillment only (lame) women find appealing?
That isn't a leading question, it's an honest one, I'm sure they exist. But the people who write those don't get jobs at Disney. A lot of these girl stories seem to be made completely independent of everything that's been learned about basic storytelling structure, like they've been made up from scratch instead of being built on a foundation of previous works.
I Think the only woman author I've read extensively is the Dragonriders of Pern books by Anne McCaffrey, which was back in high school. While I remember those having female protagonists, they did heavily feature men, many of whom were genuinely loved by the author and characters in-universe (the master harper), for being men. There was the full spectrum of heroes and villains of whatever gender. I suppose some of the male characters had realistically male flaws that stuff written for dudes would normally leave out, almost like the author had, you know, known men in real life. But in McCaffrey is very obviously some kind of spergy horse girl, and wasn't writing to be in line with 2020s corporate intersectional feminism.
Oh and Harry Potter. Those are at least competently written, and are generally appealing to everyone without pandering to one gender or another.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
22hr ago
So, you take a work of fiction with a male main character. It falls into the "Men want to be him, women want to be with him" tropes and everyone is happy. You try to do the same thing with women? You create a woman that women want to be, and men don't want her or you create a woman men want, but women don't want to be her.
Not an anime but have you guys heard the Japanese VA for FFX? I thought the very inconsistent VA for the English version was a due language barrier during production but apparently not..
Ioper
22hr ago
Have you tried any roguelikes/lites? Easier to just get one to couple of runs in when you feel like it and then do something else. You don't have to stay super engaged for extended periods of time.
Crowstep
23hr ago
It would be interesting to know why this is
My gut says that it's something very profound and evolutionary. In the ancestral environment, a boy has to earn his place as a man (by hunting, fighting etc) whereas a girl grows into a woman without doing anything per se. It would make sense for boys to seek out male role models for that reason.
07mk
23hr ago
I saw on Twitter someone comment that the idea that the company that owns Marvel, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones would need to look for a new IP to help draw in young male audiences in their teens & 20s is pretty hilarious and absurd. You could probably have put any random 8th grade boy in charge of any one of these franchises back when Disney acquired them and turned them into at least good draws for that crowd, if not great. Yet the actual executives in charge appear to have less competence than that (or, perhaps, different incentives than making the best product or most money).
Makes me think there could be a modern remake of Big where he becomes a studio exec instead of a toy store VP and greenlights hits over the adult execs. Would have to be a longer timeframe and also, I'm guessing Big probably won't get a remake anytime soon given the implied statutory rape.
Curly_rincewind
23hr ago
Nah this is the plot of S07E01 black mirror "common people".
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
23hr ago
It would be interesting to know why this is. My intuition is that, if I picked up a mass-market piece of adventure literature with a girl protagonist, there would be a greatly increased likelihood of there being some point in the story where the dramatic arc is sabotaged in the way that is so typical of female-protagonist stories - like the heroine actually had the power to solve all the problems in her if only she realised her own worth, or there was a solution that involves using emotional intelligence and likeableness to dissuade the villain from his villainous ways instead of defeating him, or whatever. I would find this disappointing and anticlimactic, especially in literature of a tier so low that I have no expectation of the victory-by-leveraging-wonderfulness-of-women being written in a remotely interesting way. Could a similar line of expectations dissuade other prospective male readers?
Indeed, it doesn't seem like boys avoid e.g. the Metroid series of video games; even if the protagonist is revealed to be female, the genre guarantees that Samus will still only defeat the final boss by getting gud. I also do not get the sense that the fandom of wildbow's Worm (whose female protagonist does not get treated well by the universe at all) leans female.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
23hr ago
Okay. I have a lot of thoughts about this, gathered over the years of my own (unsuccessful) attempts to be a published author.
To be clear, my failure is mostly lack of commitment (I have not written that many manuscripts, I have only intermittently tried to shop them around, I still mostly treat it as a hobby). I will assert that I am a good (publishable) writer. My posts here on the Motte may not reflect that, but I don't put much effort into writing here. I've been in critique groups, a few writing workshops (these are mostly worthless) and read all the books on writing (both the "how to write novels" ones and the "how to get published" ones). Feedback and my own (obviously not impartial) assessment is that if I really wrote like an author who is determined to be published and kept trying, I'm good enough to get published. (FWIW I did make it all the way to Baen's final round with one of my manuscripts- I got personalized feedback from the editorial committee telling me why it was an "almost but not quite." If you have researched publishing, you know that getting anything other than a polite "This showed real promise but it is not what we're looking for at this time" is rare.)
So first of all, you are right about the overwhelming bias in literary agencies. Fortunately they mostly advertise their biases, so you already know if they are looking for "diverse voices, especially from marginalized and underrepresented communities blah blah blah" there probably isn't much point in submitting to that agent. Most agencies list each agent's preferences, and usually there is one person (most often the one man) at the agency who specializes in things like science fiction and epic fantasy. If his (or occasionally her) profile doesn't flash all the same LGTBQ flags and "craving stories about found family, non-heterocentric romances," etc., then they just might be the sort who is looking for the next Brandon Sanderson or George R.R. Martin, and you have a shot.
But yeah, I would estimate that about 80% of literary agents today have a shingle that says, not quite in so many words, "If you are a straight white dude writing fiction that would appeal to straight white dudes, don't bother me."
It's always going to be a long shot no matter what. Always has been.
I would strongly recommend against misrepresenting your own identity. (Yeah, I've considered that myself.) It will come out eventually, and then your agent will dump you and you might become the next scandal/cancellation in the literary sphere. Also, you do want to eventually be known under your own name, right? Getting your foot in the door by pretending to be a queer BIPOC neurodivergent she/they will only ever look like you were trying to pull a stunt.
So a lot of people are telling you to skip trad publishing and go indie. This is a more viable option than it used to be. But the thing you have to realize about the real money-makers are that they either got extremely lucky (yes, that includes Larry Correia and John Scalzi and Matt Dinniman- hitting it big with a self-cultivated fanbase isn't just about writing a good book, it's often just about timing and catching a wave) or being a grinder. The real moneymakers on KU are people who churn out a book every month or two, whether it's werewolf romances or LitRPGs or harem fantasies, and while some authors can grind out passably entertaining stories at that speed, none of it is good writing. Their audiences are looking for more-of-the-same-please brain candy, not quality writing. Those authors also, of course, are doing it full time if they've started to make enough to live on.
The elephant in the room with self-publishing that hardly any of the self-publishing advocates really want to address is that you and ten million other people are all trying to do the same thing, and nowadays that includes five million Indians using AI. Kindle Unlimited was always looking for a gem in a sea of muck, and now that is true more than ever. Writing a book and throwing it online and hoping it gets "discovered" and builds an audience organically is an even bigger long shot than getting chosen by a rainbow-haired non-binary polyamorous pagan literary agent for your right-wing Catholic epic fantasy (I know that is not how you described it). So that means you have to do all that social media stuff and marketing yourself and getting "in" with various review and lit circles and hanging out with other aspiring self-pubbed authors who will boost each other and... if this sounds like a shit job to do what you really want to do (write) yeah, and everyone in that sphere will tell you tough shit, that's the game.
If you are serious about wanting to make a living from writing... you know that every single book on writing tells you the same thing ("don't quit your day job or have a supportive working spouse") for a reason, right? Even if you do get published (traditionally or self-published), your odds of making enough money to live on are extremely long. Successful authors, big name authors, authors you know, mostly do not live on their writing alone. If they do, it's because they do lots of other writing besides novels. They hustle for freelancing and editing and teaching gigs, they are constantly selling short stories, they do some journalism, they maybe get a gig writing a superhero comic for Marvel or DC. The number of authors who actually make a living, let alone a decent living, off their novels alone is tiny relative to all published authors. Absolutely, dream about becoming a Rowling or a King or a Sanderson, but don't set that as a realistic life goal.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
23hr ago
Hyperdimension Neptunia's EN dub is head and shoulders above the rather generic JP, in both vidya and anime incarnations. With due respect to Rie Tanaka, Neptune's eternally-smug English VA is uncannily fitting and lived rent free in my head ever since, this is the dorkiest laugh I've ever heard and it sends me every single time I watch this clip (compare original). IMO Neptune and Noire's respective VAs legitimately carried most of the franchise, to the point that the absence of sovl Erin Fitzgerald from Cyberdimension onward due to [whatever bullshit was going on at the time, I forgot] tangibly contributed to me eventually dropping it.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
23hr ago
What are the human-animal hybrids in the western imagination besides werewolves and centaurs and minotaurs? Not too many. Werewolves were all over vanilla WoW.
why not 20th century Disney style animal people
Cut-off should be whether it is an organic development of the Western imagination, or whether someone looked at trends and spreadsheets and determined that “catboy” looks adorable and will bring in players. Remember that “gothic” is itself a conversation with the Middle Ages and folk legends. Cat boys are unserious.
A lot of stuff in these movies are like this, reused badly or inexplicably. Even down to Holdo's Leia-style costuming frankly. Leia dressed that way in ANH because she was still undercover in the Senate, still a princess. Why does Holdo dress like that during open warfare?
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1d ago
Dream video game subthread:
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An XCOM-like, but one that eschews turns (even interleaved ones) in favor of real-time with pause. Small unit tactics, but with realistic weapons (scifi stuff allowed). More emphasis on training and hardware versus soldiers shooting enemies till they become Majors and develop not only better aim but a resistance to bullets. You can, by expending some kind of currency or skill point, manually seize control of a soldier and puppet them in first person. Otherwise they semi-autonomously follow your orders, think being a squad leader who tells Ramirez to hole up in a Burger King, as opposed to having to choose the exact toilet stall he needs to occupy like in XCOM. Land vehicles as special units, air units as call-ins or on rotation.
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Civ/EU/CK/Total War hybrid: An ungodly behemoth where combat between armies is either resolved with Paradox-style stats, or you can manually fight the battle TW style. There is literally an existing mod that does that, you initiate a battle in CK2, and then the mod imports units and stats into a Total WR title and then the results back into CK2. Realistic AI, in the sense that other leaders or generals act like simulated characters, rather than generic optimizers or min-maxers (which is why I don't play multiplayer in these titles). This could be done today by having an LLM make overarching command decisions or RPing, while delegating the micromanagement to more real-time AI.
Imagine if you could negotiate with Julius Caesar about the petroleum in Sicily, and use your own wits to argue with him. Imagine if you could convince Roosevelt to support you to stave off the Commie menace. What if you could talk to your subordinates, every general or governor being simulated entities that have their own thoughts and feelings that aren't just thinly veiled stats?
Hell, have a hardcore mode with true fog of war. If you're Caesar, you might send several legions off to Germania and only get old, vague reports. They might vanish in Varrus's hands, and you need to find out the hard way. Are the taxes from Asia Minor having too much skimmed off the top? Do the plebian demands have a point? You have to vet and trust agents to find out, unless you absolutely must go there yourself.
I'm leaving home for 2 weeks, 2 days after Silksong releases.
07mk
1d ago
I beat Stellar Blade recently, with all the achievements, collectibles, etc. It caused a minor culture war kerfuffle in the video game community due to having a conventionally attractive female protagonist being highly sexualized in costumes and camera angles and such. It was also the first 3D action game of this type by Shift Up, which is better known for Goddess of Victory: Nikke, which is a gacha game definitely on the "gooner" side of the spectrum, so it was actually reasonable to wonder if it was just going to be shallow eye candy, but it turned out to be right up there with the best action games I've played recently, like Elden Ring or Lies of P (latter of which was also the 1st 3D action game by that dev, IIRC).
Looking at trailers, I remember wondering if it was going to be a DMC-like or Ninja Gaiden-like, something sorely lacking in the industry these days (we'll see how NG4 does soon). Turned out to be a Sekiro-like more than anything, with a similar perfect parry-based posture system, except it's discrete perfect parry counts, and it doesn't recover automatically over time, and it's not a deathblow but rather big hit like a visceral in Bloodborne. It doesn't feel as natural as, nor does it incentivize aggression quite as much as Sekiro's, but it also had its own quirks that I appreciated, like being able to count to set up for viscerals right after boss phase transitions. It also had perfect dodges, which slowed down time during the dodge like Witch Time in Bayonetta, though that didn't extend to giving you time to punish.
These mechanics only work if the enemies are designed properly for them, and that's where the game really shone. The bosses were the highlights, but for every enemy, it was clear the devs thought carefully about how to communicate timings to the player via animations and attack patterns. It wasn't as well executed as From Soft's best work both in terms of telegraphing attacks and pushing the player to really tight openings, but it was only a step or two behind.
I found Normal difficulty too easy after the 1st 2 bosses and restarted the game on Hard, which was originally not available until NG+ with an upgraded health bar. It took me 1-2 hours of sometimes dozens of deaths for most bosses like this, but the design of the bosses was such that it was a fun learning experience the whole time. Regular mobs in the overworld were also 2-shotting me, so exploration was slow and almost souls-like in pace, so it took me about 70 hours to beat the game with all side quests, but played normally, I've heard it's about 20-30 hours.
Like Sekiro, it had skill trees instead of stat upgrades using souls, and also you didn't drop your Exp when you died, so the souls-like "enemies revive when you rest" system didn't really mean a whole lot. Besides weak and strong attacks on Square and Circle which could be chained in different ways for combos, there were special attacks called Bursts and Beta Attacks used via L1 or R1 + face button, which used independent but related resources that recharged through actions during combat. I think what made the combat so satisfying, besides the parries, was the managing of these special attacks and their unique abilities, like i-frames, self-heal, or attack speed-up.
So recommended highly to anyone who enjoys 3rd person action games. Especially on PC where the mods are aplenty, and also, it's incredibly well optimized and bug-free. Zero crashes in 120+ hours and solid consistent 60fps+ on my 4090. I'm glad they decided not to contribute yet another souls-like to the flood of them in the industry right now. Again, it's heavily souls-inspired, but it also draws from many other games, creating its own thing. I just wish it drew more from the crazy action games like DMC, since crowd control and 1-on-many combat in general was mostly not great.
I've heard people criticize the story for being too predictable, but I thought it was exactly right for this kind of game, which almost feels like a throwback to mostly straightforward action games from 360/PS3 era. I found it funny just how much the game took inspiration from Nier: Automata, what with the sexy woman flying down from space to the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is Earth to fight off the beings that took it over from humans, but then discovering the deep dark secret of what really happened, etc. They even hired the same composer to do a lot of the soundtrack, so I'm pretty sure they knew what they were doing.
"worth is largely dependant on immutable physical characteristics" is true evolutionarily speaking about all forms of life
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