domain:alexepstein.substack.com
erwgv3g34
1d ago
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood : Closer to 8 than it is to 7
A show that frustrated me. Too tropey, too many characters being retarded. I find it hard to articulate my dissatisfaction in a satisfactory way.
FMAB represents everything that's simultaneously right and wrong with shounen storytelling. The worldbuilding is genuinely excellent: alchemy as magic system with consistent rules and costs, political intrigue that feels like actual statecraft, character motivations that make sense within their contexts.
But the show consistently undermines itself with genre conventions that feel obligatory rather than organic. The power of friendship speeches, the reluctance to actually kill major characters, the way complex moral situations get resolved through superior firepower, it all feels like the show is checking boxes rather than exploring the implications of its own premise.
You should really try the original Fullmetal Alchemist.
First of all, if you only watched Brotherhood, you completely missed the setup, because Brotherhood speeds through the early episodes on the assumption that you have watched the 2003 version. Second, it is a much darker, cerebral, and emotional story. It's not filled with fights and comedy and friendship speeches the way Brotherhood is. 2003 avoids the standard battle shonen cliches in favor of telling a more dramatic and philosophical story using the exact same setting and characters.
It's like Fullmetal Alchemist for grownups.
My own recommendations:
Erased (AKA The Town Without Me) is one of the most beautiful stories I have ever had the privilege of experiencing. It's also only one cour long.
The Promised Neverland. The first season is incredible, and ends at a very natural stopping point, but definitely leaves room to continue the story. The second season is legendary for how bad it was, and most fans pretend that it doesn't exist. It works really well if you choose to treat it is as a single-cour anime. I wrote a longer review on /r/rational.
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
Except there was a really loud leftist/arab group celebrating Oct. 7 basically immediately. There were "Al Aqsa Flood"/pro-Palestinian parades/celebratory demonstrations in several US cities in early October, 2024, and lots of random hang-glider imagery.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1d ago
Maybe I hadn't aged enough, but I didn't notice myself having a reaction like this before. It was more of a cursory "she's young and pretty, but not my thing" thing.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1d ago
Guns in the UK? I thought you weren't allowed even pointy scissors and pocketknives that lock.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1d ago
One use I have for MBTI (InTx btw) is safely demonstrating diversity. Not on a forum like ours, where INTJ/P are dominant, but in a more normie company it can be eye-opening how different people are. Like, a guy you are buddies with tells you he's an ESFJ and you're like "woah, he should be the complete opposite of me, he has answered every question on this quiz wrong and yet he's still a human being I enjoy working/studying/hanging out with".
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
1d ago
It's an unsinkable aircraft carrier whose location checks 3 regional powers that outnumber them at least 9:1- Iran (obvious), Russia (not quite as obvious), and Egypt (if a blockade/freedom of movement on the Suez needed to be enforced).
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
some people just feel that they're entitled to post gibberish on why LLMs must be unintelligent
They are. People are in fact "entitled" to make arguments you think are gibberish. You can address the argument and why you think it is bad.
If you think he's being insulting you can say so and we'll take a look, but "I'm just going to come right out and say he's an ignorant slut, not like that coward" is doing you no credit.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
1d ago
A model 3 might be a finer car than a 70 muscle car but the reason the picture of the teen with the muscle car looks richer is that he is. The 1970 teen can buy a brand new V-8 (not the base model) Camero after about 1800 hours at the 1970 minimum wage. Today's teen needs 2500 hours to buy a base model 3 (after the tax credit expires next month) at the median teen wage of 17/hr.
It looks like a rich society because it was a rich society. Further the 1970 teens future house and college look much much better.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
How much of the improved standards of care are, specifically, about giving the very aged and terminally ill just two more weeks?
I didn't have you pegged that way based on some of your other posts, but I suppose it does fit.
That's actually my big issue with the MBTI: Thinking and Feeling aren't so alien to each other. I could probably be equally described by the INFP functions, making decisions based on values, following what's right, working on refining values, trying to take others' perspectives into consideration. I do both. But I'm distrustful of my 'gut,' and I want to expose it to logical argumentation to see if what I'm doing is actually in accordance with the logical way to pursue my values and preferences. I'm a big believer in cooperation, but because I believe it is logical.
I also have a strong romantic identity, which does somehow slot in to that frame. But by far the most important thing in a relationship to me is that I can explore ideas with my partner -- my girlfriend met me because I gave a lecture about history and she felt, according to her recollection, that "this is the kind of man I need in my life!" 100% of my partners have either identified with the Tumblr phrase "sapiosexual" or could fairly be described with it. That's not to say I'm not affectionate in a traditional sense, because I have also been described as romantic, but for me a relationship needs both aspects. For me, my idea of an amazing date is a discussion about the concept of justice over dinner and a reflection on the future of commerce as pillow talk.
That's also a problem with the MBTI -- it doesn't have anywhere to put the logician who's also a hopeless romantic!
But it's rather foreign to me, because logic to me is a tool, it's not where I live.
I think in words. Have you ever used Spreeder? I hardly know her! That's what my mental imagery often looks like; words scrolling through my head against a black background. I often feel punctuation, when I wrote "feel" just then I felt kind of like I needed to lean, and when I write a full-stop period, I feel like I need to jolt forward like a typewriter. (*jolt*)
Basically 85-90% of my internal experience is me thinking about what I would write in an essay or say in a lecture about my experiences or whatever I'm thinking about; for instance, today, I was thinking about how the prisoner's dillema applies to dating and the kind of argument I would make for cooperation in a world where so many people feel like defecting. I don't necessarily think in syllogisms, but I do think in logical, well-flowing arguments. So what people read on the motte is extremely close to just what I'm doing in my head most of the time. That's why my motte posts are often so long. This, right now, is literally my stream-of-consciousness.
I have "absent-minded professor" vibes, and I frequently make wrong turns when driving because I was thinking about personality theory instead of navigating. Fortunately my cerabellum is pretty good at keeping my foot on the brake when it needs to be.
I also like listening music to crowd out distractions so I can get into my flow of words, and sometimes I pace while thinking to also occupy my body and 'get it out of the way.'
Do you actually not experience your mind as a buzz of images and sounds by default?
Well, maybe not unless you count the sound of my own voice, or music. I don't experience many mental images, and I find fiction hard to read if it has a lot of description, because my imagination can't keep up with the imagery they're trying to get me to experience. I prefer dialogue.
My internal conscious experience is highly verbal, and I've occasionally found myself thinking about a phrase so intensely that I say it out loud accidentially. My chief mode of internal experience is to imagine that either I'm doing what I am now -- and writing something -- or to imagine myself with my partner, or in front of a crowd of people, explaining to them what I'm thinking. When I was in school I often imagined giving a class presentation on whatever was interesting me at the moment.
I hate smalltalk, but I love public speaking, because to me it's like writing an essay out loud, and with more opportunity for humor.
It's quiet and "logical" up there?
It's logical, but not necessarily quiet. Like I intimated, the logical processing I go through has to compete with the anxiety feelings that often try to crowd it out -- tightness in the chest, lightheadedness, shaking, impending sense of doom. I guess you could maybe think of the logical thinking as a way to compensate for the fact that my emotional experience is so intense and unreliable.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
It's a core right/left political distinction whether 'people like me' means people like me or people in my shoes.
Is it fundamentally about class consciousness? About religion, ethnicity, geography, and family?
In the USA the rightist party is leftist, for making class based appeals. The leftist party is rightist, for making ethnic appeals.
theincompetencetheorist
1d ago
Why did it take 20 years for Reddit to turn a profit? Looking at another heavily moderated forum in the past Twitter! How often did it turn a profit? Why did these companies keep on getting funding at ridiculous valuations? Maybe it is a way of doing sentiment engineering at scale through various behavior modification tricks with Likes, upvotes, retweets. Maybe that was the purpose? Not turn a profit but to modify behavior to do social engineering, maybe that is more valuable to the owners?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
Instead, current research strongly suggests that LLMs are primarily pattern-recognition systems that infer regularities purely from text statistics rather than internally representing the world in a structured, grounded way.
…do you imagine that cause-effect relationships do not constitute a “regularity” or a “pattern”?
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
1d ago
incels
This is just a fancy way to say "dissident" when it comes from the mouths of the orthodox (who believe they are dissidents axiomatically).
and into Asian women
There's a stereotype that Asian cultures tend to encourage women to have a healthier relationship with what men want, and men who are not getting what they want right now are more aware of that. When the orthodox say that, though, it's mostly to attack Asian women for being pick-mes (orthodoxy defines itself in opposition to everything men might want, so their existence lessens their power).
FtSoA
1d ago
Ok, but Skyrim is an immersive open-world game with a narrative and all that.
Most phone games are way worse on the metric of gamification! It's like slot machines--they just skip straight to the dopamine.
Plenty of people just play games like Skyrim or Red Dead or GTA as a way to pass the time, long after they've beaten them. I'd argue they'd be better off if they found it less relaxing.
A lot of shooters are just fun because it's fun to shoot endless hordes of zombies or whathaveyou.
Don't some people love to just play poker on Red Dead?
Personally, my perfectionism gets triggered a bit too much with a game like Fallout and so I can't even just enjoy it because I have to keep checking the damn guides to make sure I hit all the things. So I started Fallout 4, but barely did anything. (I really like Fallout New Vegas years ago.)
I barely even game anymore and haven't for the better part of a decade now. My dopamine circuits are apparently satisfied with arguing on the internet. (I can and do still read full books just fine though. Never understood that issue.)
Hereditary landowners love love LOVE bringing in exploitable labor from foreign ethnic groups. I can understand why right wing parties are opposed to immigrants. I can't understand why right wing parties aren't opposed to the farming and industrial interests responsible for encouraging their entrance in the first place. If they actually want to stop immigration, they need to eliminate the pull factors. Criminalise paying illegal immigrants. Criminalize accepting non-money payments from illegal immigrants. Lock up the suburbanites using maid services, and the factory and agrobusiness owners, and pretty soon illegal immigrants don't have a reason to stay in america. Even if they're feloniously on welfare... Healthcare, food, education, and housing is still cheaper back home.
Oh well. I like immigration so I guess this works out in my favor.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I think a big part of this perception is that the bottom 80% were invisible in the past. I'm not saying these people's behavior has changes, I'm saying the median person in 1990 wasn't putting in much self-study effort to learn Spanish either. It's just that this person's behavior, habits, and life is invisible before social media and smartphones, unless he's in the army or some other unusually well-documented lifestyle- which is probably documented because it's unusually regimented, not because it's average.
I think, sure, there might be legitimate criticisms of smartphones- almost assuredly, there really are- but a lot of what gets blamed at them is very much not new. It's simply visible. Bush era Alex wasn't making much progress on communicating with his girlfriend's family(and Hispanics love it when gringos try to speak Spanish and are usually eager to help). He was just able to politely lie about it in a way nobody could call out.
It seems like this 'polite, public facing fiction' is the victim of social media and smartphones. How much of the recent decline narrative is driven by the destruction of these little white lies by instagramming everywhere?
erwgv3g34
1d ago
That's G Gundam. I hated it, personally, since my whole attraction to Gundam is the real robot aspect, but if you want battle shonen meets mecha, I guess it is the perfect show.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
1d ago
The first episode (and the first arc) of Jojo are really far from what people usually like about it.
The exact same thing that happened with Fate. It turns out that people give you their money if you keep re-imagining the Pacific War in space with giant robots, so when Philip J. Otaku says "Shut up and take my money!", the market responds by supplying as much Gundam as can be sold.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Which is the one with the national stereotype gundams, ie mexico gundam with the sombrero?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1d ago
More than zero rationalists are extroverted. Not gonna dispute the NT part of that though.
But the median non-human animal is probably a termite whose population size is measured in the zillions of myriads, not some endangered species. Because many of these species are un-extirpatable(see rats, cockroaches, etc) and others are beneath our notice but benefit strongly from us(pigeons etc).
Maybe, in the event that AIdoomers aren't just huffing, there will be tribes of feral humans living in the now abandoned wastes, farming and fishing and whatnot. Maybe feral humans will be tapped into the automated powerplants, and this is as beneath skynet's notice as the squirrels in your attic. Maybe AI will write pocket articles about 'what to do when a tribe of feral humans camp between the cooling towers of your datacenter'. I told chatgpt to write that article, actually. Suggestions included decoy towers.
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