domain:link.springer.com
TIRM
2d ago
That last one was shockingly bad. Confusing how they could make such a thing. I almost recommend watching it just to feel baffled at every turn. It is a unique movie experience in that sense.
cjet79
2d ago
Awesome videos. I'd seen the amazing cultivator simulator one. And it is part of what makes me think this genre has untapped potential.
I had not heard of The Matchless Kungfu. It does sound of potential interest.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
Sam Hyde has some advice about this.
And that would be…?
(I mean, this is totally vague — you don't even have a link — how is it not "low effort"?)
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
2d ago
There is a reason Fluttershy is the most popular of the mane six.
Since when? If we accept the sheer number of works involving a character as a proxy for popularity, and look at Twibooru, Fluttershy is in third place (nearly tied with Pinkie Pie, at 295K and 291K respectively), far behind Twilight Sparkle (1st, at 410K) and Rainbow Dash (2nd, at 318K).
It's completely different from a man, who can be nice, safe, reliable, and still end up completely overlooked.
Rather humorously, the same dynamic is true for Worst Pony Applejack (227K), behind Rarity at 247K.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
Man, I didn't think anyone else but me has read those. Yes, this was my absolute favorite series when I was a kid.
I also read the series as a kid, and while it wasn't my favorite, I enjoyed it.
I also haven't seen anyone mention the book that was my favorite read as a kid — enough I wore out my first paperback copy and had to buy a second — which also had a female author and was first in a fantasy-with-some-SF-elements (some might call it the other way around) series (not to mention more than one less-than-good film adaptation by Disney): Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.
(I still get a chill rereading the passage when Meg finally sees IT.)
Lizzardspawn
2d ago
Every wartime economy is planned economy. Make what you want out of it.
Glassnoser
2d ago
If they're getting something in return, then it's not a subsidy.
Glassnoser
2d ago
This seems backwards. By their nature, private businesses tend to be focused on the long-term, since their value is equal to the net present value of all future cashflows from now until the end of time, whereas governments tend to focused on the short-term, since they just want to win the next election.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Hmm. In the case of Tarkov, the game just got continuously worse. Content came out at a glacial pace, the AI oscillates from aimbot to Helen Keller with an HK every six months. I would play the game if there simply was anything to justify it, such as a new massive map or other content of similar scale. I also refuse to play it solo, so I'd have to build a new social network of like-minded gamers to enjoy it.
The Warhammer branch of Total War killed my interest in the historical titles. They just seem so... boring, when you have tanks shooting at dragons. I played the hell out of those historical titles back in the day to boot.
I've been chasing the dragon on both for a while.
Might I suggest a return to Skyrim? You can't take a shit without one attacking your outhouse.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
with very long-term focused horizons like governments.
Is 4 years really that long?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
First, one must move out of Somalia or Inner Mongolia, or at least unstick one's self from the nearest toilet. There are 1.4 billion of us in India, and even sex-selective abortion hasn't prevented half of them being female. You might find a sample near to home, we seem to get everywhere.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
2d ago
If LucasFilm wasn't run by idiots, they'd have caught on and the Obi-Wan movie would be a Yojimbo pastiche with spaghetti characteristics instead of the tepid and lame saturday morning cartoon the tv show ended up being.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
It's also annoying because women aren't exactly better at writing men. I've seen some truly awful caricatures of what women think men are like (mainly from books my wife reads, and then asks me "is this accurate"). Yet the "men writing women" complainers act like this is a uniquely male offense. They don't seem to understand (or perhaps don't want to understand) that it's simply hard to get in the head of the opposite sex.
pigeonburger
2d ago
"The Mandalorian" worked because the female appeal was Pedro Pascal plus baby Yoda (and I understand the female lead was not actively terrible in a Girlboss mode, so of course Disney bounced her for badthink) while having enough of the SW lore to appeal to the guys.
I like to think it worked because it (well, at least the first 2 seasons) was a freshly brewed batch of the original Star Wars recipe. Instead of reheating in the microwave the same old moldy batch of samurai/western (same thing) tropes with pulp sci-fi trappings from the originals like Disney did with the sequels, Jon Favreau took the recipe but made it with fresh tropes. Western/samurai tropes that were not part of Star Wars yet, starting with the premise taken straight from Lone Wolf and Cub.
zoink
2d ago
It's not too unusual in Europe for strategic companies like Airbus and VW to have this.
And Germans are poorer than Mississippians.
Crowstep
2d ago
What are some examples of "girl" stories that aren't cringe pandering softcore-relationship-porn wish fulfillment only (lame) women find appealing?
Depends what you mean by girl stories? Stories with female protagonists, or stories that girls/women like?
If it's the former, I remember enjoying the Old Kingdom series as a kid. The stories all (or mostly?) had female protagonists who were recognisably women, but they weren't romantasy books, the focus was on the magic and the fantasy elements. The author is male but I think he just preferred writing female protagonists.
DiscourseMagnus
2d ago
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.
An important distinction here: "modern female character design" does still produce characters with lots of bad points, but not on purpose.
Grant_us_eyes
2d ago
Susan Cooper's 'The Dark Is Rising' is pure young-adult adventure fantasy and done very well.
CS Friedman's 'Crown of Shadows' series is a personal favorite, and a twisted mix of sci-fi and fantasy and also done very well.
Hell, even the penultimate male-fantasy young-adult book 'My Side of the Mountain' was written by a woman.
I always considered it a bit weird when people bitched about the lack of female writers in fiction, when I turn to my bookshelves for 1970/80s fantasy and flip through female after female writer. If anything, it's the men that are lacking, not the women.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Have you heard of The Matchless Kungfu? It's practically beat for beat what you're looking for, even if it's closer to Wuxia than Xianxia:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=o-4snPeCyWw
Another game of potential interest, Amazing Cultivation Simulator:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wJxM3POU92w
Warning- Sseth's videos are both incredibly funny and incredibly NSFW.
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?
Because someone mentioned it above: the flawless mean-spirited girlboss is a religious thing, and most show writers are, if not necessarily that religious, encouraged in that direction by the suits. Problem is, of course, that because their religion is a religion of hatred, people need to have some other motivation to watch it.
The best example of a Western show post-MLP (or at least, post-Lauren Faust-directed MLP) to not be outwardly religious in this way is Gravity Falls. I don't think Alex Hirsch is particularly religious in that way (or at least, he isn't in a way that negatively impacts his work, though there are also signs that he understands what I'm about to talk about below).
given the bronies of the 2010s, perhaps it worked a little too well
Oh yeah, about that. The boys that persist in watching it are also [at least sometimes, if not most times] doing it for that reason, just like they were with Sailor Moon back in the '90s (and is part of why the post-woke MLP [G5, the 3D era one] designs look significantly less attractive, like dogs), and is why slice of life anime with all-female casts tend to have significant male followings.
(What that reason is... is more complicated; smarter men than I have tried and failed so I'd have to think about it more. I'd say 'moe' as a first pass, but that's not any less dense.)
I firmly believe there is a good number of strong female characters that western/American male audiences have been fans of. Even in the action-centric genres, Ahsoka from the the Star Wars Clone Wars tv show, Katara from Avatar, and Vi from Arcane, Gwen Stacey from the newer Spiderman are all examples of very well received female characters.
How can you write such list and omit The two strong women in western action movie canon: Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor? Zero girlbossing, 100% believable authority, Significant Relationship Stuff, all while exhibiting classic female traits. I’ve never heard a single guy say anything bad about either character.
What made them such great and believably strong characters is that they were strong women instead of being "strong" teenage girl romantic fantasy protagonists. A show vs tell difference. Anyone who's seen a mother on the warpath for their children knows they can be really fucking scary. That's the energy channeled by Ellen Ripley at the end of Aliens and Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. That's what made them both so believable for teenage boys because which teenage boy doesn't know a mother (their own or some friend's) whose wrong side you really don't want to end up on?
It really is a shame both movie franchises ended after only two movies.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2d ago
Started playing Project Highrise. I was a big fan of SimTower as a kid, and this is the best spiritual successor I've played yet. The mechanics are more interesting and complicated than SimTower which is nice as an adult. It's very sandboxy, by which I mean the difficulty levels are not scaled -- in easy mode, it feel like you just get infinite free money (even with "infinite money" turned off), where normal and hard actually require you to carefully build a flywheel before you can start building financial momentum. The different types of tower you can focus on (residential, commerical, hotel, office, mixed use) makes things strategic and rewards multiple playthroughs.
Overall, good value for money if you like sim games.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
The amount of content in Genshin Impact is absolutely staggering. I know everyone thinks of it as just a gacha but it's gigantic compared to full-price open world rpgs too.
It's got a huge map with lots of verticality and ambient content, puzzles and regional features. It actually looks pretty, unlike Skyrim. A tonne of characters with their own unique abilities. Mechanical complexity beyond just stacking on more attack.
And the story just goes on and on and on. There's a fair bit of BS they put in like 'you NEED to sit through endless tedium with Zhongli gathering ingredients for this ritual before you can go to not-Japan', clearly they want to do artsy character-development and worldbuilding stuff rather than just gacha moneygrabbing. That's just the main story, which is well over 100 hours at this point.
Then there are heaps of character side missions which are also long and voiced. And then dozens and dozens more area missions which are unvoiced but are still long with plenty of cinematics. Or just exploring the huge map, that would take ages.
There are more limited-time events than you can shake a stick at. Player housing. A card game. Really the only things missing are deep endgame like Path of Exile's mapping system and proper modding.
There is however a grindy element to it, you have to kill a bunch of bosses over and over again and pick huge numbers of flowers to level your characters and advance through the story. Surprisingly it seems you can't even skip this by paying, which seems odd to me given it is gacha. You're supposed to pay to get the character you want, not to skip the grind. I refuse to pay either way.
But WTF were Starfield devs doing with their 400 million if the Chinese can make something so huge for 800 million, get whales to pay for it all and have it actually be good too? Does Call of Duty Black Ops really cost nearly that much to make?
Apparently Genshin Impact is second only to Monopoly Go in cost, the latter is pure marketing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop
In 2025, the game surpassed $1 billion in marketing spending since its launch.[12] The game generated $5 billion by April 2025.[3]
What a sad state gaming is in, Monopoly Go makes considerably more money. There's always sloppier slop.
They got invaded and conquered by the USSR, and then the USSR-including-them dissolved.
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