domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
23hr ago
I went to college in Montana. One of the professors noted that a local baker owned their own farms for quality reasons. At first the farms were operating at a loss, but they preferred the consistency of the wheat that came from vertical integration. As the bread brand grew so did the farm. The farm turned profitable at about 10,000 acres (4000 ha). I would guess most of their competitors were at least 1 order of magnitutde smaller. The college town and climate probably wouldn't support very high-priced organic produce farms (it'd be cheaper to fly in produce from those farms in a warmer state).
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
23hr ago
I think what bothers me is it feels like more and more companies are using inject racial poltiics into otherwise crappily designed media in order to blunt all legitimate criticism because then all criticism can be tarred as racists.
Shrike
23hr ago
Not "swimming in space" – that just requires changing your shape.
There are "warp drives" that use exotic matter for superluminal travel, but there is also at least one proposal that uses no exotic matter, albeit only for slower-than-light travel.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
23hr ago
It's just the Grindhouse and Mockbuster traditions of different studios putting out content on the same topic around the same time to take advantage of each other's marketing budgets. Back in the old days of the studio system, when Cecil b Demille style historical dramas were the blockbusters of the time, you'd have these minor studios that would get wind of a big movie about Greece or Egypt and pop out a cheap quick movie about Greece or Egypt, and count on audience confusion to lead some people to go see their movie thinking it was the one they had heard so much about.
Netflix and Amazon prime released documentary series on the Twin Flames cult around the same time for the same reason. Or the movies Friends With Benefits and No Strings Attached, which came out in 2011 with identical premises. Audiences see marketing about the one product and are curious, so consume the other product. Writers read one article and boom half their research is done right off the bat, add a twist or a new angle and it's done. Content created.
One of the positive feedback loops of diversity politics is the acceptance of "How did [event] impact [group]" as publishable material in media and academics. Writing a new analysis of the tactics of the Peninsular Campaign is hard, writing a new analysis of how the Peninsular Campaign impacted women and minorities is easier.
Man, the Assassin's Creed series. My take can be succinctly summarized. Disclaimer, I haven't played any in the series since Black Flag, which to my mind is as damn near perfect as a game can get.
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The series has prided itself on broad historical accuracy. The events it depicts as historical actually happened, the historical figures actually existed and are mostly true to their recorded personas.
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Even so, the whole premise is that a secret order of Illuminati-like villains has been both guiding history AND rewriting the historical record as part of a propaganda war.
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Even even so, the magical technology that enables the plot to happen is 'genetic memory' or whatever, which holds that the historical periods being experienced by the players actually happened and thus are telling a 'true story.'
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So they can just say that Yasuke's history was rewritten by the Villains to downplay his role, and the story in the game is the accurate retelling in the game universe even if 'real world' events are different.
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YET, this starts to undermine the general premise that you're a stealthy assassin who kills, then blends in with the crowd. The ONE black dude in Japan is not going to be able to just break line of sight and evade detection by pulling on a mask and sitting on a bench.
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But who cares, the gameplay is optimized for fun, not realism.
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But but... one point someone made is that the playable protagonist of EVERY game before this has been a fictional character made up specifically for the series, with no historical parallel, which is perhaps in order to give the player the 'blank slate' avatar and avoid any major historical inaccuracies by having some well-known historical figure being an extremely dangerous assassin in their spare time.
So, to the extent Ubisoft has broken a longstanding convention in the series in order to create a playable black character in Japan of all places it bodes ill because it is clear evidence of a point I've made before: If they are specifically advertising their game on grounds of how diverse it is, and they're taking pains to enforce that diversity, it betrays that their priority is not on quality of writing or game design, they're counting on something else to sell the product or, at least, to mask criticism.
But then again, Ubi's whole model is to spit out iterations of a specific formula with small innovations on a regular schedule. Hence there's a new Ghost Recon game, Far Cry, or AC game on the schedule for release just about every year. And while admittedly the AC games tend to be a cut above in terms of average quality, one can understand that Ubisoft isn't in it for the art, it is just another franchise they can milk indefinitely, as long as they don't alienate the fanbase too much with any one entry.
hanikrummihundursvin
23hr ago
I don't disagree. I just wonder why that criticism of the white mans burden is only pushed when the topic of jews, Israel and Palestine are on the docket. Outside of that you would only hear it from ethno-nationalists. Yet the people pondering these things now don't consider themselves as being ethno-nationalists. At least they don't advertise themselves as such. So what gives? Does it just happen to be that in this case we can actually genocide the browns for the greater good and not the other way around?
I mean, just as a point of honesty, for how long could anyone back in 2016 or so uphold the idea that they were just rational skeptic centrist logic lords whilst constantly railing against the white mans burden? Wouldn't everyone just see that they are white nationalists? Isn't that transparently obvious?
confuciuscorndog
23hr ago
The stat posted is a binary yes/no on sexlessness in the last year as far as I can see, but yes you're right about another aspect of the limitations of these kinds of statistics and how men can apparently come out ahead even though they're actually not by any means.
ace
23hr ago
Along these lines, I believe at the start of this experiment, @ZorbaTHut mentioned something about calculating correlations between plebian jannies and known-quantity moderators to figure out if any of the jannies could be trusted more, or if some should be trusted less. It's been a year(?) since then, but haven't heard what's become of that idea.
crushedoranges
23hr ago
I don't buy games with black people in it anymore. Historical exemptions from a previous era, like Barret, get a pass, but if I see a black person (especially that one black bald woman, you know who) on the cover then it a 'never buy, sports-game-tier slop' category.
And I'm not even white.
Don't buy things from people who hate you.
faceh
23hr ago
Injecting your stupid racial politics into 16th century Japan and then hiding behind "actually, there was a black samurai, and you weren't even upset about a golden apple, so I've gotcha you racist".
Especially when it would be approximately as valid to have some random European dude instead, if they were merely looking to inject diversity into a Japanese setting. (They'll probably still have this guy in there as a side character or something, they love doing that).
And this coming up with a background of an extremely well-received show, Shogun, which tries its damndest to keep things realistic as to the demographics of the time and not shy away from the brutality of Japanese culture during the era.
There's clear demand for a straightforward historically accurate dramatization of feudal Japan, the extra step of adding the culture war issues of today into it is just hilariously tone deaf.
yofuckreddit
23hr ago
- Autopilot is nice. You can't rely on it completely, but the latest versions are pretty excellent and would make long trips far, far more pleasant.
- The range is "legit" in the summer. A new Tesla will frequently get very close to the advertised range. Temperature, elevation changes, and how heavy your foot is literally mean YMMV.
- Maintenance is non-existent/easy, though getting parts is still annoying unless you're in one of four US metros. The one thing people forget and talk too little about, though, is that if you get a performance model with low-profile tires, you will rip through them. If you hit a pothole, the tire is done, and each tire is more than $250. They also wear insanely fast if you drive the car the way you should, IMO.
2rafa
23hr ago
Niall Ferguson is a very widely read and famous popular historian who has made a living defending the British Empire. Sure, many leftists don’t like him for it, but they typically don’t like Israel either, and Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg and Newsweek so can hardly be considered cancelled by the mainstream. In general neoconservatives broadly defend the legacy of European (especially British) imperialism while acknowledging some limited atrocities.
faceh
23hr ago
It surprises me that we don't see more robot mowers for this exact reason. "Roomba for your lawn" seems like it should sell itself.
I guess hiring a service is still the overall cheaper move.
2rafa
23hr ago
Assassin’s Creed is more in the ‘Bridgerton’ school of historical fiction than the more realistic style. I don’t think the demographics of Bridgerton are propaganda to trick people into thinking the British aristocracy in 1820 or whatever was half black because so many other aspects of the show, from the music to the hair to the gender relations and sex are completely anachronistic. The casting is because it’s a show created by a black woman legendarily famous for self-insert characters. It’s “historical fiction” in the way that Disney’s Cinderella is.
In any case, the rage well has surely been mined with Assassin’s Creed to the point of utter depletion. A woman in 1868 London facing no instances of sexism was standard for the series back in 2015, so I find it hard to work up any performative outrage about a black samurai in 2024.
2D3D
23hr ago
(My below is solely from my time spent in, strictly speaking, retarded discords where I kill time and hint at black/dog cucking just for shits and giggles so my insight should be treated as pondscum for the below, but spaces for actual bigbrain white nats aren't online in any form and only comes about as Hidden Power reveals by inference.)
Honestly the white nats barely talk about white mans burden being a Good Thing. That seems to be at best a poor osmosis of blackpilled IDW arguments, and white nats frame the white mans burden as one of ingratitude rather than justification. The evolution of the more IDW type of race realism seems to be a reluctant but inexorable blackpilling by virgin liberals who found their race blind utopias crushed by the real world after leaving college, and their intellectual solidarity being found only in the redpilled heterodox academy types. That would account for the sanethrashing (opposite of sanewashing) of IDW arguments, and their relative incoherent yet visible presence in 2015+.
bonsaii
23hr ago
One angle I'm somewhat surprised hasn't been brought up much is that this set-up will almost certainly lead to the "problematic" optics of a non-Japanese person running around slaughtering a bunch of Japanese people. Video games are largely a power fantasy so the player character is going to be generally depicted as by far the strongest being. In the best case scenario, the Japanese will be depicted as weak and passive, needing a "foreign savior". I can imagine the outcry on the left would be swift if this were a game starring, say, a European warrior in 15th century Africa.
Even as someone who feels like "problematic" gets overused, I'd say those optics are more than sub-optimal. I remember having a conversation with someone about a similar potential issue arising with the God of War series, which sees former Greek solider Kratos slaughtering a series of mythical gods (first the Greek pantheon, then the Norse). We were discussing whether it would be difficult to continue the series beyond European pantheons while keeping Kratos as the main character because it just seems like the optics of a white guy traveling to Japan, India, and Mexico and killing a bunch of their local gods would be harshly criticized as a narrative faux pas in this day and age.
I'd be curious to know how positions on the two series correlate. If people were largely basing their opinion on "principle" I'd expect the largest groups to be:
1.) "It's a video game. I don't care if it's about an African guy killing a bunch of Japanese people, or a Greek guy killing a bunch of Japanese gods."
2.) "Optics are bad. I'd prefer a story set in Japan to star a Japanese samurai and I'd prefer a story set in mythical Japan to star a Japanese character."
Does anyone here fall outside of these two and if so why?
WhiningCoil
23hr ago
What's even the point of this? It's all so tired. Ubisoft games are practically a parody of themselves at this point, and have been for years. They are the defining example of monogame slop. Soulless open world games with the same generic tedious grab bag of decade old game mechanics, with a sprawling cluttered minimap full of OCD bait. This one has a giant red flag that a DEI consultancy group ratcheted up the The Narrative a few notches? So what? The games before this weren't worth playing, the games after this won't be worth playing. It's just the same battle lines between people who are tired of demoralization propaganda, regardless of it's plausible alternate explanations, and people who are 100% aboard with current year NPC updates. No one will ever give an inch of ground.
Tomato
22hr ago
"problematic" optics of a non-Japanese person running around slaughtering a bunch of Japanese people
For sure the battle lines would be completely inverted if he were white.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
22hr ago
A lot has been said about QAnon, but it is definitely religious in nature: parables, eschatology, cryptic sacred text, prophecy involving Trump triumphing in the last days… indeed that it is called “Q” anon always made me think this was conscious: academic scholars believe that the gospel was preceded by a “Q” document of sayings, which were then disseminated and interpreted by the anon posters apostles
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
22hr ago
ChatGPT has gotten a lot better at finding me studies about topics. It is giving me actual, relevant studies, whereas it used to literally provide fictitious study names. This is going to be so fun to play around with.
2D3D
22hr ago
I view the Japanese as treating Yasuke as a joke, like a court jester. See here this trinket, dancing for our amusement! That he may have accorded himself decently in battle is no big feat, especially since the samurai were absolute gun nuts in contrast to popular portrayal and should things ever get close in hand a big dude naturally has advantage over smaller dudes: weebs jerk off to the katana when the yuni and yari were the main weapons of choice (or the nagitana but I can't remember the specifics of whether that was the female weapon)
Ironically I feel like we are already past the peak of that particular tactic (I could be wrong). I think that time period where we got a Watchmen sequel series with a Black Dr. Manhattan, and a Lovecraft series specifically about his racism, and Amazon's Rings of Power LOTR adaptation adding in Black elves, dwarves, and Hobbits would be hard to surpass, without straight up becoming comedies.
There's also some funny irony in how Disney's Marvel fumbled (nearly) every move made post-Endgame, such as trying to replace Captain America with a black dude (no hate at Anthony Mackie, mind), to introduce a black supervillain to supplant Thanos as the big bad (maybe a little hate towards Jonathan Majors), and of course their attempt to get audiences engaged with three female heroes almost nobody cares about which was not Black Girl Magic at the box office. I can't even muster up enough interest in that to even attempt to hate it.
It is not working. Maybe they got the message after shareholders attempted a coup.
I would vaguely expect to see a bit less of this particular brand of culture warring in a period where interests rates are higher and thus projects actually have to justify their existence on the basis of short-term profitability.
On the other hand, pretty much every commercial or ad these days still does the Interracial couple thing, almost always black male, white female.
So not sure if I'm looking at the wrong bellwether.
I noticed this while renting a car for a group trip recently, that it was cheaper to get the electric vehicles in comparable price ranges than the internal combustion engine vehicles. I can only imagine what unholy set of federal subsidies are encouraging this behavior from rental companies.
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