2D3D
2mo ago
Nah, I was also delirious from straining in the crapper and while I got the intent I didn't get the joke.
Eat veg, people. Psilum Husk is no substitute.
ahem i wish to clarify that I did not say gay fanfic ruined chinese pop culture. in fact i would submit that gay fanfic is the exact reason why chinese pop culture suddenly started gaining traction within asian spheres, and the ccp being afraid of women having unrealistic standards was the cause of the clampdown. edit: perhaps a better accurate-yet-dishonest representation of an AAQC could be Isekai-Titling the subject. Dean Convinces Bigbrains That Japanese Developers Are Secret Nazis, or MonkeyWithAMachinegun Survives The Wire Immersive Reality Sim
east asian pop culture especially needs to go beyond the romance of three kingdoms, journey to the west, sengoku jida, generic anticolonial resentment and the joseon dynasty for rehashed fodder. if that vector attracts writing and artistic talent because prettyboys in flowing robes draws in the female consumers, thats capitalism baby!
also, the aaqc being feted is indeed quite an honor, since i do actually respect the overall quality of postings and posters on this forum. not that much, since i sometimes try to have a life, but enough to expend brain cells grokking the outputs of this board.
happy 2nd anniversary to this corner of the internet, we culture war refugees that neither fling poop automatically nor disappear our heads up our own ass to sniff our farts. may this delicate balance continue and leave the jannies with no poop to clean up.
(sorry, im typing this out while using the can)
2D3D
2mo ago
Eh, they can get credit. Her name is Naomi Nagata, and could easily have been asian. They got an indian guy to play a texan hick as well, and no one really gave a shit because the series cleaved its racial differences as space palestine vs 2 faraway superpowers. In fantasy all colors of humanity unite to be racist against orcs, and speciecism is more appealing in scifi than racism still.
2D3D
2mo ago
RLM has consistently dunked on whiny fanboys crying about Canon or muh blacks and girls, and especially mindless Consume Product fanboys. But RLM also doesn't hold back from criticizing mid products and calling them shitty even if they have a protected class in the forefront, especially Star Trek Discovery.
Perhaps the nuance here is that RLM has not actually come out as anti-woke, but that RLM has not onboarded the Message consistently pushed out by 2016-era progressives smirking about how all these legacy franchises were being replaced with new hip exciting Modern Audiences. The media/academic elite narrative came first: these legacy franchises with shitloads of money were ripe for being replaced by minorities and women for social messaging to be readily absorbed by fanboys hungry for content.
Of course, the problem for that logic is that fanboys are no longer restricted to whatever slop is out on the theaters or newly released or even in print. Torrents of legacy shows exist, reducing even the friction of going to Blockbuster and hoping the DVD for some oldass show still exists. I don't think ANYONE here on this board would have watched any Star Wars show without their dad or friend digging up an old copy of the Original Trilogy to let John Williams hit us right in the jimmies. Fans don't need to be wheezing 80 year olds trying to capture the magic of the 60s, they can watch legacy shit. The existence of RLM and other media critics (left and right) who can say 'hey this new thing is not like the old thing' is poison to new talent that want to force their relevance into the modern cultural landscape.
For the sin of knowing the past and not really giving a shit about the future, RLM is an enemy. Good thing they can just keep repairing that VCR to time travel to the good old days when men were alcoholic sex perverts and women didn't exist.
2D3D
2mo ago
Strictly speaking, who is losing here? The progressive media elite say they care about fulfilling the market demand of the hidden woke masses screaming for representation, and will whine that normies don't give a shit about lousy shows, but in the end the only opinion that really affects the media elite is their own peers. The hundreds of millions of dollars burnt on progressive shows shows up as a line item on some production companies balance sheet that disappears into a thousand hollywood bank ledgers as accounting aether.
This money was never theirs to curate, manage or be responsible for. Make the highest grossing R rated movie ever? Pandering to incel chuds (Joker) or manchildren (Deadpool). Lose a billion dollars with your female and minority heavy slopfest? The Marvels/WW84 was never for the men anyways and also its their fault for not supporting it so just keep slaying kween, its all good.
Its not like anti-wokeness is an automatic money printer. James Gunns Suicide Squad lost money while incredibly woke Avatar 2 made money, but neither director is playing the media victimization game. For video games Cliff Blezinski and Randy Pitchford are whiners complaining that modern gamers are woke pussies who like the marvel aesthetic, while Kill The Justice League is a flailing shitpile with defenders playing defense for uglified women.
The hollywood elite are all playing social games with each other and burning some index funds capital while clogging up our media with trash. They don't actually care about us, and are not obligated to actually deliver shit the audience cares about. Crash winning an Oscar was the start of the end, and our shows have been continually enshittified as a result.
2D3D
2mo ago
They are old fat midwesterners who dress as blue collar repairmen in their movie warehouse dungeon and don't breathlessly celebrate 'representation'. As far as wokes who worshipped Lindsay Ellis till Rayagate are concerned, these old white men might as well be MAGA redhats.
Also, RLM skewered girlGhostbusters ,Star Trek Discovery and Last Jedi/Rise of Skywalker, the originators of 'fans hate their white male.heroes being replaced with strong women and blacks!' anti-criticism card. Since RLM was the only platform with significant reach to beyond weird film autists, they caught the ire of progressives.
2D3D
2mo ago
Dafne Keen as the young jedi girl also brought her A game, and Carrie Ann Moss also brought gravitas. Both could work with facial expression, body language and limited dialogue to still bring character and intent.
You know, acting.
A good actor can be a shining gem in a bad script, but it just highlights how shit the script is and how much of a slog it is to get through. Bad actors in bad scripts just become exhausting, and right now there are no good young black actresses. Zoe Saldana and Zendaya are above average but not Halle Berry or Angela Bassett level, and Dominique Tipper is decent but can't do dialogue. Every other young black woman is some flavor of 'repressed racial rage' and can't fucking smile or joke because that's white supremacy or something. (Note: I heard good things about Abbott Elementary so maybe black talent is concentrated in comedy AS USUAL).
The Noticing variable for an enshittified show is a young black woman who don't take no shit from no man. Scifi is especially guilty of this, and thats why Discovery, Acolyte and Obi Wan sucked balls.
2D3D
2mo ago
Even without legal sanction calling oneself a woman was merely (and literally) a box ticking exercise. Despite living in the relatively unpozzed east, LGBT being a woke thing means the western dating apps are filled with self identified women. My lesbian friend showed me her filters and her preference matches, and she still gets flooded with dicks on the apps. Its all feminine penis stuff for the pozzed, and shameless 'you lesbos just need a REAL dick to know your place and this app lets me superlike you without review.' I understand the Chinese gay app Blued is just pure degeneracy and transphobia, and all lesbian apps whether western or eastern have been infested.
Singapore has a unique case where identity and sex are actually distinct: you can freely change your gender at will on official documents, but sex is based only on birth certificates. Since there are no legal protections for gender save for medical requirements, self declaration has no practical value here. Penises are conscripted regardless of presentation, and declaring oneself trans gets you out of conscription only because it is classified as a mental illness. Being homosexual used to be an excuse to get out of conscription too, but the army realized that actual gays will be the ones bullied in the army so they did not pose a threat to the integrity of a unit.
2D3D
2mo ago
We don't have a 2008 crisis on our hands yet (things suck but its a rotting, not collapsed economic house), and the wrecking ball of an economic failure will annihilate Harris just as badly regardless of her party discipline. My point is that a portion of the animus motivating people against democrats from 2020 to 2023 have dissipated with the retreat of the progressive cultists. It will be a while before they can resurrect their unpopular totems, and in the meantime the Republican's are flailing against shadows. 2024 Harris isn't spewing progressive bullshit like in 2020, and her current brevity has let her deflate much of the invective flung against her I'm also not sure pinning her down is an automatic win for Trump; a blow has to land and Harris being brief on specifics and long on Joy somehow stinks of Bait to lure in a bad attack from Trump.
If Trump can stay on message and hammer Harris on the border and the economy consistently, he takes November. Right now though he's just whining and rambling.
2D3D
2mo ago
I'm not American so any specific figure hidden in the deep woods is likely to escape my current notice. I will state that I do pay attention to track records as evidence for total success, and mere participation in one successful project doesn't make up for historical failures. Musk powered through to get Space X and Tesla working despite immense (and to my mind still extant) disadvantages, and X is a flailing shitpile (along with Optimus, Hyperloop, The Boring Company, Neuralink and other stupid ass ideas). Thiel and Vance are SV VC who have culture war trappings drawing eyeballs to them and their decent-but-not-especially-outsize performance. @SlowBoy is right in saying that Musk beat Boeing and NASA with SpaceX, but that highlights the incapability of Boeing more than anything else, and Thiel is... like, he founded PayPal. Great investor/manager maybe, not exactly genius planetbrain.
My gut is basically 'when this man speaks does his rambling pass the smell test'. I'm too old and lazy to hyperoptimize and backtrace, so just based on gut for recent supposed smartdicks I've seen interviewed on whatever shitty clip floats to my attention. The following logarithmic scale is my assessment of smartdickiness, with 0/10 being College Educated Corporate Professional With 10 Years Of Experience And Steady Career Profession With No Fuckups. The modal mottizen is probably a 3-5/10 on this smartdick scale. A 10/10 galaxybrain is I dunno, a combination of Nikola Tesla, the Black Scholes dudes, Grace Hopper, and lets throw in Billy Beane and Michael Jackson (americentric references due to availability and common reference pools).
If forced to choose the closest I'd rank as a modern singular smartdick I'll demurr and give the following options (weighted for visibility and common knowledge osmosis),
Chase CEO Jamie Dimon 7/10
Berkshire chancellor Charlie Munger: soft 7.5 (or 8)/10
Stephen Cohen (the one I think actually has the sauce instead of Thiel) firm 8/10
(sigh) Steve Jobs: 8.5/10. The man had the product design and pivoting flexibility to drive the change we see in modern microcomputing. Theres a reason every SV blowhard wants to copy his style.
For reference I'd rank the 3 i cited as follows: Vance 5-6.5/10 Musk 6.5-7.5/10 Thiel 7-7.5/10
I do not think Musk Vance and Thiel are stupid at all, they clearly are smart enough to avoid crippling fuckups and have pushed appropriately for given opportunities. However I do think that current conservative fluffing of these particular smartdicks is to contrast them against the cucked college educated cowards abasing themselves to performative wokeness. The motivated reasoning to claim that these men are Truly Intelligent comports their actual achievements into parody. We fete these men as kings among sheep because they dare to stand against the intelligensia, even if their crown ill fits.
2D3D
2mo ago
Yea the media smothers all the migrant rape and murder stories pretty hard. The only migrant murder/rape stories that make it out is if it was mass captured on social media and impossible to ignore, like the muslims attacking random white people at the pub in the UK. Without public eyeballs the media just repeatedly confirms coulters law over and over again.
2D3D
2mo ago
That didn't happen in Veep, and that show is unfortunately a crystal ball for US political developments now.
2D3D
2mo ago
The religious revival is, if anything, a reactionary retreat in response to the disgusting progressive ideology. I will use such a negatively loaded term because the actual visceral response most normies have to Drag Kids, or Black Crime Is Just Unfair Noticing, or Public Junkie Defecation Is Part And Parcel Of Living In A Big City is disgust.
Secular humanism and urban social dynamics have turned out to be bitter tinctures because progressive shibboleths have not been filtered for failure. With the continual rot of safety and education failings being unable to address due to the moral sanctity of the poisoners, religion is a steady bulwark standing against the continual social degradation. It is no surprise that some would find genuine comfort in religion as a result.
I honestly don't think Musk Thiel Vance are especially intelligent and capable. Certainly their public profile allows for such generous assessments to be feted, but thats just a best-fit for the Smartsuit, not that the suit actually fits. Too many normies don't think especially highly of Musk or Vance, and Thiel is not on the public radar. Also, Trump kicked out the last smartdicks he had (Tillerson, Mattis, Bolton - I accept the controversy about this dude, pls no bully), so there is a risk that being smart isn't actually good enough to stay in the cabinet.
2D3D
2mo ago
To be honest the sense I get is that the Democrats have settled their major internal fights since 2022/2023, and Bidens age was a distraction. Three progressive democrat sacred cows were executed in 2022: racial hyperfragmentation, defund the police, open borders. Latinx as a neologism being thoroughly disparaged by the entire polity in 2022 put paid to the split-and-lift approach democrats had of highlighting racial subidentities and holding them in high esteem in order to oppose white men and drive turnout. Defund the police and restorative justice as a whole died with the COVID crime rises and Chesa Boudin being ousted put other prosecutors like Krasner, Price, Bragg and Gascon on watch for being overly progressive, with less public celebration of defending criminals. Finally, the migrant invasion into democratic cities has muted active open border proponents.
The democrats still are vulnerable on these issues, but the muting of the progressive wings gives normies hope that democrats aren't actively trying to end run the retard ball into an open goal. Yes the progressives are loud and extremely irritating still, but they aren't being actively supported by politicians anymore. Without the progressive bogeyman, much of the past 8 months has been focused on Bidens incapability, and with Harris wisely shutting up about specifics there is little attack material that is holding against her.
Culture war now is a wash for republicans, because abortion is remarkably salient, while Trumps centrality to the Republican establishment means his rambly whining and halfhearted autofellatio is taking up valuable discussion focus away from economy and border.
Hyperfocused overthinkers are wont to laser in on individual policies or vague connected webs to posit the end of civilization based on the extrapolated outcome, but most people don't care for that. Talking about democracy ending with Trump was not a vote winner, and talking about the woke mind virus isn't either. Democrats have pivoted to a surprisingly blank slate bollard of a candidate, Trump is still trying to gas up his hot air balloon while flinging shit at Harris. The election is still Trumps to win, but he's gotta get the cook going now.
2D3D
2mo ago
The MtF I know are either self-loathing autogynephiliacs transposing a woman are wonderful effect back onto themselves and thus both desire and loathe natal women INTENSELY, or they are mentally injured (usually raped) self loathing depressives whose bodily mutilation are an attempt at deautonomizing their body.
Healthy autogynephiliac men shave and diet to become femboys, healthy gender fluid people just become transvestites. MtF is plain fetishism and narcissism wrapped in a +50 to Oppression skin.
2D3D
2mo ago
To be fair I've only seen this discussion ONCE in real life. Most of my uncovering of the inner goblins of my college educated lit-minded peers was in one-on-one settings where I express surprise at something like 'I didn't understand the first scene of Sherlock season 2 where they made Sherlock and Moriarty kiss' or 'God Sakura is so annoying the series would be much cooler if they got another girl in the team' and seeing the goblin glint in the girls eye. It only happens with girls who both trust you AND have zero intention of fucking you, which is a sadly rare combination in the current day and age.
2D3D
2mo ago
Plenty of 'women' engineers with said capabilities. once the Chinese make AI waifus it'll be a short step before AI husbandos. And outside of reproduction women dont actually need a husband for anything other than carrying heavy stuff and being socially inclined to act first in dangerous scenarios. If the T1000 skeleton does all the actual mechanical work, why can't I just shove that in a Christina Henricks suit instead of Arnold? Just swap the genital unit on demand.
2D3D
2mo ago
Chris Roberts wanted to act out his Star Wars Starfighter only fantasy so hard he blew all his money to get Luke Hamill as an actor for 15 minutes for bis now TEN YEAR OLD trailer for a game that still isn't released.
Freespace may be the only media that successfully gave the inanimate ships a weight of history and despair and affect that makes you care about the outcome of this hunk of metal. (Homeworld Cataclysm somewhat achieves this too)
I wrote a long dump on how the Psamtik and Colossus had emotional weight to their presence because of their direct intervention in the MCs journey, and the impact of their destructions in highlighting the stakes of the plot, but it got too rambly. Freespace simply managed to hit on the sauce, hitting a near perfect combination of progression, mechanics, player emotional investment and especially flair.
Freespace stands out because its capship fights had flair. No other space sim managed to recreate the sense of starships really smashing into each other, mainly because streams of pew pew lasers or waves of torpedoes don't look interesting compared to big honking beams slashing giant ships - and Freespace did hit it on getting the sense of scale.
Chris Roberts needs I M M E R S I O N to sell his Luke Skywalker self-insert dream, but Freespace made me feel I was actually blowing up a Death Star and not just some spiky macguffin.
2D3D
2mo ago
Fictional but likely realizable conversation between me and my friends:
Me: can Harry with the Elder Wand take on Mangekyo Sharingan Sasuke.
Guys: autistically calculate power levels and how to resolve conflicting magic systems and Prep Time
Girls: Sasuke takes Harry because he is more Seme than Harry unless Harry is an Alpha and Natuto made Sasuke his omega
2D3D
2mo ago
Mid. So much of the HK dramas dubbed into mandarin for local chinese audiences here in southeast asia are basically the same few stories with different skins. The underlying skeleton of family dramas are the same across all cultures, so whether it is Billions or Succession or Dynasty the centrality of sibling and patriarch dynamics will always be present. I do blame the honkies for shitloads of weird complexes about younger-brother-and-elder-brothers-wife, and the Japs for son-and-stepmother complexes based on certain Noticing of their dramatic outputs. I heard that Indian dramas especially focus on mother-vs-daughter-in-law conflicts but my tolerance for bad filming cannot handle Indian or Latin American editing.
I think the reason for HKdrama exploding outwards and receiving a virtuous cycle of profits and reinvestment was the Chinese diaspora being starving for recognizable content, and the Hongkies were the first to produce media at scale, since the Taiwanese were struggling with their language issues over Hokkien vs Mandarin and the Hongkies went went full Cantonese. The Honkies were happy to license their stuff cheaply to Southeast Asian broadcasters and have their shit dubbed, leading to the first mover advantage of Honkie stuff. Inevitably local productions would spring up, creating inferior copies of legacy HK media and highlighting the appeal of just licensing their stuff and etc etc etc.
The plots and writing for HK shows have been really mid, and it was the brutal competition of talent that let certain auteurs like Wong Kar Wai and John Woo exploit available talent like Chow Yun Fatt and Jackie Chan but only after a long time. Advances in filming and special effect techniques allowed Wuxia and martial arts to ascend, and those filled a niche otherwise missing in most television productions. Maybe China would have had the opportunity to develop their film industry as well for local tastes, but they were too busy making Romance Of The Three Kingdoms or Journey To The West for the 2000th time. Never Water Margin though.
2D3D
2mo ago
I don't think it was an effortpost as much as it was a snide/snarky observation on the tropiness of Kdramas and their specific deleterious effect on Asian women regarding expectation management. I do think it is VERY funny to see the specific tropes crop up over and over again and the common trends. one reason my wife got sick of watching these shows is that I ruined everything for her witb my meta commentary. This dude will die and have a secret twin brother! This secretary actually is the half sister! This car is just product placement and it will be that car that will crash!
For my own edification I did follow your stated path of Noticing the intense man on man melodrama and the diminishing centrality of the female MC.
It should be explicated that the main consumers of dramas are women, and that is true across all cultures all over the world. The difference I think is that the Asian women writers and producers lean in to the degenerate goblin woman energy fermenting in their writers room, leading to women following through in putting pen to paper their boiling emotions after seeing two hot men yell at each other. @FistfullOfCrows mentions that this shit is bait for women, and I think I can reliably tell when there is a goblin woman cackling in the writers room depending on how many opportunities for personal conflict are painfully forced into the character interactions. Men write action scenes with autistic attention to power levels and how smartly the characters will use the environment and the situation to their physical or social advantage, women will force these two guys to grab the retard ball together and smoulder/yell at each other as much as humanly possible.
2D3D
2mo ago
True that the Chinese acting talent pool just seems to terrible. I would personally attribute that to traditional sinic objections to economically precarious professions, with Chinese talent development basically being 30 years behind the evolution of Japanese and Korean talent scouting and development model, compared with the Hong Kong and Taiwanese producer driven model. Given the constraints put on directors and the frankly terrible salaries writers and producers and staff get compared to celebrities, it also explains the formulaic plots and recycled sets. My own limited dealing with Chinese creatives is that they usually leave China, or go into the relatively unmoderated video game scene, which is where you get the Chinese video game trope of 'cute girls with PTSD' being the dominant narrative medium.
As for the CCP tentacles being winked at, I did not notice it. I stopped watching K/C/HK/Tdramas when my wife got bored of them and got hooked on shopping livestreams instead, freeing me from the torment of pretending to care about formulaic love triangles.
There may be great acting talents in these shows, but being shoved into formulaic tropefests for lowest effort highest reward limits opportunities to showcase auteur talents. The Japanese do seem to like their weird shit which lets actors like Hiroyuki Sanada and Ken Watanabe flex their chops, and the Koreans do good KATUSA work with Steven Yuen, and I really like Lee Jung Jae in Acolyte, where he did fantastic work objectively and his performance along with Manny Jacinto elevated an otherwise messy show. For a dude with no native english and just constant micro expressions he did really well, and if Acolyte had focused on him and Dafne Keen instead of the black girl it would have been way better received.
We have not seen opportunities for Chinese auteurs to flex, beyond the stuff from Hong Kong and that is largely the remnants of the 90s-2000s Hong Kong greats like Tony Leung, Andy Lauand Jackie Chan (he was really good in Steelhead). It will be awhile before any modern Chinese actors like Yang Yang will go beyond domestic attention.
2D3D
2mo ago
The HBO series was fucking weird and the female lead was a good actress, but that world was just so tortured in its framing that nothing about it made sense. Vigilante police, reparations, the Klan, nightmare squid storms... its just such a baffling show so far up its own ass that there it took until the penultimate episode to figure out what the central conflict of the show was.
Everyone despises JJ Abrams Mystery Box attitude to storytelling now, but the overly convoluted framing also is Damon Lindlehofs doing. His grubby fingers are good for kneading slow burning plots like The Leftovers, but most of the time he works just collapse in the bake.
2D3D
2mo ago
We can't race swap anymore without the metanarrative causing irritating discussions. It really doesn't help that Shonda Rhimes ruined 'put black people in fancy clothing' by inserting racism analogues, instead of just ignoring race and letting black actors dress and talk posh.
If the performance is strong enough the race or even gender swaps become secondary, like Idris Elba as Heimdall or Steve whatever as Corlys Velaruon or whoever played Jet Black in live-action cowboy bebop. There are a few gender swaps too, like Katee Sackoff as Starbuck, but I can't think of many.
Anyways, after initial kvetching, the blackness of the portrayal became secondary to the other criticisms of the media in question, because the flipping was relatively unproblematic.
Contra anything made currently where race and gender are front and center: maximal irritation without a good enough product to overwhelm criticism means everyone just shits on it and defenders are few. Dustborn and Valid@te are clowned on for being the woke shitpiles that they are, but BG3 literally has race swapping into an ANIMAL which is bestiality, not just furry, and it turned into a selling point of the game.
Associate communism with a universally hated enemy if talking to strangers, or a specific enemy if talking to an individual with known preference profiles. This is INCREDIBLY easy since communism, especially modern communism, has parasited itself to literally everything except productive prosocial socioeconomic development models.
Bob hates gays and trannies? Point to the DSA trying to make communism fully gay and trans.
Carla hates welfare queens? Point to /r/antiwork and show how these lazy fucks just don't want to work ever.
Ahmed hates colonial exploiters? Look at expansionist communist countries and how they treat their minorities.
Suzuka hates conservative values? See how communist countries persecute gays.
Etc etc etc.
For every shit thing a commie does, it is possible to level the same accusation against a capitalist or monarchist or whathaveyou. But normies don't care about winning an argument, they care about an emotional valence right in their pain point. And there is one universal pain point commies will never be able to refute:
'Commies want to take your stuff and give it to the shithead down the street.'
Dress it up however you want, no commie wants to refute that. All this guff about 'personal property is not private property' breaks down with the slightest investigative breeze, so commies have to focus on overintellectualized utopian dreams to justify their existence.
Normies will not like communism. Even losers scrabbling at the dirt don't like communism because they ultimately want to keep bennies they ultimately scrounge up. It is only failed class aspirants who want communism, because being the guiding hand on the lever gives the illusion of power even if the machine is broken.
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