AnotherSiteAnotherName
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User ID: 319
AnotherSiteAnotherName
11mo ago
As a very strong rule, this is not the case for financial news Corps. WSJ and Bloomberg are paywalled and subscriber only because their reporting is considered financially worthwhile for their subscribers. They are very different than most media, which is primarily for entertainment.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
11mo ago
the most popular conservative leaning news aggregator?
I disagree that Drudge is conservative. He is primarily motivated by money/clicks. There is a study that I'm not going to find right now that showed that Drudge is very centrist. He just seems conservative because he comes from an era where there wasn't even Fox News as a counterweight, and he was actually willing to blow the whistle on the Lewinsky scandal when all the other MSM outlets were willing to bury it.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
11mo ago
I didn't take your comment as serious, but I very much think that Xi is coming from a position of weakness hoping to get Biden to back off with some vague promises. China has enough systemic economic problems right now without the US making things significantly harder.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
11mo ago
If Biden gives Xi Jinping anything, I will consider him a total failure as a president. The rise in hostile actions from China came entirely during Xi's regime, and they came amid reassurances that they wouldn't happen.
He is crawling back now because China is in a position of weakness, but things will go back to the way they were the moment he feels confident.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
The fawning tone is undeniable, but on the other hand, users on this site wage the culture war often. It is just usually with a more negative tone/perspective. The truth is that users on this site are far more comfortable with wholly negative criticism because it can be passed off as analysis. Never mind the fact that critical analysis is far child's play next to strong positive claims.
There is a growing miasma of pseudo-intellectual sneering here, perhaps because of its connection to another site. At least this user leaned the other way. At least there was something earnest about his post. It is something this userbase really lacks these days.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
If anything, I'd say it's the opposite. The gameplay is a thin layer to make the subject matter feel more earned/discovered. It is supposed to be esoteric, after all, so simply giving you a textbook on the world would be counterproductive to the feeling the author is trying to cultivate. I suppose that you could describe much of the writing as thin. But that isn't because the subject matter is thin. That is because the writing is meant to obliquely reference things you have to cobble together for yourself. Again, this adds to the esoteric atmosphere.
I don't begrudge anyone who doesn't like that sort of thing, but let's be accurate about just what it is. Kennedy does a very good job at what he wants to do, but it certainly isn't for everyone.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
Pretense is just the hater's word for atmospheric.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
yes it is the same problem
No, it is a financially different problem for the exact same reason that hardware is different than software. Software has infinite do-overs at malleable speed. Hardware has to work in reality. Sure, after enough refining, ML will be able to manufacture a complete car. But how many attempts would it have to undergo first? Even ignoring the iterations on the manufacturing hardware itself, how much money would you have to spend on materials and energy in your tens of thousands of attempts to teach the ML how to manufacture a car? And then there is the political cost. What defect rate will people be willing to put up with from entirely autonomous robotic manufacturing? Almost certainly, it will be a lower rate than what we put up with from humans. Especially if it is from a black box like current ML.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
That almost certainly isn't true considering political patronage has been much more explicit in the past (e.g. prior to the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act).
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
It's not bizarre at all if you remember that ChatGPT has no inner qualia. It does not have any sort of sentience or real thought. It writes what it writes in an attempt to predict what you would like to read.
That is close enough to how people often think while communicating that it is very useful. But that does not mean that it somehow actually has some sort of higher order brain functions to tell it if it should lie or even if it is lying. All that it has are combinations of words that you like hearing and combinations of words that you don't, and it tries to figure them out based on the prompt.
You're right - you use more words to be petty and condescending. Now stop it.
As opposed to what? This comment from you right here? I never said I wasn't being petty and condescending. I owned it. Stop telling me to stop it in a petty and condescending way.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
If you want to say I'm being petty and condescending, that's fine. But you're going to say that someone is being petty and condescending after he misquotes me and says that I'm "accidentally" admitting that my extremely abstract idea is unfalsifiable? No, he's being hostile and antagonistic. Don't do some false equivalence here. He mischaracterizes what people write and seems to only be here to "win" discussions. I get annoyed by his hostility and get prickly. We are not the same.jpeg
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
I didn't use the word prove, so I don't understand why you are once again attributing words to me to mischaracterize what I wrote. Is this intellectual dishonesty or just poor reading comprehension?
Edit: Oh, you think I "accidentally" admitted that this is unfalsifiable. Just poor reading comprehension, then.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
What do I have to argue against, even if I wanted to? You say that Dune II is mostly generic with its ships and units, as if that is somehow a strike against the idea. But a couple of other people already made the point that the ability to fill in the gaps and details of Frank Herbert's universe is one of the things it has going for it when creating media.
Are they wrong? Maybe. Feel free to make that argument. It could be interesting, but you haven't actually made it yet.
Instead you seem to think you have proven some point when all you have done is attack me, state some facts about Dune games, and declared that I am "wrecked" because of my "grand-sounding theory."
If you step out of your weird fanboy-rage for a second, you'll see that I don't actually have a theory at all. I have three statements, only two of which are at all controversial. One is the assertion that some media inspires higher-quality derivatives than others (even if the media itself is not necessarily higher quality). This is a hypothesis. It has none of the characteristics of a theory because it is currently a blank page. A thesis statement looking for a body.
My second assertion was that Dune has inspired quite a lot of high-quality media. This was an illustration of the hypothesis. Because abstracts without concrete examples don't get engagement.
My final assertion, the one that seems to have filled you with such weird, fanboyish rage, is that Lord of the Rings has a much lower average level of quality. This is also part of the illustration for comparison and contrast. This isn't a theory. Now, I'm not going to say that I don't understand why the statement is controversial, and I'd be happy if people were disagreeing in a way that even broached the thesis statement, but again, you aren't doing it. You haven't even actually engaged with the concept.
You are so mad that you think that you can somehow knock down my "grand-sounding theory" without even engaging it. You can't. Even if you were to somehow prove that I am totally wrong and Lord of the Rings has much higher quality media, that still wouldn't disprove my hypothesis. Because that would just fit the hypothesis in the opposite direction.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
Aside from generally being unpleasant and mischaracterizing my post, I'm not sure what your point is.
Are you mad that I'm not listing more fun Dune media? That I'm not getting further into the weeds? Or do you think that talking about another game that you have already described as fun and unique somehow disproves my point about Dune having disproportionately better media than Lord of the Rings?
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
So what do you think makes Dune so much more alien? It can't simply be cultural. Western fantasy, at least as an aesthetic, has certainly found fans in Asia. Is it the focus on politics and big, weird ideas like transhumanism? Is it the focus on the macro scale compared to LotR, which made it less character focused but better lent to the strategy games that I ended up having to talk to so much about?
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
I wasn't even particularly looking for Dune-related insights, but this is definitely an interesting point. Thank you.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
No, because I wanted a more universal examination. People just got really attached to the Lord of the Rings and Dune game comparison. Even the licensing aspect was less about importance for the principle and more about trying to head off nerdy arguments about what counts as influenced by these books. (E.G. how much inspiration does Star Wars take from Dune?)
I mean, if comparing Dune II to War in Middle Earth is a particularly useful comparison for insights, sure, compare away. But I was hoping for universalizable principles here, not just comparisons of these two franchises.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
On the one hand, I'd say this actually must be my fault in writing clearly because almost everyone is responding with a focus on the books themselves rather than the larger multimedia franchises.
On the other hand, I am mostly getting a lot of tears about how the Lord of the Rings trilogy is better and posters didn't even know that the board game existed so how impactful could it be? All without even engaging the question. High decouplers? Yeah, okay.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
I don't dislike Lord of the Rings at all. I have read it four times. I'm rather disappointed by the trilogy next to Villeneuve's Dune, but only because I have high expectations for it. In fact, most Lord of the Rings media is underwhelming and forgettable. I tried a lot of Lord of the Rings media in the 90s and 2000s and most of it fell in that 3.5-6.5 range. It is so forgettable that (some) people disagreeing with me here didn't even know that Lord of the Rings branded media was being produced long before the movies. Compare that to most Dune media, which I have been very impressed by. Not because I prefer Dune, which I enjoy but have read half as many times, but because the media that is based on it is so consistently impressive by comparison to what Lord of the Rings has put out.
And while the board game is undoubtedly niche (as games that have been out of print since '84 tend to be), its impact upon board games is still huge. Unique, balanced faction powers are now common in board/strategy games.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
Define "stuff."
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
But this is just vague handwaving. I'm not arguing the popularity of Lord of the Rings or its cultural impact. I'm talking about the impact, in turn, of the licensed media that followed.
Lord of the Rings, as a book series, is hugely impactful on the culture. Lord of the Rings the multimedia franchise is, on average, middling and most of it will be forgotten. Dune, on the other hand, has been less impactful overall. Yet, despite having far less adaptations and licensed media (before the most recent movie. I'm not young and free enough to keep up with everything that is coming out now), what exists is both of a much higher average quality and often hugely impactful on their own mediums.
Just shrugging that off is simply being obtuse and ignoring the actual subject.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
Of course the others before it matter. It's an infinite monkeys on typewriters scenario. If you give enough people opportunities to make a game based on Lord of the Rings, one of them eventually is likely to be good.
And sure, on a technical level, Battle for Middle Earth is the more polished, later game. But that is sidestepping the most difficult part in creating, which is creating something new and dynamic. It is easy to make a similar game in hindsight, once it has already been done. And you are simply wrong when you say that there was no opportunity to make Tolkien-branded games while they were making Dune games. That just isn't true. They were making games. They even attempted a strategy game before Dune II. It is just forgettable.
AnotherSiteAnotherName
1yr ago
Right, but that is why I chose Lord of the Rings for comparison. For all of its impact, for all the media based on it directly and indirectly, it has a much worse pound for pound showing than Dune. Sure, it has a forgettable RTS, but Dune II practically invented the genre. Sure, one of the Lord of the Rings board games ended up being great, but Dune has, again, a hugely influential game that people loved so much they were still playing it when it had been print for nearly 30 years.
Was this just luck that Dune has such a stronger showing than a more popular, older IP? Or is there some quality that can be analyzed?
Yes? I mean, it obviously isn't the only reason, but there are far, far more 20-somethings who are eligible and without serious emotional baggage than there are 40-somethings. It's the superior dating pool if you want those types of things.
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