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User ID: 1083
problem_redditor
1d ago
I do genuinely feel bad for the people who have to live close to the over-touristed sites in Japan. A lot of the temples and neighbourhoods that get traffic are places where people actually live and work, and I can't imagine living in, say, Kyoto and getting exposed to this absolute bullshit. Even as a tourist I hate it, I wouldn't be able to handle it in my day-to-day.
If I'm ever going to Japan, I'm almost certainly picking somewhere out of the way, like Koyasan and their Shingon Buddhist temples. Too much of Japan suffers issues with overtourism, and it just kills the vibe of these places which are ostensibly supposed to feel quiet and calm.
Place; Place, Japan
So, I'm currently planning a holiday in South Korea over the Christmas period, and when researching it's common to come across posts on social media asking whether SK or Japan is a better place to visit. The outcome is always the same: regardless of the comparison, Japan is virtually always touted as the best destination in East Asia. Note - I don't want this to be any kind of anti-Japanese post, since I actually quite enjoy Japanese food, culture, etc quite a bit, and see how it would be attractive to a tourist. However, I'm not quite certain why it is that Japan gets hyped up to this degree, compared to other Asian countries.
I am a very archaeology and history-focused person, so keep this in mind when reading this post.
The arguments many travellers make in favour of the pro-Japan position primarily rely on historical significance: there's the characterisation of Japan as being a uniquely cultural place, filled with ancient historical shrines, palaces and temples that can't be found elsewhere in East Asia - Korea in specific is considered to be generally devoid of meaningful culture as compared to Japan due to the history of destruction in the country from the Imjin War onwards. But once you've looked further into this Japan begins to look more and more like any other East Asian country: it certainly wasn't unscathed by wars and destruction, and because many of its buildings are wooden it's been repeatedly ravaged by fires, bombs and so on that have destroyed many of its cultural sites, most of which have been rebuilt repeatedly over time.
Here are a handful of examples:
Senso-ji. This is one of the most significant temples in Tokyo and a major tourist site. It was destroyed during the extensive WW2 firebombing in 1945, and the buildings still standing today are reconstructions dating to about 1951-1973. These buildings are undoubtedly beautiful, but certainly not old - the famous five-storied pagoda is younger than Nicholas Cage. Additionally, they're also made of concrete, unlike the original wooden structures, so as to prevent the thing from burning down again. Not very authentic.
Osaka Castle + Nagoya Castle + any number of other "historical" castles in Japan. These are probably some of the most egregious examples, considering that they're unashamed ferroconcrete pastiches of the original castles. Osaka Castle was destroyed in the Boshin War in 1868 and Nagoya Castle was destroyed in WW2 in 1945. The current reconstructions hail from 1931 - 1959, with the insides being tourist-trap museums complete with lifts and other modern amenities.
Kinkaku-ji. Probably the most obvious and recent example of a reconstruction in Kyoto - this reconstruction was built in 1955 after a schizophrenic, suicidal monk burned the original structure down, and now it draws so many tourists that it's definitely suffering from overtourism. You can hardly see the temple for the most part, because of the throngs of tourists lining up to get even the slightest glimpse of the (admittedly very beautiful) golden pavilion.
Nijo Castle. Let me be clear, this palace is incredible. The Ninomaru Palace is wonderful and truly historic. While I bet it's been thoroughly Ship-Of-Theseused over the years due to the need for constant renovations and upkeep, it is a structure that's persisted continuously over the years and its construction was fully completed in 1626. Many of the other structures in Nijo Castle, however, are not like this - the actual Honmaru Palace was burned to the ground in the 1700s, and the current structure standing there today is actually a completely separate building taken from the Kyoto Imperial Palace.
Kyoto. Yes, Kyoto. This is attacking a steelman, since Kyoto is the historic city of Japan, but even that's not an ancient city - 90% of the city was burned to the ground during the Great Fire of 1788, and as a result in the bounds of the old city there are not more than 10 to 12 buildings pre-dating 1788. Of course, this doesn't mean the city isn't historically or culturally significant - but most of Kyoto is not older than the Edo period.
There are many more examples I could offer - Kiyomizu-dera is a temple hailing from the late Nara period but which had to be rebuilt in 1633, To-ji Temple was rebuilt in 1644, and so on. I'm sure you can find some truly old structures in Japan - the opulent Golden Hall of Chuson-ji comes to mind, a structure that was built in the 11th century and remains extant up to this day. But as a general rule, most of the structures in Japan are generally not that old.
It's necessary to note that Japan has a different viewpoint surrounding "authenticity" than the West does. As Douglas Adams notes on his visit to Kinkaku-ji: “I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide. “But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question. “But it’s burnt down?” “Yes.” “Twice.” “Many times.” “And rebuilt.” “Of course. It is an important and historic building.” “With completely new materials.” “But of course. It was burnt down.” “So how can it be the same building?” “It is always the same building.” I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.”
It is a not-uncommon East Asian view that buildings can be demolished and rebuilt and still be the same structure, just as long as it sits on the same site and serves the same purpose. Many believe that changes to the structure are another step in its evolution, and this is perfectly okay - the Japanese answer to the Ship of Theseus is in fact "yes, it's the same ship". Ise Shrine, in fact, gets ceremoniously demolished and rebuilt every 20 years in an event called Shikinen Sengu. But this results in weird, unintentionally misleading marketing, where buildings that are barely older than the 20th century get marketed as "ancient", which leads a Westerner to think that the actual extant building in fact does date back to the 5th century or something when in fact it's newer than some New York buildings.
The historicity of South Korean buildings, in this light, seems not that different to that of Japanese ones. Here are a couple of notable examples:
Changdeokgung. This incredible Joseon palace was finished in 1412, but multiple wars and fires have resulted in a wildly differing age distribution among the structures of the palace. All of it was destroyed during the Imjin War in 1592, except Geumcheongyo Bridge which dates back to 1411. The palace was restored in 1609, and the oldest proper building (the Donhwamun Gate) can be traced back to this date. Other structures date from the 18th to the 20th century, though the reconstruction generally seems to have been fairly authentic. The secret garden, located north of the palace complex itself, is generally quite authentic - the buildings and gardens there have sustained their original forms from around the end of the Joseon Dynasty.
Jongmyo Shrine. This is a Joseon-era Confucian shrine housing the spirit tablets of Joseon monarchs, initially built in 1394 but (unfortunately) burned down during the Imjin War. The spirit tablets were saved by hiding them in a commoner's house, and the current reconstruction dates all the way back to 1601. Note: This shrine is old enough that its reconstruction is as old as the aforementioned Ninomaru Palace in Japan.
Haeinsa Temple. This remarkable place houses the Tripitaka Koreana, a series of 81,258 wooden printing blocks with over 50 million Hanja characters inscribed on them - they constitute one of the most complete Buddhist canons ever, one that's 750 years old. The buildings themselves were first established in 802 AD, but most of it was destroyed by fire in 1818 and rebuilt shortly after. The Janggyeong-panjeon (the storage hall housing the Koreana), however, is very old, and while it's not known exactly how ancient it is it's probably original, having survived both the fire and the highly destructive Imjin War.
Seokguram Grotto. This is an artificial grotto facing the East Sea with a truly monumental statue of Seokgamoni-bul (the Historical Buddha) inside it. Its construction dates all the way back to 742, at the height of the Unified Silla kingdom. The structure fell into ruin over the years, and while there were some repairs over the Joseon period, disrepair continued because of their suppression of Buddhism. During the Japanese colonial period, there were attempts to repair the Buddhist sites around Gyeongju (including Seokguram) as an attempt to establish a sort of pan-Asian buddhism to unite their colonies and distinguish themselves from the Joseon Dynasty, and their photos here from 1922 suggest that the statue of Seokgamoni-bul is ancient.
I could go into more, but this post is already long enough with the histories of random East Asian buildings and artefacts, so I'll move on. Maybe it's the amount of historical sites in each country that are informing people's evaluations. But I don't see South Korea as having less in this regard either, at least not if you conduct any amount of cursory research. There are historic tombs and burial mounds all over the country, including in Seoul, Gyeongju and so on. The Namsan mountain south of Gyeongju alone boasts over 100 Silla buddhist sites, many of which are spectacular like the Chilburam buddha sculptures (8th century) or the Sambulsa statue triad (7th century). There is just so much to find once you dig a bit deeper beyond the Instagram-friendly sites.
Choosing SK as a point of comparison is also making it harder for me than it really needs to be. Comparing Japan with the big granddaddy of East Asia, China, makes proving my point that Japan isn't the be-all-end-all of East Asia trivially easy: there's the ancient walled city of Pingyao that looks like something out of a fantasy movie, the Mogao cave temples, etc, there's so many truly epic sites there it's really hard to know where to start. The Cultural Revolution, try as it might, couldn't erase everything; China was a huge stable empire for most of its history and its historical sites are appropriately spectacular.
Note I'm not bashing Japan, again I quite like it and think it's a very nice place to visit. It's just always baffled me to see the amount of esteem it receives over... well, pretty much any other travel destination. Perhaps the explanation is just that it was a big cultural and tech exporter during the 20th century, and that's kind of rippled through our cultural consciousness and resulted in Japan being The Place To Be.
EDIT: accuracy
My grandmother died at the start of the month, after a long year of close brushes with death. I wasn't there for the bitter end - I was in Sydney while she rotted away on the other side of the world, crippled by a tumour she would never get over.
The last time I ever saw her, it was over a call. She wasn't responsive enough to say anything or even give any indications that she was there, and it was disconcerting to see just how unrecognisable she was. The way she looked was halfway between human and mummified corpse. Her eyes were half-open and defocused, and her arm, now shaped like a long, attenuate claw, jerked up and down haphazardly. My family tried to convince me she could still hear and understand; they were almost certainly lying either to me or to themselves, drawing spurious correlations out of random noise so they could hope there was something there.
Even if she could hear me, everything I could say would just have been a pathetic insult. "How are you doing?" Terrible, thanks. "I hope people are taking care of you well." My catheter is uncomfortable, and the nurses won't do anything about it. "I've been pretty good on my end." Fuck off. I ended up telling her about my day, and the last thing I said to her was something laughably trivial and inconsequential, hilariously stupid in hindsight. There was nothing particularly graceful or poignant or even sad about it. I was never close to her - quite the opposite; she had done a good number of ethically questionable or downright repulsive things during her life - but seeing someone I once knew turn into a flesh puppet, flailing around aimlessly on the bed like a poorly rigged 3D model, was profoundly disturbing in a way that's hard to articulate.
Shortly after the call ended, a blackout fell over my apartment building. This had never happened here before, and it was night time so the entire room was blanketed in darkness - all there was to do was sit in the silence and think. Walking out into the corridor presented a scene from a horror movie; the halls of the building were lit with a strange liminal yellow-orange light, and the background hum of the building - which I usually take for granted - had completely died out. It took two or three hours for the power to come back on.
A couple hours after the call and the strange blackout, my grandmother died. It appears her husband took her death extremely badly. He initially seemed in denial about what had happened - he was surprised to realise her body was cold, and refused to let the undertakers take her away, snapping at anyone who tried. For a while he kissed and slept beside her deteriorating corpse, and by the time they managed to pry her away from him she was disintegrating so badly they had to rush out a cremation. Her ashes are now in an urn at the home she once lived.
Ever since then, this has popped up repeatedly in my mind. I'm not even in mourning - I'm more relieved that people can start moving on now, since everyone was being held in stasis for the longest time - rather, it's something else. I've thought about death a lot, but the existential dread of seeing someone wither away like that is really potent, and the weird, coincidental timing of the blackout doesn't help. I certainly won't try to find any meaning in it; that would be doing the same thing my family did when they insisted she could still understand, but this is probably one of the most terrifying coincidences that has happened in my life, and I am still rattled by it despite my agnostic nature.
I don't know if I should even post this, to be honest. If this comment gets deleted later, don't be surprised.
EDIT: Thanks to everyone for sharing their condolences and their experiences with the death of family, it's much appreciated. I don't think I'm going to delete this now, but it did feel strange posting about something so personal on an anonymous online forum.
Divorcing my wife because she fell into debt is very different from deciding not to marry her because she revealed she revealed to me late in our engagement that she'd been in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt all along, even if both could be described as "Making marriage decisions on the basis of money."
This is a very obvious false equivalency and I'm not sure how you don't see it. Failing to disclose something, like your debts, that you know will affect the other partner personally is beyond the pale precisely because it is so relevant to their future wellbeing - you can't really say you care for a person and yet want to dupe them into taking on your debts.
Something like voting for Trump, on the other hand, is just not super relevant to the other partner's personal life or material wellbeing outside of "You hold opinions I don't like and that makes me feel bad". Who your partner voted for is not your business in the way that your partner's debts are your business. If someone wants to abandon a relationship for that reason, it's certainly their prerogative, but it is their own hangup that's at fault.
This is true, but typical-minding someone who's been described to pen comments "more hateful than the worst comments I have seen on Reddit" is probably a bad idea. And I do personally know people who have dumped friends who have voted for Trump - incidentally (or not), they themselves generally happen to be fairly shit people in my experience.
I genuinely think you're typical-minding here. There is a contingent of people so intent on hating Trump supporters that when there's a conflict between their idea that 1) Trump supporters are horrible human beings who support Bad Things and 2) this person I know is good and principled, they'll resolve the cognitive dissonance by sacrificing 2) to protect 1), instead of entertaining the idea that there's a remotely valid train of thought that might allow someone reasonable to consider supporting Trump.
It seems quite bizarre for me as well that this would be someone's reaction, but people can indeed be so afflicted by political derangement so as to do this - they see casting your vote for Trump as tantamount to ushering in the American equivalent of the Third Reich. It's just such an illegitimate position to them that they refuse to humanise their supporters; it's a close-to-irredeemable action that overrides much of the positive personal qualities you may have had and makes them see you as barely even human once you've done that. I am only slightly exaggerating.
Tiptoeing around this is a gigantic mistake - this is going to come out at some point, and the values difference will have to be confronted. If she truly can't handle it and is going to want to force consensus, it's not going to work. I know of a guy who married a strongly religious girl who's extremely domineering in terms of beliefs, and he's slowly changing his own stated beliefs. Not just on religion, too - he's even allowed her to not vaccinate their baby daughter just for the sake of harmony. This kind of relationship dynamic where you just keep quiet and hide things about yourself to keep the missus happy isn't sustainable or healthy, I think, though it's unfortunately common.
My partner and I talked about politics very early on in the course of the relationship (homosexual relationship, take that how you will) and laid bare all of these value differences that bother most people. We knew what we were both getting into before we got too invested. Our political opinions are similarly divergent, and we had pretty gigantic blowouts about it early on - there was a point in which he linked me a BreadTube video and I did not hold back when tearing into it, to the point I had a whole script written complete with sources as to why it was wrong about everything. At this point, we have a pretty high level of certainty that neither of us is going to leave the other for such things, and while we may still disagree every now and then it's not going to jeopardise the relationship.
My prediction is that the DNC will just double down. They did it when Clinton lost, there's no reason to believe they won't do it again. I expect that after this there will be a lot of hand-wringing about how Harris lost because she's a black woman, gigantic screeds on the supposedly pernicious nature of misogyny and White supremacy in America will be penned, and Trump will be scrutinised for any hint of wrongdoing a la the Steele dossier. Expecting the DNC, their voter base, and their institutional apparatus to have any self-awareness at this current point in time is, I think, completely unrealistic. The strategy they've been going with for a while now is just to claim that it can't be anything they've done, it must be these horrible voters who are the problem. See also these exemplars from other countries: Brexit, Australia's Voice, the Irish referendum on women and family. Every time the voters vote "wrong", it is a sign that democracy itself is flawed. Perhaps much of this will be driven by strategic party-political considerations, but I think many members of the DNC certainly still believe that this tactic will help them garner support for 2028. They certainly have enough institutional clout to (try and) make it work.
Besides, the current tribal political landscape is not conducive to self-examination - oddly enough I'm reminded of the situation in many former communist countries. ln Mao's China, the horrific failure of the Great Leap Forward was attributed not to the communist system that produced it, rather it was attributed to the members of the cadres trying to sabotage their great political project. Despite the fact that the cadres acted the way they did because of the incentives created by the system, they were portrayed as secret members of the Kuomintang plotting a bourgeoisie revolution under the noses of the communist authorities, and Mao's reputation remained untouched. The ideological can never admit that what they're doing isn't working - rather, it is because their enemy is just too strong and too powerful, and it needs to be railed against even more until it goes away. These kinds of narratives are very easy to capitalise on, and I doubt one failed election will stop the DNC from using it.
As for the Republicans, I expect they will take this as a sign that populist politics are working, and it might motivate them to lean into it even more. I don't expect anyone to do anything that will decrease the temperature of the culture war. Perhaps something like a bringing back of the fairness doctrine might help prevent these partisan bubbles from forming, expose people to a more balanced information environment and stop people from creating superweapons backed by The Authorities, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
My biggest hope personally is that the DNC loses enough elections to moderate themselves significantly on the topic of idpol or discard it entirely as a part of their platform, but unless they have a very long string of losses under their belt, I think the only thing that'll happen is a doubling down. I think they'll need to be forced into having a major come-to-Jesus moment before any of this materialises. And until they stop being "woke" entirely, I'll take pleasure in their losses. I am also not of the opinion that a Trump win is a "win for wokeness", I certainly think they'll try to use a Trump win to drum up support, but I don't believe in giving your enemy what they want with the faint hope that maybe they stop stepping on you. The right way to deal with this is to make it very clear that such tantrums do not yield results, and if that entails increasing the temperature of the culture war, so be it.
Found a new album recently that I'm hugely into, an event that's increasingly rare nowadays especially considering how voracious I've been with my music consumption in the past. The album in question is 裸の王様 (The Naked King), an absolutely ridiculous funk album from the Japanese band JAGATARA, released in 1987 and which sounds like a seamless blend between Talking Heads-like afrobeat and Japanese city pop. Unfortunately this band didn't have a very long life, as the bandleader Edo Akemi died while taking a bath in 1990.
This is one of the finest albums I've heard in a bit, they juggle these mammoth 7-10 minute songs while maintaining the energy throughout in a thoroughly engaging way. I think the only thing that drags it down is the final track, where the infectious flow built up by the first three tracks is interrupted by a more ballad-like number - which I don't think they particularly excel at, and is the only song on there which really seems to have aged. Still, this album is very worth your time.
Sure, but "brutalism is apt for buildings that are meant to be morbid" is hardly an argument in favour of its application everywhere a la Chandigarh (in Toronto, that kind of architecture is a staple of everyday life). I also think the Kyiv Crematorium is quite ugly, and I wouldn't build a crematorium like that, but different strokes, I guess. The only one I like in there at all is the museum in Tashkent, and that's because it uses some ornamentation and maintains some level of continuity with earlier architectural traditions, but ornament is anathema to many modernists.
🤨🤨🤨
It's long distance, and "member of my family" here just means people related by blood.
However while I can't make any insight into whether the art community is shrinking or growing, the fact that this piece made you feel emotions, and then discuss them, is probably a victory for the artist.
They certainly succeeded at making a piece of art that evokes emotions, but that's just not my criteria for what constitutes good art since (as someone who dabbles in arts myself, primarily literature and music) I think it's trivially easy to do so - especially if you consider "intense hatred of and anger at the artist" a valid emotion. Part of the problem is that the art in Union Station looks like it was taken straight from an unfinished sketch. Skill is an integral part of it for me - an important part of being an artist is constantly questioning what you bring to the world others couldn't already offer themselves, and if your art lacks technique and is easily replicated, you genuinely don't offer much. In order for any art to be considered good at all, there also needs to be a way for it to be bad, there needs to be a non-trivial set of failure-criteria that a sizeable amount of people would not be able to satisfy. A lot of modern artists, even celebrated ones (e.g. Rothko) don't have that.
Furthermore, there are works that fit an art gallery that don't work in a public space people have to frequent every day. I don't know about you, but I don't think Francisco Goya's Black Paintings should be displayed in a public square, and that was constructed with infinitely more talent than whatever was in Union Station. I would honestly rather have an inoffensive, bland piece of public art than something that makes me feel depressed or annoyed every time I encounter it.
So, I went to Toronto in June of this year to meet my partner. It feels surreal for two reasons, one being that I never expected my life to become the plot of a bad romantic comedy, and the other being that it makes me the only member of my family to have ever been in North America. It was also an interesting dichotomy - I loved spending time with my SO, but detested the city. I couldn't stop noticing just how ugly and unmaintained the city is, and couldn't help wondering how it got this way. Disclaimer: I spent much of my time downtown.
It's a ridiculously Soviet-looking city considering that it isn't actually in Russia or any of its previous satellite states. Much of their architecture, including their public spaces, looks like it's trying to be a soulless pastiche of Le Corbusier or Walter Gropius; structures supposedly built for the public that actually looks like it hates the very people it's meant to serve. They are featureless blocks of concrete that evoke no joy, and in line with the modernist architectural ethos ornamentation is basically absent. Also, if there is any doubt about the unpopularity of modernist and postmodernist architecture alike, look at "America's Favourite Architecture", very few of the buildings people actually chose as their favourites are from the post-war period. The response from many architects was that the list didn't reflect the opinions of "architectural experts", which isn't insular and elitist at all. Good to see that people who build for the public actively couldn't care less about their aesthetic preferences, and in fact are incapable of predicting their preferences at all.
The starkest example of the shift in architectural trends is probably the current Toronto City Hall. The new City Hall is a featureless, barely geometric concrete block, framed by the treeless, austere Nathan Phillips Square - apparently supposed to be a public gathering space. Now compare it with Old City Hall, which is still there but no longer in use. I think most people would view Old City Hall as a much more appropriate building for its purpose, and find it more pleasing to look at. Another example of the modernist turn is exemplified in the Royal Ontario Museum, a building that looked like this in 1922. Then it had a (now-defunct) planetarium and terrace galleries attached to it in 1968 and 1984, then in 2007 oh my god what the fuck is that. There is not an iota of respect for any of their architectural traditions. Old buildings that are part of the city's heritage just get "iterated upon" and superseded by horrific modernist/postmodern/deconstructivist blocks with no relation or connection to the previous style the building used to have.
The same pattern can be seen in public art. This infamous piece of public art, named Zones of Immersion, is displayed in the tube in Union Station, one of the TTC's major transportation hubs, and it succeeds marvellously at offering your average commuter the indescribable experience of being loaded on a train headed straight for Auschwitz. According to the artist, Stuart Reid, "This window into our contemporary isolation offers faces and body language, blurred and revealed poetic writings from my journal entries, and rhythms of colour that punctuate the ribboned expanse." I, too, would like to be reminded of the bleakness and misery of everyday life every time I try to go to work. This is a very clear example of an artist being distanced from the very people they are designing for, and pursuing clout in an increasingly small and incestuous sphere of "art fanatics" who have long disappeared up their own ass in the endless pursuit of social status. It wouldn't be so bad if everyone wasn't forced to look at it every day.
As if it wasn't bad enough that the city is by and large a mix of seedy strip malls and truly unpleasant brutalist blocks, on top of that there's the sheer lack of maintenance of any of these spaces. The train stations are some of the best examples of this - the poor state of the TTC is well known at this point among Canadians. These tubes are depressing spaces often badly disfigured by water damage, missing tiles and ceilings, and just in general seem to be falling apart at the seams. Here and here are some illustrations of normal scenes in the tube system. The same applies to many of the buildings, where their already unfriendly-looking concrete surfaces are further marred by water stains and damage, and nobody seems to have given it any care for decades. Other aspects of the city's design also worsen the experience, such as how when you walk around the city centre on hot days an awful stench will often waft out of the gutter grates (Yonge in particular smells like human faeces). Oh, and then there's the homelessness problem, which I won't get into here but really worsens the sense of dinginess and disrepair that the city already possesses. Downtown, there is at least one encampment every kilometre you walk.
The general vibe of the city is also information-overload in the worst way; an instance that sticks in my mind was when I was walking in the town centre and all at once the following was happening in a crowded square:
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Someone playing a flute in an absolutely fucking ridiculous way that somehow almost reminded me of Kazoo Kid.
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Someone trying to proselytise the glory of God to random passers-by.
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Somebody with burns trying to solicit money by sitting naked in the street showing the grisly scars all the way down his body.
There was probably more happening that my brain filtered out so as to preserve my sanity.
All of this could've been compensated for if there were many particularly interesting things to see, but the issue is that there just isn't very much that's worth stopping and looking at. The Royal Ontario Museum and perhaps the Distillery District are virtually the only things worth visiting, the Art Gallery of Ontario is only worth stopping by for the Group of Seven paintings (which are, to be fair, beautiful to see in person). The CN Tower and everything around it are unashamed tourist traps built and maintained largely for vanity purposes, without all too much to do there. The beach on Centre Island was hardly a beach at all, and seemed dirty enough that I didn't really want to step on the sand barefoot (though I am almost certainly spoiled with the best beaches in the world due to living in Australia). Outside of that, I can't remember anything else particularly memorable about the city.
In short, I didn't like Toronto. It was unpleasant enough that once I got out of the airport in Sydney, I walked into the train station at International and heaved a massive sigh of relief at how spacious, light, quiet and well-maintained it all seemed.
So, work is really stressing me out right now.
For context, I'm a junior tax accountant, and I recently had some client work delegated to me for a client experiencing some financial struggles. Aside from preparing their business activity statements and income tax returns and so on, one of the tasks delegated to me was to add a small amount owed to their pre-existing payment plan with the ATO (Australian Taxation Office), where the client is supposed to pay off a tax debt in monthly instalments. I called the ATO on the tax agent line, and was informed that I needed to cancel the previous payment plan and renegotiate a new one. Because of some past defaults on the client's end, we were incapable of setting up a payment plan via the tax agent portal, and had to call via phone.
I informed my superior of this fact, who then gave me the go-ahead to re-negotiate the payment plan with the ATO. Note, my superior has worked on this client for longer, and has a more detailed knowledge of their financial situation than I do. I have also never negotiated a payment plan with the ATO before (they have), and was not provided any context regarding how to deal with them. So I pretty much do as I'm directed, and attempt to set up the new payment plan, but the ATO refuses to provide assent to establishing any new payment plan because they are unsure of the client's ability to make the payments on said payment plan. At this point, the original payment plan has also been cancelled, so the client no longer has their original deal either despite the fact that it was previously agreed on.
Dealing with the ATO is a bit like dealing with a little autocrat where the rules of the game are entirely determined by them. When you're dealing with most creditors you typically negotiate the cancellation of the old arrangement and the formation of the new one at the same time, and sign off on it all at once as a legally binding contract. With the ATO, the very process of renegotiating the terms of your plan has the distinct possibility of leaving you stranded, with zero recourse to any agreement at all. It’s not a negotiation between parties, it’s a rent-seeking coalition that has the power to unilaterally decide whether or not to grant you clemency, and whose leniency (or lack thereof) heavily depend on how their revenue collection targets have been set. The issue is not so much that they're severe on taxpayers as much as it does that they're fundamentally unpredictable and unaccountable, leaving people in a perpetual state of uncertainty regarding what one should expect from them.
Eventually, the client pays the original debt they want to add to their payment plan, but their original payment plan is also cancelled so they have a larger tax debt to pay off. And at this point, I'm wondering how much responsibility for this entire shitshow can be hung on me. I've kept my organisation in the loop throughout, and I've taken a huge amount of screenshots of Teams chats specifically showing that I informed my superiors of the requirement to cancel the prior plan and was still instructed to set up the new payment. I still feel some level of responsibility for the entire thing, despite the fact that I was basically doing exactly what people in my organisation had asked me to do, and have zero control over my client's financial decisions or the ATO's dictates.
Honestly panicking a little bit. It often feels like much of the work that more senior accountants don't want to do gets unceremoniously offloaded onto me even when I have limited experience doing the work, I'm given little to no guidance as to how to do it, and I'm left in a potentially precarious position when things go wrong.
Yeah, sure thing. I don't know which genres you're most partial to, but here are some games I think are particularly well done, along with a short description of what they're about.
1: SOMA (2015)
SOMA is a horror game by Frictional Games, a studio best known for pioneering a game mechanic where you can essentially only run and hide from enemies. They primarily broke out with the game Amnesia: The Dark Descent which blew up on Youtube everywhere in the heyday of Let's Plays. Ever since then, they've mostly tried to recapture the pure horror vibes of Amnesia, but there was a brief moment where they decided to make a horror title with more existential sci-fi leanings.
Frictional's game designer, Thomas Grip, has stated that SOMA was hugely inspired by hard sci-fi authors such as Peter Watts and Greg Egan, and it really shows. It's by far my favourite game of theirs, and if you're playing one game on this list, make it this one. Go in completely blind. You won't find a better game narrative anywhere.
2: Baba Is You (2019)
I feel like Baba Is You is one of these indie titles I don't have to say too much about because of its ubiquity, but Baba Is You is a sokoban puzzle game where you push statements around an endlessly manipulable game world in order to satisfy a win condition. The game allows for constructing statements that allow the player to change the very characteristics of the level, to the point that you can yourself define the win condition of many levels.
It is not easy, and is one of these sadistically difficult puzzle games which you'll find yourself banging your head against for hours. According to Steam I've wasted 47.5 hours of my life on this game's puzzles alone.
3: Growing My Grandpa! (2022)
Now this is a weird one. Growing My Grandpa! is a short game by up-and-coming indie creator Yames that exhibits a strange hybrid of influences coming from Virtual Pet games, 90s adventure/edutainment games and Cronenbergian body horror alike, and the result is an extremely surreal and unique game that has absolutely no parallel elsewhere. The gameplay is fairly sparse, innocuous and repetitive, as is par for the course for a game based around a virtual pet-like mechanic - but it gets contrasted against an increasingly eerie, grotesque and uncanny plot, a dichotomy that's exploited as both a source of humour and horror in the game.
This game is very esoteric. It's not for everyone, and I can imagine people being really put off by any combination of the mechanics, the visual style, or the writing. In my case, I think his work is enticing enough to want to donate to his Patreon, which is fairly unusual for me.
4: INSIDE (2016)
INSIDE is a dark, cryptic platformer from developer Playdead. It draws many elements from their breakout hit Limbo - child protagonist, bleak atmosphere, abstract plot, many ways to die in bloody fashion - except it's executed better in virtually every way. As is usual from this developer, there's not a single line of dialogue and there isn't too much explanation provided to contextualise the events of the game, and much of the story is told through the environment.
A major draw of INSIDE is the art direction and music, which is executed beautifully throughout - it's a very atmospheric and potent game, and despite the lack of a clear through-line for the situations the game throws at you there is always a sense of intentionality behind every design decision that keeps it coherent.
5: Inscryption (2021)
This is a roguelike deck-building card game from Pony Island creator Daniel Mullins, and it's yet another title where it's best to know as little as possible about the game gong in, because suffice to say, it does not stay in that genre for very long. Despite appearances in the beginning, it is a plot heavy game - while the story is certainly a (I'd say intentionally) campy one, it provides the framework for a lot of very interesting genre-bending that gets executed quite smoothly and cleverly.
The element of surprise is crucial in this game, and the only reason I'm giving this much away about it is that I am aware of people who completely didn't anticipate the later shifts in the game, and were fairly disappointed by it since they went in expecting one thing and got another.
Forget everything you just read. This is a perfectly normal game.
There are many more quality games that have been released over the past few years, but these are the ones that currently come to mind which I actually think try to do something really interesting and intriguing with their setup, even if sometimes they are a little rough around the edges. Note I have a bit of a bias towards plot-focused, generally bleak games (with the exception of Baba Is You), these are my own genre preferences showing through and they might not align with yours.
That said, look at the AAA gaming scene over the last 5 and what developers are left that haven't devolved into slop mills pushing out incomplete, buggy, soulless games? Nintendo, From Soft, maybe CD Projekt depending on how charitable you want to be towards Cyberpunk.
This is certainly true and it is why I unironically Only Play Indie Games. I grew up in a time where Newgrounds games were becoming increasingly popular, and as a result have always had a bent towards the more idiosyncratic styles of small teams and individual creators. And as high-quality tools to create games have slowly become more democratised and readily available over the years, there has been less and less reason for me to turn towards AAA studios for... anything, really. You can now find really well refined games coming out of independent studios now without any of the soulless, manicured, decision-by-committee feel that AAA titles tend to have. Indie games have always been able to pursue more distilled and targeted visions as they are usually geared towards smaller consumer niches, instead of aiming for wide appeal, and in addition the small size of their operations allow for less compromise.
Does Nintendo stack up favourably to many other AAA studios? Yeah, but considering the absolute disappointment that is the AAA gaming scene in general I'd argue that's not saying much.
Back in June, I flew to North America to see my partner (who lives on the other side of the world), and when I was there I had the opportunity to try out some Nintendo games on his Switch. My opinion was fairly lukewarm, and I came away with the impression that the high esteem in which many of their games are held seems to be driven primarily by legacy clout. Breath of the Wild was hands-down the Nintendo game that I enjoyed the most (I put a good few hours into exploring the world and experiencing the main story), and it's a game that has been hailed as a shining example of open-world done right and has been placed on many peoples' lists of best video games of all time. I thought it was good, but don't believe it's nearly good enough so as to warrant inclusion as one of my favourite video games.
The game is fun, and the fact that you can climb and scale basically everything in game and explore the world in a variety of different ways imparts a feeling of freedom that's quite addicting, an aspect in which the game excels - but in practice that all amounts to getting from A to B in a subtly different way. The game doesn't really justify its (extremely large) open world, and in order to progress the main story you're mostly going from one very clearly spelled-out quest marker to another. Now, these quest markers are necessary because of how sprawling the world is - the player would easily get lost without some form of guidance - but the game explicitly tells you where you are supposed to go, and doesn't really give you incentive to explore out of bounds. If you are making an open world game you need to capitalise on the open world part as a core aspect of the game.
Technically, you don't need to progress through the game using the path set out for you, and you can take it as fast or as slow as you want, you can even skip straight to Ganon after the tutorial. One of the most exhilarating parts in my playthrough was sneaking past a bevy of guardians on the way to Hyrule Castle, a place where I was certainly too underpowered and under-skilled to be at that point. From a game design standpoint, this was certainly meant to dissuade beginner players from trying to go straight for Hyrule Castle immediately and trying to skip past the main game's content, and it felt like I was exploring outside of the manicured, well-trodden path the game had laid for me. This felt great, and I did make it past all of the guardians, but eventually turned back since I was essentially forfeiting main game content by trying to cut straight to Hyrule Castle without much reason to try and do so.
Trying to explore for additional, optional content isn't particularly enticing either, since the world is kind of a content desert with large areas of dead air in between points of interest, and there are only so many shrines and Bokoblin outposts you can explore before the cost/benefit of exploration starts looking very unfavourable. As a result, I never really felt the urge to explore outside of the bounds of the game, and was pretty much always shoehorned into doing everything the game set out for me. It's effectively an open world game that doesn't actually really make use of its (all too large) open world.
To be fair to BoTW, this criticism can also be levelled against most open-world games - the idea of an open world is generally much more enticing than how it actually plays in practice. So far, the only game I've seen do it right is A Short Hike, which succeeds primarily because of the fact that it has a fairly small, condensed "open world" packed full of content relative to its size and an extremely simple objective which you can easily complete and that doesn't require a huge amount of trekking through empty terrain. Once you start trying to expand the game's scope, when you're trying to make a 10-15 hour game with a coherent throughline set in a large, sprawling open world, making your way through the world starts to feel very tiring, and content deserts are all but guaranteed unless you want development time to inflate hugely.
It should be noted that I am someone who does value plot fairly heavily in games, something that's generally not a focus of Nintendo's. BoTW appealed to me more than, say, any mainline Mario game because of its relatively consistent worldbuilding and the fact that it had a story that wasn't an extremely marginal part of the game. The seamless incorporation of compelling narratives into a game format is an important part of the medium for me. But even excluding the general weakness and inoffensiveness of Nintendo's stories and worlds, and just focusing on gameplay, their games have some issues that I find quite difficult to brush past, and I don't agree with how highly their games are generally ranked.
Change my mind.
I wrote a long response, then I accidentally erased all of my progress. Now I'm writing it again.
Those IRC logs don't really exonerate Gamergaters, though. The people there are openly talking about sharing Quinn's nudes. I thought these were supposed to be the non-harassers? Gjoni himself condemns it, but the rest of the server seems fine with it.
The user discussing sharing Quinn's nudes in that IRC chat log is mainly SweetJBro, and you can see many other participants in the server objecting to the idea. Such as this entire block of text from the chat logs:
Aug 18 17.42.01 SaladCream Posting the nudes wouldn't be productive
Aug 18 17.42.11 VidyaBro saladcream is right
Aug 18 17.42.14 Geno_ Yeah but we need to put her as the villain
Aug 18 17.42.16 Geno_ not the victim
Aug 18 17.42.19 cuteGamrgrll doin' it indiscriminately might be a little reckless though.
Aug 18 17.42.22 Geno_ Otherwise it won't work
Aug 18 17.42.25 cuteGamrgrll GET THIS HOT HEAD OUTTA HERE
Aug 18 17.42.34 BurgerKing Don't forget
Aug 18 17.42.41 BurgerKing You post those nudes she can go to that pax panel
Aug 18 17.42.44 VidyaBro we can always save the nudes for an encyclopediadramatica page
Aug 18 17.42.48 BurgerKing and make us look like the bad guys
This certainly isn't a case of "coordinated harassment through IRC", as anti-GGs tend to describe it.
Sharing her nudes is clearly harassment, and if they're doing this, how do we know they aren't engaging in all the other forms of harassment she received?
Given the size of GamerGate, and given how prominent and hot-button GamerGate was at the time, there are almost certainly a non-zero amount of GamerGaters who would've harassed Quinn in some capacity. The question is whether or not GamerGate tried to police itself, and there are multiple instances of them making attempts to do so. I'm not saying they were all Literally Angels, I'm saying that the description of them as a "harassment campaign" is inaccurate.
And another question, if you don't mind: what is the timeline on the Grayson/Quinn conflict of interest? Did people first believe she traded sex for positive coverage, and only when this turned out to be false did they find out about their prior (non-sexual) relationship, by going through their Twitters? When did each of these events occur?
I believe initially the typo in Gjoni's post making it seem like they were on break between March and June, instead of May and June, led people to believe that Grayson and Quinn were having sex while he was giving her positive coverage, outlined by this Internet Aristocrat video called "Quinnspiracy Theory". I don't believe the idea of sex for positive coverage has actually been conclusively refuted with this new timeline though. Putting the sex a few days after the coverage doesn't necessarily make it any less transactional.
Regardless of whether they were wrong or right about that initial detail, they uncovered a conflict of interest - in fact many, across the industry. They might not have been right about every detail (4chan/8chan shitposters aren't the most rigorous people), but they were right enough, and right about a lot of things that people would really have wanted to deny.
Also, do you know how Sarkeesian and Wu got involved? Wikipedia places them right next to Quinn as victims of Gamergate, but as far as I can tell, there were no allegations of unethical behaviour on their part. According to Wikipedia, Wu was targeted "as retaliation for mocking Gamergate", while Sarkeesian was targeted because people didn't like Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. Would proponents of Gamergate consider these harassment campaigns unrelated to Gamergate?
Off the top of my head I can't tell you about Wu, but I can about Sarkeesian. GamerGate partially originated because of the reaction to the uncovering of these conflicts of interest, specifically the infamous "Gamers are dead" articles that appeared en masse after Quinn started getting flack. One of the most famous ones was written by Leigh Alexander, a journalist who likely knew Quinn in some capacity beforehand (given the twitter logs). As a result GamerGate ended up not just being about conflicts of interest; at least part of GamerGate was about the idea of gaming being gatekept by progressive cliques who were completely contemptuous of your average game consumer, and who would dishonestly use accusations of racism and sexism and other such tactics as a method of both deflecting from their own failures and enforcing their preferred sets of norms upon an unwilling consumer base. Sarkeesian's grifting was sufficiently egregious and also sufficiently related to this phenomenon for it to become a hot topic among GamerGaters. I also recall that it was claimed that threats that Sarkeesian got even before GamerGate was even really a thing was "GamerGate harassment", even though this was effectively evidence-less, with Anita herself trying to retroactively contextualise her harassers as being GGers, and this shaming tactic also helped pull her into GG's ambit.
Sarkeesian wasn't even a fan of video games. She claimed to be a gigantic consumer of games since she was young, several times. Then people discovered a lecture where she was caught explicitly saying that she didn't really like them. The pro-Sarkeesian crowd tried to spin this as her being a "casual" fan who didn't base a significant portion of her personality on being a fan of videogames. But that was absolutely and demonstrably not the way she advertised herself before.
People in gaming don't tend to take very kindly to moral scolds who attempt to force their own sensibilities upon a community they're not part of. What Anita Sarkeesian experienced here is... fairly normal, and the main unique thing was her insistence that she had been uniquely victimised because of her sex. Look at the case of Jack Thompson, a fervent critic of video games and their supposed ability to cause violence, as another example. The main difference is that Thompson was derided by pretty much everyone with articles in Ars Technica and Engadget advocating you make a Thompson lookalike in Mortal Kombat and beat him (his avatar) up, whereas Sarkeesian ended up overshooting her funding goals by several orders of magnitude because of the sympathy drummed up for her.
And to risk sounding like a broken record, there was certainly harassment against Sarkeesian, but the harassment against her mostly didn't come from GamerGate, and in fact there were instances where GamerGaters attempted to oust people who were sending threats to Sarkeesian, something which even Kotaku admitted to. GamerGate certainly didn't like her and gave her a lot of shit for her actions, but saying negative or even unpleasant things about her isn't automatically harassment.
EDIT: added more
I wrote a four-part post here about exactly this a while ago, with a focus on the Grayson/Quinn conflict of interest, and some of my responses in the thread address the pro-GG response to harassment. For bonus points, I have also summarised cases of unethical conduct among the anti-GG side here, for example an instance where they rallied around a known pedophile in their ranks.
God fucking damnit, I got so much shit for writing these. Who's laughing now?
She was tasked to solve the 2021 border problem, namely, migration originating from a few specific countries. In 2024 migration flows from those countries are way down, but migration from other countries has increased a lot. It’s basically two separate problems stapled together by the fact that both problems materialize for the US at the southern border.
I'll provide a counterargument and say that I think there is a pretty plausible angle here through which her opposition can criticise her. Note that as presented, Harris' mandate was not only to work with countries to reduce the root causes spurring migration from these countries, but also "work with those nations to ... enhance migration enforcement at their borders." Most of these migrants gaining access through the southern border are going to be coming through Mexico, and often getting in there through the Northern Triangle. So yes, many migrants coming through the southern border do not directly originate from the countries she was tasked with, but they are gaining access through these countries, and that is a border failure that falls within her stated ambit.
This isn’t necessarily an airtight, uncontestable argument to prove that Harris was in dereliction of her duty, but to defuse it Harris would have to actually tackle these claims in full rather than trying to shirk responsibility for her role in stemming migration and arguing endlessly over the semantics of "border czar". The latter comes off as weaselly and dishonest, because that’s exactly what it is.
So, let me see if I'm understanding this situation right:
Per a 2021 article by Axios, Harris was "appointed by Biden as border czar." Their wording: "Why it matters: The number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border has reached crisis levels. Harris, appointed by Biden as border czar, said she would be looking at the "root causes" that drive migration." Yet another 2021 article by Axios says this very same thing, saying that Harris was "put in charge of the border crisis" and calling her border czar.
So Axios in 2021 (and many other such media outlets) call Harris "border czar" when they think it might make Harris look good and bolster her importance. Axios then conveniently disavows this label and issues a correction to their own article only three years later, in 2024, once it's discovered that the situation at the southern border might not reflect well on Harris now that she is running against Trump. Note both the second article calling Harris border czar and the one saying she was never border czar were written by the very same journalist. One moment it's Huzzah, Harris is border czar and the next it's You guys, Harris was never border czar, the Republicans just made that up, and we have always been at war with Eastasia. Democrats have already produced internal memos telling their people how to fall in line on this issue.
My understanding of this whole situation is that this is one of the things that are technically true, but that these pedantic fact-checks are obviously partisan and misleading (and designed to lead you to a different conclusion than it actually warrants). Yes, the term "border czar" doesn't exist, and so technically Harris cannot have been border czar. But "czar" is an unofficial term that is generically used to describe people in positions of power like this, going back to the Bush era. Clearly the media thought it was an appropriate term in 2021, but not in 2024, and the fact that they're now going back and "recontextualising" their previous articles based on whether or not it's politically convenient is an extremely bad look.
It is correct that her role was not to literally manage everything regarding border policy, and she was not directly in charge of the border. She did, however, have a responsibility to try and stem the core cause of the border crisis, engage in diplomacy to do so, and to work with these countries to enforce borders, something that she also admits to in this tweet. If she really did what she was tasked to do, she should be able to confidently reply that she offered solutions to these problems that weren't taken up, not to claim that she holds zero responsibility on one of the few issues she was asked to assist with. As Biden himself states:
"In addition to that, there’s about five other major things she’s handling, but I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border."
"[T]he Vice President has agreed — among the multiple other things that I have her leading — and I appreciate it — agreed to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept re- — the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders — at their borders."
This entire thing just seems like one of these comically exaggerated Ministry-of-Truth-esque things that happen often in election cycles, the last one being the total 180 on Biden, where before the debate they were proclaiming that Biden was in the best shape ever and that all the alt-media outlets talking about his mental decline were just conspiracy theorists, then right after that shitshow of a debate that they couldn't BandAid over, all of a sudden the calls to resign started up and it turned out his party had been silent about his decline for years despite knowing about it.
problem_redditor
3mo ago
Oh, yeah I did, thanks for the heads up.
I suppose you could make an argument that certain parts of the human nervous system like the retina and/or the visual cortex are deterministic enough to be controlled in this way and that other parts of the human psyche do not function deterministically and cannot be controlled so easily. I think it is somewhat on tenuous ground to state that one's world-model can be predictably influenced but one's personality cannot, the line between the two has never been a clear-cut one, but let's go with that for now and have a look at personality manipulations.
Something that bolsters the idea of consciousness as alterable and deterministic are certain types of brain damage that impact human behaviour in somewhat predictable ways, for example lesions on the periaqueductal gray can cause intentional activity to cease entirely, a condition covered in The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms.
Also covered in that book is a condition called Korsakoff psychosis, a condition characterised by amnesia and confusion caused by thiamine deficiency-related damage to the limbic system. One of the main symptoms is confabulation, where memory is disordered to an extent that the brain retrieves false memories. There was a man (Mr S) affected by this who constantly believed he was in Johannesburg and simply could not be convinced otherwise, and believed his condition was due to him missing a "memory cartridge" that could just be replaced. His false beliefs are not only indicative of a change in perception, but also in how he is, in some sense. When blind raters were brought in to evaluate the emotional content of his confabulations, Mr S's confabulations were found to substantially improve his own situation from the emotional point of view - so confabulation occurs not only because of deficits in search and source monitoring, but also release from inhibition of emotionally mediated forms of recall.
Here's another case study from The Hidden Spring: An electrode implanted in a reticular brainstem nucleus of a 65 year old woman reliably evoked a response of extreme sadness, guilt and hopelessness, where she claimed that she wanted to die and that she was scared and disgusted with life. When stimulation was stopped, the depression quickly ended and for the next five minutes she was in a hypomanic state. Stimulation at other brain sites did not elicit this response. In other words one carefully placed electrode completely rewrote her emotional state.
Urbach-Wiethe disease, calcification of the amygdala, impairs people's ability to feel fear through exteroceptive means (though they can still feel some kinds of fear, such as those induced internally via CO2 inhalation). Unilateral injury to the right cerebral hemisphere can cause hemispatial neglect, a condition where the affected person neglects the left side of their visual field; they literally have no concept or memory of vision on the neglected side and can easily read half of a clock or eat half the food on their plate without noticing that anything is missing. They do not feel the need to turn. The entire idea of there needing to be a left side of their visual field is just gone.
If there's a difference between any of that and "externally induced manipulations can greatly affect how human consciousness functions", I'm not sure what it is. Your general critique in this situation could be that these manipulations are not fine-grained enough to constitute "mind control", but the fact that our current known methods of manipulation aren't enough to craft someone into exactly how we want them does not mean that they don't provide evidence in favour of a mechanistic outlook regarding human consciousness.
I think we need to talk about definitions of mind control here before we discuss that.
Don't get me wrong, I certainly do think the ability to exact full control over someone's mind would be significant (and terrifying, both philosophically and practically), but I'm also not sure if I see a clear-cut distinction between something like "I can make you see whatever I please through stimulating your neurons in a predictable way" and mind control. If you have designed a system which can predictably induce certain perceptions in someone's mind, how is that not already a restricted form of mind control?
We kind of are getting there, though. As an example, there is a growing class of proposals to make the blind sighted again by introducing optogenetic actuators - proteins that modify cellular activity in response to light - into neurons via transfection, and then using patterns of light to induce vision. If that's not an attempt to Write to minds, I don't know what is.
This has also found a good amount of success in practice - this paper describes a patient that was blind and who was given an injection containing a viral vector that encoded for the channelrhodopsin protein ChrimsonR in his retinal ganglia. He was then provided a pair of light-stimulating goggles that translated visual stimuli into a form processable by him and subjected to some visual tests, and when wearing the goggles he could actually attempt to engage with objects in front of him. Of course, stimulation of the retina won't work for other issues such as glaucoma or trauma, so there have also been attempts to stimulate the V1 visual cortex directly, and on that front there are primate experiments showing that stimulating the visual cortex through optogenetics induces perception of visuals (see this paper and this paper).
DARPA has even funded such research in their NESD (Neural Engineering System Design) program, with some of their funding going to a Dr Ehud Isacoff whose goal is to stimulate neurons via optogenetics to encode perceptions into the human cortex. It's certainly in its infancy, but already there is a good amount of evidence that manipulating the mind is very, very possible.
I pretty much agree with this. In the specific case of South Korea, I also think people come away with bad impressions of SK as a worse Japan because they approach it wrong - they typically weight their trip in favour of large metropolitan sprawls such as Seoul and Busan and expect it to feel polished and put-together and historic in the same way that they would expect from Kyoto and Tokyo. This, I think, is the wrong way to structure one's trip there. Korea was downright catapulted into modernity after a long period of poverty, destruction and war during the 20th century, and the modernisation effort under Park Chung-Hee was haphazard and quick - the sole aim was accelerated industrialisation at all costs, without too much regard about how the cities would turn out. SK's metropolises reflect this - many buildings were cheap and utilitarian constructions, and they certainly look it. This was a good move that made Seoul into the "miracle on the Han River", but the result of this is that their large cities have less of a glossy feel than that of Japan's. Outside of the Joseon palace complexes in Seoul, there just aren't too many truly historic things to see within the metropolis proper (though there are a handful of very pretty historic neighbourhoods, such as Bukchon Hanok Village).
This isn't to say that SK doesn't have a historic feel! But you have to look elsewhere outside of the megacities to find that old South Korea. Old villages and temples are everywhere, but they're typically located deep in the countryside, such as the UNESCO-listed Hahoe and Yangdong folk villages which still preserve that old Korean spirit; down to retaining their clan-based social structure. There's pavilions, study halls, traditional Confucian academies for learning and so on, and they often run traditional folk festivals out of these villages. They're not tourist traps or outdoor museums, these are actual places that people have lived in ever since the days of the Joseon Dynasty. These aren't the only ones either, though they're certainly the best known. Stationing yourself in some smaller non-folk-village towns in the countryside and using them as a base to explore a certain area, such as Gyeongju, is also a good idea if you want to see a lot of historic stuff. As noted, the mountain just south of Gyeongju was sacred to the Silla Dynasty and has hundreds of Buddhist sites that can be found just by walking aimlessly through its trails. Bulguksa Temple and Seokguram Grotto, located on Mount Tohamsan, can be accessed from there via a short train ride. I've located so many spectacular historical sites in easy distance of that town in my research (much of which is poorly marked and practically hidden within the mountains). Suncheon and Gwangju are also good jumping off points, I've heard.
I feel like when planning holidays, most people don't really care to do this work. They typically want to situate themselves in a really big and famous city and walk around and explore neighbourhoods without having to research too much, and in South Korea this approach just doesn't work quite as well as it does in Japan since most of its attractions are in the countryside. It also doesn't help that SK seems to want to make everything as hard as possible - in order to navigate and find out bus timetables and train routes you can't use Google Maps, you have to use Naver Maps, which has an awful UI and is in Korean. The only way you can use Naver Maps in English is on the fucking mobile app, and even then using it is still a pain. Granted, they're doing this out of security concerns, but it makes it more difficult to plan one's trip. Many sights are just missing from tourism sites, such as the Buddha sculptures at Gunwi Grotto or the pagoda stonework and statuaries at Unjusa Temple or the views of Boriam Hermitage. I think SK gets shafted relative to Japan despite having an equally large heritage to boast about (relative to land area, at least; SK is a quarter of the size of Japan) partially because of these factors.
With regards to the character of its cities, this seems to perhaps be changing. In 2000 the Korean government began to subsidise hanok projects, and more and more traditional hanok villages have been built in the surrounding areas of Seoul and other big cities (Eunpyeong Hanok Village, for example, was built in 2017). Lots of new traditional architecture is appearing all the time in Korea. A law involving a restoration project for the core historical relics of the Silla Dynasty, named the "Special Act on the Restoration and Maintenance of Core Ruins of the Silla Royal Capital", was passed in 2019, and this will probably make the city of Gyeongju proper have even more of a historical feel. In this sense, it's not too different to Japan, where most of their historical buildings are not, in fact, historical but regardless help contribute to the feel of the city. I guess we'll see how this all turns out.
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