sohois
1d ago
Typical for most years, there wasn't much at Cannes this time round and a lot of the Oscar bait will come out December/January.
sohois
1d ago
Just at home on a large TV. While plenty of the film is nice to look at, it's not a film I'd say needs the cinema experience
sohois
4d ago
Did we ever have a thread for Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis? A quick search suggests just one post, but perhaps more people have seen it by now.
Personally, it was the best of films, it was the worst of films. A plot that is barely there, constantly jumping from one thread to the other. Direction which swings from "yes, this is supposed to be so bad it's good" to "hey look how amazing I am at directing". Driver's main character can stop time just for no reason at all. For that matter, Driver and Esposito are called Catilina and Cicero, but the plot doesn't follow the Cataline conspiracy at all, and Catalina is also called Ceasar for some reason. The main macguffin of megalon is never explained, nor is Catalina's plan for the city. At the end there's some bizarre futuristic landscape that you accept, it really comes out of nowhere. None of the characters seem to have coherent motivations.
And despite all of that, this is an incredible watch. It's not been a great year for film thus far, but this was easily the best film of the year, ahead of the likes of the Substance, Challengers, and Mad Max. The cast is near perfect and know exactly how to play it from the serious to the scenery chewing (with the exception of Emmanuel, who should be someone who can act like they can't act, rather than someone who just can't act at all). Jon Voight whipping out a bow and arrow from his giant erection is easily the best scene of the year. After a too indulgent and even trollish first hour, Coppola just goes all out on the screen. It's often stunning and often hideous. I'm still not really sure how deliberate Coppola is throughout the film; some stuff is so blatant you have to believe he intended it to be bad, but when it gets good it gets really good as well. Did he just lose control, lack oversight? Who knows? The bad stuff is often hilarious and the good stuff is just good.
I really can't blame a lot of viewers and critics for not liking or understanding the film, it is really quite incoherent in a lot of places. Nonetheless, highly recommended
sohois
5d ago
Many men - including many of these men who desire chastity in mates - are quite dissatisfied if they cannot get laid regularly or at least rack up a reasonable body count for themselves in their youth.
sohois
9d ago
ACX readership is now well outside of the ratsphere.
Not really a surprise that a niche spin off forum isn't super well known amongst the many substack readers. Unless you read SSC long enough to see the announcement all those years ago, or posted on the SSC reddit, it's not got any public advertisement
sohois
12d ago
But what is today China was, 2500 years ago, just a small collection of states along the Yellow River. Gradually, over the millenia, they absorbed more and more territory into their country.
It's more like the size of the various dynasties ebbed and flowed. They at various had control of north Korea and Vietnam, and of course the Yuan dynasty was essentially the continuation of Genghis Khan and could make a claim for much of Asia.
If you look at recent history China seems pretty non-expansionist, with Tibet the only exception. They famously turned away from the opportunities of colonialism at the peak of China's power
sohois
20d ago
Because people like to play characters that look like them? If you want women, you add women. If you want blacks or hispanics, you add them. If you want lqbt, you add lgbt.
I brought up LoL earlier and just responded to someone else on the game; it's a good case study. A Riot study found that among female players, 97% exclusively played female champions.
This doesn't mean that it's a good strategy to target what are likely niche audiences, but I don't think it's confusing why people believe in it.
sohois
20d ago
If we're talking about LoL specifically, I'd say female preference appears to tilt towards pretty/cute rather than attractive/sexy. Lux rather than Miss Fortune. And I think Riot's redesign of some earlier characters and move away from the high level of sexualisation (and general huge tits that a lot of the early female champs had) was probably a big deal for potential female players.
sohois
20d ago
I don't think the woke additions do all follow the one option though, that was just an expression. In some responses below, people are complaining about minor changes like using "Body type" instead of Sex or Gender. Plenty of female characters added into games are good looking and the bizarre non-binary examples from Dragon Age are much rarer.
So I'd say corpos are deciding they need to do something to attract wider audiences. And then the developers themselves are choosing implementations as simple as body type and a female protagonist to full blown Dragon Age. I'd imagine explaining these would need to focus much more on individual studio effects.
sohois
20d ago
You could ask this about millions of bad business decisions: I think the consensus is that there is a bias to action in corporate settings, because people need to be seen to be doing something. In a lot of media, not just games, this ends up as "Put a chick in it and make her lame and gay"
sohois
20d ago
Just getting regular sales data for retail games is difficult enough, let alone trying to parse out how an ongoing GaaS title is affected.
I think League has probably done well out of it, research suggested female players overwhelmingly played female characters while men played an equal mix - indicating that the male playerbase was unbothered while attracting new female players.
Battlefield V sold less than its predecessor according to Wikipedia, but still sold more than 7 million copies. Presumably there is some percentage of regular players who decided not to buy the game due to the woke marketing, alongside some percentage of new players who were attracted by it. 2142 looked a lot more regular in its marketing, so perhaps EA decided it wasn't worth it overall?
sohois
21d ago
If individual characters or elements are enough for a game to be woke, and thus the industry, then the OPs question has a very simple answer. Companies are putting these things in because they want to make more money. Adding a women or similar is a very low effort way to make a game more appealing to a wider audience
sohois
21d ago
Concord was supposedly in development for 10 years.
Everytime I see facts about this game, the budget and development time grow larger.
Wikipedia currently lists an 8 year dev time for Concord. But it's not directly sourced, and it doesn't seem to match reality. The studio that created the game wasn't even founded until 2018. Maybe some of the founders were had an idea for a hero shooter in 2016, but if you included all ideation for a game everything would have ridiculous development times
sohois
21d ago
Is the video game industry woke? Or are you just updating on a few high profile titles?
As others have pointed out, Japanese games are largely not woke. The big mobile titles and Mihoyo stuff coming out of China are very much not woke. Indies are rarely woke. Eastern Europe and similar nations largely don't produce woke stuff.
So we're largely talking about AAA/AA titles from the larger publishers in NA and Western Europe. How many of their titles are woke? Is Call of Duty woke? Fortnite? FIFA/Madden/NBA?
Before we dive into other titles, we need to define what is and isn't a woke game. Something like recent (indie) flop Dustborn is clearly, explicitly woke, but most titles aren't nearly so clear cut. The biggest seller of 2023 was Hogwarts Legacy. Is this a woke title? Supposedly it had a very diverse cast for 19th century England, but Rowling's reputation has become poison amongst woke-types, so much so that there was a big backlash against the game.
How about Battlefield V? I recall there was a furore around the announcement trailer because one of the main characters was a 'girlboss' in WW2. But as far as I'm aware there wasn't much else that would be woke in there. Is a single character enough to make a game woke or not?
What some of the big GaaS titles? LoL's character design branched out from big titty anime girls years ago, but are a handful of 'diverse' characters enough to deem it woke? Rainbow Six Siege has get some shit recently because of a character in a wheelchair, and I believe the much criticized recent 2B design was a skin from that game. But again this is just a handful of characters available.
Here's the top selling US games from 2023, 22, and 21 (with duplicates/yearly entries removed). Which ones are woke?
Hogwarts
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Spider Man 2
Diablo 4
Jedi: Survivor
Mortal Kombat 1
Starfield
Call of Duty
Elden Ring
Madden
God of War: Ragnarök
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
Pokémon
FIFA
Horizon: Forbidden West
MLB: The Show
Battlefield 2042
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
Resident Evil: Village
Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury
sohois
23d ago
Status is a thing outside of the UK, perhaps 2rafa was guilty of miswording it. Think about it like this, if you're introducing a potential spouse to your family, what would come off better? "He/She is a doctor" or "He/She is a nurse practitioner"? I don't think it's building consensus to state that everyone would agree on the first option.
sohois
28d ago
There are two issues here:
first, ERCOT is perhaps the most liberal energy market in the world. Gov assistance can help to reduce barriers to nuclear investment, but it's still going to come down to largely private companies making the choices to build or not to build. However, as the below response says, Texas already has ideal conditions for more fossil fuels or more renewables. Unless the funding assistance is massive, it's hard to see much interest in new nuclear.
The one exception would be interest in co-location with a data centre. I can see Musk, with Tesla now in Texas, publicizing a carbon-neutral AI centre using nuclear power next door. But such deals are unlikely to transform the generation landscape of the state unless every data centre in the US moves to Texas.
Second, ERCOT's liberal attitudes led it to separate almost entirely from the rest of the US. There are almost no interconnections with other states, just a few tiny ones with SPP and Mexico. A lot of the red states surrounding Texas are still regulated, with vertical utilities that follow federal rules and/or have their own ISOs. So even if they succeeded, it won't necessarily provide a path for other states to follow.
sohois
1mo ago
I think negative sentiment towards Indians can be narrowed down to one dominant factor: the English language.
Indians are, what, 1 in 6 people on the planet? In the past this number didn't mean much as the vast majority rarely leave their home country, but the internet and outsourcing means you have a much greater chance to encounter Indians. The thing is, India's cultural issues and level of social niceties are no worse than any other developing nation. China has many of the same problems, with a vast underclass of people that have awful hygiene and manners, a massive scam industry, nepotism and dishonesty, and even the "incel" characteristics that are ascribed to indians can be found in many Chinese men.
But people will very rarely encounter Chinese people because they don't speak English. There are no Chinese call centres, and while there are plenty of English language Chinese scammers you are still much more likely to get a call from an Indian. And on the internet, the Chinese are essentially banned from many of the most popular Western sites, while Indians will likely soon become the majority on places like facebook, reddit, youtube, and tiktok. The majority of the time an average Westerner is encountering someone from China will be Chinese tourists, and they have a godawful reputation.
sohois
1mo ago
Nothing speculated on by 4chan users is a "known phenomenon". It's just pattern matching and confirmation bias.
sohois
1mo ago
How many RPGs were even published in the 90s? Particularly if you're excluding Japanese games where the localization decisions would play a huge role in perception of writing quality.
sohois
1mo ago
I've had posts appear in the "Highlights from the comments..." threads under a username in the past. Not seen any bias towards real names, the bigger issue is that it's likely too late for a comment to get noticed amongst thousands of others
sohois
1mo ago
Given Scott's endorsement in 2016, I'm not at all surprised he's not changed his mind this time around.
In 2016, you could argue for "high variance". There were plenty of supporters who believed that Trump would bring his business acumen to bear to sweep away inefficiency and to make deals, or that he would successfully take on the establishment and "drain the swamp". There was a positive case to make for him.
But this didn't happen. In his 4 years, Trump was a pretty generic Republican, average to below-average in most respects. He failed to achieve most of his policy goals and was not a dealmaker or businessman in office. Perhaps the only area you might praise his achievements was in foreign policy, but even those successes look very short lived. Then right at the end, he veered towards the down part of the high variance argument.
It seems like now the overwhelming arguments for Trump are all "He's not Harris" or "He's not the democrats". For Scott whose policy positions are probably closer to the democrats, this is not going to be particularly convincing, as he lays out.
sohois
1mo ago
Make your point reasonably clear and plain. Try to assume other people are doing the same.
What does this mean? Are you suggesting that Israel Jews have engineered fertility crises in every country except their own? You're not supposed to put words in posters mouths but such a vague assertion forces people to speculate.
If this is what you mean, why would Israel Jews do this? What do they have to gain from plummeting the birth rate of, say, South Korea? How would they engineer a plummeting birth rate in South Korea?
sohois
1mo ago
I wouldn't recommend Buster Scruggs as your first film from the Coen brothers, it's a collection of short stories that I suspect was made largely to satisfy Netflix's insatiable lust for content. Not that it's a bad collection, just not what I would recommend if you wanted to get introduced to the directors. I would heavily recommend starting with Fargo
No, I don't really care for horror so it probably wouldn't do much for me. I'm expecting Anora to take the top spot once I get round to it given Baker's films are always good
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