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vorpa-glavo


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 05 18:36:07 UTC
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User ID: 674

vorpa-glavo


				
				
				

				
3 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 18:36:07 UTC

					

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User ID: 674

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Maybe you could write the "Farewell to Manzanar" of UK rape gang survivor stories, and then find a way to make it part of the curriculum.

Honestly though, I find your post here pretty silly. A fundamentally curious person would read both The Diary of Anne Frank and the Turner Diaries, and they'd have already waded through all of the reports around the UK rape gang scandals.

Time is limited of course, and no one will ever have time to read or care about everything, but it would be ridiculous for me to say something like, "I'll give a fuck about Karl Marx's Capital, when Gulag Archipelago is required reading in public school", because it is obvious posturing.

While I agree it is somewhat unhelpful to have hagiographies and anti-hagiographies of real, complicated people, I think it is immensely valuable to learn from the past in a variety of ways.

I think it is useful to have moral biographies like Plutarch's Lives of Eminent Greeks and Romans, which are written to show each figure's greatest virtues and greatest vices so that someone can learn and grow from their example.

I think it is useful to engage with parts of the past to get a real sense of the fact that "the past is a foreign country", and to understand the historical forces and major figures who shaped history on down to the modern day.

I think there's a place for discussion of figures like Anne Frank, or Hitler or General Lee within all of that.

Since nobody has uploaded slime tutorials/bootlegs, I engaged with the art in the format it was available to me.

I have enjoyed musicals enough via cast recordings that I've wanted to look up bootlegs or find a way to see a live performance or a pro-shot. But Slam Frank wasn't one of them.

If you feel that a more fair review would be something like, "Don't buy the cast recording of Slam Frank, it omits crucial songs from the musical, and it feels like the Kickstarter to get it released and the fact that it costs $20 and isn't up on YouTube or Spotify are cynical ways to turn rage bait for a mediocre work into profit", then I suppose that's fair.

Slam Frank is kind of disappointing

(Spoiler Warning: Full spoilers for Slam Frank.)

Slam Frank is an anti-woke satirical hip hop musical, created by a few Jewish guys, that depicts a play within a play, where a woke theater troupe decides to update the story of Anne Frank for the modern age, and depict her as Anita Franco, a neurodivergent, Afro-Latina, pansexual girl forced to hide in an attic by the Nazis, as she and the other Jews hiding there deal with the most important issues in their lives: patriarchy, coming to terms with their sexuality and gender identities, and being true to her identity as a proud Afro-Latina immigrant.

Now, a disclaimer at the top, I have only listened to the official cast recording ($20 I will never get back), which omits an important song from the last 15 minutes of the musical that serves as its main twist, and I've been forced to cobble my understanding together from various summaries and the lyrics of the omitted song. (Worth pointing out that I have occasionally enjoyed musicals I encountered roughly this same way.)

But overall, I'd say I'm pretty underwhelmed.

To be very fair to it, I actually think a lot of the music is pretty decent and catchy. For a work that is so dripping in irony that many people had trouble figuring out whether it was serious or not, and what the play's message was, they put more effort into the music than you'd expect. I appreciated some of the nods to other musicals like Hamilton here and there, and there were lots of little funny moments throughout. The absurdity of a beat poem about how every woman is a Jew and the patriarchy is their attic, or Peter van Pels singing about coming out of the closet as nonbinary feel like they belong to the long tradition of musicals like Avenue Q or The Book of Mormon which manage to thread the needle of being outrageous and offensive but still enjoyable.

However, I might just be desensitized from having been on the internet for too long, but I just didn't think there was much there there in Slam Frank. While I do kind of respect them for ending the play by having Anne Frank turn her own family in to the Nazis after she learns what the Jews are planning to do to Palestine (only for Adolf Hitler to show up after the execution, revive the family, and come out as a trans woman, before the whole cast sings a song meant to show the parallels between woke left rhetoric and Nazi ideology), I can't help but feel like it is all shock humor with very little else going for it.

I wanted to feel something. I wanted them to do something witty and interesting, and instead it just seems like they had a single idea for a joke and managed to stretch it over the length of an entire musical.

I'm reminded of the empty feelings I was left with listening to Kanye West's Heil Hitler. I was listening to it, waiting for brilliant lyrics or interesting themes or ideas, and instead I just got lazy shock schlock, which doesn't do much for me. I'm not easily outraged by this kind of stuff, and so I'm just left a bit bored, asking, "What else you got?"

I'm happy that the musical exists, but in some ways it feels like a grift designed to sell tickets, even as it is a complete musical play. I thought it was odd that I couldn't find any bootlegs of the whole show, and only short clips of some of the songs online, but I think they made a very deliberate choice not to upload the complete album to Youtube or Spotify, because it would remove a lot of the "mystique" around the show that their viral advertising on Tik Tok and Instagram has created.

Well said.

It was frustrating seeing headlines blaming Anthropic for destroying rare books, when it was the incentives around copyright law that made it more cost effective and efficient to do it this way.

Heck, I'm usually more okay with patent law than copyright law, but there's even a patent angle to this story. OP's post mentioned:

By contrast, the Google Books project largely used a patented non-destructive camera process to scan millions of books borrowed from libraries and later returned.

But here's the thing, if Google had just given the patents away in this case, Anthropic could have made some of these non-destructive scanners and done the same thing. Because Google decided to sit on this technology instead, Anthropic's hands were further tied, and they did what was cheap and easy instead.

I think people think that there are more good books than there actually are.

Looking at e.g., the latest book releases on Standard Ebooks, I recognize none of the new titles, so in some sense that site is already scraping the bottom of the barrel, despite having a catalog of a mere ~1500 books. Gutenberg's at like 78k books (though many are duplicates), and both all the titles and all the authors of the new releases are completely unrecognizable.

Books can be "good" in a conditional sense.

When I was researching the real world history of elementals for my D&D game, I found Parcelsus' "A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits" and "The Comte De Gabelis" invaluable. And while those books are hardly obscure in the right circles, I also don't think most people's lives would be at all impoverished if they never read those books. And yet, I am happy I was able to read them, and would consider it a shame if they hadn't survived to the modern day.

There are plenty of other books that are only conditionally useful for someone researching a very particular thing, and unlikely to be read by the vast majority of the reading public.

I want more conservative-morality, gritty media.

Nolan's Odyssey is arguably little-c conservative. It's about how breaking down the traditions that uphold law and order can lead to the collapse of a civilization.

The original Odyssey isn't really "conservative", so much as it is pagan and bronze age morality. There are a few scenes that really stand the test of time, like the shade of Achilles' lament that he would prefer to be alive and a nobody instead of being a glorious dead warrior, but it's got a lot of stuff that even most modern conservatives probably wouldn't go for. (Like, would they be okay with him cheating multiple times on Penelope?)

Worst part to me was taking out the Nobody dialogue with Polyphemus. One of the big Odysseus highlights gone for no reason

I also missed "Nobody", but I don't think it happened for no reason. Because Nolan's film is about Odysseus being responsible for the Bronze Age collapse, due to the break down of norms the Trojan horse gambit caused, he couldn't let Polyphemus talk because it muddies the waters of what xenia/sacred hospitality/Zeus' law means in the film, by having something negative related to it that doesn't trace back to Odysseus' "original sin" of the Trojan horse.

Another problem is that GRRM isn't actually all that grim dark. ASOIAF can be quite cynical and/or "realistic" at times, but it is shot through with a heavy strain of romanticism and that undermines critique-of-Tolkien angle.

Yeah, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms really made me take a step back and realize that GRRM is actually incredibly idealistic as an author. He kills off characters like Ned Stark or Baelor Breakspear, in order to show that in the long term their values are actually correct and will ultimately win out in the end, even if it might take a long time in the broken world they inhabit. They serve almost as "martyrs" for honor, virtue, and honest dealing, and inspire their successors (the Stark kids, and Sir Duncan) to carry on their values to victory.

The iliad and the odyssey are fine, but nobody wants to watch a movie of a faithful adaptation. It'd be seven hours, nc-17, and an art film all at the same time.

People watch marathons of the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings movies. I think truly epic and faithful adaptations of the Odyssey have the potential to be perennial favorites for some people.

Honestly, if I had one complaint about Nolan's Odyssey, it is more about it not feeling epic enough. Lord of the Rings mastered the art of absolutely massive battles with thousands of combatants, but the Greek and Trojan armies felt surprising small throughout the film. Not a deal breaker, but definitely a bit odd when Hollywood already had so many examples of massive fight scenes in film epics.

and decided the story was going to be a Lesson about Trump Tariffs (yes, really)

While I do believe that Nolan's Odyssey is a spiritual companion piece to Oppenheimer, since both movies are war-adjacent stories that deal with the consequences of winning a war in a way that might destroy your whole civilization, I don't really think that the timeline of Hollywood movie production makes sense for Nolan's Odyssey to be about Trump tariffs specifically. Doesn't it take years for a movie to be greenlit and made?

I would find it much more plausible that the themes of societal collapse are coming from a similar place to Coppola's Megalopolis, though I think Nolan manages to make a more enjoyable film out of the material. While I think Nolan does probably see Trump as one example of the kind of breakdown of law and order through the erosion of social norms that he's depicting in the Odyssey, I don't think the film is exclusively about that. I think Nolan sees the modern Western world as about to enter a new Dark Age, and he decided to make two movies touching on that theme.

The mechanism would be that it was in the Mythical Heroic Age between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

I think the Illiad is pretty hard to get into, but I actually think the loose adventure structure of the Odyssey actually keeps it pretty fun and engaging in the modern day.

It's part of why the Aeneid kind of sucks as well. The Odyssey-like part of the Aeneid just has worse episodes over all ("Ooh, some spooky ghost reeds say you have to go and found Rome"), or straight up retreads of parts of the Odyssey (like the guy Odysseus left behind on the cyclops island.)

Why entertain art that has nothing to say? Why spend millions on IMAX cameras to make something with less spiritual content than an AI clip?

I wouldn't say that it has nothing to say, whether it is a good movie or a good adaptation.

Nolan's Odyssey is a little-c conservative movie, about how civilization is a result of maintaining a tradition of law and order that people can believe in, and what happens when you undermine that belief and destroy your civilization as a result.

While I do think guilt has largely replaced hubris in the movie, I think a lot of the threads Nolan is pulling on are actually in the original epic in some form. Whether it is the Cretan Lie that Odysseus tells the loyal swineherd inspiring the Sea Peoples plotline, or Achilles' speech in the Underworld (sadly ommitted in the movie), where he says he would rather be alive and a nobody than be the glorious dead warrior that he is, inspiring some of the anti-war (or anti-norm-violations-in-war) storyline of this movie. (And this is more of an Illiad thing, but Homer did a lot more to humanize the Trojans than many war movies do today. He gives the scene of Hector with his infant son, and often will give a short biography of a Trojan as he is cut down. Imagine a modern war movie showing a mini montage of a person's life every time an enemy soldier was killed!)

I liked the movie overall, and while there are scenes and episodes I wish that had been kept ("nobody", and the Phaeacians were sorely missed), I thought it was a fine retelling of the story. When the medieval world gave us things like Sir Orpheo (a retelling of Orpheus and Euridice, were she is kidnapped and taken to the Celtic Otherworld instead of the Greek Underworld, and it has a happy ending where they actually leave the Otherworld together), I don't really mind if an adaptation is unfaithful. We'll always have the original.

One of my exes wrote smut in high school about Luigi and Daisy, and watched Overwatch porn despite not playing overwatch because the production values tended to be the best for her tastes.

The simple reality is that a small percent of people will always make porn out of just about anything. Anime isn't special in this regard, as the thousands of Harry Potter smut fics from 20 years ago attest.

I think the problem is that you're going to try to aim normal, and probably be a few degrees off and ostracize your kid in other ways.

If your kid goes to a public school, their peers are going to be able to tell that their media diet has been restricted in some way. I knew kids who were Jehovah's Witnesses, and even though I was casual acquaintances with them, all the restrictions their parents made them live under (no Pokemon, no holidays, etc.) made them stand out like a sore thumb, and made it hard to form the easy, breezy friendships typical of K-12 education.

My parents weren't too strict, but I wasn't allowed to watch "violent" media growing up, as decided by my dad, so I never got into the Lord of the Rings movies in elementary school like all of my other friends (though I did read the book around that time), and I still feel as an adult that I was denied something I can never really get back as a result. Of course I've been able to watch the movies since leaving my parents' house, but I can never have a nostalgic connection to them, and I'll never be as into them as some of my same age peers are.

I also think a lot of what made people "weird" was just autism or ADHD, and trying to guide your child into normie interests won't change whether they have those conditions or not. If your child doesn't become "that kid" obsessed with anime and manga, they're just going to be the kid who's way too into some other random thing you happened to let them interact with in their youth like every other ADHD/autism child. And things that are "okay" to be casually into like Greek mythology or Arthurian legends or even certain video games, are still really weird if you're obsessive over them around your peers.

For me, it's an interesting idea: That someone is using fan art to push a progressive pro-trans agenda. And to mix metaphors, perhaps the molehill has a slippery slope.

I just do not buy this. We live in the era of Miku Binder Thomas Jefferson. If people want to make progressive reinterpretations of characters they do so, openly and proudly.

There is no way that the fan artist here could have known that if they made slightly mannish images that so many people would go to bat for them, showing off their faces as "evidence" that teenage girls really do look like that.

I just see it as a combination of a bad artist, and teenage girls having low self esteem and body image issues, and accidentally creating the perfect toxoplasma moment.

I honestly just chalk it up to the original fan artist not being very good at figure drawing. I read enough badly drawn webcomics in the early 2000's to not see much strange in an accidentally "mannish" or "ugly" drawing of a female.

I genuinely feel like this is people making a mountain out of a molehill. Like, do we really need to transvestigate fan art that is in no way associated with the actual game? Someone made some bad art online, and some people apparently like it. You can judge them for their bad taste, but what are we doing here?

As you have already stated Doki Doki Literature Club is a fake VN, but considered real by its fans, instead of them thinking of it as belonging to the EOVN genre.

I'm a casual fan of visual novels, and I don't see much point in distinguishing visual novels this way by region of origin, the same way we do with manga vs. comics or anime vs. cartoons. Visual novels largely originated in Japan, so most will be Japanese by default, but I'm not really sure that I would call something like DDLC or works like that 4chan visual novel, Katawa Shoujo, "fake" visual novels. They're just visual novels that weren't made in Japan.

Like, we can discuss them as works of arts by region the way we do with phrases like "French cinema", or "South Indian cinema", but it would be silly to say that French films are "fake" films because the first films were screened in New York City or something.

The comparisons in the original OP to Champagne don't make sense, because I don't think even the Japanese think of "noberugēmu" as a characteristically Japanese art style, even if it is far more popular in Japan than in the West.

Because they never experienced sincerity, they can't see anything wrong with further parody.

I have played several Japanese visual novels, and I appreciated DDLC as a fun little horror parody of the medium.

I don't actually think the existential horror of Monika's existence as a sentient side character in a video game is nearly as good a horror beat as when the childhood friend commits suicide, and all your saves are deleted, so you can't reload from a previous save to make a different choice. As someone who had learned to play VNs a particular way, make choices, restart when I got a bad ending, the fact that the game took away that option and made you live with the consequences of a story beat was really effective meta storytelling, whether DDLC is a "real" VN or not.

I think that the issue is that the more niche you go, the sillier it seems to try and have a big hullabaloo.

To use an example from the other side. A while back feminists were up in arms on Tumblr about this picture, depicting a well-endowed, tan bimbo transforming into a more modestly endowed nerd. They said it was racist, sexist, etc.

But it was just a niche bit of fetish art, made by a niche fetish artist, that had accidentally escaped containment and reached a far larger audience than it was ever intended for. There was no larger political message in it, and the only artistic purpose was to help a small subset of fetishists get off to a debimbofication/nerdification image. I'm not even saying that that is beyond criticism or critique, but almost none of the feminist critique was coming from a well-informed place where anything they said was anything more than initial knee jerk reactions to seeing something they had no context for.

I agree with you, that people should be allowed to comment on, criticize and pay attention to small creators. There's no "you must be this big to ride", but I still think there is a discretion that is good to exercise when dealing with a strange tempest in a teapot.

I don't think people are singling out anime here. I've played DDLC and enjoyed it.

But most of the other threads on the Motte touching on multimedia products are talking about the actual product itself, which is high budget, has backing by a major corporation, and there is always an opportunity cost where the resources going into these mammoth productions are not going to art that would appeal more to the non-woke or people on the right. There's more justification for them being in the culture war roundup than a "literally, who?" fan artist making bad fan art.

(I say that, even as I also tend to avoid a lot of those kinds of threads on here due to a general lack of interest.)

The artist in question has about 400,000 followers, so, more than BAP on X.

My limited understand is that Tik Tok followers are different from followers on older sites like Youtube or X/Twitter. I remember hearing some influencer on a podcast or radio show say that Tik Tok follower counts are so inflated that advertisers and brand deals had to adjust in response.

I suspect a lot of Tik Tok followers are bots or fakes, more so than on other sites.

But even so. I just feel like going after a random fan artist feels like such small potatoes for the culture war in general.

Like, what does this battle accomplish in the larger culture war one way or the other? There were always going to be bad artists who made cringey art, and tried to defend it in social justice terms. Why feed the toxoplasma and take up arms in this case? When it's not even the actual video game studio doing the culture war thing, I don't see what anyone is hoping to accomplish here.

So tell me if I understand this correctly. The controversy is that a fan artist, in no way affiliated with the original game, made bad Doki Doki Literature fan art where they made the teenage girl characters look mannish?

This truly seems like a tempest in a teapot to me.

Like, whenever I learn about a controversy on any social media site that I'm not on (and that's basically all of them), I always feel like I'm getting news from a parallel world slightly worse than ours. Is this seriously a controversy? Was the fan artist particularly well known or influential before this? Why should literally anyone not involved in the flame war on Tik Tok care one iota about this?

I find most of the post you linked pretty bad.

Scott Alexander has written enough about culture-bound disorders that I don't find it implausible that several Western psychological disorders are psychogenic on some level (while allowing for a core to some of them that will happen regardless of culture), but I don't really find the framing of depression or PTSD as "demons" to be very helpful.

Even if it turned out that from a God's eye view, that it is better for Western society's collective mental health to not allow therapy speak or knowledge of disorders like depression and PTSD to be widely disseminated, that still wouldn't justify thinking that all of these labelled mental illnesses are best characterized as demonic influence.

From a Christian standpoint, aren't we living in a fallen world tainted by sin? Why can't COVID, PTSD and depression be as "natural" of a consequence of Adam and Eve's transgression as death or pain in childbirth? Why do they have to be demons specifically? The gospels do feature Jesus casting out a lot of demons, but sometimes there is no demon and he just removes the cataracts in a blind man or ends the constant menstrual bleeding that a woman has been suffering for 12 years. Why is it better/more helpful to view COVID/PTSD/depression as the former kind of issue, and not the latter kind?

I could imagine effects pushing in both directions for this, but isn't it also possible that gay parents abusing their children is more likely to become a polarizing headline in the first place, and thus increase the availability heuristic around gay parents being abusers?

When a straight father or stepfather sexually abuses or murders his kids, that's "dog bites man", and has hardly any staying power as a culture war issue. There is broad societal agreement that it is a tragedy, and while a particularly bad case during a slow news week might be reported by a local news station, it will rarely become national news. But when a gay teacher and sales manager abuse and murder their adopted child, there is more fuel for a culture war fire.

EDIT: Typo.