2rafa
maybe it will all turn out fine
User ID: 841
2rafa
18hr ago
What I’m really excited for is the actual Holodeck / Tron / what people thought future virtual worlds would be like in the 80s / type stuff where it just generates fully immersive, coherent, endless, well-written virtual worlds on the fly. I don’t even need VR, just an endless Red Dead II tier world
2rafa
18hr ago
Yeah, but that goes back to the original argument where the woman was suggesting that men writing these woman characters will have them be hypercompetent in some ways and then be, say, a terrible mother or give them crippling neuroses. That doesn’t seem too different to Holmes being a hypercompetent detective but also an addict or Poirot being a hypercompetent detective but also a neurotic asshole
Hypercompetence is generally uninteresting and - even when it’s interesting - it’s mainly interesting to men. Not because men are more competent, but I think because men like examining very complex and well functioning machines; men will watch hours-long YouTube videos on steam engines and industrial machinery and pore over complex diagrams and cross sections and so on. The ‘hypercompetent man’ is essentially just another one of these machines, the man who reads about these famous generals or whatever is seeing them less as characters or even as human beings and more as versions of those videos where the railroad track connector perfectly switches between the different rails so that trains can go in different directions or something.
If I imagine a hypercompetent woman, like my mother, who held down a very demanding job, had three children, cooked dinner most nights, would pick us up from school on the way back from meetings and then often go back to work, was always working on like 17 different side projects on the weekend, baked sourdough bread, taught yoga for fun twice a week and still attended absolutely everything, her life isn’t actually very interesting. Impressive? Certainly, but these kinds rarely have the tragedy or the strife to be compelling protagonists.
Holmes is an addict and a loner, he isn’t married and is officially a lifelong bachelor. He has lost the one thing that gives a man (or anyone) a true legacy. For Poirot the latter is true, I’d say he’s even more asexual than Holmes, he’s a fastidious neurotic, he’s highly flawed, and many people hate him and even those who don’t often only tolerate him because he is useful or well-connected (on account of his usefulness).
In general, universally hypercompetent main characters are rare.
2rafa
3d ago
There has. It was a big deal in the British news when a former rugby player (Rob Burrows) died of MND which was probably caused by head injuries. But rugby isn’t as widely followed in Britain as football is in the US, the English invented too many sports for any other than soccer to have the outsized prominence of (American) football in US society.
2rafa
3d ago
Yeah I agree with most of your criticisms, but my point was I don’t think the complaint about women’s attractiveness really falls into the same category as 14th century Hungary having the racial diversity of Chicago.
2rafa
3d ago
I talk about some of them in real life, politics (without saying many of my own opinions, just neutrally), economics, AI is a big one now I guess, sometimes pop culture or literature or art. I’ve always loved zoos; probably most of the money I’ve given to charity in my life has been to zoos and animal conservation. Obscure history and geography and demographic / cultural stuff is just from a lifetime of reading the news, when I was a kid I read the Wall Street Journal my dad left when he went to work when I got home from school every single day, I won’t say front to back but probably near enough. Then the usual route of becoming very online as a tween, finding weird online atheism, then probably from there babby’s first geopolitics, stuff like Fukuyama and Diamond’s guns germs and steel, then moldbug and TLP and the other usual suspects, then VS Naipaul who is very good on the interesting things that happened in Islam between 1970 and 1990 around the Muslim world. My parents love reading non-fiction, which I think for a long time I looked down on as a kind of petit bourgeois midbrow habit but which has definitely allowed me to semi-productively waste thousands of hours arguing on the internet. I remember reading a huge book, maybe a journal or memoir of some European officer or diplomat, writing about 19th century travels through Central Asia, Silk Road stuff, when I was maybe 12 and getting a couple of hours of sleep a night. I also have regular phases of specific special interests like rococo or the history of musical instruments or certain kinds of cooking or human expansion out of Africa or the history of horticulture or the sexual revolution and the early years of playboy magazine or psychoactive fungi etc etc over the years where I’ll read like a dozen books on something over a month and then get bored.
I’ve met a few other people like this in real life, and there are more than a few others here. It makes for fun conversation when you find one, because it’s almost impossible that your knowledge overlaps perfectly, so you always learn a few interesting things.
2rafa
3d ago
I disagree, a lot of modern literary fiction is, as a lot of literary fiction has always been, about beautiful and/or wealthy people. To the limited extent that it is about cripples and uggos, well, it always was.
As regards taste, maybe. But you might not be completely correct, either. Like I said, a hugely disproportionate amount of Japanese media focuses on the adventures of very beautiful high school students, including games, and a lot of them did very poorly for many years until the collapse of the Yen (and to some extent Dark Souls, which doesn’t have that many attractive characters) made Japanese non-Nintendo AAA game development viable again. A lot of people played Persona, sure, but a lot of people also played the Grand Theft Auto games, which have never had particularly attractive characters, men or women. (Interestingly, this year’s GTA revolves around a couple in which the man is more attractive than the woman; we shall see how it sells).
I think the comparison you draw between hot characters and gameplay is limited. There are games without much gameplay, and some are even quite entertaining (I have enjoyed a few walking simulators), but in 99% of games, the gameplay is supposed to be entertaining. Meanwhile, many of the most important stories in all of literature, film and television that you and I could both agree are actually very good would make no sense if everybody was a hot 17 year old Japanese high school student, which seems like the bailey of the case you’re making.
I see it like the difference between British and American TV. The former has a certain charm, a certain patina, because it doesn’t just cast hot people. It could, there are enough beautiful underemployed actors even in England. But it gains something by not doing so, for in American television the impossible hotness of everybody in a small town grocery store or police department or family on TV contrasts with the reality of those who know it to be laughably impossible, laughably unrealistic to the point that one’s sense of disbelief is tested.
She was sentenced to 11.5 years in prison which is relatively long for white collar crime / criminal fraud (a lot of potential charges around like endangering patients etc would have been hard to prove)”. If you look at white collar criminals who get much longer they tend to be either SBF types who repeatedly violate their bail or other conditions and get the book thrown at them because the judge is annoyed, or there’s some surrounding sob story (Madoff was basically the effigy burned for the entire financial crisis, and his victims were wealthy and ran a big lobbying campaign around all the nice upper middle class Boca Raton retirements he marginally inconvenienced ‘destroyed’ whereas Holmes’ investors were mainly billionaires and VCs) that can be tied directly to the fraud.
2rafa
3d ago
The end point of this logic is that endless stream of Japanese media where all the characters are hot teenagers and everybody’s depressed their whole lives because media overfocuses on romanticizing like a 3 year period before adult life begins.
If games only feature hot young adults they miss out on telling stories about the middle aged, the old, the ugly, children, the disabled, and those are often some of the most interesting stories in any literary canon.
2rafa
3d ago
All the God characters in God of War (including Kratos, Odin etc) that aren’t children seem to kind of freeze aging some time in middle age. Freya looks like a 40-something year old woman.
2rafa
3d ago
you cannot tell me Aphrodite of II is not a man's face stapled onto a woman's figure.
Man I know so many real women who have vastly squarer or more masculine jawlines than this character, if that is really the ‘issue’. The reminds me of the controversy over the Cora character in Mass Effect Andromeda, whom BioWare inexplicably decided to give the Full Karen haircut (which itself was apparently reactionary ‘queerbaiting’ because they made her straight). Again, people said she looked like a man, even though in the real world many biological women have faces like this.
2rafa
3d ago
Don’t most mainstream Freemasons lodges still permit no women members? (There are some offshoots that do, but not many of them). There are still a few all-male golf clubs. I’m pretty sure there are still a couple of super old school NYC clubs (not like the Harvard or the Union) that are still all male.
2rafa
3d ago
“Don’t commit crime so you don’t get brutally raped by barbarians in jail” just doesn’t seem to work so well as a disincentive to me. Do white collar South Africans or Colombians commit far less fraud because of the poor state of their prisons vs, say, white collar Spaniards or Canadians? I doubt it.
Separation of prison populations by whether they were involved in violent or non-violent crime seems reasonable.
2rafa
4d ago
The only game where I've personally not played it because the characters were ugly was new world
One thing I prefer about Western MMOs is the more mundane / ‘ugly’ character designs. I think it’s in part because I associate Korean MMO style beautiful character creators with Korean MMOs, and therefore entirely nonsensical (even by Blizzard standards) storylines, dull grinding, terrible quests and predatory microtransactions / p2w.
I definitely think BioWare took it a step too far with years of weirdly ugly characters in games, but Western MMOs are a more workmanlike kind of dull. And I just hate the anime aesthetic all East Asian games seem to have (even Dark Souls when they occasionally decide to have a non-hag female character), I hate it more than anime itself where there are at least some gems.
2rafa
4d ago
New York has a large black population but working class African Americans tend to be more likely to work in retail, food service, the DMV and government jobs, some childcare, clerical and administrative work etc.
2rafa
4d ago
Truly successful grifters almost always have to believe.
Almost.
I think if you actually look at the scammers that the public is most fascinated with, year after year and decade after decade, it’s not the crazy true believers. Or at least it’s not the obvious true believers. There are a lot of those. Holmes was a true believer, and a crazy one, but seems interesting because she was a blonde autistic woman in a world of men and because the blood testing thing was more salacious / bloody / fun than the usual scam. Like Trump’s inner life isn’t very interesting. He believes he’s the best and always has had supreme confidence in himself, psychologizing him isn’t appealing - even libs don’t really do it more than halfheartedly, they just call him an evil narcissist.
I actually think the public is most fascinated by the very small minority of grifters for whom doubts exist about the extent to which they believed in their own innate luck. Examples that come to mind are Anna Delvey and L Ron Hubbard. Delvey never believed in her grift, she just thought everybody else was stupid and deserved to pay for her. Hubbard literally wrote his own science fiction and seemed to be relatively self aware, those who have studied Scientology’s history have often argued he never really did believe the way that his successors did. Another example? Madoff, who shielded his own children from his scheme.
Absolute self-belief is common. To hold the knowledge that you’re a fraud in your head and still continue takes much more fortitude, and makes for a much more interesting grifter.
2rafa
4d ago
I mean DC has been heavily black since 1800, maybe before, and certainly since reconstruction, so probably never.
2rafa
4d ago
Yes, and that’s the point. I don’t think there’s any likelihood of some highly functional multiethnic Muslim civilization state here, but at same time Brazil-with-low-key-sectarian-warfare is also like even worse than Brazil. Occasionally religious and ethnic violence compounds because nobody has anything in common with anyone else. The Christians loot the central bank, the Sunnis loot the finance ministry etc etc just like in Lebanon.
2rafa
4d ago
I don’t disagree, I’m not saying the action was successful. Clearly the studies that exist on lifetime contribution show huge net losses for third world immigration. But that wasn’t the question when they were imported, or are imported, which was ‘we need cheap care workers’ or ‘we need cheap factory laborers’.
2rafa
4d ago
There are like multiple layers of snobbery here but yes a lot of both plebs and new money classes in places like Indonesia, Pakistan etc worship Gulf Arabs and their customs, dress, purported Islamic-ness.
2rafa
4d ago
Almost nobody who works in retirement homes, wipes old peoples asses etc is a born American citizen. If you’ve ever had elderly relatives in these places you’d know this. The reason we can’t have an American kafala system that sends the workers home after they’ve done 5 or 10 years is the fault of progressives, and birthright citizenship of course for their children. But it’s all connected. Migrants are let in for broadly economic reasons (not in every case, eg Syrians and Somalis in Sweden, but Pakistanis in England, Turks in Germany’s and most Central Americans in the US arrived to fill labor market needs) and allowed to settle for ideological ones. In the 80s, Germany tried to mass deport the Turks but concluded it would risk social unrest and was too expensive, so eventually they just gave them citizenship.
Part of it is that audiences consider female characters with major flaws to be unsympathetic. For example, there are many widely liked male main characters who cheat on their loving wives (Don Draper etc). This isn’t necessarily portrayed positively, but it doesn’t detract from their masculine appeal really.
How many female protagonists regularly cheat on their loving husbands? It’s almost unheard of. When it happens, they’re universally decried by men and women as a total bitch unless EXTREME extenuating factors apply (like the husband is very abusive or disappears for 20 years).
More options
Context Copy link