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TheDag  Per Aspera ad Astra  2yr ago (text post)   2216 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 11, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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If you like your space battleships with gimballing engines, glowing radiators, and invisible lasers, check this guy's stuff out

Sadly he's only commissioned a few clips so far, but I'd watch a whole series in that style.

/images/16686457249355423.webp

Who are your campfire members? That is to say, who are the top four people you’d want spend one night with around a campfire? I separate it into two groups, those living and dead. I exclude relatives, so it’s generally famous people who I’ve never met or known in person. Judge your people on your own merit.

Living

  1. Larry David

  2. Stephen King

  3. Sam Harris

  4. I can’t choose a fourth, Barack Obama , Eminem, and Sebastian Maniscalco are three who come to mind.

Dead:

  1. Theodore Roosevelt

  2. Abraham Lincoln

  3. David Foster Wallace

  4. Anthony Bourdain

Jesus, Nietzsche, John von Neumann, Aristotle. Maybe replace one with a historical Bulgarian figure, Stefan Stambolov or Ivan Asen II.

Living - Musk, Thiel, Jacek Dukaj, my high school crush.

Living (I wonder how many would no longer belong to this category by dawn):

  • Vladimir Putin

  • Vladimir Zelensky

  • Joe Biden

  • Xi Jingping

Dead:

  • Muhammad

  • Otto von Bismarck

  • Vladimir Lenin

  • Park Chung-hee

If I were single the living list would've looked completely different

No thought has been put into would the guests like each other.

Dead:

  • John Von Neumann - Sharpest mind ever if the anecdotes of his peers are anything to go by. Something you would want to see in the flesh. I would love to hear what he has to say about the advances in modern CS and ML.

  • Alexander the Great/Ghenghis Khan - Arguably best strategists of all time, their throwaway intuition would have been more valuable than libraries and books. Similarly what they think about modern armies and how they would run things differently had they had what we have now.

  • Jesus/Mohammed - Writers/Characters of some of the most effective meta-stories of all time.

  • Dostoyevsky - Probably the most insightful person to have ever lived.

I think game sees game regardless of what the game is, so these 4 men would have enjoyed my company.

Alive:

  • John Carmack

  • Warren Buffet

  • Jordan Peterson - Very underrrated as a thinker because of the political climate.

  • Vladimir Putin

Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Gwern and anybody else they'd be willing to split with. I hope we do shrooms lol

Come on man, you can choose anyone who ever lived and you choose 3 people from a niche internet forum.

Well, most historical characters don't speak English in the first place ;)

Although a campfire with some moldy corpses for company would be a memorable time too, albeit for entirely the wrong reasons haha

That's a lame excuse. In this hypothetical world we can resurrect the dead but universal translators don't exist?

But you do you I suppose. I don't know if your initial post was a joke or not but I am still somewhat shook that if answered seriously anyone would choose 3 niche internet bloggers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/books/review/charlie-kaufman-by-the-book-interview.html

"You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, living or dead, would you invite?

I’ve always loved this exercise, the imaginary dinner party! What fun! I see Oscar Wilde there, of course, Voltaire, Carol Saroyan Saroyan Matthau (wife of William Saroyan, William Saroyan, and Walter Matthau, and a writer in her own right), Hitler (not witty but quite a “get”), Edie Sitwell, Molière, Oscar Wilde (so witty I thought why not double him and place him on each end of the table so everyone could enjoy his witticisms?), Aristophanes, and Sir Kenneth Dover (to translate Aristophanes’ jokes for the other guests). That’s more than three, but one must assume there will be cancellations. Oh, and Jesus."

I like it. I’m judging my guests mostly on their ability to make me laugh and tell wild stories.

Is a campfire considered a place where people open up to each other? Here in Russia it's "who are the two people you'd want to drink with?".

Drinking would certainly occur at the campfire.

Socrates, Jesus Christ, Siddhartha Guatama, Sargon of Akkad.

Living people are boring.

Only now did I find this week's thread, and at 666 thread views (no screencap, sorry).

This is probably a long shot but about a decade ago I came across some kind of paper that I failed to find it again, which described the cochlea as a constant time, linear space (frquency domain) discrete fourier transform device, and contrasted it with the Fast Fourier Transform. It also talked about how this inspired a design for an electronic spectrum analyser. The device had the same spiral layout as a cochlea but worked at radio frequencies. I don't recall anything else about besides it probably being a PDF and probably being lecture notes, but I found it fascinating and if it rings a bell to anyone here I would really appreciate a link. I would also be interested in any similar works for other organs too. Thanks

A lens does a Fourier conversion: it maps directions (of the incoming rays) into locations (on the focal plane), summing stuff up.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/596774/why-can-a-lens-be-described-by-a-fourier-transform I guess.

That does look like what the presentation I had in mind was talking about. Thank you very much!

Watched the first three episodes of house of the dragon. Does it get any better? So far the whole thing was incredibly boring and badly written.

I stopped watching for the same reason but a friendly Finnish fascist said it gets better afterward and lo he was right.

Gets better though not to the level of early episodes of GoT.

Maybe middle seasons of GoT, after it ran out of steam but before it became a trainwreck. Only the black valyrians and dragonflight physics are noteworthily jarring, and I kinda got used to the blackies. Makes no sense from book lore perspective, though one could imagine a country made up of non-interbreeding peoples, like e.g. India, I guess.

The black Valyrians just look weird but whatever. They found a decent lore excuse for them I think. I will watch a couple more episodes trusting your Finnish fascist friend I guess. So far the entire thing has been super shallow repetitions of the duality between royal duties and personal freedoms, in endless conversations between same characters. The story is just devoid of deep political intrigue that made game of thrones great and runs like a soap opera.

Not really a friend - I follow him & his wife* on twitter. They're some sort of far-right media / political types and I use translator to peer in what's going on in Finland sometimes.

Heh. Apparently he's a Moroccan born Finnish anti-immigration activist, which is quite ironic. Thought he looked a too dark for a Finn., which I'm guessing implies he's half French or more likely Arab and once again drives home the uncanny inclusivity of the racist club. (the famous quip included as jpeg).

/images/16685481822310638.webp

*(a psychotic valkyrie, according to their version of rationalwiki)

Well, for you I would say no.

I thought the entire thing was great and as good as the first few seasons of GoT.

What did you like so much about it?

Not to be a knob about it, but everything.

I'm just not a critic when it comes to my entertainment, and I usually don't have a tolerance for people who are too critical of things. Likewise, I understand completely when someone says they didn't like something.

I thought it was incredibly entertaining, well written, had multiple fantastic characters, had some dope ass battle scenes, etc. I just thought it was cool, and fun, and yea it was mostly a court drama about a family.

I'm a freedom of speech maximalist and I'm having a ton of fun watching the pro-censorship established media melting down about Elon Musk buying Twitter. I joined Twitter in 2007 and it's finally fun again. Trolling, memes, comebacks, I love it.

I'm glad people are questioning what "freedom of speech" actually means in this new computational era.

I was looking forward to seeing twitter explode because I hate what that site does to society and people in general regardless of politics but I've been disappointed by how weak the pushback has been. Was hoping for a more spectacular meltdown than the usual weeping and gnashing of teeth from blue checks. How many people of any note actually left?

Yeah!

I used to hate twitter because of how its Algorithm was a constant pressure to turn my brain into mush, but now I actually have hope that it will evolve into something better, a little closer to the better boards on 4chan. And I'm glad that chaotic neutral Elon came around and gave the overton window a solid fucking kick.

Dr. Seuss' shorty story The Sneetches, published 1953.

Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches had bellies with stars.

The Plain-Belly Sneetches had none upon thars.

Those stars weren’t so big. They were really so small.

You might think such a thing wouldn’t matter at all.

But, because they had stars, all the Star-Belly Sneetches

Would brag, “We’re the best kind of Sneetch on the beaches.”

With their snoots in the air, they would sniff and they’d snort

“We’ll have nothing to do with the Plain-Belly sort!”

And, whenever they met some, when they were out walking,

They’d hike right on past them without even talking.

When the Star-Belly children went out to play ball,

Could a Plain Belly get in the game? Not at all.

You only could play if your bellies had stars

And the Plain-Belly children had none upon thars.

When the Star Belly Sneetches had frankfurter roasts

Or picnics or parties or marshmallow toasts,

They never invited the Plain-Belly Sneetches

They left them out cold, in the dark of the beaches.

They kept them away. Never let them come near.

And that’s how they treated them year after year.

Then ONE day, it seems while the Plain-Belly Sneetches

Were moping and doping alone on the beaches,

Just sitting there wishing their bellies had stars,

A stranger zipped up in the strangest of cars!

“My friends”, he announced in a voice clear and clean,

“My name is Sylvester McMonkey McBean.

And I’ve heard of Your troubles. I’ve heard you’re unhappy.

But I can fix that, I’m the Fix-It-Up Chappie.

I’ve come here to help you.

I have what you need.

And my prices are low. And I work with great speed.

And my work is one hundred per cent guaranteed!”

Then, quickly, Sylvester McMonkey McBean

Put together a very peculiar machine.

And he said, “You want stars like a Star-Belly Sneetch?

My friends, you can have them for three dollars each!”

“Just pay me your money and hop right aboard!”

So they clambered inside. Then the big machine roared.

And it klonked. And it bonked. And it jerked. And it berked.

And it bopped them about. But the thing really worked!

When the Plain-Belly Sneetches popped out, they had stars!

They actually did. They had stars upon thars!

Then they yelled at the ones who had stars at the start,

“We’re still the best Sneetches and they are the worst.

But now, how in the world will we know”, they all frowned,

“If which kind is what, or the other way round?”

Then up came McBean with a very sly wink.

And he said, “Things are not quite as bad as you think.

So you don’t know who’s who. That is perfectly true.

But come with me, friends. Do you know what I’ll do?

I’ll make you, again, the best Sneetches on the beaches.

And all it will cost you is ten dollars eaches.”

“Belly stars are no longer in style”, said McBean.

“What you need is a trip through my Star-Off Machine.

This wondrous contraption will take OFF your stars

so you won’t look like Sneetches that have them on thars.”

And that handy machine working very precisely

Removed all the stars from their tummies quite nicely.

Then, with snoots in the air, they paraded about.

And they opened their beaks and they let out a shout,

“We know who is who! Now there Isn’t a doubt.

The best kind of Sneetches are Sneetches without!”

Then, of course, those with stars got all frightfully mad.

To be wearing a star was frightfully bad.

Then, of course, old Sylvester McMonkey McBean

invited THEM into his Star-Off Machine.

Then, of course from THEN on, as you probably guess,

Things really got into a horrible mess.

All the rest of that day, on those wild screaming beaches,

The Fix-It-Up Chappie kept fixing up Sneetches.

Off again! On again! In again! Out again!

Through the machines they raced round and about again,

Changing their stars every minute or two. They kept paying money.

They kept running through until the Plain nor the Star-Bellies knew

Whether this one was that one or that one was this one. Or which one

Was what one or what one was who.

Then, when every last cent of their money was spent,

The Fix-It-Up Chappie packed up. And he went.

And he laughed as he drove In his car up the beach,

“They never will learn. No. You can’t Teach a Sneetch!”

But McBean was quite wrong. I’m quite happy to say.

That the Sneetches got really quite smart on that day.

The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches.

And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.

That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars and whether

They had one, or not, upon thars.

INTRODUCTING: you must be able to throw a baseball at least 50 mph in order to work for the government.

Seriously, this would change everything. Can anyone come up with a rule superior to that in simplicity and efficiency in blocking bad hires?

Problem is government jobs suck. Which is why people who aren’t the brightest or most motivated do them.

If you institute this rule nobody will work for the government.

Why? Most normal healthy native born American men (and Dominicans, Japanese, Cubans) can throw a baseball 50 already.

Have you ever worked with local government? Half of it is 60-80 year old ladies who've been there for 20 years.

Exactly. Requiring basic physical fitness would prevent senile employees from hanging on forever. It would encourage people to treat government service as a phase in their life rather than a lifetime gig.

You must be able to squat (barbell, set of five, with good form) the weight of your salary in single dollar bills.

One bill weighs one gram, so not enough nerds will work for NASA when they can get bigger salaries without squatting them elsewhere.

I can squat 30kg 15 times, so 5x50 is possible. Squatting 100kg would require intensive training.

Yes. Only hire people who are very good at playing EVE online.

Do you think a 70 year old could throw a baseball 50mph? Do we want to block the majority of those 70 and older from working for the government?

I think that's half the point.

Sounds good to me

R is for red

O is for orange

Y is for yellow

And G is for green

B is for blue

I for indigo

And V is for violet

And that spells Roy G. Biv

Roy G. Biv is a colourful man.

You'll never see Roy G. Biv.

(Move from reddit wasn't all bad; HTML is fun.)

On an unrelated I am working on a problem related to this. Let be G(N,x) be the fraction of integers up to N, for which the sum-of-divisors function is smaller than x*N, x a real number greater than 0.1 Numerical experiments have convinced me that the limit as N goes to infinity exists, which I will denote simply as G(x). It follows Grönwall's theorem that for finite x, G(x) never equalls one. G(x) can be thought of as a CDF with support the positive reals. For 0<x<1 G(x) appears, again from brute force calculation N=10^7, to be a linear function .627*x (the coefficient is approximate). This graph depicts G(10^7,x) in blue and .627*x in red, showing that for 0<x<1, they appear to overlap.

1: More formally, using the notation from the link:

G(x)=lim_{N->inf} (1/N)*#{1<=n<=N|σ1(n)<=x*N}

Edit: TIL that in the post preview "border" and "font-size" attributes are displayed, but actual posted version stripts them out.

HTML is fun.

I agree, but you used primarily CSS, not HTML.

Aaaaaaaaaa! I fucking did it!

Last week I mentioned there was this really pernicious issue on the NuXT I ordered. If the VGA card boots in monochrome mode, it appears that the system fails to boot. You'll see a cursor zipping across the screen, but no text. Then the XT-IDE bios prints it's messages, and then seemingly nothing. Except it's not nothing. At the bottom of all the empty space, the cursor sits in the 5th position at the bottom of the screen, blinking. If you type, you can see the blinking cursor move, but no characters appear.

A lot of forum post describe this behavior as failing to boot. But I wagered the system had booted, and was responsive. But something was corrupted in how it output to the display. My first question was, why the XT-IDE bios, and nothing else? Looked through the source code for that project, which was quite labyrinthine let me tell you. Layers upon layers upon layers of defines obfuscating what the actual code doing anything is. Eventually I find, it's not using any BIOS functions to print to the screen. It's reading the location it should print to from the BIOS Data Area, and just directly printing characters there. So I know that works.

The 8088 BIOS by Sergey Kislev is also open source. And looking through it's printing functions, it mostly uses Int 0x10, Function 0x0e, teletype output. So why might it not be working? I wrote a utility to dump the BIOS Data Area, and ran it in a good state versus a bad state and compared the results. Unfortunately, a serious case of survivorship bias confounded these efforts, more on that later.

I found some utilities that could kick the system back into a good state. But looking over it's source code, nothing obviously seemed to directly address the problem. The values it changed in the BIOS Data Area did not look misconfigured in the good state versus the bad state. And yet it still worked. So another dead end. Something in the VGA BIOS functions it called was rescuing it from the bad state. Which means venturing into the VGA BIOS.

But first, as aside about the good state versus the bad state. The bad state was the VGA card detecting a monochrome monitor, and initializing the system in Graphics Mode 7, 80x25 Monochrome. The good state was the VGA card detecting a color monitor, and initializing the system in Graphics Mode 3, 80x25 16 color. So we're dealing with different detected capabilities and different graphics modes. I probably should have started off comparing the BDA in Mode 7 working versus Mode 7 not working, but alas, it took me longer to get there. Onto the BIOS.

I wrote a utility to dump the VGA ROM, as well as reinitialize the card by doing a far call on c000:0003, which is apparently the entry point for initializing a VGA card using it's ROM. That worked, and I could re-initialize the card as much as I wanted, and doing this also resulted in a functional state. Even in monochrome mode, which it would randomly boot into. This is a hardware issue, near as I've researched. The Trident 9000i chip, and many old VGA cards, expect a certain pin on the VGA cable to either be grounded or open for a color monitor versus a monochrome monitor. Newer monitors use that pin as a data pin. It just compounds the bug in the 8088 bios where it's borked with a VGA card in monochrome mode.

At this point, I felt like I had little choice but to begin stepping through the disassembled VGA BIOS I had dumped. Found an online disassembler which worked rather well. After several days, I eventually discover it's setting, and then looking at, the equipment list in the BIOS Data Area, 0040:0010. It sets bits 5 and 6 depending on the display properties it detects. In monochrome mode, it gets ORed with 0x30. It then tests that byte against 0x30 every time it interacts with video memory to determine if it should be writing to segment 0xb800 or 0xb000. 0xb000 is only used in monochrome mode 7. Furthermore, zeroing in on the suspicious bits, I can observe them being set to 0b10 or 0b11 when I change to graphics mode 3 or 7 using utilities, assiting the VGA bios in determining it's active segment of memory.

Sure enough, knowing this I double check the dumps of the BIOS Data area in the good state versus the bad state, and realize the equipment bytes are misconfigured. Bits 5 and 6 are cleared in both, when they should both be set to 0b11 monochrome mode. I came to find out even in the functional color mode, it's misconfigured, and should be 0b10. It's only by good fortune that things worked at all with that particular VGA bios, since the it was only checking for 0b11 (at least that I saw), and then resorting to default behaviors for color mode outside of monochrome mode. If it were ever explicitly checking for 0b10 (80x25 color) or 0b01 (40x25 color), I expect more display functions would be going off the rails. At long last I found my culprit.

Back to the 8088 Bios, after initializing the VGA card, and the card detecting a monochrome monitor, it then wipes those bits believing the VGA BIOS does not need them. The author asserts only cards without a BIOS, CGA or MDA, should be utilizing them. Then it immediately attempts and fails to print the copywrite message to the screen. Which helps a lot in really conclusively isolating the problem, since there is literally only that single instruction clearing bits in the BDA between initializing the VGA card and attempting to print to the screen.

After reading the innards of the VGA ROM, the problem here was plain as day. A single semicolon commenting out the bit clearing instruction fixes the problem. I flashed the BIOS on my system, and the problems completely vanished with no discernable side effects. Then began my trials in getting people to believe me.

I haven't received a response on github, by on vogons the reaction has been hostile. People "explaining" to me that everyone knows old VGA cards randomly boot into monochrome mode. Yeah, I gathered that, but that doesn't explain why the 8088 BIOS fails to print to the screen when monochrome mode happens! One guy went hard that the relevant equipment bits must be set to 00, the "Pink Shirt Book" says so. I go read the relevant sections, and it doesn't say so. He goes onto insist that the initial video mode bits in the equipment list should never change like I observe, the "Pink Shirt Book" say so. The book actually says software can and will change it all the time. Still, books aside, what do other systems do?

I tested 3 other systems, a Pentium 233 with a Riva 128, a K6-2 with a Geforce 2 MX, and a Pentium III with a Geforce 2 GTS. All of them initialized the video mode bits to 0b10 for 80x25 Color Mode, not 0b00 for EGA+. And all of them changed those bits to 0b11 for 80x25 Monochrome mode when I switched it to Mode 7. I also perused the source code for another open source IBM PC/XT BIOS, GLaBIOS, and while I haven't flashed a system with it to test experientially, the code appears to initialize the VGA ROM, and then leave the initial video mode bits completely alone. In fact, it even tests if they are 0b00, and considers that an error!

I guess it's entirely possible I'm still wrong somehow. But I increasingly doubt it.

Congrats, man! Sounds like some solid troubleshooting work, I'm glad you were able to get it!

I recently watched Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and can concur with the other reports herein(I'm sure there were, if my memory's not playing tricks on me) that it's excellent and worth watching.

Strong recommend to everyone apart from

-people suffering from epilepsy due to flashing lights. I think there's even a warning.

-people who are likely to suffer unduly from a significant emotional event. (if you're depressed or always kinda fragile)

-people who are notably squeamish. The show really doesn't pull its punches when it comes to violence. It's not that frequent but it's there and it is very memorable.

The show's mostly a fairly straightforward tragedy/romance story set in a cyberpunk brazilified California which doesn't have as many homeless schizos as the real one but South African crime levels and also apparently in 2077 degens now use some cyber-fleshlights in public and cops don't care if it's not in a rich area.

The story is solid, the characters relatable, the environmental design & aesthetics excellent. The outcome is basically preordained from the start due to hubris

and setting. The ending is the subject of many memes which are really kinda true. I've a hard time imagining a person who could finish it and not shed at least a solitary tear.

It's also notable how on twitter people liked it and there is no seeming political category that doesn't have people liking it. If something is beloved both by trans they/them socialists and e.g. hard right Pinochet appreciators, it is kind of special.

EDIT:

Finally found someone who hates it. My dad refused to watch more than three episodes. Said something along the lines "it's too violent, the animation is bad and cyberpunk is cringe BS". I suspect it's partly bc he's notably squeamish about violence, and partly bc he's a pussy -he loses his nerve very easily in even mildly dramatic situations.

Mind you, he watches weird anime all the time and has watched entire series of such BS as e.g. Lucifer.

I watched it today without any prior context of the Cyberpunk games and yeah, it's a decent show.

The characters and visual aesthetics are clearly the strong point here for me - David as a main character is incredibly likeable and it's very hard not to root for him, which is a task that most modern writers seem to completely fail at. The plot is quite basic and exists almost solely to serve the world and characters, but it does that job well. It benefits from being fairly short and fast-paced for a TV show too. I do feel the soundtrack didn't fit well with the cyberpunk aesthetic, but that might just be my personal preference in music bleeding through.

I didn't shed tears at the end, maybe because I saw it coming a mile away considering all the foreshadowing beforehand, and/or maybe because it simply takes a lot to get an emotional reaction out of me compared to other people. I don't feel like this show was particularly gritty or dark either, I think that despite the fact that the show is portraying a dystopia they keep a streak of hope a mile wide going through it (though this might be because I'm extremely inured to bleakness in my entertainment).

Anyway, it was fun and a good way to spend my weekend.

Yeah. It was surprisingly decent. Maybe even good, but maybe I'm just impressionable.

I've a hard time imagining a person who could finish it and not shed at least a solitary tear.

I did not shed a tear because the ending is reminiscent of a famous anime which I'm not going to spoil. But the whole thing isn't bad.

Huh.

Looking back on it, this is the most waterworks I've done in the last 20 years with the exception of a couple days of a depressive episode.

I've cried a bit reading some books, a small bit when I figured grandpa is going to die soon, sometimes cried reading non-fiction (reading about military pilots flying off onto doomed missions,etc). I did cry when watching Atonement in cinema. Shed a few tears in True Detective seasons 2 too, I think.

Most of it now is just me trying to imagine how many times do I have to listen to “I Really Want to Stay At Your House” before it stops tearing me up at least a bit. So far I'm at number 12. and it's still there.

EDIT: number 22 cca. Still keeps going on, but not on every listening.

Crazy how the music associated with a strong emotion keeps bringing said emotion, or at least tears again and again. I've a rather hard time noticing other emotions than joy, tenderness, rage and excitement. I'm very much the 'feel nothing much but cry' type. No sobbing though, can't recall that happening last 25 years.

It's also notable how on twitter people liked it and there is no seeming political category that doesn't have people liking it. If something is beloved both by trans they/them socialists and e.g. hard right Pinochet appreciators, it is kind of special.

I think Cyberpunk is in kind of an ideal position to do this, actually. The sci-fi body modification technology allows for things like intersex characters, huge bruiser-brawler women, and so on without it seeming shoehorned in. The leftist may feel that it's vaguely empowering, the rightist that it's part of the dystopia, but neither feels like it doesn't belong or add to the story and setting.

Likewise the economic realities of Night City could be taken as an indictment of capitalism run amuck - and even have revolutionary figures like Johnny Silverhand fighting against the system - it also never really posits the Glorious Comrades' Revolution as a viable alternative, since Resistance Is Futile anyways and that's the point. Also, the sort of capitalism they depict is so far out there that I don't think rightists really identify with it anyways, however bullish they might be on markets. It's clearly the bad aspects of capitalism to the Nth degree, no-one's gonna argue it's a good look.

I have noticed a trend, though, for things that would trigger culture war in a Western show just...don't when it's Japanese. Popular recent examples - Jujutsu Kaisen is a progressive-trending show, and Demon Slayer is a quite conservative show, and I literally think that no one in America even notices. A combination of the exotic settings and stories, and of Japanese bromides not being ours, perhaps? Certainly the culture that Demon Slayer is conservative of is quite different from the Anglosphere.

Might write more about that later, I've had a proto-essay banging around in my head about it hah.

Right-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that view certain social orders and hierarchies as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable,[1][2][3] typically supporting this position on the basis of natural law, economics, authority, property or tradition.[4][5]: 693, 721 [6][7][8][9][10] Hierarchy and inequality may be seen as natural results of traditional social differences[11][12] or competition in market economies.[13][14][15]

Yeah, us RW doesn't have to stick to neolithic biology, I think.

Personally I'm fairly RW in that I believe hierarchies are inevitable, inequality unavoidable, competition indispensable and important and traditions ignored at one's peril, however, it's clear there's simply no winning in a future if you stick to traditional biology and eschew the easy kind of eugenics to boot. It's just losing like a noble idiot.

Letting psychologically aberrant women get biomods so they are physically competitive with fighting men doesn't strike me as dystopic if artificial wombs mean other women are less burdened by childbearing which would mean they'd probably do it slightly more so you don't have to exert psychotic iron age Greek levels of control over the population's means of reproduction.

But maybe there's a personal bias. I have a marked preference for man sized women. Found Dorio the most attractive female character.

Having a partner that's not much smaller than I am strikes me as being just right. Sad it didn't work out with one girl I met who was about my size, actually even slightly taller than me.

How would you rate it relative to Arcane?

Edit: 3 episodes in. Excellent so far except the very jarring soundtrack.

Personally, I found myself more drawn in to Arcane. That may well be because I vibe a lot with the younger-sibling and parenthood dynamics in that show (my family is great, but since I care for them it lets me really imagine what I would feel if they weren't ok I guess), and really like the way it hems to yet plays with classic dramatic structure. Also, the wonderful facial animation really binds you to the characters. Top-notch voice acting doesn't hurt.

That said, I was blown away by Edgerunners as well, and my sister's boyfriend is flipped relative to me - really liked Arcane, LOVED Edgerunners. In spite of both of them both being tragedies set in dystopias, they have very different vibes. Edgerunners is starker, grittier. It has less character warmth, more intrigue, a harsher world. It is more graphic, and plays less on...adolescent idealism? It feels less like warm-hearted characters learning the harsh realities of the world, more like jaded characters trying to find some hope in a God-forsaken world again.

Edgerunners animation is top-notch and unique aesthetically, but I think lacks the masterpiece-level visuals and composition of Arcane.

They are both quite lovely. I prefer Arcane personally, but def not mad at anyone who prefers Edgerunners.

Unlike most anime I'd watch in the English dub if you decide to see it; especially if you've played the Cyberpunk game. It's quite solid voice work, and uses a lot of slang and vernacular and accents that are missing in the subs, it really helps bring the city alive.

I feel like anime made in multiple languages isn't worth watching in Japanese.

The dubs and translations are usually flawless - e.g. talking about say,Jin Rô or Edgerunners.

It might well be the case that the dubbing is on par with regular American VA, it's just that the Japanese VA industry is more robust and better developed and consequently their VA is much better in general.

Dubs, much like CGI, used to be HORRIBLE in anime, haha. So we fans still need to reassure each other occasionally if a show has them.

But these weren't dubs made by the creators of the anime, but by importers.

That's the crucial difference. E.g. Edgerunners is excellently dubbed into English. Czech dub seems kinda shoddy, probably done by Netflix. Not sure how good Italian one is, I could ask. I started watching it with my dad who watches all anime in Italian.

Haven't seen it, so can't say. I like it more than Gits: SAC. Maybe on par with 2nd Gig except Cyberpunk has less fluff and is artistically better.

Gits was pretty well drawn but they had some odd aesthetic choices and the visual quality was lower.

Plus a bunch of meh fluff episodes. Nothing like that here. The visuals are just better.

Anyone playing the new God of war?

I've heard some conflicting things, that the dialogue writing has taken a nose dive for instance, but I'm having a hard time telling if there are genuine gripes that are getting drowned out by astroturfing/fans or if it's butt hurt culture warriors throwing a fit.

I could of course check out some streams but k would prefer not to spoil myself if I'm going to play it.

Never played any of those.

Found an interesting thread on twitter how the newest game was hit by the changing attitude to masculinity where having a unapologetically masculine killer as a protagonist isn't acceptable anymore so they mellowed him out and gave him a beer gut.

It also mentioned Last of Us, another game I never played which apparently features a post-catastrophic survival situation of an adult dude and an unrelated(!) teenage girl and they don't end up fucking which makes less sense as using polystyrene for ballast.

Nothing makes women more likely to glom onto a man than him successfully protecting her from actual danger. That they'd not end up fucking seems extremely unlikely.

Can't repost the thread it, for some reason I've got a search ban from oct 25 so..

I could of course check out some streams but k would prefer not to spoil myself if I'm going to play it.

Pirate it and buy it if it's good ?

I'd ask if you've played or even seen the other God of War games, but you said it yourself you didn't.

Kratos "mellowing out" wasn't suddenly tacked on in GoW 2018. Arguably his "unapologetic masculine killering" was his undoing in all the rest of the series, consistently. If you ask me GoW 2018 Kratos has become wiser, not "mellowed". Also, the beer gut is Thor and I am convinced that it's mythologically accurate.

Man, this game has .. interesting writers.

Can present day baizuo not insert their ideas everywhere ?

/images/16685281751276817.webp

Why not? Don't you insert your ideas anywhere you think you can get away with it?

If I were making a game about the middle ages I'd try to not insert modern BS there. It's a challenge though. Even people who tried to do right, eg. Warhorse with KCD could not resist including something suspiciously seeming like a dash of late millenium nationalism into a 15th century game. Or failed to realize it wasn't a thing back then, possibly.

Who is to say that a mythical god of knowledge or whoever Mimir is can't have ideas deviating from the norm? Or anyone, really. What has been written down and passed down as the zeitgeist of that era would have to be much more narrow than the real range of held beliefs.

I should have stopped writing my reply after finding I've a twitter search ban and can't search through my own activity, as the thread I mentioned it had more info than I remembered and seemed topical to your query.

Nothing makes women more likely to glom onto a man than him successfully protecting her from actual danger. That they'd not end up fucking seems extremely unlikely.

That girl is like a third of his age, underage, and a daughter figure to him. It would be wildly inappropriate for them to bang, and it's totally plausible that the male character would refuse even if she offered herself to him.

In a post-apocalyptic environment where you're unsure if you'll live through the month 'appropriate' takes the Sam Fried-Bankman route and flees for the Bahamas.

Not really, no. People still have morals about things even if they are in pure survival mode.

Uhh.. maybe. Sometimes. But having sex with willing teenagers you haven't brainwashed isn't particularly heinous and I have very serious doubt about 'morals' in survival mode.

I played some 'survival' games and let me tell you that shit is very much Game of Thrones level of pragmatic immorality.

Few people reject a strong ally even if they knew he was cheating, you just took care not to be in the blast radius when mods wiped them.

(Then you'd donate them resources so they could start up again and become strong once more)

Really the only thing that was unforgivable is a reputation for treachery, and there were pitiful outcast groups whom everyone wanted to murder on sight.

Apart from that you don't care if they're eating babies as long as they're not your babies.

If the choice comes between being allied to baby-eaters and extinction, people always pick the latter one because we're desecended from a long line of survivors and you can tell yourself you can settle accounts with the loathsome but useful baby-eaters later anyway. Some day.

A species can tank a few gene-defectors. And they can pass on some interesting memes that have surprising effects on cooperation. Consider, for example, that one guy who died 2 thousand years ago and is known for that.

The girl carries the zombie fungus. There’s a second major reason that’d spoil the story. It is more than adequately justified.

like an implant, or she's a typhoid mary or what.

She’s infected but uniquely nearly asymptomatic.

But doesn't spread it?

Yep. It’s actually well written, as zombie stories go. Probably worth playing if you have the right console.

I've never owned a console and never will. I also do not like 3rd person games, especially if you can't even design the character whose back you're going to be looking at the whole bloody game.

I believe you're confusing the protagonist for the antagonist.

Going back through old CW threads I realize that I missed a lot of interesting stuff! I might start going back and doing a survey like repost of big topics.

Also I have to say it seems the site move is going really well. I saw a bit of negativity in the beginning but I’m glad to say we seem to have reached a nice equilibrium.

What is this place?

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