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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3254 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 1, 2023

Happy New Year!

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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The worm has turned and now lots of things are magenta instead

There's an interesting contrast to be made between the Call of Duty era where games went for 'gritty realism' and the, call it the Fortnite era where literally nothing needs to be taken seriously, and real life personalities and pre-existing characters are rendered as a perfected, cartoonish versions of themselves.

I won't even say one is better than the other, but Fortnite definitely represents the sort of unrelenting positivity, the hiding of ugliness, the avoidance of negative emotional valence that I'm talking about.

To my mind, most of the big trends in popular music in the last ten years have prominently featured a conscious embrace of ugliness and poor taste

On the other hand, I'd point at bands like Imagine Dragons and a lot of imitators that produce peppy and/or 'epic' sounding songs with aggressively positive/affirming lyrics that... also don't mean anything. They want to induce some positive emotional valence but without having any real 'message.' Other than a vague "YOU GOT THIS! YOU ARE UNSTOPPABLE, YOU CAN ACHIEVE ANYTHING YOU WANT" sort of statement. And these songs become MASSIVE HITS.

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