domain:ymeskhout.substack.com?page=0
urquan
18m ago
I think it was probably "we have graphics so good we can have this incredibly fine detail", and then when that wasn't actually true and it was too prominent they were woke enough that nobody was willing to point that out.
Unironically, I think this is the problem in general with the appearance of women in video games.
It doesn't take much processing power or artistic talent to render a beautiful, flawless lady. Soft skin, no blemishes, no rough spots, all of that means very simple appearance to render, and very easily reproducible. We know that people are capable of seeing humans even in very low-quality representations, otherwise cartoons would not be possible.
As processing power grew, developers wanted desperately to add detail, be more realistic, depict "people as they really are." Which is a good goal!
But depicting people realistically, blemishes and all, requires a lot of extremely fine detail that costs a lot in terms of processing power and artist time. So when developers started to push the envelope faster and cheaper than technology really could allow, what they ended up with is uncanny-valley monstrosities that don't even look like people at all!
But by the point people realized that, there were already feminist thinkpieces about representation in media and developers were too afraid to pull back from their realism uber alles goal, so we end up with ever-so-slightly less uncanny realism every year. IMO, the more recent Steven-Universe-style trend of depicting intentionally homely looking women came later. And you notice that the character here looks, at least in the still, pretty good, for what they were going for; she's less uncanny and more intentionally obese.
But of course, when developers care, and put real effort and time into their work, they can end up with both beautiful and homely characters that are effectively rendered, though you might notice that the older woman looks significantly closer to the uncanny valley even aside from the fact that she's designed as an elderly and sun-damaged peasant woman.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
19m ago
My predictions have been VERY SPECIFIC. And the things I write are true, full stop.
That has yet to be the case, ever.
The things you write are what you want and hope will happen. Whether you really believe they will happen or are just trying to manifest them into being, I'm genuinely unsure.
Bleep
19m ago
The Matt Gaetz Story: Blackmail Operation, Distraction Attempt, or A Bunch of Convenient Coincidences involving a Naughty Congressman?
Let's go over some of the people involved:
- Joel Greenberg: Tax Collector of Seminole County, naughty boy
- Matt Gaetz: Sitting US Congressmen for the 1st District in Florida, bee-hive poker and boat rocker
- David McGee: Former Federal Prosecutor for Northern District of Florida, now works in Big Law
- Bob Levinson: Retired FBI Agent and CIA contractor who disappears in 2007 and becomes an Iranian hostage
- Don Gaetz: Matt Gaetz father, Florida politician, sold his company 20 years ago for a half-billion dollars
- Stephen Alford: Felon, client of David McGee
- Bob Kent: Former Air Force Intelligence Officer and cold-case Hostage Finder
Let's start somewhere in Florida with an ascendant failson of a wealthy family named Joel Greenberg. He gets elected as Tax Collector of Seminole County in 2016. He quickly becomes a social center for well-to-dos in central Florida. He then engages in an almost comical level of naughty behavior.
Well, it doesn't take long for authorities in FL and the federal government to take an interest in our new hotshot Tax Collector. Rumors are awash in Seminole County of the sort of behavior their first term public servant is up to, so a middle school teacher decides to challenge Mr. Greenburg in the upcoming Republican primary by the name of Brian Beute. Now, Greenberg couldn't have this interloper ruining his fun, so he set out to ruin his reputation by crafting ever escalating smears which he released on social media, e.g., pretending to be former students posting in comments on Facebook. This eventually escalated to Greenberg writing handwritten letters sent to Beute's place of employment accusing him of sexually assaulting his students. Well, those letters were turned over to the local sheriff who found both Greenberg's fingerprints and DNA on the letters and he was arrested and charged by the federal DOJ with stalking. During his arrest, the DOJ seized his cell phone and computers and discovered the mountain of naughty behavior he had been up to, the worst of which was Greenberg paying tens of thousands of dollars to at least one underage girl, 17 at the time, to have sex with him and others, including paying for their travel, which is also known as sex trafficking. As part of this scheme, Greenburg was issuing fraudulent real Florida IDs to at least one woman he was paying for sex off a sugar daddy website.
And that's where Matt Gaetz comes into the story. Matt Gates and Joel Greenberg had become friends, perhaps even good friends, years before in around 2017 after Greenberg started his term as Tax Collector for Seminole County. During his prosecution around June 2020, Greenberg or his lawyer, approached the Bill Barr DOJ claiming he can provide evidence a sitting Congressmen had engaged in sex acts with a minor. The Barr DOJ then opens a secret investigation into Matt Gaetz which remains secret for months and isn't known in public until it is leaked to the NYT in March 2021. Matt Gaetz then immediately goes onto Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News that night to respond to the leak and it's a gem for those who would like to watch. Some may remember this bizarre story being told by a sitting US Congressmen about his father being blackmailed for $25,000,000 to help free an American hostage in Iran. Many wrote this off as nuts and attacked Gaetz as crazy and yet years later the story has proved to be true. And in that bizarre story, Gaetz doesn't hesitate to name the person who tried to extort his father: David McGee.
Now who is David McGee? David McGee is a former federal prosecutor who now works at a large firm in Florida. David McGee is involved in this story because a man he had worked with while at the DOJ named Bob Levinson. Bob Levinson was a retired FBI agent who allegedly became a spy for the CIA against Iran. He disappeared in 2007 while in Iran. In the early years of the Obama administration, the FBI was trying to covertly get the retired FBI agent back by selling favors to a Russian Billionaire named Oleg Deripaska. Bob McGee was the liaison to work out a deal with Deripaska who would give $20,000,000 to the FBI to pay for the hostage rescue/ransom and the FBI would get him and his entire family green cards in the US. The point man for the FBI was a guy named Andrew McCabe. This deal is shut down at some point during the Obama administration and Levinson disappears. Nothing is heard about him to the point where documents confirming Levinson's employment by the CIA get leaked to the Associated Press in 2013. And still nothing comes up about Bob Levinson. Obama negotiates the Iran deal and gets 4 American hostages back from Iran as part of the negotiation, but none of them are Bob Levinson. This creates quite the scandal which received a fair amount of press because Levinson is now the longest currently held US hostage in the world. No one hears about Bob Levinson for more years and he's written off as dead. His wife sues Iran in US federal court, gets a $1,200,000,000 judgment, and the US government declares Levinson dead.
And then a former intelligence officer named Bob Kent claims to have received information that Bob Levinson is still alive. That intelligence officer contacts David McGee, the man who had previously attempted to rescue his former colleague through a scheme to sell favors to a Russian billionaire. And so a plan is hatched and now we finally get back to how this involves Matt Gaetz and the Gaetz family.
Stephen Alford, a man with a criminal record and a former client of David McGee, contacts Matt Gaetz's father Don Gaetz on March 16, 2021. The new plan is for Don Gaetz to give David McGee $25,000,000 to finance a rescue mission for Bob Levinson and in exchange unnamed government officials were going to secure a presidential pardon for Matt Gaetz who was going to be charged with sex trafficking because there is currently a secret grand jury investigation into him. Don Gaetz calls Matt Gaetz who tells him to contact the local FBI office which he does. The FBI convinces him to wear a wire and talk to McGee. The details of the investigation had been kept quiet. Luckily for the Gaetz family, Don requested from the FBI a written agreement detailing the purpose of the investigation, the meeting, and the cooperation, and the FBI eventually agrees and Don Gaetz gets this in writing.
And what do you know? By pure coincidence, the NYT runs a story the next day detailing the case against Matt Gaetz. A media frenzy ensues.
There are so many questions. Two months later, Joel Greenburg pleads guilty and is sentenced to 11 years in prison. The DOJ doesn't close its case against Matt Gaetz until late 2022 without ever explaining sufficiently why Gaetz wasn't charged. Matt Gaetz is now permanently tarred and his fellow congressmen are more interested in using this secret investigation to smear Gaetz instead of what could be a honeypot extortion scheme. Stephen Alford pleads guilty and is sentenced to 5 years in prison.
Joel Greenburg recruits women off of sugar daddy websites, gives them fraudulent real Florida driver's licenses listing their age as 18, he then pays them to have sex with men (at least one rising star in US House of Representatives), and then uses this information to negotiate a deal with the DOJ, the DOJ uses that information to open up secret investigations into sitting Congressmen, the corrupt Florida official case is put on hold, and then at least one former DOJ official attempts to blackmail the father of a sitting congressmen with this information from a "secret" investigation, and then when the target gets solid exonerating evidence and the FBI cannot further entangle them in situations which can be portrayed against them, they then likely leak the investigation to the NYT, and the corrupt FL official pleads guilty and gets a near mandatory minimum deal on sentencing.
No one is apparently interested beyond how this could damage Matt Gaetz. David McGee and Bob Kent are uncharged. As far as I know, they weren't even seriously investigated beyond being questioned. Any time Matt Gaetz does anything, details of his case find its way to the media and a media blitz starts anew with a buzz for Matt Gaetz to resign and whatever else. The set-up, the blackmail, and the stitch-up when it fails.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23m ago
THIS IS A TANGENT POST
Humble request:
Something like this reading list for dissident right / post-liberalism. Think about "What would Oswald Spengler be reading today if he were still alive"
Thank you, Mottizens.
(Mods: This probably isn't the best place for this, but I don't know where else it would go? Maybe Sunday thread?)
SkoomaDentist
25m ago
Also true of music
There's been very very little of worthwhile music made since the mid to late 90s outside metal, some niche genres (which don't include so-called "indie", anything related to EDM or what most people call "electronic music") and legacy artists who are now at or beyond retirement age.
This is a hill I'm willing to die on.
WhiningCoil
32m ago
Why does a shorter development cycle mean that game developers in the past were better? I mean yea, I'm not sure any modern game developers could come up with fast inverse square root but I don't really follow the inner workings of modern games so maybe they are doing equally shocking things and I just don't know about it?
And lets lump @HalloweenSnarry in with this too
id Software managed the pace they did at Softdisk because their games were relatively simple, used simple graphics, weren't (yet) trying to push the limits of what was possible with computer games, and knew the hardware they were targeting (in the days before the Pentium and 3D accelerators). That Romero and Carmack were fairly skilled definitely helped, but in hindsight, you might not expect that looking at Rescue Rover or Dangerous Dave.
My point in bringing up id software's Softdisk days, or Westwood's workmanlike porting jobs, or Bullfrog's start writing business software or ports, is not that these were obviously geniuses from the jump, who've godlike talent was plain as day in everything they did. It's to point out you don't get good at anything working on a single project for 10 years. You need to crank out 10-20 workman like finished projects before you make your first Doom, or your first Command & Conquer. I'm not harping on the notion that the programming was better (though I think it was), or that the games had better core gameplay loops (though I think they do). I'm pointing out that these game developers racked up feedback on their products at a much faster pace than game devs today who slave away on a single mediocre arena shooter for Sony for 10 years straight.
daguerrean
35m ago
I predicted a major conflict INVOLVING the US would continue, start, or conclude in that period
A bold prediction to make considering it exhaustively covers literally every possibility
KulakRevolt
41m ago
Israel has seen it's fronts multiply and its geopolitical situation decaying as we speak as it fights mutliple iran backed enemies and has had major blow for blow exchanges with Iran, If Israel makes it to 2030 I'll say that they beat the odds. And I did not predict "as well as" I predicted a major conflict INVOLVING the US would continue, start, or conclude in that period... that could be civil war, that could be cartel war, that could be nuclear exchange with russia, but that could also just be Ukraine or Israel escalating to kill 1 million since the US is already involved in both. At the time of that writing 2 wars involving the US were already active Ukraine and Israel, and BOTH are creeping up through the hundreds of thousands dead right now.
My predictions have been VERY SPECIFIC. And the things I write are true, full stop.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
52m ago
Last April, you said:
Israel cannot survive unless Iran is destroyed now. There’s basically no scenario where the tit for tat won’t escalate into an unending front of infinite Iranian resources in Lebanon, Gaza, and/or the Golan Heights,as well as constant back and forth air and rocket fire.
And Iran can't be destroyed unless the US implements a draft of millions of Americans which would start a civil war and end the US.
...
So after this move, basically the only thing that can save them from a death spiral is a major US invasion, which the US would lose militarily without a draft...
Such A draft that would cause a violent revolution/civil war in the US... A civil war that would quickly become ww3 as Chinese and Russian Assets egged on the US collapse and the US military tried to reply in kind.
...
This is probably WW3 Friends. stock up now. End of the age.
Do you think this was wrong? If so, how did you learn/update from the last 7 months?
You have also repeatedly predicted WWIII as well as a major civil war with >1,000,000 dead in the United States following the election. While you still have 50 odd days left for some assassination scenario or Biden to nuke Moscow, do you think the lack of violent protests (or serious protests at all, really) or the general acceptance of Trump's victory mean this was also a bad prediction? Is the point to be edgy clickbait or...do you genuinely believe the things you write?
JarJarJedi
53m ago
The other day my account was limited, then suspended out of the blue, then reinstated without comment after I sent an email asking why.
OK so that at least disproves the theory moderation doesn't exist anymore ;) I remember pre-Musk I once created a secondary twitter account for some silly project of mine, made a hello world tweet and it was promptly permanently suspended. I didn't even bother to research why, I just dropped the twitter part of the project and forgot about it.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
55m ago
I enjoyed Witcher 3 tremendously. Cyberpunk seems very well liked, though I haven't played it myself. Civ VI also seems well liked. I usually only buy games on steep discount so more recent stuff isn't exactly on my radar.
07mk
1hr ago
It looks like the specific departments where >75% of the employees were fired (primarily ad sales and content moderation, on my understanding) did fall over - ad revenue crashed, and content moderation is (quite deliberately on the part of Musk) no longer happening, except when Musk wants to ban one of his political opponents on a whim.
The ad boycott doesn't seem like the service becoming worse, since the variety and types of ads that a user sees tends to have minimal impact on the user's experience. But even if it were, the ad boycott seems largely coincidental to the firing of ad sales employees, since, AFAIK, the ad boycott happened primarily for ideological reasons rather than due to the lack of resources or competence of the ad sales department on Twitter. The content moderation result seems like almost a strict improvement in service, though opinions obviously vary.
On the plus side, bugs actually get noticed and fixed now. We don't usually get deus ex style "hey we broke a bunch of maps, all the plasma weapons, and some random character interactions, have fun dealing with that for the next 25 years. Dev's out"
SteveKirk
1hr ago
There are a lot of weird errors and inexplicable decisions on Twitter, but I can't tell if it's gotten worse. The timeline spazzes out constantly, showing the same stuff over and over. The other day my account was limited, then suspended out of the blue, then reinstated without comment after I sent an email asking why.
Granted, the only part of that different from 2020 was actually getting unbanned, but still.
I would suspect that boxers and musicians of today lack something that old-time pugilists and rockstars had: chemical enhancement to aid that greater grind.
Games specifically take longer because they're often scoped bigger, are more complex, and the technology that builds them is more complex. In a few hours, one could crank out a barebones Mario-style platformer in 2D. Making that same game into a Metroidvania-style game would take an order of magnitude more time (let's say weeks). Make it 3D, and the time horizon for development extends to months at the minimum.
id Software managed the pace they did at Softdisk because their games were relatively simple, used simple graphics, weren't (yet) trying to push the limits of what was possible with computer games, and knew the hardware they were targeting (in the days before the Pentium and 3D accelerators). That Romero and Carmack were fairly skilled definitely helped, but in hindsight, you might not expect that looking at Rescue Rover or Dangerous Dave.
Games can be made in short timeframes like the old days, but you will notice the difference that lack of extra time makes. Go look at any game jam on Itch and play a few submissions, they're often very barebones, sometimes obviously crude, and typically quite short on content.
SteveKirk
1hr ago
Does this place get indexed super fast by Google? The other day I searched for "Kamelanomicon" to see how many people had already made that joke, and we were the top result an hour after posting. Are their scrapers just that regular these days?
daguerrean
1hr ago
Why does a shorter development cycle mean that game developers in the past were better? I mean yea, I'm not sure any modern game developers could come up with fast inverse square root but I don't really follow the inner workings of modern games so maybe they are doing equally shocking things and I just don't know about it?
I do think there is something to be said for raw numbers of fights. A similar thing happened in baseball where basically every record based on sheer volume has some unbreakable record from 1910 when pitchers pitched complete games every day. This is undoubtedly largely a result of player pay, if your pitcher has a 300 million dollar contract you are going to treat him like a priceless artifact and handle him incredibly gently, you're never really going to want to push him to the absolute breaking point. When contracts were at most a few hundred thousand a year, yea you can ride him like freaking Secretariat until his UCL turns to dust. So I think there is some truth to the idea that the most resilient players today are probably being held back from achieving their true potential out of fear of injury. Nolan Ryan definitively shows that some humans are capable of throwing at modern speeds for a vastly higher volume of games than pitchers today ever approach.
campfireSmoresEaten
1hr ago
I really liked Beau is Afraid, which had a budget of 35 million. And I liked Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Top Gun: Maverick was solid. Joker was a good experience in the theater, although it may not be a work of pure genius.
One side of this political debate believes in consciousness-raising uber alles. They deliberately seek opportunities to shoehorn (and then brag about shoehorning) their values. They want people more aware of this stuff and why they do it.
It works. People become "hypersensitive" (aware) as a result. Some people appreciate it and go along, some won't. But they don't get to pretend it isn't a result of their actions.
Lizzardspawn
1hr ago
What do you have against basic human decency?
Who gets to decide what basic human decency constitutes. Your basic human decency many be "enabling the delusions and fetishes of mentally ill people" for others.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I don’t think so. It’s just that after a certain saturation point of woke, you just get tired of picking up a game that you just want to turn off the world for a while and play in another universe. Except you don’t ge5 to escape because the designer insisted that he can’t keep away from real world politics for 10 minutes.
I feel the same way, I’m rewatching old sci-fi movies from the 1980s because honestly it’s absolutely refreshing to jus5 see a story that doesn’t have to preach at you.
Out of curiosity, what's your opinion of Christian Rock as a musical genre?
What do you have against basic human decency?
"Basic human decency" is an appeal to shared values. When the values are not shared, the term loses all meaning. Making an appeal to shared values when values are not shared is straightforward deception. Attempting to change the definition of "basic human decency" to point to some novel, bespoke value set you invented five minutes ago and which have no buy-in from even a significant plurality of the public is an extremely central example of dishonest rhetoric.
The history of the Culture War over the last several years has essentially been a case study in the long-term downsides of such a strategy. The strategy burns scarce trust that cannot be replaced, with woeful effects for the community in question long-term.
I'm more curious as to how it stacks up with the 1993 version featuring Tim Curry as Cardinal Richelieu, which is objectively the most enjoyable to watch. Not the best, perhaps, but most enjoyable.
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