domain:mgautreau.substack.com?q=domain:mgautreau.substack.com
hooser
just now
Glad you brought up Richelieu. In the book, he and Milady are aptly juxtaposed because of these very qualities: smart, adaptable, ruthless, resourceful, and seeking power. The difference is that Richelieu (for the most part) uses that accumulated power to make the state of France strong, while Milady (when not kept on a tight leash) uses it to pursue her own passions, including murder and revenge. That is Milady's one ultimately-fatal flaw: whatever her intelligence and talents, she ultimately serves her baser instinct. It's what makes her such great villain, while Cardinal Richelieu is merely an antagonist who aptly pursues goals contrary to whose of the protagonists.
She's not exactly portrayed as a role model by Dumas.
Exactly: Dumas develops her as a villain, not an anti-hero. And as a villain, she is absolutely the tops. She has her own clearly developed story arc. She has a great back story. She grows as a character. Her resourcefulness gets developed and revealed and stages. By the time of the "boss fight" scene, the reader really believes that it indeed takes four musketeers and a professional executioner to finally kill her. All that, and the only time she lifts a weapon is to pretend to wound herself.
Men hate when women characters like this are empowered.
You know, I have never met a man who likes the Dumas books but was incensed that too much time gets devoted to this Milady character, or how it's bullshit that she's so powerful. Dumas chose to devote many more chapters to Milady. The chapters about her mission to kill the Duke of Buckingham are from her point of view. Dumas published the chapters serially, a lot of his readers were men, and I take it as evidence that he responded as much to popular demand as he did to his own creative urges.
I mean, how much more empowered can a character get? The Duke, forewarned by a lucky fluke, captures Milady, imprisons her, puts an incorruptible guard over her. In a few short days, she not only gets that guard to help her escape, but to carry out her ultimate mission: kill the Duke. I mean, damn! that's Power!
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4m ago
Can I quote stats on university hires? The percent of federal "science" grants going to DEI programs?
Ooo, please do. I'd be interested.
I don't think anyone's claiming that SJ is fully gone. Certainly, I would tell anyone claiming this to extract head from own anus and take a look around. The claim @Ben___Garrison and @MadMonzer are making is that the six-metre two-tonne croc has lost a few centimetres and a few kilos, and (in BG's case) that the trend will continue.
2rafa
8m ago
Ballmer is the classic example.
How much of a bean counter was Ballmer, really? I truly believed he loved Microsoft, probably even more than Bill.
Tanista
18m ago
Trans women are already, typically, fairly loud and visible influences.
Why? There are no loud, visible anti-wokes? Why don't they win, if a minority can seize all the spoils? Surely the presumption should be on their side since until comparatively recently unwoke things like "objectification" of female characters and jokes that punched down were common.
The "trans priestly caste" explanation simply doesn't work because someone is going to say "no". Someone is going to find trans people changing their plans offputting (or the trans themselves tbh -- they were a punchline in living memory). Why is it that small percentages of people are able to swing entire organizations across the entire industry? No one wants to pick up the $20 bill?
And what about industries that don't attract people with programmer socks? Why did they go woke?
they'll help drive direction in a game studio's writing
I'm actually not sold that random devs, even good ones, can do this. There's plenty of work that doesn't involve the story.
especially if the corporate overlords are looking closely at leadership position diversity.
And there we go.
There's always some other element that explains the "and the entire organization bent the knee". Seems to me that, as with woke more generally, whatever that is explains why the vidya game industry is where it is more than the trans priestly caste.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23m ago
Thank you for the detailed response and commentary. Great effortpost.
Let me know if this would make a suitable blogpost.
Probably. With the big "IF" upfront of - I don't think simply cataloging the NRx idea ecosystem is of a ton of interest on its own (outside of the morbidly curious like myself). What would be truly widely appealing, imho, is trying to trace how we got to NRx starting from post WW2 conservative / tradtional thinking (with pit stops in Big-L Liberalism) with a final section on what likely outcomes are.
This is exactly why I asked for recommendations. I'm try to build a deeper understanding of "how we got here" in order to have a stronger confidence in thinking about "where we are headed." It's important not to get too tied up in pure ideology - this was how Big-L liberals failed, how the neocons failed, and how the Progressive of today (Kamala) failed to even get off the launch pad*.
While the re-election of Trump has created a Right Wing honey moon period still very much in full swing, the Right in America / Britain is still very far from coalescing around a reality driven approach to the next 10,20,30 years. Right now, it's a coalition of angry populists (hardcore MAGA'ers), old Reagan style conservatives who have abandoned any idea of calm negotiation and co-existence with the Left, techno-libertarian bros (Thiel, Vance, etc.....frankly I think Yarvin is closer to this bucket that he wants to admit), and the centrist wanderers who have been so turned off by the really weird Left that they, for now, will happy vote against Blue Tribe. Oh, and then, of course, there's like 7-12 million younger men who feel utterly forgotten. This is a strange coalition to try to drive forward and, since 2016, it has been utterly dependent upon the person of Donald J. Trump. That lasts for 4 more years (Trump doesn't have the deep managerial ability nor the personality to existent as shadow emperor of the Republicans after the end of this term).
Sorry not sorry for the tangent. This is something I have a deep interest in. Again, thanks for the effortful response.
Quantumfreakonomics
23m ago
Cyanide tastes horrible. I would be insulted as a Kraft Heinz executive that Jim Jones didn’t trust Kool-Aid® to mask the flavor.
Pitt19802
29m ago
How much of Barkley success do you want to give him vs his situation?
Between him and McCaffrey...
I mean, it's a team sport, everyone looks better when give them better teammates.
Both those guys did a lot of good work on not particularly good teams, stick them on a strong team.
idk, both are fun guys to watch when they get it going, I'm glad they both found good situations.
I'm not sure it changes the narrative around how to value RBs as much as people might suggest. (as much crap as the Giants are getting for it, I still think that was a fairly reasonable decision).
fmaa
32m ago
No, you cannot. You cannot even come up with the coolest game you've ever played. At best you can do an elevator pitch for the latter, and noone will give a shit because being an ideas guy is indeed not an exclusive skill.
Actual game design starts at the hundreds of pages of plans and spreadsheets and design documents required to turn those ideas into something concrete. The detail level of which keeps growing the more people with less direct personal communication you need to convey those ideas to.
Tons of great games have been made without artists. Many, many more only spend any time and effort on artists long after the designers are satisfied their prototypes are worth the expense. Tons of great games have been made without programmers. The entire fields of designer board games and tabletop rpgs are like 30-60 years old despite requiring no technology not available centuries ago, only advances in game design.
yofuckreddit
1hr ago
Is design really that exclusive of a skill? I find it hard to believe.
I'd put artists above designers in terms of value, and programmers above all of them.
I can come up with the coolest game you've ever played, in my head, right now. Good luck making it without artists and programmers.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
What are some games where the “reward mechanism” is increasingly delayed the longer you play?
A game like chess arguably has the same amount of reward per game regardless of elo, it just gets more difficult. (Games will take similar amount of time and chance of winning/losing doesn’t shift much). Same with MOBA games. World of Warcraft and other RPGs may seem as if they delay the rewards, because it takes longer to get to the next level, but I’m not totally sure if this is the case, because you still acquire loot and have same amount of exploration and combat while the next level is delayed.
I suppose Souls games may be an example: because you keep dying and retrying as you progress through game, then the reward (the completion) genuinely delays over time. A lot of older games have this mechanic, where you are forced to retry until you complete the level. This is rare in modern games. Puzzle games and games like Portal have this mechanic. Crosswords and Sudoku as well.
I’m in interested in how this mirrors the real life progression of skills; ie, real life contains an element of delayed rewards across progression. Reading a book goes from quick and fun (children’s books) to long and tedious (professions involving lots of reading). Math problems don’t just get harder, they may take 10x longer to solve. Occupational obligations may involve increasingly delayed feeling of reward. Someone’s goal in meditation may go from 5min to 35min. Etc.
yofuckreddit
1hr ago
"Overrepresented" is not enough.
But it is. Trans women are already, typically, fairly loud and visible influences. If you double or triple their representation in a given population, they'll help drive direction in a game studio's writing, especially if the corporate overlords are looking closely at leadership position diversity. Not to mention, many trans women are excellent programmers, and so therefore valuable to placate.
Terracotta
1hr ago
Never attribute to feminism what can be adequately explained by endumbening.
Substituting cartoony physical stuff for nuanced dialogue and subtle social powerplays has been a trend in youth media for a while now. Women's YA novels should be the peak medium for wordy scenes of deception and covert social manipulation, and even those regularly pull out some kind of broad screen-ready Loony Tunes thing these days, not necessarily girlboss swordplay but someone being punched or shoved, or physically restrained, or exploded (!), in interactions that would have been subtle verbal insults or manipulations a few decades ago. There's maybe some element of fantasy about women wreaking physical revenge, but equally often it's evil moms and boyfriends inflicting violence on girls, or just the universe conveniently providing violence to fill up plot holes, so I don't think it can be purely a girl power thing.
My bet is on a combination of progressively lower social intelligence in younger cohorts (if you're raised without freeform peer play, how would you learn to recognize and understand negotiation or manipulation strategies?), worsening verbal/logical ability in writers, and possibly some studio mistrust of audiences. Say what you will about sword-swinging girlbosses, but they're easy to write, don't need to say much, and reliably capture a viewer's attention.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
1hr ago
I believe the contention is that the devs should also be designers, or rather, that the designers should rise up from the dev mines.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
I mean, yeah, obviously. SJ still to some degree brands itself as heterodox too (the claimed orthodoxy being the cis-het white patriarchy). "I'm a zombie" is not exactly a fun story to tell oneself.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
1hr ago
Coat your fries in some kind of spice rub. They are much lower calorie but can be very flavorful
Corvos
1hr ago
marketing has grown bigger than the product being marketed
There are reasons for this. A friend of mine is a VERY successful indie developer and publisher, and his business thinking is as follows:
The vast majority of people buy very few games every year. Even most ‘gamers’ might play five to ten.
So if you’re in the top ten in your market, whatever it is, you’ll rake in money. If not, you’ll make almost nothing.
Therefore, it’s worth spending whatever you have to on marketing, celebrity cameos, etc. Anything to shift you from 11th on the list to 9th.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1hr ago
Why should devs be the one in charge? It's the designers, the ones that design the systems, that make the games what they are.
Even weirder aspect: why was the Israeli consulate privy to info about Gaetz’ Dad?
this is screwing up my efforts to free Bob Levinson. Gaetz's dad was secretly funding us. So I'm very much wanting this to be untrue. I've got a commando team leader friend of mine nervously waiting for wire transfers to clear. […]
And we only asked for $25 million as an estimate at first. We came way down.”
That consulate employee is now the spokesperson for Betar USA. Why would an employee at Israeli consulate know all of this? What did he mean “my efforts”, “funding us”, “we only asked”, “we came way down”. This indicates that an employee at Israeli consulate (who now works at major Zionist org) was somehow intimately involved in an operation to extort Gaetz. Which in a normal world would be a huge deal. Did this have to do with Gaetz’ opposition to Jewish lobby / Israel?
gives them fraudulent real Florida driver's licenses listing their age as 18
Right — in Gaetz perception, nothing he was doing was illegal and plausibly nothing he was doing was immoral. The “payment” can be simply reimbursing for the girl’s travel expenses or time off work, which wouldn’t be unusual for a man to do for his girlfriend or wife. As in, if you have a girlfriend and you want her to vacation with you, but she planned to work during this period because she needs money, there is nothing off or suspicious about providing her with money so she can join you and also be able to eat next semester. There’s no evidence that the payments were for sex.
Another weird thing: Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch, paid 20 million to the FBI in 2009 for the same “operation to free Bob Levinson”.
As a result of this rotten bargain, the men who choose this field will tend to be young, not have families, and be fixated on video games. Frankly, this is going to select for autists. To the extent that autism and MtF trans are correlated, I would expect that video game developers are trans at a rate at least far above the norm. This might explain a lot of the soy-type politics espoused by major game studios...
Does this explanation make sense?
Not really. It runs into similar problems as most attempts to explain wokeness, especially the first one:
- "Overrepresented" is not enough. The claim is that woke politics is overwhelmingly dominant to the point where there're no antiwoke studios. Trans devs would have to be overwhelmingly dominant to match that claim or something else is going on to give even an overrepresented minority this outsized say.
- The idea that young gamers who want to be devs will naturally be woke doesn't pass muster to me. Gamers tend(ed?) to be irreverent shitbags and were a target of woke whining from feminists for a reason. Even if they were woke today, they'd eventually find some way to piss off the keepers of the revolution because the ideology doesn't stand still (the same way progressive, "science, bitch!" atheists pissed off their feminist fellows). They'd end up on the same trajectory as Elon Musk basically. There have to be some disagreeable autists that go the other way.
Something else has to be happening.
No_one
2hr ago
BG3 is mid. The game is okay but the writing is crap.
Stellaris is also mid and in many ways more of a role-playing game than a strategy. In terms of depth it has the same sort of 'fake' depth other Paradox titles have, and is not in any way deeper than an ordinary Civ-game from before they got hit by the stupid ray.
No_one
2hr ago
So ?
Great men are rarely good men. Gaetz seems to be pretty eloquent and an enemy of the bureaucracy. Until that is purged and once again accountable to elected representatives, you'd do well to ignore any wrongdoing short of large scale fraud, actual forcible rape or murder.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2hr ago
It's not so much that non-tech people are bad for games. But that their utter dominance means tech nerds rarely get their voices out.
When doctors & lawyers take on secondary leadership roles, they don't turn into narrow minded autists. They learn the ropes of their new role, and apply those to their profession. Tech people should be able to do this too.
A company must have at least one of - love for the product, love for the tech or love for the user's identity. The counter to that is love for the money, love for the optics & love for the media. The nerds are most likely to have love for the tech, love for the user (because they're gamers themselves) and love for the product (because they want to make good games).
MBA types usually love the latter. But, media, optics and money are downstream from success. You can game media + optics and temporarily identify a money extraction strategy. If the MBAs don't play the games, don't care about the tech and don't identify as a the user (a gamer), then they'll inevitably crash and burn. In the woke era, many video game art-people hated gamers & gaming, and were using it as a way to tell their own woke story. This doesn't work. GTA was the Housers' baby. They may not write code, but they surely loved the product.
Andrew Wilson
Wilson definitely revolutionized the monetization of gaming as EA CEO. It's not to say that people like him shouldn't be hired or given important roles. But the CEO is the lifeblood of a company. Give bean counters the reigns, and they destroy the whole company for better quarterly results. Ballmer is the classic example.
The counter to this is Google and Facebook. Susan Wojcicki and Sheryl Sandberg turned them into the world's richest companies. But, because the CEOs were technical, the focus of the company remained technical. Even Tim Cook's peak MBA personality (in the best way possible) was balanced by Ive & Craig as two people who loved the product. It's cliche to say you need a balance. But, you need a balance. For instance, look at the EA board. 2/11 people have technical backgrounds (2 CTOs). One of them is a forever program manager without game-dev experience and another is a head of security, who while technical, has nothing to do with game development. This is the lopsidedness I'm talking about. 0/11 people are hard core game dudes.
don’t have the MBAs? You get SAP
I guess I'm in the Bay Area where technical people are fiercely business focused. I can't relate to the SAP situation
Say what you want about Elon, but he quickly reaches a 201 level technical knowledge in the companies he runs. Your CEO doesn't need to be an expert. But they need to be good enough to smell bullshit when it stares them in the face. Listen to Elon's reasoning about major strategic decisions. It is simple first principles reasoning on top of the core technical primitives of his company. (and I don't even like the guy).
Throwaway05
2hr ago
Some complicating factors include the fact that not all spots are funded by the federal government which means we can in fact increase the number of spots. Not all spots are desirable, and a good number are bad enough that American grads will give up or try again next year instead of being willing to take them.
As to if the international applicants are so bad that the places won't take them or the spots are so bad they won't go to them, I do not know.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
2hr ago
Tremendous week for the Eagles. With any luck they have the NFC East sewn up after beating the Rams, with the Redskins dropping a sloppy game to a scrappy Dallas team.
Saquon is the truth. You can't stop Barkley you can only hope to contain him. Next week is going to be key for his MVP and OPOY narrative, if he has a great game and the defense stuffs Lamar and Henry, then Saquon will emerge in a two horse race with Josh Allen. He'll still probably lose to Allen, non-QBs rarely win, but he'll have a puncher's chance down the stretch.
Hurts and the rest of the offense looked OK at best. I was hoping to see Hurts spread the ball around more, but he stuck to AJ Brown and Dallas Goedert. He just never has the processing speed to run through his other receiving options. If he could, he'd be unstoppable. He'll need to find it against a weak Ravens pass defense next week if they're going to outshoot Lamar.
The Eagles' D finally managed to beat a competent QB in an unassailably well executed way. Stafford looked good, but didn't have enough. Unfortunately, they lost Brandon Graham to a season ending triceps injury. That leaves the team dangerously thin at Edge, relying on Josh Sweat, second year development project Nolan Smith, and developmental rookie Jalyx Hunt. All three will need to step up if the team is going to make any noise down the stretch.
Luckily for the Eagles, the Redskins fell apart against a shorthanded Dallas team. Three up in the loss column with six to play puts them in a position where if they just beat the Panthers, Giants, and Cowboys at home, then the skins need to win out in order to get a tie. The dallas game was hilarious, I listened to the radio broadcast doing chores, and I turned it off after the kick return touchdown figuring the game was over. Missing two more touchdowns and a field goal that were still left in the game. Daniels is Good, and will be trouble for the rest of his rookie contract for the Eagles. Dallas is bad, but still has enough star power that if they all decide to pull the wagon together they can make it tough for any team. Hopefully by Christmas they are so far out of it that they have little motivation to play spoiler in Philly, and if you put your arm on their throat they'll fold.
Elsewhere in the NFL: Can Pat Mahomes keep getting away with it? Is Russell Wilson cooked? How much tanking is too much tanking in New Jersey?
Thanks, that's an interesting idea. Any specific rubs you had in mind?
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