domain:moultano.wordpress.com
2rafa
5m ago
Larry Fink has no major politics beyond being a mainstream Democrat, at most he’s a centrist neolib. He strongly resisted almost all activist demands for Blackrock to divest from arms companies and fossil fuels firms. Blackrock isn’t primarily or even substantially responsible for DEI in corporate America and its influence on firm culture at board level is minimal. Fink is likely in the 65th percentile, no more, on the right-left scale among Americans. ESG was always a fake movement and the amount of money invested in ESG-focused funds, while high in nominal terms, was tiny compared to aum in the global asset management industry. What little was done was often under pressure from big institutional investors who do care, mainly universities and progressive pension plans (like teachers and academics), along with some progressive sovereign funds like the Norwegians. Blackrock promoted ESG under pressure from these institutional clients, not because of Fink’s own politics.
07mk
9m ago
There's a common refrain among the "woke" that all art is political/ideological, and if you don't notice it in some work of art, then that's just because it's pro-status quo, and you're just comfortable with the status quo. What I've come to realize is that, buying into this framework, art that is political/ideological in the pro-status quo perspective is better than other art. Not categorically or anything like that, but that a work of art having a pro-status quo political/ideological message is something that meaningfully improves that work of art compared to the alternative of it having some non-status-quo (i.e. overtly noticeable) political/ideological message.
2rafa
10m ago
AI, mass immigration and cultural fragmentation, the power of political Islam, low birth rates, the risk of biologically engineered pandemics, the effect of social media on population psychology. Not stuff most high schools are going to want you to spend all your time discussing in class.
DiscourseMagnus
11m ago
The emerging second Cold War?
gog
14m ago
What are the "world issues" of our age?
I am a high school social studies teacher (lame) and our curriculum is very old. As such, it is adamant that kids learn about the AIDS crisis, SARS, the Millennium poverty reduction goals, UN peacekeeping, third-world debt and the IMF, etc. It's all very Naomi Klein, Michael Moore-type stuff, and feels like teaching in 1992 with books written during the Cold War.
Most of those issues are still around, but they are obviously no longer as relevant to the globally-minded. Other than stuff like SARS, which has an obvious analog in COVID, what issues SHOULD we talking about. In 2007 you could pretty easily list the things that were considered "world issues" by the bien-pensant class. Has wokeism bulldozed all that? Are there constituencies out there who are still worried about this type of stuff? If so, what are they worrying about?
sohois
21m ago
If individual characters or elements are enough for a game to be woke, and thus the industry, then the OPs question has a very simple answer. Companies are putting these things in because they want to make more money. Adding a women or similar is a very low effort way to make a game more appealing to a wider audience
DiscourseMagnus
23m ago
I think what people around here are missing is that trans people in tech are more important as a long-term byproduct of feminism than they are as their own specific hot-button issue. There are so many of them in tech because they're an end-run around demands to load he industry up with mediocre authoritarian women and restructure everything to cater primarily to them. There are some women who excel in STEM, sure, but as a demographic, women are so uninterested in the field that it turns out that the easier way to comply with the demands of feminism is to convince a significant portion of the actual male talent (who were kind of incel-y anyway) to take up the trans thing. For culture war reasons (to put it charitably), we get a warpedly negative sample of the trans population around here. In fact, transgender "women" are obviously much more culturally compatible with tech than their cis counterparts; they aren't attractive but they're more pleasant to be around. They aren't going to call HR to have you written up for having an anime figurine on your desk, they aren't going to try to have math devalued as a racist skillset, they aren't going to get pissed off and go scorched Earth on the company and have everyone fired on trumped up sexual harassment charges and replaced with the Gestapo. "Loud exhibitionist Chris-Chan-type autist" is the common model of the situation on the culture war right, but it's the wrong model; the ones who succeed professionally in tech are meek intellectual rationalist-type autists. They think like men and it's a field where you need to think like a man to make money. They aren't a real priestly caste, they're a fake priestly caste, a stopgap to prevent the installation of a female-feminist priestly caste, and to be frank, I much prefer things this way over the way things were going about a decade ago. (Of course it would be better if relations between the sexes weren't falling apart in the first place.)
DiscourseMagnus
51m ago
On a somewhat less culture-war-ish note, consider the other primary impact of the low-time-investment Candy Crush mobile set on traditional gaming - the rise of microtransactions, games as a service, whale hunting, the transformation of the gaming industry into a bizarrely legitimized clone of the gambling industry. There clearly is actually a lot of money in chasing the success of Candy Crush.
DiscourseMagnus
57m ago
I think that there's something to be said for a movie's thinking that it's neutral (because it's part of the hegemonic culture) actually making it somewhat more neutral. Sure, I'd rather that movies comported with my values rather than values I find noxious - but I'd also rather have movies take values I find noxious for granted rather than try to sell their noxious values to me.
Better a movie written by someone who thinks gay people are normal than a movie written by someone trying to make them normal.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
58m ago
I believe that the classic answer in this scenario is "fuck em". But seriously though, the idea that all things need to try to appeal to all possible people is ruining art. It's ok if some people don't enjoy the character of Milady, or even the movie as a whole. The director shouldn't water down the material just to try to be inoffensive to all (which, ironically, is itself offensive to some people).
A quick Google search reveals the following documents:
By offering only "hardcore gamers" the right of passage into its workforce for years, Riot denied equal employment opportunities to hundreds of qualified female applicants since opening its doors.
Note that this lawsuit (1) was brought by the California govt. in state court rather than by the federal govt. in federal court, (2) alleged more illegal behavior than just hiring discrimination, and (3) ended in a settlement rather than in a determination of guilt after trial.
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
You can't stop Barkley you can only hope to contain him.
He's looked good the past several weeks, but the rushing defenses the Eagles have been playing against are dogshit. The last time they played a team ranked in the top 20 they were 2–2 and everyone was talking about whether the bye week would be a good time to fire Sirianni. I am, of course, only mentioning this so I can say that I think the Steelers defense has a decent shot of stopping him. The Eagles have an RPO-heavy offense, and the Steelers have done a good job of against the RPO. If they blitz at Barkley with Highsmith off the strong side they'll make Hurts beat them himself. Derrick Henry only had 65 yards against the Steelers, half of which came on one play.
Can Pat Mahomes keep getting away with it?
Yeah, probably.
Is Russell Wilson cooked?
No reason to think so. He looked fine in the second half of the Browns game, and the Ravens game was bound to be close since they've been playing the exact same game since Jackson entered the league.
How much tanking is too much tanking in New Jersey?
I was wondering about this but I couldn't get a good answer. Was there some kind of cap reason that made it more advantageous for the Giants to bench Jones than release him? It's a moot point now, but nakedly benching your best quarterback for cap reasons should trigger some kind of penalty for blatant cap manipulation. Kind of like how an arbitrator flat-out rejected the deal Ilya Kovalchuk signed with the Devils back in 2010. There was a trend at the time to circumvent the salary cap by signing long, front-loaded deals. The league eventually put an end to the practice, but the Kovalchuk deal was so blatant that it was rejected outright (though the deal he ended up signing was only slightly less ridiculous).
HalloweenSnarry
1hr ago
I'd say Transformers pretty much belongs to Hasbro now. For a decade-plus, they've taken the initiative on Transformers media, on top of printing money with the toys. It's not like the old days anymore, where they could rely on the Japanese side conveniently making content for them.
HalloweenSnarry
1hr ago
I remember, back in the GamerGate days, that there was actually a statistic claiming that (slightly) over half of gamers were women--however, that statistic rows against the belief you described. The under-publicized explanation for that statistic was "women prefer simple, low-time-investment mobile games like Candy Crush and aren't playing COD or AssCreed,*" and I think failing to understand that is why bigger companies and gaming-related insititutions have spent the past decade flailing and floundering about with progressivism--the classic "things vs. people" gender divide.
*Not that there aren't women who are into traditional "hardcore" games at all, mind you.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
1hr ago
Because riot games was forced to pay 100 million for gender discrimination when it hired people on the basis of whether or not they even played riots games.
Where can we read the best breakdown of this?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1hr ago
When companies like BlackRock were pushing ESG hard, ESG money was cheap money.
Why were companies like BlackRock pushing ESG hard?
TwiceHuman
1hr ago
I see, this feedback loop is to blame again. Viral content gets more viral, and less viral content disappears. This is because popularity is made out to be a metric of quality. All modern algorithms generally work like this, but it's a huge mistake. Merely changing the way the rating works from "Most plays" to "Best ratio of postive and negative reviews" should balance it better.
I actually want to make a game of my own. Guess I'll have to jump into a moral and social dilemma. Thanks for the answer by the way!
spiky_fungus
1hr ago
claims Western defense capabilities are useless against it.
well, MAD works for nuclear-armed countries
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
1hr ago
Yeah that's fair. The thing is that disney owns many of the highest grossing media franchises and we may quibble about how much that correlates to "large media franchise" but it's really hard to find other measurements and this one is an easily accessible wikipedia page. of the 17 that are bigger than $20 billion 7 are from disney. of the 10 that are not Disney franchises
3 are japanese (Anpanman (Yeah wtf is that), Pokemon and Hello kitty)
2 are toy brands (Barbie and Transformers) (is transformers Japanese it originally is but the main seller now is Hasbro the american company, I'd probably count it in Japan but hard to say)
2 are western video games (Candy Crush, Call of Duty)
2 Warner bros Franchises (harry potter, Batman)
1 Korean Video game (dungeon fighter online)
basically once you exclude disney you're looking at a group that is 50% east asian franchises anyway, (counting transformers as Japanese). If you estimate like me that roughly 1/3rd of the media landscape is woke to some degree then the 2/3rds that are not are going to lean more heavily in the direction of the 1/3rd of the media landscape that is not western.
07mk
1hr ago
You don't need to convert as many of them as you do men for a similar payoff, which in theory should be easier.
My guess is that this is the correct explanation. 10+ years ago, when I was all-in on social justice, the prevailing belief was that the primary reason women didn't play video games in exactly the same amounts as men was that the video games hadn't been designed to appeal to them, with most of the rest of the reasons being the video game community being misogynistic and hostile to women. Thus, by changing the way the games were designed, the theory went, video game companies could tap this untapped market and make even more massive profits, all the while also making the world a better, more Socially Just place. How convenient it is that we live in a world where doing what matches my preferred ideology also results in making more money! You'd have to be a complete idiot or an extremist bigot not to pick up that free money that's just sitting there on the table!
I think the recent high profile failures of "woke" games (arguable if "woke" is the same as "trying to appeal to women," but one of the core arguments for uglifying women in "woke" content is that such things are more relatable/appealing to women) such as Concord, Star Wars: Outlaws, or Dragon Age: The Veilguard show that many of the people in charge of the purse strings were true believers of this theory.
I believe that the lesson that those people will learn is that this proves that the video game community is even more misogynistic than they thought, and also that the content directed at pulling in woman customers in these games didn't go nearly far enough, and therefore next time they need to double down and also bully the existing toxic primarily-male gamer fanbase even more, so as to make the space more friendly to women. After all, when you're on the right side of history, you cannot fail, you can only be failed by all the bigots around you who have just not caught on yet that they're headed for extinction.
I would build out the model as something like: If there is a genuinely good woke video game with solid mechanics and few competitors, most anti-woke people will still buy them.
I think most slop isn't bought by non-woke normies, let alone wokies themselves. The question is whether "it's woke" is being advanced as the whole reason for the game's marketability, or is just a big part of the story.
Though arguable, video games are already one of the most gender egalitarian artistic mediums. Plenty of strategy games like XCOM make no distinction between male units or female units, and there's plenty of Amazonian protagonists in the medium.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
I have such mixed feelings about early access. Or similar mechanisms of protracted public development.
On the one hand, yes, it provides that feedback I think a game developed for 10 years in private wouldn't get. On the other hand, it's just GaaS by another name, where so long as the game continues to sell the developer will keep incrementally adding onto his cash cow. I always think of that phrase "Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Public development encourages the complete opposite of this, with more and more being piled onto an increasingly shaky gameplay frame until the whole thing teeters over under the weight of almost a decade of slapped on sub mechanics attempting to keep the game relevant on Steam's front page.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
Making a video game is an extremely risky proposition. Wokes coordinate to credibly threaten increased risk for those who resist, and can at least plausibly promise reduced risk for those who cooperate. Up until recently, the other side wasn't even on the field as they had to build an entire information economy from scratch. This is not all of the picture, but it's a big part of it.
I don't think that's the case. Rather, I think it's a low effort way to convince oneself that the game is more appealing to a wider audience, assuming that the oneself in this case buys into a certain ideology. The question then becomes why so many decisionmakers buy into this ideology, to such an extent that it overrides their greed.
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