I could tell from mthe outset that this was going to be sexist, probably the fact it took the stance of “men do x” over “men also do x”, but I didn’t anticipate the final line being outright misogyny.

There is less pre-modern art by women because women were either censored or indoctrinated into roles where they couldn’t create, which is the primary sin of the patriarchy.

There is a myth of men knowing love because the myth of the powerful, rational man doesn’t accommodate for this, and what perpetuates that myth? That’s right, the patriarchy again.

It’s heartbreaking to see someone see through the patriarchal myth of masculinity and arrive at the conclusion that men are objectively better at creation and love than women

Coming from the UK is correct, it was literally an artistocratic flex at having literally useless land. I read a dissertation a few years back that also linked this to a Baudrillard style simulationist desire for the upper class not to see land with any practical value immediately besides their homes because they were resistant to accept that their wealth was exercised from any real action, and instead they’d pretend it was just a truth. But beyond the lawns were forests and fields, because they had to exist.

When lawns were adopted by the bourgeoisie, who only had half an acre of property, it was already trendy to have the surrounding acres of the house be only lawn. The bourgeoisie simulation was to have the house surrounded by lawns as if it were to then give way to fields and forests, which of course did not exist, just your neighbours equally ugly plot of land.

What I never understood about all of this though, is that gardens are equally cosmetic vanity. I have fond memories of the garden of my grandmother, which has a small greenhouse and two raised vegetable beds at the back, but everything else was flower beds, a pond, a summer pavillion, a small lawn, a shed and a scattering of trees and bushes. Other than the small sections for growing vegetables, it was all entirely for vanity. But it was beautiful. Hell, the small lawn was even pretty functional as the primary place to set up chairs in the sun and play ball games.

I am British, and once this island was forest and mountains from shore to shore, with meadows and plains being rare. The lawn never made sense here, and caught on less in in the Soviet Bloc as plains become more common in nature. America is a land with far more natural plains, and the lawn is further removed from it’s original status. It’s imitating an imitation of a denial of reality, Baudrillard would have a field day.

But I did mention, in my grandmother’s garden, playing ball games on the lawn. American sport is largely built on the suburban madness that is lawns. I’m not talking about sport born in urban centers like basketball, or sports from true rural areas, which I can only assume is rednecks drink driving, if watching US shows has told me anything, but Baseball, American Football and even golf are sports made for lawns. It’s hard to detangle lawns from middle class America without stopping middle class kids play sports in their gardens.

One day they’ll add vegetable gardening to the Olympics and America will be saved, and Joseph McCarthy will be stuck in hell on his fucking lawn.

At least I expect that from him and basically all his characters. It’s most irritating when it’s a character who should have eloquence, ht doesn’t.

Also by extension, film / TV is the ideal medium for imperfect dialogue. The medium took queues from theatre and literature in it’s inception but there is truly no other medium suited to the imperfection of real dialogue like real life.

Mediums which demand a high critical analysis like most paintings invite the viewer to study and puzzle over the narrative, but film has it’s roots in cinema, and lowbrow cinema at that. I don’t really mean that critically, it’s my preferred medium, but nothing expects an easily digestible narrative like film and TV.

I don’t think it’s inherently the mediums flaw, duration and viewing time dictates a lot.

• A good song is intended to be listened to by the same person a few times, and as such be meditated on.
• A good painting or photograph is often displayed in a galleries or otherwise as part of some sort of exhibit that encourages reflection and analysis.
• Traditional musical theatre can be shallow and vibes based, but in it’s structure, it’s intending to be viewed once or twice but listened to frequently.
• Literature typically takes days, weeks, or even months to compete, which invites a degree of analysis via it’s inventment.

Film and TV his a wired niche. Although mainstream TV also takes days, weeks of months to compete, the vast majority intentionally invites you to consume without analysis. Mainstream film fully invites the average viewer to see it once, and anything further than that is for chance or deeper fans.

However film and modern high budget TV is mor* e venture capitalism than art, it’s just that in it’s method of consumerism, it poses as art. This gives it its own rules, and one of those rules is that comprehension is only a useful tool when it favours creating and retaining viewers/income.

But as it’s rose to dominate all other media, there and many, many people who enjoy film and TV without any media literacy outside of it, and therefore their only touchstone is reality. That paired with the fact that we’ve largely cracked our ability for movies to direct focus via mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing sound etc, means it’s the ideal medium to not just emulate realistic performance, but focus on it and celebrate it. This often comes with unclear dialogue.

Then the only way for deeper fans to enjoy this mediu BBm is to re-experience it By re-exploring rit. Each additional delve, albeit short - often just an episode or feature film length - gains that viewer status unlike other mediums.

This forces realistic dialogue to be idolised by fans bove clarity, while being irrelevant to the casual viewer. At last in my opinion.

This is a lunatic ramble, which I’m writing at 3am in my time zone after being unable to sleep. Beyond any typos, I apologize if this is entirely incoherent or just wrong and assumptive.

I 100% agree on consistency, but I actually suspect LLMs would be pretty decent at translating linguistic concepts. Their grasp of contextual language is always surprisingly good, as seen in how well they rewrite tone to very specific parameters.

I don’t use ChatGPT loads, but I do use it a little, often alongside a method of project that can’t hallucinate. The other week I was talking in one chat about the vocal tone of the novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, that has this laconic, worn down dialogue with old testament feeling prose. In another chat, I was prompting ‘sage advice’ for a matcha scone recipe I wanted to make where I was marbling strawberry directly into the dough. I got which chat I was responding in wrong and accidentally had it give me a the scone recipe in Cormac McCarthy’s writing style.

MARBLED SCONES

He measured two cups of flour into a bowl and cut in the baking powder with the side of his hand. Salt followed. It hung in the flour like stone dust. He stirred it with a fork and the dry mix turned over itself and fell still. He cut the butter into cubes and dropped them in and pressed them through with his fingers until the flour took the texture of packed soil. He added a spoon of matcha. The green of river weed. The taste of old things left out in the rain.

He poured in buttermilk and cream. A little at a time. He stirred it slow with a blunt knife and the dough pulled together like it didn’t want to be one thing.

In another bowl he took a handful of flour and mixed it with strawberry powder. A drop of red dye like blood in water. He stirred in cream until it held. He pressed the green dough flat on the counter and laid the red over it and folded. Folded again. The colors turned but did not blend. Like veins of ore in a dark stone.

He shaped the dough into a slab and cut thick rounds with a glass. Each one imperfect. Some leaning. Some split. He set them on a tray lined with paper. The oven was already hot. He did not preheat it. It was always hot. Four twenty five. He watched the scones rise through the glass. They broke along the seams. Green and red and gold. They looked like they’d been dug up.

He split one open while it was still warm. He spread pistachio butter across the inside. It melted into the crumb. Then clotted cream. Then jam. The weight of it brought the top half down slow.

He took it outside and sat in the dirt to eat. There was no sound but the breeze. The sky was wide and empty. The scone was good. The scone was all right.

Now this is actually super easy to critique as a recipe, because it fucking sucks. In adaptation, it’s lost a lot of critical instruction. This is effectively a translation that must adhere to narrow and specific tone to achieve a meaning that cannot be translated without grasping a meaning to language that exists beyond the words.

Obviously this is English to English, but a big difference is that there is far more Japanese out there than Cormac McCarthy.

That being said, nothing cements what you’re saying about consistency more than how badly butchered the underlying instructions to this recipe are.

Although I think it’s worth saying how much dubs have improved in the last decade, I’ve always been reasonably lightly into anime, but always had the odd niche recommendation on the go. Most anime I watch is still casual in tone, so I like to have it on while doing art or something, so I’m a big dub supporter.

A decade ago, you could probably have a rule that unless you’d see someone wearing merch of the anime in public, the dub would be shit, but I think because streaming services are paying so much for dunning themselves, it’s lightened the burden across the scene.

Also if over 50% of users watch dubs, I wonder what percentage of their users solely watch high budget, mainstream anime which has perfectly fine dubs.

Purple: Magic??

Green: Life/death??

Red: Life/fire??

Blue: Magic/cold??

Honestly the only colour I don’t feel uncertain about is orange, that’s always bad.

Also on the topic of health potions, a great piece of advice I once heard was that if your players are in a foreign land, remove health potions. Give them health biscuits and watch them reconcile with God.

Microsoft has absolutely been preparing for the end of traditional consoles more or less since the flop of the Xbox One. Their entire push a few years back to make “Everything Xbox” was a bit mistimed and disloyal to their console war cultists but they’re right that it’s the natural end point.

I think we’ll probably see streaming games from their servers reoccur in popularity pretty soon, as much as I’m not a fan of it, because it’s the total end point for non tech savvy consumers, they just pay a subscription, get a controller which can connect to the TV or phone and download an app, no hardware required. Meanwhile every consumer who is resisting the death of tech literacy (everyone else), is going in this direction. The physical console will reduce in popularity year by year as it fills a niche that nobody needs anymore.

That being said, the popularity of the switch and steam deck interests me, because it’s a third direction away from traditional consoles that I’d not have predicted.

I doubt any major power will intervene for Iran unless it looks like a regime change that actually benefits Israel / the USA happens. China and Russia have basically been minimal allies with Iran for the sake of funding an enemy of America, but they’ve always wanted Iran to remain weaker.

The small pro Iran groups, largely the groups Iran trained will act, but they have been already for the past 3 years.

Also I actually have less of an issue with other people buying Gaiman’s work. I have no love for the man and won’t buy anything myself again, but if you buy something of his, the money goes to him, and stops there. Rowling directly funds bigotry; the money people spend on Harry Potter is in a direct pipeline to funding the suffering of innocent people.

At the very least, before everything happened with Gaiman, he was known for having positive philanthropic ventures. Even if you gave him money, a sizable portion went to him, another portion went on to better the world. I’d presume he still supports these trusts and charities too.

I’m the opposite, I want romance, character death, low magic, a later era (1700s theming more than 800s), safety tools out the wazoo and in-game bigotry that my party can rebel against.

I 100% agree with this. He’s already behaving badly, and overall it’s a huge red flag of a comment.

But his male friends are presumably his friends from either prior to the relationship or with no regards to his partner. They would be betraying a friend they’re fond of to act on this attraction.

Her male friends do not care about hurting his feelings anywhere near as much, and may even have delusions of replacing him. Many of them may have become her friends directly because of their attraction to her.

I don’t believe that this inherent means that he intends to cheat on his partner with a female friends of his own, and therefore believes men are like this, to be clear. I am lucky enough to have a beautiful partner, and have close female friend who I have platonic friendships with while aware those women are very attractive. But I wholeheartedly trust myself not to act on any attraction to anyone else, which is the bare minimum of course. There are men my partner is friends with who I can tell are attracted to her, but largely I don’t care, because I wholeheartedly trust her to rebuff them too. But I’d also expect that if one of them made a move on her, she would distance herself from them.

To me, his comment means “I don’t trust you around people who find you attractive.” That means one of two things. Either he is behaving possessively and exerting authority over her, or there actually is basis in his comment. I’d assume the former, largely because personally, I’ve known more possessive men than women who would cheat but we don’t really know enough about the situation.

Overall I hate the entire post and absolutely do not believe these two people are going to have a happy relationship.

Edit: I support her in maintaining those friendships. If he truly believes she’s not trustworthy to be around those friends, and does not want to remain in a relationship if something were to happen there, he should leave her. If it’s in his head and he’s behaving possessively, she’s better for it anyway.

In my own opinion, it’s Disney good.

Early Simpsons was slightly edgy, not in a shock factor way, but in a way where it could explore mature themes without any tonal whiplash, while still being entertaining for kids and adults.

As Fox deteriorated, so did the Simpsons, presumably from bad producing and low funding. Pretty much as soon as the Disney acquisition happened, quality began to climb again, and people have been saying it’s good for a few years.

But I can’t shake the feeling that the real feeling isn’t that it’s good, just that it isn’t bad anymore. It’s as inoffensive and bland as many Disney IPs, but doesn’t carry the true badness of Fox. I don’t trust that Disney is able to give it the ingredients for it to be great again.

Maybe it’s luck but I’ve shamelessly torrented in the UK my whole life, I wouldn’t be surprised if in the past fifteen years, I’ve downloaded a petabyte on pirated content.

I’ve never used a VPN and the one time I got a letter from my ISP, I suspect it was a scam anyway. I have used at least 4 ISPs in this period and two mobile networks, I’ve even used public and work WiFis with not issue.

I’m not sure if this a UK thing or if I’m just wildly lucky.

Oops, you’re right. It is copying something of its time because it’s all my dad would tell me when watching it growing up, but I can’t remember which film.

In time is absolutely an idea that I wish would get revisited for a TV show.

When I was a kid, for some reason, I loved the original West World movie, which is about 20% high concept and 80% “how do we copy terminator when all we have are a bunch of random Wild West, medieval and classical back lots?”

Obviously a few years ago HBO picked it up for a show, and that first season explores some of the richest philosophy I’ve seen on TV, in the way only Sci-Fi can; by building characters and technology directly around their philosophical takes and stress testing them. Also simultaneously it created an incredibly compelling story and characters. All of this stemmed from the idea “what if there was a wild west theme park manned by perfectly realistic animatronics?”

In Time may not have the cult classic reputation of the first Westworld but it’s got appeal and charm, while being basically only interesting in it’s high concept, and therefore perfect to pull apart and explore an HBO style branching plot. I bet you could get Justin Timberlake to appear in it again too, for added audience appeal. A show like this can also explore multiple characters in different classes, and those who interact with both. It’s just wasn’t that suited to a movie.

Just to ask, nobody understood the full picture of what they were making? Or was there someone who created the concept but intentional obfuscated it from everyone else via bureaucracy?

I moved to a city where the office / recording studio of some YouTubers I was inspired by when I was a teenager are based. Whenever I’d walk by the plaza where their office was based, I’d keep an eye out for them.

Green flame blade is a great horde killing spell while still feeling cool. IMO everyone picks booming blade because it’s more useful against single targets, which is more fun against a larger range of enemies, from bosses to your equals, plus thunder is rarely resisted compared to fire.

Some people implement minion rules where overflowing damage from killing a weak enemy flows on to the adjacent enemy, which of course is simplified and incorporated into green flame blade. One of the hardest things to capture in the standard D&D rules is that in fantasy, the warrior (Aragorn, Holga, Achilles) typically cuts down hundreds of mooks while the mage battles the giant powerful monster who cannot be defeated by a sword (Gandalf Vs Balrog). In D&D, either it’s totally inversed or the mage is better at both, largely because spells like fireball suit both situations better.

Green flame blade is a very easy option to balance this scale, albeit via magic.

The flip side to this article is that most of the criticisms, while really valid, talk about the intended play style for life sim games to be to live through the key points of their character’s lives with immersion.

For literally 20 years, I’ve barely seen it used for this purpose, instead people make themselves, their friends, their dream house, they cheat in money and turn off aging etc. Actually stopping to roleplay your character making friends is the activity most people do when their bored of the regular things they do.

Still, InZoi seeming to not simulate the lives of any of the other NPC’s is a big loss. Even if you’re not interacting with that part of the game, knowing it’s there is great. The Sims 4 (or 3, I forget) strove to reach the dream version of this: You buy a cheap property in a fully open world and ‘functioning’ town and you could walk from your front door to the town center, and the neighbour you see may also drive to town and you’ll see them there. Then as you play, you go from working in the gym to owning it, and can now modify it like your property because it runs on the same rules, the same goes for everything else. The Sims didn’t manage this but their later games clearly launched with this as their design’s guiding light.

I’m mostly interested in the game as a character creator and house builder, but that’s because I don’t expect any game to do a good job of what the article writer wishes for, The Sims included.

The main thing I’ve heard online is that it’s a pro-europe movement, particularly in support or rearming the EU, particularly in response to current US actions.

I was speaking to an Italian guy at the pub on the weekend and he said that’s totally wrong and it’s just protesting general government corruption. I don’t know if he’s more credible than the internet, being Italian is a big plus but being a man at the pub means it’s likely wrong. Maybe there are protests for both.