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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Gonna try to phrase this an inflammatory way:

    People who like bad movies have been conditioned by consumerism to not appreciate art. They believe spectacle, humour, and a tight plot are ‘good enough’, and they don’t value thoughtfulness, novelty, beauty, or abrasiveness nearly enough. Film is more than a way to fill time and have fun. Film is more than an explosion, a laugh, and a happy ending.

    On an unrelated note: Mad Max: Fury Road is one of my favourite movies.


  • I think you’ve correctly identified a problem, but misidentified the solution.

    It’s true that there are many redundant communities of which everyone would be better served if there were an easy way to group them together. The solution, however, is not to reduce the number of instances, but rather to provide more tools for instances to group communities together. You want communities to be spread across many instances because this maximizes user control - it’s kind of the entire point? But of course, the lack of grouping makes it very difficult to try to centralize discussion, which is important for the community to grow. This service is still a work in progress, so these kinds of things - I hope - will come in time, as both the technology and culture develops.

    tl;dr: centralized control bad, centralized discussion good, the current system does a bad job of reconciling these two positions


  • If you want, you can view science as a system of organization. A way of making sense of facts. If I give you a file of seemingly random ones and zeroes, it is useless. If I give you an algorithm to decode those ones and zeroes into a message, that has utility. However, somebody else could produce an algorithm to decode those same ones and zeroes into an entirely different message. So, which algorithm is correct? Neither.

    But say I give you another file, and Algorithm B doesn’t produce anything useful for this message, so now Algorithm A is more useful. But I also provide a new Algorithm C which also finds messages in both files. Now which is more correct, A or C? And on and on. We continue to refine our models of the data, and we hope that those models will have predictive utility until proven otherwise, but it is always possible (in fact, almost guaranteed) that there is a model of the universe that is more accurate than the one we have.

    Consider the utility of a map. A map is an obviously useful thing, but it is also incomplete. A perfect map, a “true” map, would perfectly reproduce every single minute detail of the thing it is mapping. But to do so, it would need to be built at the same scale as the thing it is mapping, which would be far too cumbersome to actually use as, you know, a map. So, we abstract details to identify patterns to maximize utility. Science, likewise, is a tool of prediction, which is useful, but is also not true, because our model of the universe can never be complete.





  • or played the game

    I would argue it’s actually a detriment to experience anything other than the source material when adapting a work. Especially with books, different people are going to have wildly different interpretations of the world. The character that exists in your mind is going to be different from somebody else who read the same book. But once it is adapted to a visual medium, you lose a bit of that magic. Which sucks, because all of those previous interpretations are still valid! More valid even, than anything that was put to screen, because they were yours.

    I think the argument for accuracy is kind of bullshit anyway (not that you said this, but others have). Is The Shining (the film) worse for the changes it made to the original text? Stephen King might think so; he would also be wrong. You don’t want something accurate, you want something that’s good. You want somebody with passion and artistic vision to create something new and uniquely amazing. The recent Last Of Us show, to my knowledge, tread pretty closely to the source material. “Aha!” you might say. But what is also true, is that the best episode of that first season was also the probably the biggest deviation from the source material. I probably don’t even need to say which one if you’ve seen the show.

    Anyway, companies should hire people who are both passionate about the source material, and want to make something cool and new in that world - not robots who are just going to recreate the original work beat for beat. If I wanted that, why wouldn’t I myself just, you know, read the book?






  • I’ve read similar things about the development of Morrowind, about creative decisions needing to get past Todd, in this excellent article about its development.

    Here are some quotes from Michael Kirkbride:

    The game was originally set in the Summerset Isles. And then we got bored and decided, “Man, this is really boring. How about we put it in a volcano with like giant bugs everywhere?” And people were like, “What?” So Todd Howard — the easiest way to get anything past Todd, at that time, was you basically just had to say “Star Wars.” Which was true for me and anybody then. So I was like, “The game should be like Dark Crystal meets Star Wars.” And he was immediately hooked. I got all the bug creatures I ever needed, we moved it from Summerset Isles to this weird dark-elf place on the map, and we just went from there.

    I used to have this thing with Todd, because he was one of the ones that’s like, “Let’s not make it too weird.” So I’d bamboozle him. There was a period where I would actually draw two different versions of a monster — the one that was weird and that I wanted to be in the game, and then one that was fucking crazy. And so I’d go to Todd, and I’m like, “OK, I think I’ve got the mid-level creature set.” And I’d show him a picture. He’d be like, “Nah, dude, that’s crazy.” Then I’d go back to my office and I would act like I was drawing something new, and I’d just come back with the original drawing of what I really wanted to be in there. Like, “Hey, is this what you were thinking?” And he’d be all, “Oh, yeah, that’s much better. That’s great.”

    I can definitely believe his influence has become immense following the studio’s success - though it definitely feels like he needs to hand the reins over to somebody else.