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[Metaphorical readings] come off as arrogant and dismissive: an insistence that the Artistic Interpretation™ is important enough that the text and setting itself is irrelevant by comparison.
Artistic interpretations (that are competent) don't believe this. Meaning and text have symbiotic relationships - they enable each other. Two primary paths of thought here are [Narrative mechanics communicate meaning and increase the impact it lands in audiences with,] i.e. Storytelling, and [Narrative mechanics create a structure that facilitate further narrative mechanics, serve as a playground of artistic interpretation, and signal author dedication / knowledge / etc.,] i.e. Worldbuilding. I talk about this symbiosis more in a prior post about the curtains meme here.
I don't care about your allegedly real, deeper, more insightful, etc. reasons why the curtains are blue right now, I am busy tracing a supply chain for blue dye.
Like, by all means, care about the stuff that you desire to care about. But you're also making a claim on "What in a story ought to be considered more important?" It looks like it's trending towards "Nothing in a story ought to be considered more important than anything else," and I find that perspective difficult to defend. It leads to conclusions like "The themes of the story ought not to be considered more important than the number of pages," which I find silly.
I'll move from the abstract to the concrete. Yes, I think themes ought to be considered more important than the supply chain of blue dye. That doesn't mean you need to care more about them, but I believe art is more valuable for evoking philosophical meaning than for the inherent existence of mechanics. If you disagree with that claim, I pose this question: Why in particular is the supply chain more important than the page count?
I may as well post my definition of art – and implicit claim on its primary value – here, as I recently polished it up for another discussion.
"The use of any medium to evoke philosophical meaning beyond just, explaining the meaning in normal text"
maybe this is just because of the depth of writing regarding things i like but overanalysis is never the real cause of the pseudointellectuals in communities i'm involved in. instead it's because of some weird misconception pushed by the franchise's wiki that never got corrected because one part of the franchise is only available as a nearly 20 year old movie anthology and no one's read angel notes for some reason. or kagetsu tohya. or plus-disc. or hollow ataraxia. or any of the melty games.
I don't know what you're talking about particularly, so inevitable caveats, but this itself reads as pseudo intellectual. Intellectual artistic interpretation isn't whether about you get the factual detail right. That's geekery and trivia, fine domains that have their place but not about the meaning of a piece. Correct trivia and incorrect trivia are operating on the same plane of artistic meaning. This tails into my above response – if someone misremembers the number of pages in the book, does that make their interpretive effort worse?
Of course, some misconceptions have more immediate bearing on interpretations than page count. But making an interpretation off of a misunderstanding isn't some pretentious phony fakery, it's just making a mistake. And hey, interpretation is a form of art in its own right, and maybe their misread (alternatively "their read on an alternative universe version of the piece) still has something valuable to say.
my hot take is that "the curtains are just blue" has caused more anti-intellectualism than almost any other individual internet post and has done genuine and significant societal harm. sometimes the curtains are really just blue, but people use this to justify not having any reading comprehension more often than to actually criticize the tendency of pseudointellectuals to overanalyze everything
The curtains meme is garbage, but I'm skeptical of its actual impact. Is it convincing people, or is it just giving already anti-art people a phrase to voice their pre-existing sentiment? I guess I can't be sure.
The curtains meme is garbage, but I'm skeptical of its actual impact. Is it convincing people, or is it just giving already anti-art people a phrase to voice their pre-existing sentiment? I guess I can't be sure.
from a memetic perspective, it's accomplishing basically the same thing either way. it allows people with existing anti-art sentiment to coalesce their vague, abstract sentiment into a concrete, easy-to-visualize, repeatable phrase, strengthening their existing belief and making it easier to spread to people who might not otherwise be susceptible carriers
The 67 meme has already decreased in popularity, its reached the same stage as the low taper fade meme did following the end of conflict between locked in alien and king von anti piracy These words would put a victorian child in a mental asylum.
Anyone who says "Just google it" is a stupid bitch who I hate. FUCK YOU! I DON'T WANT TO TYPE FOUR WORDS IN A SEARCH ENGINE, I WANT TO ASK YOU! IT'S A MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL AGREEMENT BECAUSE YOU WE GET TO a) talk to someone (humans are social creatures) b) i get to practise not only effective communication but also beating back the weird feelings in my stomach (this may also apply to you)
THE PRECISE MOMENT YOU SAY JUST GOOGLE IT YOU HAVE INSTANTLY SHUT DOWN THE CONVERSATION AND MADE ME LOOK LIKE AN UTTER TOOL! THANKS A FUCKING LOT! YOU MAY HAS WELL HAVE JUST SAID "WHO ASKED" BECAUSE IT EFFECTIVELY COMMINCATES YOU DON'T WANNA TALK TO ME!
if you actually geniunely don't know, say "I don't know" you pretensious, stupid, evil, FUCKASS.
Anyone who says "Just google it" is a stupid bitch who I hate. FUCK YOU! I DON'T WANT TO TYPE FOUR WORDS IN A SEARCH ENGINE, I WANT TO ASK YOU! IT'S A MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL AGREEMENT BECAUSE YOU WE GET TO a) talk to someone (humans are social creatures) b) i get to practise not only effective communication but also beating back the weird feelings in my stomach (this may also apply to you)
THE PRECISE MOMENT YOU SAY JUST GOOGLE IT YOU HAVE INSTANTLY SHUT DOWN THE CONVERSATION AND MADE ME LOOK LIKE AN UTTER TOOL! THANKS A FUCKING LOT! YOU MAY HAS WELL HAVE JUST SAID "WHO ASKED" BECAUSE IT EFFECTIVELY COMMINCATES YOU DON'T WANNA TALK TO ME!
if you actually geniunely don't know, say "I don't know" you pretensious, stupid, evil, FUCKASS.
Humans are social creatures, it's true, and preferring asking a human to a machine is totally normal, sure.
But it's also totally normal to not be interested in conversations like that. They're generally pretty shallow and brief, especially when you're not the one getting information.
If one person says no to your invitation by saying "just google it," why not just try with someone else? It doesn't seem like that big a deal.
Bigger picture, if you're coming in with a personal need to have conversations, why not talk about the sorts of stuff that more people like talking about, versus more linear questions?
The 67 meme has already decreased in popularity, its reached the same stage as the low taper fade meme did following the end of conflict between locked in alien and king von anti piracy These words would put a victorian child in a mental asylum.
I don't get why Minecraft and Warhammer fans are so incredibly upset about changes to their franchise when these are literally the most "do what you want" settings on Earth
Like I can kinda get it when you can't find many people to play with because your preferred way of playing isn't very popular but both of these franchises are so huge that you will eventually find someone to play with
I don't like the newest editions of 40k but it's not particularly hard to find some people that want to play an adjusted version of 4th edition. Just go the store and ask some people if they wanna try that out. And if I don't like the lore, it's all questionable anyway, just take it as you want
I don't get why Minecraft and Warhammer fans are so incredibly upset about changes to their franchise when these are literally the most "do what you want" settings on Earth
Like I can kinda get it when you can't find many people to play with because your preferred way of playing isn't very popular but both of these franchises are so huge that you will eventually find someone to play with
I don't like the newest editions of 40k but it's not particularly hard to find some people that want to play an adjusted version of 4th edition. Just go the store and ask some people if they wanna try that out. And if I don't like the lore, it's all questionable anyway, just take it as you want
For me, the social side of it just ended up being too much effort. It's pretty difficult to convince wholly new people to play your main version of 40k with how much an army costs. On the other hand, the main places to find people with the minis are running the new edition. Fine if you can handle a couple games of the stuff while recruiting, I guess, but I'm so incompatible with 10th I can't even manage that.
The setting and story though, yeah I don't see a reason for many of the complaints.
now, this has to come with the caveat that I haven't played the game (price complaints about the game are valid, I can't just lay down 90 bucks for a game). However, I think that to some extent the visual aspect can be analyzed purely from watching gameplay. And like, the Pokemon themselves look great, which is the most important thing. Dare I say they look amazing. And as a whole, the game looks pretty good in general. The environment looks overall perfectly fine. I'm sure you have a bunch of examples ready to go, such as, for example, this:
And yeah, if you were looking at that all game, it might be a problem. Except you aren't. The focus of the game is always on the Pokemon, not the environment. These flat models aren't an issue or even noticeable if you're playing the game and not going out of your way to look for them. In other words, the graphics generally aren't a problem unless you are looking for problems. What actually matters in the game looks great, and what doesn't look great doesn't matter. You can call it cheap all you want, but these are completely reasonable sacrifices to make to get a game out on time.
And yeah, if you were looking at that all game, it might be a problem. Except you aren't. The focus of the game is always on the Pokemon, not the environment. These flat models aren't an issue or even noticeable if you're playing the game and not going out of your way to look for them. In other words, the graphics generally aren't a problem unless you are looking for problems. What actually matters in the game looks great, and what doesn't look great doesn't matter. You can call it cheap all you want, but these are completely reasonable sacrifices to make to get a game out on time.
I did get to buy the game and play it and part of the gimmick is that you get to just roam around the roofs and streets of luminose, go on top of every building you can, see every alley, etc. Its an open world game after all. And when you spend so much time climbing up ladders and checking around the borders of roofs you start to really notice how every window in luminose is fake, and how in some spots you can even make out the pixels on the texture.
Its not even part of a cute aesthetic or anything, its just embarrassing coming from a big name like pokemon
Folding Ideas (you know, the Youtube) isn't thriving right now. I really like him and love a ton of his videos, but I think he's in a relative weak point.
The core of Folding Ideas, to me, has always been about two interconnecting strengths. Storytelling and insight. He tells you about a non-intuitive story that happened, like a movie turning out real bad or people believing a wacky conspiracy, and explains why in a fashion that not only clarifies the non-intuitive story, but tells you something more about art and the world. Bigger picture, the insight helps us care about the story, and the story makes the insight richer and more entertaining.
Lately, I've seen three interconnecting problems here. More importantly, he's running low on powerful insights. Less importantly, he's long been a little bully-ish and indulgent and bitter, and that's starting to grate on me, with a particular recent whiff in that department. A bit meta and last, not every video will be a banger, but he's releasing 2-3 videos per year now, ostensibly for high quality productions that aren't always there now.
I'll say that "modern era Folding Ideas" started with Manufacturing Discontent and Fortnite about 6 years ago. I've seen most of his videos since then, and imo his two worst of that era, his Jarhead and James Rolfe videos, are about within the past year. I also found his Gold video unremarkable, which makes 3 of 5 in the past 2 years. The NFT/Decentraland/Gamestop trilogy surely set high expectations, but I think his work before that is so far better than this work after.
Jarhead is the natural one to talk about when it comes to lacking powerful insight. I don't have a lot to say about it, because I don't think there is a lot to say about it, but I'll still spoiler because it just came out.
As far as insight, the video's core and culmination is this: There was a movie that artfully critiqued an evil of the establishment, but its sequels were cash grabs, and in that process, created product that uplifts the establishment instead. This is possible because the median viewer supports the establishment (at least parts of it).
Is this a really insightful takeaway? I don't think so. Art gets muddied by commercial interests all the time, and this often happens because art is less the interest of the median viewer versus other stuff. That financial interests, the median viewer's interests, and the establishment can intersect is like, somewhat novel (to me anyways) in the video's implicit generality of the claim, but plenty of other figures have talked about specific examples of this phenomena before, like many videos by... Folding Ideas, including as far back as 10 years ago.
Consequently, the storytelling suffers. The discussion of Jarhead 1 and its messages on evils within the military apparatus is nice and good, but FI openly says the other movies are uninteresting and have little to talk about, and... they are. Yeah. It was pretty boring and meandering. I don't care that they bargain bin money grubber producers filmed everything in Bulgaria because it was cheap, because they were based in Bulgaria. It's trivia. He tries to set up this cute twist where, he feints that Jarhead went sour because the producers were offended by the first movie's critique and reversed it, but what really happened is bargain bin money grubbers made bargain bin money grubber product, which just isn't really an engaging or exciting answer. Like ok yeah.
Of this video and James Rolfe, I think this one is worse. I understand why he would make and release James Rolfe, and I guess Gold was adequate, but I actually don't understand how this one got through the process.
The personality stuff is harder to talk about, both because it's the kind of material that slips through the fingers, and because I haven't watched James Rolfe in a while (and feel no particular need to return).
To start, FI has long been a bit of a clique guy. Enjoying railing on the out-group idiots and morons from his mountain of insight, he can be very dismissive and even smug. The Doug Walker & The Wall video and NFT video come to mind, among others. FI openly supports cringe culture, using "cringe" as a very pointed and aware attack in both of those videos. If you know FI, you probably know this clip.
And like, I want to treat this subject delicately. I don't want to civility police a Youtuber (or a group thereof) for being a bit ungentle when their targets of analysis are often like. People who have done mean and unkind and even awful things, including literal QAnon fascists. Having a bit of an upset reaction to these misbehaviors is rational and fair.
And hell, even though it's different to demean and pick on people from a position of relative strength and smugness, some of that is fair enough too. I'm not going to freak out if someone calls a fascist a loser in a condescending way, even when it's to mock and get their kicks versus a defensive response to harms. Maybe it's not the perfectly optimal prosocial wisest possible way to navigate the situation, but like, whatever, it's nitpicking type territory.
But there's just a lot of this superiority and it's very delicate to get right. It's easy to be pretentious and an asshole when you spend much of your online presence condescending about someone else, because sometimes the love of the game can inevitably eclipse the ostensible justification and point. This is especially true as the repeated presence of condescension can create a more poisonous environment, even when the individual targets deserve it, just because condescension is scary ground to be a big part of one's experience and attitude in general.
I think the Doug Walker video and NFT video present two different contexts for FI's use of cringe, one of which I find more justified than the other. This isn't to rip on the NFT video, which I still find really good, just to help clarify why some uses of cringe can be better than others.
The cringe call on Doug, alongside the other personal attacks, aren't (just?) for kicks - they have a clear point. The story of this video is "Why did Doug's The Wall get made?" and FI's answer is to look at who Doug is. His credible-seeming picture is that Doug is both very confident and pretty incurious about artistic depth and meaning. Doug's response to the original Wall is shallow and tangential then, therefore, because Doug is pretty shallow about art, and it's hard to make a fitting response to earnest depth in the original Wall when that's not a domain Doug cares to understand. Doug isn't (just?) "cringe" because "Lol what a moron to make what shitty bad art." He's cringe because he's pretentious and controlling, charging the original Wall with these nasty nonsense two-faced accusations of art crime, trying to take it down and hammer it into his personal shallow frame, versus trying to understand it. In his version of The Wall, Doug is smug, condescending, petty, and demeaning. When someone tries to fake power and gain fake power in a situation, taking them down a peg with laughter, with calling them cringe, fits more naturally into the situation than just leveling cringe as an insult to whatever.
In the process of tearing down Doug, FI actually builds up ideas of artistic depth and sincerity, because Doug's The Wall is a challenge to the importance of these ideas ideas, and FI's insults often clearly and plainly state why Doug's The Wall fails here.
The cringe call on NFTs has some similar ground to the Doug one. Many people were pretentious about the value and impact of NFTs. But FI was specifically calling out the art of them. And while that art is bad, and has elements of pretense, the cringe call doesn't ring as deep because it doesn't matter as much. It matters that the art is bad to help establish that NFTs are a financial device versus an artistic one, but – as FI explicitly says – most NFT holders know this already. By and large, they are not pretentiously claiming to have artistic merit in their purchase, they are making a speculative financial investment. When FI trashes on their art, the "point / fun" balance of trashing now tips more towards "fun" than it did for Doug.
The James Rolfe video is my locus for displeasure with FI's bashing, but not quite in the same direction as the NFT discussion establishes. Him viscously criticizing Rolfe has a clear point that is central to the video – in trashing Rolfe, FI examines his own personal insecurities, which help explain why he cares about this or that failing of Rolfe. However, this meaning wasn't enough for me. I found it deeply uncomfortable to see such a thorough vivisection of an individual human being who hasn't even done anything (important) wrong. Instead of FI's personal insecurity angle causing the bashing to snap into focus for me, it instead felt deeply self indulgent to flay a (to my and his knowledge) fundamentally decent person like that, using their metaphorical skin as a public canvas for understanding his own insecurities. This is the kind of project and analysis that I think would be great and beneficial if he kept it private, but exposing the world to that viciousness felt exposing Rolfe in a gross and vulnerable way, as if FI leaked a nude of Rolfe having a small penis to comment on his own penis insecurities.
I also found this biting thumbnail for the Jarhead video another superiority misfire.
For a 45 minute meandering video that has a weak two sentence insight to end on, this 'machine of thoughtlessness' tag and artsy composition felt pretty unaware, honestly like some of Doug's behavior that FI calls out in his The Wall video
I agree that the Jarhead video is his weakest in a while, but my gripes are more about the presentation than the ideas. By the standard that Olson has set for himself, I found it sloppy, and I got the impression that parts of it were rushed over the finish line in order to capitalize on the cultural relevance boost that the commencement of Operation Venezuelan Freedom has given to an anti-war film like Jarhead. He really blitzes through that tangent about Canadian film, for example, and I think the ending could have been given more room to breathe. The thesis isn't groundbreaking by any means, but I enjoyed the examination of some bad films I didn't know very much about, and I think this is a misread:
This is possible because the median viewer supports the establishment (at least parts of it).
This is basically the opposite of the message I took away from the video. I read the whole made-up story about the angry producers as a subversion of the idea that individual culpability is the reason why bad propagandizing sequels get made. We want to imagine that these sorts of things happen because some individual with power and influence was mad about something and had the support of the average person, but the actual truth is that it's just a system of profit incentives functioning as usual, and nobody involved has to actually have strong feelings about the matter. These films are like the AI slop that Olson ends the video on: made as cheaply as possible in order to turn uncritical consumption by a small number of people into the largest possible profit. The "median viewer" and their opinions have nothing to do with it; the median viewer probably has no idea that Jarhead ever got sequels. I read the main takeaway as being that the system chugs along no matter what individual people do or feel, which is certainly not a revolutionary idea, but that's not really what I go Olson's content for.
Also, I think the idea with the thumbnail is that it's the same font all the Jarhead sequels use.
I agree that the Jarhead video is his weakest in a while, but my gripes are more about the presentation than the ideas. By the standard that Olson has set for himself, I found it sloppy, and I got the impression that parts of it were rushed over the finish line in order to capitalize on the cultural relevance boost that the commencement of Operation Venezuelan Freedom has given to an anti-war film like Jarhead. He really blitzes through that tangent about Canadian film, for example, and I think the ending could have been given more room to breathe.
The thesis isn't groundbreaking by any means, but I enjoyed the examination of some bad films I didn't know very much about, and I think this is a misread:
This is basically the opposite of the message I took away from the video. I read the whole made-up story about the angry producers as a subversion of the idea that individual culpability is the reason why bad propagandizing sequels get made. We want to imagine that these sorts of things happen because some individual with power and influence was mad about something and had the support of the average person, but the actual truth is that it's just a system of profit incentives functioning as usual, and nobody involved has to actually have strong feelings about the matter. These films are like the AI slop that Olson ends the video on: made as cheaply as possible in order to turn uncritical consumption by a small number of people into the largest possible profit. The "median viewer" and their opinions have nothing to do with it; the median viewer probably has no idea that Jarhead ever got sequels. I read the main takeaway as being that the system chugs along no matter what individual people do or feel, which is certainly not a revolutionary idea, but that's not really what I go Olson's content for.
Also, I think the idea with the thumbnail is that it's the same font all the Jarhead sequels use.
We may be using the term "median viewer" in different ways. If we interpret "median viewer" in terms of market penetration and cultural consciousness, then you're surely right, these films were too small scope to get there. And I agree that this is not a story about individuals.
But when we're thinking about the form that slop content will take, it will usually take a form that is palatable to common sensibilities. If the average American was hostile to the U.S. military and to the country / government, I think the Jarhead sequels would look very different, even though the motive behind them would not change. It's an impersonal system of profit, but that system optimizes by (to some extent) matching peoples' preferences. The system would continue if preferences changed, but with different specifics.
That ending tack-on makes me realize we're probably approaching this from different angles. The system allowed the mediocre sequels to exist at all, and the preference distribution changed the specific nature of their mediocrity.
The 67 meme has already decreased in popularity, its reached the same stage as the low taper fade meme did following the end of conflict between locked in alien and king von anti piracy These words would put a victorian child in a mental asylum.