#step.blogger

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It's always disappointing when a series makes a big deal about societal and structural problems in it's setting, making readers think it has interesting things to say about the subject, only to then resolve the problems by fighting The CEO of Racism, John Racist, so that all of society's problems would then get better because they promoted a new CEO.

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this is a very funny crossover idea. Jing Yuan has dedicated his life to fighting against basically the exact thing the dungeon exists for, and what marcille wants specifically. Trying to imagine a world where his pet lion was the winged lion makes sense has me chuckling.

Though honestly it wouldn't be hard to slot him in there. The Xianzhou faction maps quite neatly to dungeon meshi's elves in terms of goals and philosophies, with the cloud knights serving the role of the canaries. The merged universe AU fanfic is right there. The question then becomes. how do you get the winged lion to befriend him? How would the lion befriend anybody, really? Well honestly that's more a straight up dungeon meshi question that has nothing to do with the crossover...still an interesting one that I'll be thinking about, though.

hugs 🦁

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Lately, I've been thinking about the effect of real-world time on perception of media. Or, wait, let me start from the beginning.

When I was 11, I read the book Ender's Game for some school assignment or another. I don't remember ever considering Ender a relatable character, but certainly my understanding of the events was shaped by being of an age to see the protagonist not so much as a young child but as someone of my peer group, someone who could have been slotted amongst my classmates without anybody batting an eye.

Over a decade later, I read the sequel, Speaker for the Dead; it takes place many years later, when Ender is in his thirties, and my feelings about the in-universe time skip were undeniably shaped by the real life time gap between my reading of the novels. Reading the first book back then and then the second book now created a feeling where it's almost like, I'm browsing the facebook page of someone I had known in middle school but lost contact with, checking up on how they're doing today. The real-time factor caused me to perceive it less like a timeskip, and more like a reunion - the feelings were closer to "oh wow, that's my boy! I haven't seen him in years! Wonder what he's up to?" Which in turn gave me a better position to appreciate the parts of the narrative about him struggling to find a place in his adulthood than I would have been had I perceived it more strictly as a quick skip from 11 to 20 to 36.

While musing about this, I considered a VN I played a few years back, which took place over three in-game days - except at the end of one in-game day, the game would lock you out from progressing for 24 hours real time. So that as the in-game investigator protagonist was ruminating on the information that had been discovered that day, the player would be forced to do the same. In this example, by forcing the player to experience the same timeframe as the in-game characters, the sense of it being an in-depth and extensive investigation increases, even though without the forced pauses the game would be short enough to blow through in a handful of hours real-time.

Which brings to mind how time effects things in long-running serial works. It's well known that an audience which watches an episode or reads a chapter week by week has a very different experience than one binging through whole seasons or volumes at a time, but I wonder if the real time relative to the in-universe time makes that effect stand out more? Fight scenes, for instance, have been known to take up several chapters in certain manga or webnovels. What does it do to the reader's perception, if from their point a view a fight takes a whole month, while for the characters they read about it's only been a couple hours? Readers might feel that the situation is more stressful, since the pressure of the fight has been ongoing for a long time for them, while in-universe it was a rough afternoon but no more than that. Contrastingly, when a series skips ahead or otherwise has long periods of time for characters that feel short for readers, it can feel like no time has passed and everything is still the same, unless the author really stresses the differences in world-state that occurred offscreen. Because the reader hasn't changed at all.

No conclusion here exactly, I just think it's interesting how often an audience's response to a work, the emotions felt, are more closely tied to their real-life timescale, something almost completely out of the author's control, as opposed to in-universe time, which can be intentionally shifted or played with for the sake of the narrative.

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It's kind of interesting how little it takes for the human brain to find storylines sometimes. Occasionally what would otherwise be just bland and static events, bullet points on a list, can be pattern-matched into interesting tales, if told with enough interest and intent.

A friend of mine jokingly challenged me to put together a music playlist of 118 songs, with each one representing an element on the periodic table. For most of them, the reasoning for the song choices have been fairly surface level, associations through name, personal association, or cultural connections, but occasionally I find something that inspires me to think a little deeper. I was looking through the wikipedia page on strontium, trying to find something interesting or unique about it, when I saw this bit of history:

Look at that! It's a whole narrative, right there, told in production numbers over time. If you'll forgive the anthropomorphism for a bit, it's so easy to imagine the story here, an element once lauded for it's technological importance, made irrelevant by the creeping advancement of time, now only able to look back and bitterly reminisce on the glory days. How dramatic! How tragic!

It's almost like it used to rule the world, but now it sleeps alone, sweeping the streets it used to own -

anyway, I decided on the song for this one, is the point.

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One thing about gacha that I think gets overlooked by critics, (perhaps because they have the good sense not to play the games in the first place) is, rather than monetary investment, how much time investment, sometimes even moreso than monetary investment, these games drain from users.

Essentially every gacha has a steep resource cost for utilizing its characters, requiring hours of grinding in repetitive content that adds little to no value for the player. Furthermore, most have "dailies" requiring a login every day. This combines to create a system in which most players log in every day, to spend too much time on content that does not actually satisfy them

Now obviously this whole thing is part of the gacha virtual casino system, keep them coming back and invested so they're more willing to spend money eventually. It all does come down to money in the end. But it is a little weird to me that even those criticizing the game design of gacha don't often focus in on this. Because 1) as a game design element this is atrocious but also 2) Many gacha fans brag about being "f2p," and know that they personally can control their spending habits (even as the genre preys on those who can't), but they ignore how they might have protected their wallet but found several days of time disappearing. It's something worth warning about, I think.

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I think the way "retro" works in people's minds is that they consider the stuff that came out after they were old enough and invested enough to pay attention as "new," and stuff that came out before that as "retro" or "old." So for 22 year old OP, who was 12 back then, probably they were only just starting to pay attention to music, and the part of them that still remembers when the songs came out still considers them a "new release."

So it makes sense that people of that age cohort would feel shock upon realizing what they think of as not that long ago - their childhoods - were actually a full decade ago, while people a bit older, having already had that realization a few years back, just see them as yet another song that came out.

Or maybe you just have an unusually strong grasp of time and every other 30 year old would be shocked, that could be the case too! I'm just taking wild guesses here.

I feel old and I'm only 22

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One thing that I think is cool for writers to do in novels that are About something is giving different protagonist characters different and opposing opinions and positions on the issue. it's great because it simultaneously deepens the conversation, enhances characterization, and creates a natural source of conflict. and best of all, it deflects from the sense that the characters are turning to the camera and describing what the author thinks the Correct Opinion is, without actually defanging whatever the author is trying to say

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Okay so if I understand the Rooster Teeth situation correctly: the co-founder, Burnie Burns, who left the company shortly before its implosion, now owns the studio's name and brand again. But he doesn't have the rights to the properties that made RT successful in the first place, nor any of the staff and former employees that built the company and those properties up. So if it's just the name brand, rather than a resurrection it may end up looking more like parading the old RT's dead body around. In other words:

RoosterTeeth: Weekend at Burnie's.

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the fact that parahumans is the term specifically for the wildbow/worm/ward type superhero characters always feels so strange to me. Like I've internalized it as part of my general cape lexicon, what do you mean it doesn't have a decades long history in marvel or dc or something

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It's a solid litmus test for how people act towards groups they don't see as "normal," but otherwise cause no harm to anybody. On a society-wide scale, many gains in basic rights for minorities have come as a result of majority members starting to see marginalized groups as "normal." When advocating to the masses, this is unfortunately a route that must be pursued. However, when choosing friends or trying to become a better person, the important thing is not that you know the correct list of groups that fit into some nebulous "normal," but rather learning to live with and respect those who you do not and perhaps cannot understand. Because the sad fact is, there's always going to be people outside of your experience. People living rich, full, lives in ways or with preferences that you never considered, or will seem strange to you on first glance. When, not if, you meet those people, what will your first response be? Will it be to shun, to degrade, to declare that every previous judgment of society was incorrect but you now have found the true list of people who deserve your scorn? Or will it be to meet with them as friends?

Never trust a furry disliker

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After my recent reread of Alice, I learned that a decade back there was a republication by seven seas, a company primarily known for translations of light novels and manga, illustrated in that style rather than using the classic pictures.

It kind of made me laugh a little at first, the way the vibe difference between the classic and the anime images created a pretty different emotional response. But thinking about it more, honestly this way might be more accurate to the original spirit than the actual original images at this point. The original Tenniel images have a style I don't see often today, so I associate it mainly with older classics and well known works - time has given it a sense of exclusivity or "dignity" that I'm not sure was originally intended. Carroll went out of his way to hire a well known satire cartoonist for the illustrations, after all, something associated with contemporary entertainment. It's possible that audiences in the 1860s felt a similar vibe from the original art as modern ones might for these.

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Have you ever thought about how weird it is that "the colors on the screen changing to black and white" has become such a common shorthand in media for a scene that's a flashback?

If I had to guess, I'd say that the practice first began because when the news or documentaries show old footage or photographs, those were in monochrome - because they were taken before color photography or video was common. So creators can use it for a quick visual association to an older era.

But the association has transcended beyond being a mere reminder, and stand on it's own. For instance, you can find the same technique used in videogames - a level taking place in somebody's memories, for instance, may be made in monochrome geometry, and players will understand what is being implied. This is despite the fact that a visual reminder for a videogame would look completely different - you rarely see something like PS5 game start using PS1-like graphical entries to represent the past. (Though I can think of a handful of examples that do actually do this, its not completely unheard of.) The color palette change as visual shorthand for the past is now something that people understand even independent of being in a medium where those associations are natural.

Which makes me think about the future. Color has been possible in movies for over a century, color TV began to be in use in wealthy nations in the 1950s, and by the start of the 90s completely overwhelmed black and white across the globe. In that time most cameras also made the switch. Viewers in their 20s or 30s today likely don't remember a time where black and white media was the predominant form of visual media; the black and white visual association works for them not because it is in their memory but because they've seen older shows and photos and know they were made before they were old enough to remember. Is it possible that 200 years from now, greyscale color schemes will exist as an artifact of the past, a visual cue that denotes the past even when casual watchers don't have any first hand experience with true black and white media? Will it seem inexplicable, somewhat how some kids today think of floppy disks as "the save icon"? It's interesting to think about.

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I have no idea what the best way to rec works to people is. Feels like, recs that are too positive, talking something up as the best media in the world, gives people inflated standards, and they are inevitably disappointed in the work as it cannot live up to impossible expectations. But conversely, leading a rec by discussing the flaws and problems one has with it can cause them to go in with a negative mindset, taking issues that a casual audience might not notice on first glance and elevating them to a core part of the experience. In either case it leads to amplification of a work's failures in the eyes of the audience.

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the thing about posts like this is that yes there are a lot of stupid rules in life, but you need to remember that you are not immune from stupid either. just because you can't see the purpose doesn't mean there isn't one.

I don't disagree that there are many stupid rules that don't need to be followed, but when breaking a societal convention, try to keep in mind “is this really stupid, or just stupid from my perspective and role in society? Or just a kneejerk rejection of things that inconvenience me personally?" Reminder that billionaires think worker's rights laws and minimum wage are also stupid rules that don't need to be followed.

"do you seriously think you're above the rules" the stupid ones yeah

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I have a mild interest in video game history stuff, so I was reading through the "50 Years of Text Games" page recently. I got to the article on The Hobbit (1982), which I had only heard about in passing before this, but this seems to have been an oversight given its apparent importance. Looking through this and some other articles, the game was well known for having npc behavior years ahead of its time, and was inspirational to early games programmers; this page even going so far as to say it "is often credited for helping to jump-start the British home computing market." But beyond the game's technical achievements, one paragraph at the article's end about the game's creator, Veronika Megler, stuck with me:

Megler for years was little aware of the game’s success. After graduating, Melbourne House offered her a full-time position, but she was sick of assembler debugging and turned it down: “I have a very low tolerance for doing the same thing over and over again.” She accepted an entry-level job at IBM, who “made it very clear that having written a game was not regarded as any kind of relevant work experience,” and would go on to a long and successful career as a computer professional—but never again worked in games. It wasn’t until the 2000s that she learned the extent of The Hobbit’s popularity, and its impact on a generation of players around the world: players who had first learned English to solve it, or had their imaginations fired for their own computer careers by the magic inherent in the game’s simulated possibilities.

(50 Years of Text Games)

And that got me thinking about legacy and how we perceive ourselves for a bit. Because to Megler none of this stuff is that important, apparently. For her this was just a college programming job, what others saw as groundbreaking NPC design she saw as ordinary, a stepping stone in her career; not part of her real life, which involved IT work. And today she is a leading data scientist at Amazon. But if you look her up online, check her wikipedia page, all of that stuff is a footnote. The last 40 years of her life, the stuff she valued, it's all placed under several paragraphs talking about her involvement in games, stuff she did for less than a year. 100 years from now, assuming people are still playing video games, people will probably be talking about The Hobbit, long after all the other stuff fades into history.

Really makes you realize that we have very little control over how we will be remembered, what about our lives others consider important and worth remembering.

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they need to invent a season with the temperature of winter but the sun schedule of summer.