aliceblossom @ aliceblossom @lemmy.world

Posts

7

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112

Joined

2 yr. ago

Big fan of "The Bunny with the Pearl Earring".

More education is definitely needed - that's the stage the movement is at. But you (whoever is reading this) could be the one to educate people. The emphasis of most of these local chapters is education, and they'll teach you how, where, and when to educate people.

Reminder that the system doesn't have to be two party. Ranked choice voting (aka single transferable vote), proportional representation - these things increase political competition by making more parties mathematically possible and give us greater control over our government.

It's already been implemented in some States and municipalities across the country. If yours isn't one of them, it could be. There are several orgs trying to get this done such as Rank The Vote. Check to see if you have a local chapter and how you can help them!

Pretty hype. The other digimon story games are pretty strong as far as the franchise is concerned, so I expect this one to be of similar quality. And with a title like Time Stranger I think there's a lot of crwative possibilities with this one.

Millie Bobby Brown actually has (or had) this going on due to her filming Stranger Things during formative years. It's really fascinating to listen to this weird halfway point between the two. You can hear it well here: https://youtu.be/xhjooxtYf9Q?t=50

A particularly interesting point is around ~1:10 where she's been largely using her American accent, but she uses the word after, but instead of starting the word with the TRAP vowel we would expect, she uses the BATH vowel instead owing to her original British accent. But I think what's even more interesting is that when she does this, it doesn't sound like she swapped back to her British accent for a single word - it sounds much more like someone with a general American accent doing an impression of a British person saying the word after!

Really appreciate that. Thanks.

I will never entertain the argument of the person you replied to and your post is exactly why. The originally story being divided into three pieces, is in itself not an actual problem. It could potentially cause other problems, but whether or not it actually does is completely separate.

Remake took me 80 hours to complete (to my non-completionist satisfaction) and had a clear and satisfying beginning middle and end. On this front, I don't know what you could realistically complain about.

Sorry for the double reply, but another useful perspective in this is derogation. I often forget this idea because I'm very class minded, but it's also very important. This is the idea that a culture can be profited off of while simultaneously despising the people that practice it. In practice, this exists as a business around a specific cultural item succeeding specifically because the business is NOT owned/operated by the original cultural group. Some of the best examples of this are around Black American culture in the US. Some cultural products were only valuable AFTER they were owned, operated, and proliferated by White Americans. Which is kinda just Racism Classic™ but allowing certain useful things to cross the cultural line for profits sake.

I think you can apply the socioeconomic and derogation lenses here. Socioeconomically, Japan has been ahead of nearly every other Asian country for a long while, with only places like China and Singapore recently catching up to them. So, I think that makes it feel okay. And derogatively, I don't think these restaurants are successful because they specifically aren't being run by Japanese people. So that's good on the front as well. So I'd say, yeah, overall it feels fine. However, I'm not Japanese and don't have a wealth of additional context that might provide counter arguments.

The popularization of Black American music is indeed a complex topic in this arena. Like, obviously a lot of cultural outsiders made a lot of money off of the situation, but there were at least some benefits to the arrangement, although whether or not they outweighed the cons is perhaps difficult to say. For example, if outsiders had abstained entirely from profiting, what would have changed? Obviously more of the money made percentage-wise would've gone to the owning culture, but would there have been less money overall? Would it have reached the same levels of popularity? If so, it almost certainly wouldn't've happened as quickly, right? These are difficult questions to answer and I'm not educated enough in this area to really offer any. So, while not worth a damn, my gut feelings is that there are at least some strong arguments as to why overall the absence of outsider profiting would've been better for the owning culture.

The know of cultural ownership is absolutely unravel-able in many situations, just not all. In some situations it's exceedingly clear and in others, not. I think you're trying very hard to find hard-and-fast, absolute rules for these situations, but they don't exist. The keyword is nuance, nuance, nuance. Each situation is different and each situation deserves scrutiny as to whether or not it crosses the line. This is a judgement call made by each and every person.

If you really want me to engage on the specific situation of Tostitos/chips and salsa I will, so you can see the process of my scrutiny.

First, I think that as any item of culture becomes more and more diffused (ethically or not), it's original ownership becomes diluted. Things that were once appropriation in the distant past, if done today, would not be considered as such as the context around them changes (in a myriad of ways).

So, if Tostitos started as a company today, I'd say making chips and salsa is not appropriation. But, if Tostitos was founded a long time ago, before chips and salsa were a foodstuff ubiquitous across the US and Tostitos was created by one outside of that cultural ownership, then I'd say it likely was appropriation. It also might be fair to argue that in the modern day for Tostitos specifically, "the damage has been done" and there really isn't much fixing it, so consuming their products isn't necessarily problematic. But this would be a point as to why identifying appropriation early on and stopping it is especially important.

As to whether I'm part the problem - for Tostitos no, but for other things almost certainly yes. I'm human and I don't know everything, and I've certainly made mistakes in this area, but that's okay. What's important is that once I've learned something is in fact a mistake, I own up to it and stop making that mistake.

I think each of the described situations has a different specific answer because the topic is nuanced. As stated above, it can sometimes to be messy to say who owns some piece of culture. But beyond that, the most useful tool is an examination of socioeconomic power dynamics.

If there is a cultural group that is poor, and an outsider from a rich/wealthy group commodifies and sells their culture, while giving nothing to those people, you'd probably agree that that's a shitty thing to do. Their culture obviously had some kind of material wealth value that they received none of.

However, if you take a situation where both parties are well off it seems a lot less shitty. Especially if the cultural group in question is already commodifying and profiting off the same piece of culture.

Absolutely loved the first game. I'm a little biased because it's one of my favorite kinds of settings, but it's really good all around. Killer art direction, palpable atmosphere and tension, interesting narrative choices, high level of intrigue, and while the mechanics are pretty simple they are snappy and engaging.

Enjoying other cultures isn't appropriation. I think the line where it becomes appropriation is profiteering. If you are commodifying and profiting off someone else's culture that's pretty shitty. Obviously that's not a perfectly clear cut line (who 'owns' culture?), but it's a good place to start.

Record of the Lodoss War mentioned 🙌

Classic anti-homeless architecture?

There is a better way! Ranked choice voting means no more voting for the lesser of two evils. Look into fo yourselves and others - vote to change the voting systems near you!

In these cases being granted citizenship for another country means gaining "dual citizenship", I.E. he's a citizen of both countries and thus still eligible for presidency in Argentina.

I got to play the closed beta. I really wanted the game to be good, but it had one major issue and one design choice that ruined it for me.

1. When you die during a mission you lose your entire mech. This is brutal but I don't dislike it for that reason. To me, interest in mech games comes from customizing the mech and building up this cool unique thing over time. In this game, your mech is so ephemeral that it's impossible to actually grow attached to it. In addition, the customization is fairly shallow, because otherwise losing your entire mech would be that much worse and putting it back together would be that much more tedious.

In addition, I think the above design decision is partly fueled by their monetization scheme. Manufacturing parts in time locked and guess what - you can pay to accelerate/bypass it.

2. The network quality was trash. In a game with such brutal consequences for death, it's unacceptable. One time I stood on an elevator, realized I didn't want to go up it and immediately hopped of. A couple seconds later, I rubber-banded back onto the rising elevator, but the position immediately forced me to slip off where I then fell to my death, losing everything.

Other than that, I had only minor complaints, like the menus.

All that being said, the actual feel of the mechs and gameplay was really solid. So if you don't mind the above, you might enjoy it.

My man! Kindred spirits.