[LS1] This seems mostly like another indication of Americans in general not hip to the whole “growing up” part.
[LS2] Mapping out Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories.
[LS3] To me, they’re best in the morning but most convenient at night.
[LS4] I’ve never been a D&D person, but Gygax’s moral alignment grid is pretty great.
[LS5] There is, of course, almost definitionally no way to ever separate fashion from class.
[LS6] The Future of Fashion, from 1893.
[LS7] Victimhood recognition may adversely affect empathy rates.
[LS8] Rather than encouraging callousness, video games may be an area where we have guilt thrust upon us.
[LS9] Yeah, it me.
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You really don’t see this as propaganda, do you?
It’s poison, pure and simple, designed to destroy the left by hobbling their ability to think critically.
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Nevertheless I still wanted to ask the author what exactly she expects from art produced by billion dollar industries. Expecting Carly Rae Jepson or Taylor Swift to do a song about the complexities of adult womanhood is like expecting Captain America to trade in CGI ass kicking for the daily humiliations of a desk job in corporate America.
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The question I didn’t see asked (& maybe I missed it, I’m still on my first cup of coffee) is what other art are these women consuming? There seems to be this idea that people who enjoy simple, pop-art don’t enjoy\consume more complex art; and vice versa.
It’s a horribly myopic view, and it’s wrong, people are complex, and what a person enjoys can be highly dependent on mood & mental exhaustion. If simple art is popular, it doesn’t have to be because people aren’t growing up, but because they are, and they are mentally exhausted, and they want art that doesn’t require much of them.
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You don’t go into McDonalds expecting a world class dining experience. Doesn’t mean McDonalds is fundamentally bad or that people who eat it are bad.
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We probably have a wider range of art and entertainment available to us now than at any other time in history. (Right now, I have a Pandora station going that is playing Chopin for me in my office). And we’re free to take advantage of what we want.
I have problems with the people who simplify it to “people can’t grow up now, LOL.” I’m a grown-up woman with lots of responsibilities and a full-time job. I take care of my own house – shoot, I own my own house – and so who is this person to criticize me because once in a while I would like to watch “We Bare Bears” and laugh a little instead of some depressing news-commentary show that reinforces my fear that we’re all screwed?
The problem comes, I think, if people can’t shoulder their responsibilities or whatever, if they routinely flake on stuff – not what kind of music they like.
I’m willing to bet in the 1800s there were aristocrats who rolled their eyes over the “stupid simple drinking songs” the peasants sang instead of lieder
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I mourn for our national drinking song.
We’ve butchered it by slowing it down to the point that our national anthem sounds like some sort of operatic dirge.
It’s supposed to be fun, for god’s sake!
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The more I look at what was happening in the recording industry, the more I recognize the Seventies as the decade that the artists held the most power, and the industry the least. Music video changed everything (along with the collapse of prog rock), and the industry regained the upper hand.
Now, I’m not sure why the industry would have such a death grip these days, since the revenue from recordings has shrunk so much. But I think probably the reason is that all the new Joni Mitchells have no way to find their audience. Maybe Pandora is what they need, I could be wrong. Maybe what they don’t have is that recording revenue to power their engine once they seem promising.
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A superhero movie where the hero had to save the world by doing something he’s not magically good at would be a fun twist. Maybe the Hulk has to step up and fix a fine Swiss watch because it must be done and there’s nobody else there to do it.
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[LS3] I shower after I work out in the afternoon/evenings or in the am is I sweated sleeping or both, which can happen when it gets really hot and humid.
[LS4 Lawful Neutral. Generally correct, but I played Neutral Good and Chaotic Neutral characters, and I doubt I’m super ALL that lawful.
[LS8] Not sure about guilt, I’ve never had a problem doing the missions on GTA, ramming cop cars, etc, but I stopped playing it at Vice City. I will say that I’ve played witcher and other games where I wanted a specific game outcome, but guilt hasn’t been a factor. Nor has it been in Falllout 4. I was going to do the nuka cola quest to kill all the raiders, but I’m having a harder time surviving, so I may just do the raider quests, get some achievements, and “be bad”.
[LS9] When I first started reading this I was like “A woman’s writing this”. Bingo!
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We need to define what growing up means though. Does it just mean doing your job, paying taxes, raising children, taking care of aging parents while spending your leisure time how you legally want or does it mean something more? The Baby Boomers kept on to the tastes of their youth longer than previous generations. Western culture also had a cult of youth, meaning people in late teens to mid-twenties, since Antiquity. Women got hit harder by this cult than men but more than a few men loved the concept of eternal youth to. There is also the element that for some people, generally attractive, wealthy, high status people, being a grown up and endless indulgence went hand in hand while for others it meant constant sacrifice.
LS4: I got Lawful Neutral when I first took the test. This was surprising because I thought I’d be Lawful Good or Neutral Good.
LS5: Fashion is more separated from class now than it was at any other time in history. The affluent usually just wear more expensive versions of what the non-affluent wear but nearly everybody wears jeans, sneakers, and other causal clothing more often than not. There was a time within living memory where no adult, let alone an affluent adult, would be caught dead in jeans. Things like when to wear different types of formal dress were also a thing within living memory. These days you also wear morning dress or white tie if your a character in a period drama, are accepting the Noble Prize, or are at a really fancy and formal function. One thing that struck me in Vienna was that there were stores that still sold men’s formal clothing. I wonder when anybody would wear it these days.
LS6: I’m always surprised about how wrong these future predictions were. I always wonder what people in the 1890s would really think of how people in the 1990s dressed. What would they think of the great informalization of clothing and how everybody wears jeans.
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Suits are a special case though. Lee is right that the great changes are about the wide-spread use of casual wear. We don’t have detachable collars or shirt-fronts anymore (yay!!) but Lee is right that within living or nearly living memory, you would not see adults wearing jeans for the most part. It was really the Boomers who changed this attitude.
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Nowadays men wear a LOT more pink than I remember them doing.
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I remember when guys just wouldn’t wear a pink shirt (it would have been considered girly or gay, both of which were very unacceptable in a business environment).
Am unsure now what the culture says about wearing pink for guys. Is it a sign that they’re gay? Is it a sign that they’re just okay with their masculinity? Are they trying to look ambisexual?
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I remember a time when women knew better than to do such things (I mean, we’re seriously talking guys losing face at the office, here). Have things changed?
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That said, my style at work involves button-down shirts, which is a step more formal than standard (there are some young-uns who wear full suits to stand out). But I temper that by salmon, lavender, silver – basically the least conservative things you’d find in, say, Men’s Wearhouse.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/us/affirmative-action-battle-has-a-new-focus-asian-americans.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage&_r=0
I guess they got tired of not being the right color for AA. I know how they feel.
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You can see this in Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. The characters seem to have a wide-ranging stuff they read, watch, and listen to. In one scene, a guitar player goes from Classical to the Beatles to Bossa Nova. The narrator reads classic American novelists, his dormmates like to read contemporary French fiction like Boris Vian. Whether this is true or a idealized version of the 1960s chic for being high-culture is hard to say. But there is a lot of insularity in American culture except for specific examples (anime) or if you live in a large metro area with good arthouse cinemas.
That being said, something I’ve notice about our cohort is a strong attempt to redefine adulthood. I’ve seen more than one person my age declare that being an adult is about fiscal responsibility (holding down a job, paying those bills) and nothing else. My generation seems to scoff at the notion that there is such a thing as cultural vegetables and maybe putting the stuff you liked as a kid down.
LS5: I agree with your basic sentence but I think it is a lot more complicated than the article suggests (though the article is true). I’ve declared my seemingly genetically inherited love of clothing here more times than I can count. There are plenty of people from my socio-economic class of college-educated professionals who don’t give a rat’s ass about clothing. Part of the whole techie status thing is to be the opposite of the New York Wall Street guy who wears expensive suits, shirts, and shoes and just wear hoodies and t-shirts and sneakers (though this is changing somewhat but I doubt you will see techies embrace Brioni suits anytime soon.) A few years ago there was an essay written by an African-American woman who wrote how her mom was criticized by strangers for “wasting” money on nice-looking clothing; the woman disagreed and said that the clothing helped her single mom navigate the system and gain respect from middle class and above admins including social workers, education officials, etc.
I think we make too many assumptions that only rich people buy expensive clothing. It might be true enough though.
I don’t know what the solution is. A lot of expensive fashion/clothing does nothing to me but there is also a lot that I think is visually interesting and unique. Maybe it is a bit dandyish but I don’t think of a world where everyone just wears t-shirts and jeans as being more equal and free and less judgey. I think of it as
a world that is more aesthetically boring.
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I would find this unsurprising of an American guitarist, once we stipulate that he plays classical guitar. The image of the classical musician who turns up his nose at popular music may or may not have been true at one time, but would be an eccentric outlier today. Check out the playlists of those kids studying at Julliard and it will turn up lots of popular music–perhaps not the bubblegum stuff, but the Beatles and Bossa Nova would be unremarkable.
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You can really do stylin’ while wearing tshirts. Or you can wear the Michael Kors devil shirt, and that’s stylin’ too. (yes, it was designed for a play).
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Remember, we had just fought a major international war, had troops stationed all over and many more people were involved as soldiers, both as enlisted and officers.
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Our pornography does not reference Cinema Paradisio.
(Yes, this is what happens when you take award winning writers and let them draw.)
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I think you are right that it could have been the spirit of the age and their was more cultural cache (even if only to pick up girls) for knowing about Bergman, Kurosawa, the French New Wave, etc.
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But I moved to a non-college, non-hip city (Fresno) and had the same luck finding, along with buying and selling, that literature there. And the same pattern held the years work took me to Merced. The more I think about it, Book-of-the-Month and other such groups were very common during that period, allowing the spread of different literatures to people who might not have come across it otherwise.
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What I think is the real story is that since American pop culture is globally dominant and has a very big population, its harder for foreign pop culture to make an entry into the general American market. This was especially true in the pre-television era. Network and latter cable channels did not need to air foreign shows unless they were starved for content or wanted dubbed Japanese cartoon shows because it was more affordable than producing your own American ones. You had different aspects of foreign pop culture shaping different subcultures though. This really took on after the Internet made access easier.
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But you see a really wide variety of stuff in many countries that never makes it to the United States even in the niche form. Though this is changing because of the Internet.
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Character alignment, which Gygax adapted/ripped off from the fiction of Michael Moorcock, was a feature that was generally dropped in other systems. Like many features of D&D that Gygax adapted/ripped off from fantasy fiction, it made sense in its original context but not really in the Rube Goldberg world development that was D&D. Among its flaws was the tension between whether it was a description of personality characteristics, a prescription of permitted actions, or an identifier of which team you were on.
Also, when I meet some kid, usually teens or early twenties, who announces a self-identification of “chaotic” I roll my eyes (mentally, at least) and move on. This kid may well develop into an interesting person whose company I would enjoy. But not now. Give it five to ten years.
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I kind of like what Shadow World did with “alignment”…
“You really don’t want to be aligned evil. The DM will take your character sheet”
(You could, however, be as selfish as you wanted, and still be good. Like, we had an assassin in our party (hence the desire to play ‘evil’)).
You, I take it, have never met someone who is actually chaotic in nature. Meeting a 25 year old who hasn’t had one legit job, and has done significant cutting edge work in multiple fields while pretending to be from all around the world (and significantly older than he actually was)… Yeah, it’s an experience.
Of course, saying that “I’m chaotic” is pretentious and … *yawn*.
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Was it about Donald Trump?
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(Christie, on the other hand)
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For all that White Wolf has gone all edgelord-y now, I quite like their simpler mechanics, and I think their archetype based character description system is really good.
Also the quiz thingy said I’m “chaotic good” which is probably not true.
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When a fire hurts a werewolf worse than a NUCLEAR Weapon?
Dreck, Dreck, Dreck.
Rolemaster had nice mechanics. d100, parse as you will. And look, a 66. DM, have some fucking fun.
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(we were playing tabletop changeling and a bit of larp vampire. I guess if anything nuclear combat fits the stereotype of werewolf players better).
I liked the simplicity of the thing – across the board: how good are you at X? That’s how many D10 you get. How hard of an instance of X is this? That’s the threshold for success for each die. Roll. The number of ‘success’ dice indicates how well you did. One principle to get comfortable with and you’re done.
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Our campaign was set in Washington DC.
Quayle came up, along with a photo op with one of our characters at the Zoo. (Apparently he misunderstood “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolfe?”)
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As far as #1, the obsession with teen singers and such seems to come from the same spot that the love of YA fiction comes from, and I think someone above picked up on it. At the end of a long day, most people want to relax. They don’t want really challenging fiction, movies, etc. My wife is a good example. She has a degree in German, speaks and reads it fluently, but when she was making an hour and a half commute each way to work, at the end of the day she wanted to simply relax. She was spending 9+ hours on work, and she wanted to read some fashion blogs or gardening books. Contrast that with me, who spent 2-3 years recovering from a work accident and had quite a bit of intellectual space for long, challenging fiction, writing, art movies. The wife would love to reread Buddenbrooks or dive into the latest Gunter Grass novel, but is just not there.
And speaking of fashion, it is still a marker of class. And if you can’t read that marker, then you are not in the right class. Wearing a cowboy hat unironically, class marker. The perfect jewelry to go with a dress, another.
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Yeah, the Dallas folks are pretty much all mopes and dopes.
Don’t pretend unless you can pull it off, and if your cowboy boots ain’t never touched road apples, well, you ain’t foolin anyone.
I remember hearing about a bar up in PA, where folks with cowboy hats would mingle with the Amish, and black folks too… Just a little slice of country livin’.
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The say is All hat, no cattle.
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I assume things are different these days, but I don’t get out in the empty parts of the high plains much any more.
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Like many other fashion items, there is both a form and a function aspect to it and it shouldn’t be trivialized… despite how easy that is to do for outsiders.
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“They will say no and laugh at me for not having enough existing friends to get coffee with.” Or rather, in my mind: “They will say no and laugh and tell me they already have enough ‘coffee friends’ and don’t need me.”
I haven’t had a “best friend” since I was 13. (Maybe that’s normal for women, I don’t know, it just seems a lot of the women I know have “best friends.”) I’m afraid to declare anyone a “best friend” out of fear she’ll look at me and go “That’s nice, but…..I didn’t really think we were that good of friends, and anyway, Amy is my real ‘best friend.'”
I dunno. I’ve heard a few people talk about how the adult-friend thing is as fraught as dating is. I don’t necessarily think so (dating is really, really, really hard once you’re over 21 or so), but yeah, making and keeping friends as an adult is harder than I remember it being as a kid.
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My list of friends is pretty damn short, honestly.
(and yes, I know, that’s fun when I start every comment with “a friend of mine”… )
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A family member bought me a six pack of the Choose Your Own Adventure books–it was a set of the first six. Man, they were brutal. I remember in By Balloon to the Sahara I only made a few choices and was dead. There was one about a haunted house, Escape from Chimney Rock maybe, that had some gruesome ends: you get turned into a mouse and are about to be killed by a cat.
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this one gave me “Neutral Good” so I don’t know.
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(Further? Farther? Farther.)
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Washington – Lawful Good.
Jefferson, Hamilton – Chaotic Good.
Adams, Madison – Lawful Neutral
Burr – Lawful Evil
Patrick Henry – Chaotic Neutral
Bennedict Arnold – Chaotic Evil
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There are arguments that his loyalty to the established order was rooted in Lawful (whatever) rather than Chaotic (whatever).
(Put Thomas Paine right next to Patrick Henry.)
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We could have Heritage Minutes!
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See also: My quasi-serious argument that the Seven Years War (French and Indian War edition) was the last important war in American history. At that point North America was destined to be mostly Anglophone with a liberal democracy. It doesn’t really matter whether this means a President for the non-Canada bits or a Prime Minister plus a Governor General with no actual power. My major reservation about this theory is that it only works if we don’t assume that Britain would have taken Canada sooner or later. My hunch is that if it hadn’t been that war, it would have been the next, and there always was a next war.
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Unjust laws and dictatorships and all that…
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Too many unintended consequences out there.
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http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/naacp-issues-first-ever-travel-advisory-for-a-state-missouri/ar-AApjKh4?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=ientp
The short version is that the NAACP is angry b/c the governor wants to change the legal standard to prove discrimination in lawsuits. The funny part is that the state is proposing changing the legal standard of discrimination to the same standard that the federal government uses. Just another example of what folks on the left will do and say.
Here is a link that explains it better than the first one.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/jim-crow-bill-leads-naacp-to-issue-travel-warning/ar-AApgMEV?li=AA4ZnC&ocid=ientp
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The protagonist is Lee (a grown adult male). He finds Clementine (an 8 year old girl) some time in the early part of the zombie apocalypse. At one point (was it chapter 2?), they find an idyllic farm. Well, without getting too deeply into spoilers, at the end of the chapter, there is a scene where Lee and one of the idyllic farmers have a confrontation.
The farmer gives a speech to Lee about the way the world works.
At the end of the speech, you are given a choice between killing the farmer and not killing the farmer.
The first time I played, I chose to kill the farmer. Immediately, in the story, Clementine ran up next to my side, looked at what I had done and gasped.
I wrenched my back jumping to the power on the 360. I played through the scene again and, this time, chose not to kill the farmer. Clem saw me not kill the farmer.
I thought to myself: “Good.”
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… It came out of a drunken conversation on “What are the really bad ideas, and how can we pull them off…?”
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Like, if it turns out that a group wanted to build a synagogue in town, would it be the right thing to do to deny it because a synagogue would create a risk for nearby residents, motorists and pedestrians?
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