The thing I find interesting with orientalism is that it has a mirror in chauvinism from the other direction, both sides reinforcing the idea that there is something special about the cultural norms of people from East Asia in particular. It's almost as if there is a deliberate effort to reify cultural differences in a way that feels counterproductive.

I think these forces are especially noticeable living as a migrant to this part of the world, in that you sometimes find people gushing over you for being able to use what is actually a pretty unremarkable set of utensils or occasionally shitting on you for not knowing an obscure bit of etiquette that locals rarely perform. Either way it's just another form of the "western people like this, Chinese people like that" discourse which at best is vapid and at worst straight-up racist. I don't think it really helps to build a common sense of humanity.

Anyway, I feel like this kind of article is representative of the problem, in that it serves to create anxiety that there is some secret etiquette that must be performed in order to not be seen as an uncultured barbarian. Again, I have no experience with Japan so maybe they really are just That Damn Serious about how they use their chopsticks, but I doubt it. At least for me it was quite reassuring to find that - outside of the folks who really did hold chauvinist and/or racist views - most people in China cared no more about how I ate than how anyone else ate, and that the range of what was socially acceptable eating for all people was wide enough to make it clear that these sorts of articles tend to be either deliberately divisive or out-of-touch.

I often get the sense that foreigners getting stressed about (or feeling pride in) how well they use chopsticks is a weird kind of orientalism. Because, like, who cares if someone shows up in a western restaurant and uses a spoon instead of knife to saw through something, or grabs a big hunk with a fork and takes a bite, leaving the rest on the fork? Maybe you wouldn't do it if you were having dinner with the queen, but any other context nobody cares. I'm sure parents still try to teach their kids to eat polite way, and maybe even feel a bit embarrassed if their kids show themselves to be less well-behaved than the neighbors', but that's a universal thing so, eh.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317315

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[0] https://www.volts.wtf/p/taiwans-energy-dilemma

The funny thing is that what makes the scammer version a scam is that they go through exactly the same process but then try to pass the products off as their own artisinal work, presumably because they think that will net them more money. But in reality most people browsing for tat at a market aren't going to pay more or less for local artisinal versus imported artisinal versus mass produced, they just enjoy the experience of browsing the different stalls and chatting with vendors and feeling like they have connection with their local merchants. So the scam was wholly unnecessary, the vendor didn't need to make up a story, they just needed to be open to chatting with their customer. They're shooting themselves in the foot by lying about their products because if/when they're found out then they lost the trust, which is the actual product they are selling. People who choose local markets over chain stores or online shopping are doing it exactly because they are looking for a more trustworthy experience, so when you take that away you have nothing to sell.

Artists are constantly getting inspiration from one another, referencing one another, performing together or having their works exhibited together...

While there are some big name artists who are famously protective of the concept of IP, those artists have made headlines exactly because when they litigate they seem so unreasonable compared to the bedroom musicians and pub bands and church choirs and school teachers and wedding DJs and millions of other artists and performers whose way of participating in "the culture" is much less tied to ownership.

It doesn't bother me too much. Many indie scenes have this sort of self-consciously avant garde sub-movement - theater, dance, fashion, games...

While I find 99% of braindance to be aggressively unlistenable and/or thoroughly tedious, the 1% that isn't tends to be truly great. Imo the best thing that ever happened to this genre was digital record stores, because casual fans can skip over all the limited edition vinyls and albums full of abstract noodling and just pick up the bangers.

Of course for ordinary people there has always been an alternative to Substack, and it's the Bcc field in their email client. For folks looking to self-publish on the web, Wordpress has been around for decades now - there is no excuse for any serious writer or journalist not to know about it and the multitude of managed hosting options. Even for a newsletter-first option, there is Ghost. But if you discuss this with writers who move to Substack the answer is always the same - they want to try access the money or the fame that may come from being on the most popular social network for writing. I think the only fix for this broken ecosystem is for governments to dismantle these sorts of companies, but the US will never kill their golden geese - they are gladly taking a cut from every other country's content creators.

Some of these are better sound-proofed than others. Some even have little TVs or radios inside, but I've never found that worse than traffic or construction noise if you're anyway in the city. There's always earplugs.

Shared bathrooms suck, especially if you need to be out during "rush hour" when everyone else also needs to be out, but for a saving of $100+ per night there's plenty of people who would gladly accept holding their pee for a few minutes and/or getting into an already-steamed-up and damp shower cubicle. Most people gotta work 4 hours to make that kind of money back.

I'm not sure it's worth lamenting that the most popular games today tend to have addictive mechanics and otherwise little novelty. Clearly that's what people enjoy. If you are interested in experimental or avant garde games, then that stuff is still out there in the indie scene. Lots of them are bad games, but they still might be good ideas.

There's plenty of examples I am sure people can share on the thread, but here's one that comes to mind for me as interesting but not very fun: Bokida - Heartfelt Reunion. It's a gigantic monochromatic world with impenetrable puzzles and weird geometry that reminded me of those old freescape games like Driller. I don't think I enjoyed it very much but somehow I did play it all the way through and it still sticks in my mind today because no other game I played really did the same stuff. But, then, it's possible that that's just my subjective experience and for someone who plays Minecraft or something similar, Bokida was just derivative and forgettable? I dunno.

There's a lot out there, though. I think we're in a golden age of games! As a kid I could never have imagined having a literal "backlog" of dozens of games I've already bought but not even started yet because there's so much to play.

The thing I love about computer games is that I can go through them at my own pace, pause whenever I like, hang around looking at a cool visual, go back to an old save and try something different, whatever. Multiplayer takes all that freedom away because everything has to progress on somebody else's timetable, which isn't as fun for me. Nowadays being expected to perform on a time limit just reminds me of work, which is the last thing I want when I'm playing a game.

So the tools already exist, but it seems to me that they primarily appeal to a very specific type of gamer, one that doesn't have much overlap with the type of gamer who would like an "endless" open world or the type of gamer who would like a tightly-plotted narrative experience. I think it's more something that appeals to fans of table-top RPGs, people who are looking for a collaborative storytelling environment.

I think many gamers have the imagination of an epic infinite metaverse style game, but then when they actually get the opportunity to participate in one, it turns out that that's not really what they wanted after all, because it requires a level of creative labor that they weren't expecting. This is why I think the market has naturally segmented into sandbox builders, survival/roguelikes, traditional narrative adventures etc.

I think the challenge of trying to make an "endless" game using an LLM is the same challenge that all procgen games face - they are boring for people who are seeking a well-paced narrative. There are players who enjoy the mechanics of looting/crafting/trading/etc who will gladly play games where the story is incidental or emergent, but if you're specifically looking for something with a bit more narrative depth, I'm not sure procgen will ever work. Even if there is a system that tries to project coherent storylines onto the generated world, you still need the player to do things that fit into a storyline (and not break the world in such a way that it undermines the storyline!), otherwise the pacing will be off. But if the system forces the player into a storyline, then it breaks the illusion that the world was ever truly open. So you can't have it both ways - either there is a narrative arc that the player submits to, or the player is building their own narrative inside a sandbox.

AAA games try to have it both ways, of course, but it's always pretty clear when you are walking through procgen locations and leafing through stacks of irrelevant lore vs when you are playing a bespoke storyline mission that meaningfully progresses the state of the world.

Except now, apparently - and I'm still not exactly sure how - business owners and activist groups and event promoters communicate everything about what is going on via... photos?! I suppose it's the digital version of flyers, except you could see flyers posted up all over town, in all the record stores or cafes you already frequented, friends could hand you them when they saw you out and about, you'd get bombarded with them when you left related events... And none of those situations forced you to enter a heavily-surveilled gated community owned by a spectacularly wealthy foreign company notorious for enabling genocide, live streaming murder etc.

I was at some event a couple weekends ago and an organizer came up to me saying that there was going to be an after and just check the Insta for the address, and I'm like... But I don't have that? Can't you tell me now? And because the site is login-walled even when at some point later in the day the thumbnail did appear, trying to click on it to see the details resulted in the login block and so I missed out.

But I am well aware that I am a teeny tiny minority of people involved in this boycot and so I'm only really hurting myself. The way I've heard it described by activists is that using Insta (or X or YouTube) is like tacitly accepting that we already live in a panopticon and thus all resistance has to take place within full view of the authorities, it just needs to be smart and present itself as something that isn't actually resistance, or that works around censorship using codewords, or this, or that, "just like how it's done in China". And it's like, great, the new generation of western activists who actually still live in a society which grants them some civil liberties have decided they're all doomed to exist under the totalitarian jackboot and practice their resistance accordingly. After all, you can't build a movement out there on the actually free fediverse or the small web where there's only a smattering of nerds.

I don't know if I should be depressed or just suck it up and get that stupid Insta account.