See also Why is Gen Z Humor So Weird? [external youtube link, not an internal link to a Close Reading thread], especially 6:55 onward

- oversaturation
- depression
- existential dread

I disagree with other parts of this manifesto, between these lines, where these common perversions (a term I love, by the way) are described as "endless" and "generic" in a way that I can only read as derogatory.

Quote[..] when writers are afraid to be perverts [..they indulge] only the safest and most unoffensive fetishes to render on the screen.

[..] when art displays the common fetishes of heterosexual matrimony, fast cars and big guns and big-but-not-gargantuan breasts [etc.] - these absolutely are fetishes.

every day you are smothered in the common perversions of so much of society [..]

Quote from: 17:22We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there's no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.

Quote from: 12:50.. the unsolved problems facing the world today are gargantuan, including the risks of climate change and nuclear war, but we must see them as problems to be solved, not apocalypses-in-waiting, and aggressively pursue solutions like deep decarbonization for climate change, and global zero for nuclear war.

Quoteif you combine our cognitive biases with the nature of news, you can see why [people have been perceiving that] the world has been coming to end for a very long time

Quick conclusion: Is the problem with the nature of news? Should we, and can we, move on from valuing 'news' at all? First of all, what is news? Is it what it sounds like?

QuoteNews (nūz), n [From New; cf. F. nounelles. News is plural in form, but is commonly used with a singular verb.]

1. A report of recent occurrences; information of something that has lately taken place, or of something before unknown; fresh tidings; recent intelligence.
Evil news rides post, while good news baits.
— Milton.

2. Something strange or newly happened.
It is no news for the weak and poor to be a prey to the strong and rich.
— L'Estrange.

3. A bearer of news; a courier; a newspaper. [Obs.]
There cometh a news thither with his horse.
— Pepys.

Back to Steven Pinker:

Quote from: 10:12bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren't built in a day. The papers could have run the headline, 137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday, every day for the last 20 years. That's 1.25 billion people leaving poverty behind, but you never read about it.

Is there too much of a focus on the "strange and newly happened", on discovering reports of "recent occurrences"?

I suppose that 'press' and journalism in general is distinct from news. I like receiving "information about something before unknown," but some days it feels as though we are enter a post-unknown world, where everything and everything is becoming further and further documented because of how driven we are by the news, by discoveries, by changes in the world...

What could replace it? What could be as compelling, once we are omniscient?

Sometimes I open up a bag of fuzzy peach and eat the whole thing and it's like 80% sugar. It's wild to see a 65g bag contain 49g of sugar, but it's also totally believable.

Browsing the hyperoptimized internet for anything feels like that sometimes; it feels like what I'm looking for is out there if I just keep scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

https://paradise-collab.itch.io/letterclub/devlog/363470/whole-grain-decisions

from borges' "a survey of the works of herbert quain"

Quote from: Herbert QuainI have reclaimed for this novel the essential features of every game: the symmetry, the arbitrary laws, the tedium.

Tips:
- Use more salt (I used something like 1 1/2 pinches - terribly precise, I know)
- Brown sugar clumps, regular sugar is OK
- Made it once with skim milk powder instead of whole milk. It was much more dry. Not sure if that was the fault of the powder, or the skim. (Perhaps both?)
- Don't make it so wet that it sticks when rolling

SEE BELOW FOR UPDATED VERSION

Pastry
Mix with fork:

• 5 1/2 cup flour (pastry)
• 1 tble br sugar
• shake or 2 of salt
• 1 tsp b powder

Cut in: (then add to rest)

• 2 cups lard

Mix well and add milk to make 1 cup: (then add to rest)

• Put egg in cup
• Tble of lemon juice (sub vinegar is fine, but smells bad)

P.S. Doing weird shit that turns out to be successful is, yes, a thing that happens, too. I'm not the authority on this, and as mentioned at the top, this is not even about this artist specifically.

But you don't learn or grow by rejecting everything that makes you feel bad about what you believe, even if you can come up with a very compelling reason why the thing that made you feel bad might be fabricated according to some ulterior motive. That's literally how we get conspiracy theories.

OK, I lied. Here are a few quotes.

Quotethe post I initially linked to keeps harping on how doomed your project is when you make the decision to make it in a genre that doesn't seem to be popular on Steam. It basically breaks down to "if you're not making a deckbuilder, or management game, you're basically set up to fail", which obviously is going to cause a lot of anxiety in people who are either inexperienced and/or are fairly deep into a project that just happens to be in a genre that isn't one of those I just mentioned.

QuoteWhat purpose does instilling a sense of despair in people serve here?

Quotea lot of the business and marketing advice for game developers out there, works really, really hard to make its readers feel inadequate and afraid

Quotethe purpose of these posts isn't really about informing people about strategies on how to sell their game (after all, just knowing that platformers might have a harder time on Steam, doesn't help anyone who tries to sell them anyway), it's about their writers trying to sell themselves as experts to an audience they manipulated into feeling inadequate and desperate.

The problem is that the popularity of a genre does, as the statistics show, have an impact on profitability. mokko acknowledges this:

QuoteI felt incredibly anxious and defensive, because well, I'm making a platformer again! And Platformers don't sell! Which I'm not disputing here, by the way.

But when mokko asks this question, "What purpose does instilling a sense of despair in people serve here?", there's the distinct possibility that a sense of despair is the correct reaction to the truth. All these other imagined motivations, that writers are doing this because they want to make a profit, they want to scare you, etc., these do not matter if what you care about is selling a platformer to an audience that doesn't exist.

QuoteWhat actual advice does this provide to people aside from "if you're making a platformer, finish it as quickly as you can and do something else"?

Sometimes a thing you want to be possible is impossible, and there's nothing you can do about it without fundamentally compromising what it is that you want.

I'm sorry. You can't ignore the truth forever.