The Genre Amalgamation

Posted on May 7, 2021 by JC

Just over a month ago I happened on a post from David V. Stewart which was very similar to something I had been contemplating on modern gaming. His post dates 2007 as Ground Zero for video games because that was the year when innovation in game development essentially froze. Almost all the most successful series that year saw major releases that set the staple for what was to follow. Games have gotten much prettier since but there hasn’t been any major shifts in game design since. Stewart admits that dating it here has its imperfections and allows for significant releases in the previous and the following year.

Making these declarations is always open to criticism by pedants though and the year is a sound enough place to set a marker. Who could plausibly claim for example, that the Call of Duty series has seen significant evolution since 2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare? How have RPGs changed in any significant way since Mass Effect? That’s just two of the games from the list. I should also add here that this applies to the mainstream or AAA games and that the lower budget or indie games have been far more innovative though even they seem to have fallen into a rut of late.

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The Fake Rebels of the Music Industry

Posted on April 30, 2021 by JC

It seems almost inevitable as a teenager growing up in the times we live that you would be heavily into music. For whatever reason, music has long been important to the identity of teenagers and the kind of music you listen to, correlates heavily with your social group. I heard at least one story growing up of a kid dumping their entire music collection and starting a new one in a different genre. It was serious stuff or at least, it certainly seemed to be at the time.

One aspect I can vividly remember was the hostility my peers had (which I quickly adopted), towards pop music. Our antipathy towards pop music wasn’t entirely unreasonable and mostly had to do with it being highly manufactured and soulless. The fact that most artists didn’t write their songs and that everything about them from what they sung, to what they wore as well as their opinions and even who they dated was managed by their record company. Our main mistake was supposing the music we listened to was any better. 

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The Legacy of Richard Dawkins

Posted on April 26, 2021 by JC

The biggest of the false promises of a less religious world was that everybody would be a lot more rational and less prone to superstition and other irrational behaviour as belief declined. In 2006 when Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion was published, one could almost be forgiven for thinking this was true. With the (highly exaggerated) threat of Islamic Terrorism being the strongest example used to buttress their arguments. Not even twenty years have passed since but this time has seen a sharp decline in the amount of people professing religious faith or belief in God. Yet, it would be hard to argue that society has since become more rational in concert with this decline.

The recent withdrawal of an award given to Richard Dawkins twenty five years ago by the American Humanist Association is excellent proof of this.

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The Unchanging Nature of Mass Media

Posted on April 14, 2021 by JC

The above video was recorded after the Gulf “war” which ended in early 1991. The first time I heard it was in 2003 when the second Gulf “war” was hourly news and knowing Bill Hicks died in 1994, I was a little confused at first. Realising that exactly the same words and rhetoric were used twelve years later was something of an awakening for me and changed the way I looked at the media from then onwards.

Nothing has changed since, I’ve just become more conscious of it.

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Financial Success versus Cultural Legacy

Posted on April 8, 2021 by JC

Though I can’t now remember where I read it, I  read somewhere that the 2009 film Avatar, despite it’s immense financial success has not left any sort of cultural legacy. When thinking about it, it is hard not to agree. It is not commonly spoken about and I have never met anyone who considers it one of their favourite films. If I do hear about it, it is either calling it overrated or mockingly comparing it to Disney’s Pocahontas, Fern Gully or Dances with Wolves — all films which have essentially the same plot and all pre-dating Avatar by well over a decade. I found Avatar to be a boring, unoriginal film despite the visual spectacle it was sold on. I suspect many went to see it based on hype and quickly forgot it, so it is quite possible the sequels won’t do nearly as well unless they offer a lot more than impressive visual effects.

It occurred to me that the Star Wars prequel trilogy, despite being rather poor films, have had a significant cultural impact. They were critically panned and many Star Wars fans dislike them but the characters, worlds and sub-stories still spawned a significant legacy across multiple mediums. They even have hilarious memes; something that just doesn’t happen without a genuinely affectionate fanbase.

This post won’t be me trying to defend the films themselves — which I do think are bad. I am in agreement with the sometimes disturbing, frequently crude but thoughtful Plinkett reviews from RedLetterMedia. All the elements were there to make great films with some better writing and direction but this was not to be. What I will do is consider what might have helped these films have developed a strong legacy despite the negative critical reaction at the time and even still today.

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The Academy Awards were Always Trash

Posted on March 29, 2021 by JC

I read a post on the Arkhaven Comics blog by The Dark Herald arguing that the Academy Awards (or the Oscars) lost credibility when The English Patient won in 1997, though he did allow for previous mistakes including the snub for Citizen Kane — often called the greatest film ever made. Though I do remember watching The English Patient (and finding it extremely boring), I would argue the Oscars have really always been terrible.

The main reason is what I’ve said about awards before and that’s simply that there are far too many given out and rarely do they ultimately represent genuine quality. Consider how knighthoods are handed out in the United Kingdom for example. In one hundred years, I doubt many people knighted will be remembered with any fondness and so it is with literature, music and film. Time is a better judge than any award will ever be. Good films have won such as Gone with the Wind and A Man for All Seasons but the academy is fast trying to forget it ever awarded films like this — especially the former. I bring these two films up because I didn’t even know they’d won until I looked up the history of winners before I commenced writing this post.

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Disney and Reality

Posted on March 23, 2021 by JC

In which I respond to the lyrics of  ‘Colors of the Wind’ from Disney’s Pocahontas. A song supposedly written from the perspective of a Powhatan woman but actually written by two Jewish men. Disney typically isn’t concerned with following the source material it plunders for films — especially when history comes into it. Disney is hardly the only guilty party here as it has become a trope to portray the American Indians as peaceful people, living in harmony with nature as seen in other films like Dances with Wolves and 2005’s incredibly boring The New World (which was also focused on Pocahontas and John Smith). Though there were certainly tribes of American Indians that were more placid; the Powhatan were certainly not.

To disabuse people from fanciful lies, I will respond to these trite lyrics with the reality.

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Thoughts on being Smartphoneless

Posted on March 14, 2021 by JC

Almost five years ago, I wrote my thoughts on Facebook after a few months of being off it. In 2018, I was planning to do the same thing with my aging smartphone and had decided not to replace it when it finally died that year. After a few months I relented and got a new one. As a result of this article by Roosh V and part of my Lenten penance this year, I decided to finally do away with my smartphone altogether. My perfectly functional phone was sold and my accounts, data and everything deleted or backed-up elsewhere — which was an ordeal of its own. I now own a very simple 3G phone (the same model as Roosh), that I need primarily for work and family reasons.

Here, I will outline some thoughts on doing this and some observations I’ve had over the years since these little toys became widespread and the rapid social change they brought with them.

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Life is Easier – So Should Religion Be

Posted on March 7, 2021 by JC

We are now well into the season of Lent for 2021 and so far at least, without any hint that we’re going to be deprived of the Mass again during this Holy Time. The Feast of St. Joseph was the last time I attended Mass last year for many months and as all with properly functioning minds now know, for no good reason at all. Hindsight or not.

I do feel compelled during this time to write on the subject of Lent and I have a couple of topics in mind. The one I will cover today can be understood by the title of the post.

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Intelligence and the Appearance of It

Posted on February 27, 2021 by JC

I like books. I read quite a lot of them and I have never been without a significant backlog of books to read since I was a teenager. Not everyone is like this though and there is nothing necessarily wrong with not being a reader. Most people in human history (including some truly great men), have not been able to read at all.

It also very much depends on what you read. Certain types of women are fond of reminding men that they consume a large chunk of the book market but they are far less fond of giving specifics. The specifics being a lot of romance, erotica pornography, self-help and general tosh. Men are better but not by a whole lot when it comes to popular genres and authors. Although I enjoy a lot of the historical fiction consumed by men, many books in this genre are the male equivalent of the romance novels that dominate so much of the female market.

So I do not consider it necessarily good or bad to read as it very much depends on what you read. I certainly believe that what I read is a lot higher-brow and respectable than the average reader and this is not simply a matter of taste. There are objectively bad and objectively good books. Most of the latter (particularly fiction), were published before the 1950s and I consider very little of what is published today to be worth publishing let alone reading. I expect the future will agree with me and a lot of these works will be lost to time and largely unlamented.

Now that this extended introduction is out of the way, I can get to the main purpose of the post which was originally inspired by a Twitter thread by Mencius Moldbugman (not the real Moldbug) which is posted below.

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