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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Like Pokémon, I would say most games with RNG. They’re basically fake and also limited by the lack of computation for RNG at the time. You can’t make them hard; there’s basically a ratio where they’re enjoyable or not, and that’s the same ratio as playable or not.

    Platformers resist this—they’re exactly as hard as they are. They’re the original physics based game. Pure skill.



  • This is the next best thing for the league besides Lakers Celtics.

    I root for Mavericks because it makes Thunder look good. Celtics capsizing at the end of an expected championship run is chefs kiss IMO. Mavericks are the clear underdog.

    If Muscala or Blake Griffin were still on Celtics, I’d root for them. But there’s no one I care about there anymore.









  • With all due respect, you’re straw manning me quite a bit. I never said anything was “bad” and I never call into question taste. There is not an objective metric to enjoyment of movies or art etc.

    There are objective—e.g true or false statements—about the film or story itself. A story absolutely is objectively measurable in a structural sense. You can contend that your enjoyment of a movie is totally subjective, which it is, however you nonetheless would likely agree that for some reason 95% of the stories you consume conform to common structural conventions.

    You can test this by playing any number of these action movies side by side with a stopwatch if you’d like, and time when the narrative milestones occur. You could do the same for scene length relative to the purpose of each scene in the story.

    There are methods of structuring story elements that absolutely will affect the way you successfully or unsuccessfully enjoy a story.

    For example: it is objectively incorrect if you said John Wick follows the conventions of a body horror film. The evidence? Quite literally the actions of the characters and subsequently the mise-en-scene which is there to support your consumption of said characters.

    But let’s take a much more obvious example instead of comparing Hollywood tent pole films.

    The 2011 film Samsara is considered a documentary film. I would argue it is “documentary” in the most basic sense, in that it quite literally documents happenings on earth—from the directors’ point of view obviously.

    Their are objective facts about this movie: it is shot on medium lenses which replicate the human eye, it has very saturated color hue, and there are 0 characters.

    You can love this film and feel all sorts of things. But you definitely won’t love the main character and how he does XYZ. It doesn’t have this; it is not a story. The director may say something like “it is a story” in the meta sense, but that is interpolation ultimately, and not something he shot from a screenplay for you to enjoy.

    I think if you made film and television for a living, you would likely completely change your perspective.


  • Yes, objective relative to the rules or conventions of visual storytelling in an anatomic sense. This means the literal structure of the action and its values relative to characters.

    Each shot (that is not in a moment of montage) has a quantifiable beginning-middle-end that is motivated by the character’s actions on the screen, and again nested inside of the sequence or scene. The reason most people experience the pace of Mad Max as unrelentingly brisk is due to the lack of wasted frames on characters. It is hyper efficient. There isn’t a single shot-reverse shot dialogue in the whole film. There isn’t unmotivated action. There is not an unnecessary or missing character on screen. And the framing from edit to edit does not yank your eye somewhere it’s not meant to be.

    Compare this to another all-time action film, Bourne Ultimatum—which has an insane volume of superfluous or narratively unmotivated camera coverage in its action. Literally the action 50% of the time, while utterly spectacular, does not advance the characters at all, and certainly does not have an opinion of its action to infer from the camera choices.

    You’re also completely entitled to not care and think it’s boring! But there are definitely objective storytelling mechanics that are binary insofar as they are present or not on a scene to scene, shot to shot basis.