"Miles Morales" was bad enough, but more details are coming out from "Spider-Man 2", and it looks like it's more of the same. That second example is especially annoying-- Mary Jane figured very prominently in my montage of "Spider-Man Remastered" from a couple of years ago, and for good reason: she had a "pretty gal from next door" kind of vibe, and she livened up every scene within the game in which she was present. For them to ruin her character by turning her face into some kind of distracting golem really irks me.
We are in an age of total, dystopian authoritarianism: no longer do the peasants tell the politicians what to do, and no longer do the consumers drive what the corporations make. Now it's the opposite: the politicians tell the plebes what is going to happen, and the corporations tell the consumers that this is what they are going to get-- whether they want it or not, in both cases!
It all boils down to the Cultural Marxist, Frankfurt School framework: "Everything Within the Ideology, Nothing Against the Ideology, Nothing Outside the Ideology."
"Why is Mary Moriarty's office more concerned with criminals than victims of crime?", this person wonders. Eric Peters asks how you can "make losses", such as the $30k-$60k "losses made" per vehicle on EeeVees which hardly anyone wants. Here, Vee asks why game companies are making art that ninety-nine percent of people despise. What's the common thread between these superficially unrelated things? They further the ideology. The politicians and CEOs don't care what you want: like a child, you'll get what's "good for you", in this case because it gives them power and control.
Outside of Alex Battaglia and six radical whackjobs on RetardEra, no one wants Mary Jane to look like an alien Neanderthal troglodyte: I bet if you polled gamers, almost one hundred percent of them would choose the "pretty" Mary Jane. But a pretty Mary Jane is outside and against the ideology, so it is not permitted.
Disingenuous
Recently, psychopaths Mark Levin-- eyes twitching madly as he spoke-- and that little "Micro Machines Man" hobgoblin Ben Shapiro both played the "nice country you have there, be a shame if something happened to it"-style card: when pressed on why the US "needs" to provide arms-- or more-- to Israel, they both gave answers like this: "Well, I'm not saying this would be good, tsk tsk, but if Israel's backs are to the wall, who knows what they might do!" Mark Levin went on to elaborate: "They don't have a nuclear arsenal for it to collect dust, after all!"
Veil, meet threat.
Recall my categorization of Jews here. I'd always assumed Micro Machines Motormouth was one of the Orthodox religious. But listen to him at the 24:33 mark here! Seeing as he's a Jew, I can understand him not believing in Christ's miracles-- but to not believe that God parted the sea for Moses when the latter raised his staff is surely pure apostasy within the Jewish Faith: the Torah is a cornerstone of their entire belief system, and the scripture is very clear that it was a miracle.
Motormouth offering a materialist explanation for the event tells me that he doesn't even believe in God: he's one of the Bolshevist Atheist Jews! I suppose that explains much of his behavior, going back decades.
Nvidia Way Ahead
I was explaining to my friend earlier this week about how far ahead of AMD Nvidia is. I explained that they got so far ahead because they had and have an army of PhD data scientists working on machine learning and "AI"-- that in fact, their company isn't really a consumer graphics firm at heart; that's just one thing they do.
In any event, listen to the description of his own company here from Jensen Huang himself: none of it has anything to do with video cards. Instead, it worked in reverse: "Hey, we already have all of this machine learning capability, what if we were to retrofit it into our consumer graphics card division somehow?" That's how we got "Tensor Cores", DLSS, and all of the rest-- all of the things which buried AMD down to less than ten percent market share.
One interesting thing I wish the interviewers would have asked him: I was living and breathing the 3D accelerator wars in the mid-to-late 90s, and my recollection was that Nvidia's early products were a joke: the NV1 was terrible, nor do I recall anyone owning or any publications recommending the Riva 128 over the Voodoo. It was the Riva TNT where I recall Nvidia turning from "yet another tiny, unheard of company making 3D accelerators" into a dominant player.
I bought a TNT when they came out, and absolutely loved it. In fact, I still have it and used it in a comparison shot for this post. It was slower than a Voodoo 2, but it was a 2D-3D-in-one card, which was very novel at the time, and it could do 32-bit color: no more dithering artifacts! But back to Jensen: it would have been interesting to ask him roughly what the sales numbers were: maybe the 128 sold better than I thought it had.
Theology
My priest friend recommended Frank Sheed's "Theology and Sanity" as a good introductory book-- I have it on order. He also pointed me to a site where I can look up Bible verses online, such as this one-- or the same scene here, as described by Mark.
I thought these passages carried some interesting implications:
- People at different times in the grand scheme of human progress will react violently to certain messages, but be "ready for those messages" later on, or in another time or place.
- God is perfect.
- Because God is perfect, He is omniscient.
- Because He's omniscient, He knows all possible future timelines.
- Because He knows all future timelines, He inspired Moses to relax enforcement of certain rules so that Moses wouldn't be harmed, or so that people wouldn't simply "rebel" and ignore the teachings altogether.
- He sent His Son to more strictly enforce those same previously-relaxed rules. Because He knows all future timelines, this was a path He, as both Father and Son, knew would cause a certain reaction among the Jews.
- Because He knew what the reaction would be, it demonstrates the love that He has for us, that He would send his son to die for us.
In other words, I think it's demonstrable in scripture that God tailors messaging differently at different times-- and from that, there are certain possible inferences available for exploration.
My friend warned me against going too far down this rabbit hole: "Remember, God didn't commit suicide." That was a crucial clarification, and I'm glad he brought it up. But to me, framing God's actions as suicide would be silly in any case: suicide is an attempt to end one's own existence-- but God can not cease to exist, nor could He ever wish for his own end since He's perfect, and since the action wouldn't be possible to perform anyway.
I also struggle grasping, how closely is God directing things?
I know that He gave us free will and that we have to thus choose Him. Therefore, in bullet six above, I'm under the assumption that He is "letting" the Jews persecute and crucify Jesus, operating out of their free will-- but that He (Father and Son, as one) knew what would happen. Or, was it that the Holy Spirit was somehow orchestrating the Jews to take those actions, independent variously of their volition?
Finally, another thing which makes me pause: to me it seems that God is so complex that He is literally unfathomable to the human mind. Thus it logically follows that any model-- even one delivered directly from God Himself-- which can be understood by the human mind is a vast oversimplification. How closely does the Trinity "Father", "Son", "Holy Spirit" metaphor get towards reflecting the reality of what God actually is?
It seems like a leaky abstraction-- but how leaky? I know that being perfect, God would give us the most perfect model, which can "fit" within our tiny human brains. But pondering the true nature of God-- even knowing that it's impossible for me to know-- is something I really enjoy.