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[silverspawn]

Checking mails again

one of the female students suggested an in-person discussion after the holidays because mails make it difficult to articulate. She said it was a shame that I would accuse her of something like that, and that there shouldn't be bad blood between us if we had to work together for the next 3 years

This is manipulative as fuck. In a way, I'm really impressed by her. I am not an attractive female, but even if I were, I could never do something like this. It takes a ruthless pragmatism and lack of shame to do this when you know you cheated.

[silverspawn]

I'm going to kindly decline the talk, but otherwise this isn't easy to respond to

[silverspawn]

I'm not sure to what extent if at all this deliberate weaponizing of female attractiveness and charm is new? But it's definitely not a coincidence that the male student who replied said something like "it would be fair if you had evidence, but not fair if you don't", and the two female students both made emotional appeals.

[silverspawn]

Also, like, it would be so telling if more evidence were needed. Imagine you actually didn't cheat and then I gave you 0 points. Would your reaction be "I think this is really a shame, think about how we need to get along for 3 years!" No; pretty sure your reaction would be "WTF?!! I didn't cheat!!!!!!!"

[silverspawn]

Think I'm gonna dig out a study or post that makes this argument and have them summarize it during detention. If I can find a German version or translate it, anyway.

[silverspawn]

Also as an aside, imagine that I agreed to the personal talk, we have it, and I get talked out of the punishment.

Just how incredibly weak would that make me look?

[silverspawn]

This is so funny to me

[Awaclus]

Also as an aside, imagine that I agreed to the personal talk, we have it, and I get talked out of the punishment.

Just how incredibly weak would that make me look?

As weak as she already thinks you are. And unfortunately, it's probably because she has already interacted with men who in fact were exactly that weak and learned that this is how that interaction works out.

[silverspawn]

Put on a random Netflix movie yesterday before bed called Sightless, and out of nowhere it was really good.

The most novel thing about it was having the image itself be an unreliable narrator. The main character is blind, so the idea is that we see what she constructs as the most probable external world. But sometimes that's wrong, and in those cases, the image just changes and e.g. one person turns into another. It's a really effective and cool way to do horror.

[silverspawn]

argh and it has 5.5 on IMBD why I do look there people are so stupid. It's so easy to get angry if I just think about what utter trash gets 9 stars there like e.g. SHERLOCK

the need to read someone else saying something nice about a thing you liked is so weird, but I do have it

[silverspawn]

Maybe the real thing that bothers me is that I don't understand public reception. There are good movies with good averages, good movies with bad averages, bad movies with good averages, and bad movies with bad averages. It seems to be just about random, but it's not. It actually can't be complicated, but I legitimately don't get it. I can't predict the average before seeing it at all.

[Awaclus]

Put on a random Netflix movie yesterday before bed called Sightless, and out of nowhere it was really good.

The most novel thing about it was having the image itself be an unreliable narrator. The main character is blind, so the idea is that we see what she constructs as the most probable external world. But sometimes that's wrong, and in those cases, the image just changes and e.g. one person turns into another. It's a really effective and cool way to do horror.

Is unreliable visual narration that unusual? Monogatari and 300 come to mind, but I feel like those can't surely be the only ones I've seen, even if we're not counting stuff like symbolic visuals that aren't really supposed to be there in-universe but aren't quite lying to the audience about what's happening either, which is relatively common in animation.

[Awaclus]

Maybe the real thing that bothers me is that I don't understand public reception. There are good movies with good averages, good movies with bad averages, bad movies with good averages, and bad movies with bad averages. It seems to be just about random, but it's not. It actually can't be complicated, but I legitimately don't get it. I can't predict the average before seeing it at all.

Good movies with mediocre averages exist because half the audience gets the point and gives it a high rating, and the other half misses the point or disagrees with the message and gives it a very low rating, making the average something like 5 or 6, which is only a bad rating because people overrate the average movie. Mediocre movies with good averages exist when they're memes so most people want to pretend they like the movie just a bit more than they actually do, and when the movie is inoffensive and professional enough to avoid getting a lot of very low ratings, that's all it takes for the average rating to start standing out. I don't think I have ever seen a good movie with a rating below 5 or an actual awful movie with a rating above 7.

[silverspawn]

Good movies with mediocre averages exist because half the audience gets the point and gives it a high rating, and the other half misses the point or disagrees with the message and gives it a very low rating, making the average something like 5 or 6, which is only a bad rating because people overrate the average movie. Mediocre movies with good averages exist when they're memes so most people want to pretend they like the movie just a bit more than they actually do, and when the movie is inoffensive and professional enough to avoid getting a lot of very low ratings, that's all it takes for the average rating to start standing out. I don't think I have ever seen a good movie with a rating below 5 or an actual awful movie with a rating above 7.

This seems like a pretty good starting point. Seems intuitively true, and much better than my model which barely makes any predictions.

But it also has to set the bar for mediocre quite low. I'm not sure I would have called Sherlock mediocre. It's basically everything above 'awful'? Would agree Sherlock isn't awful.

I'm curious enough to look through my list and see if I can find an exception to the <5, >7 rule.

[silverspawn]

So. Girl From Nowhere is comically bad and has an average of 7.6. Pretty sure I've talked about it before. It's the most autistic thing I've ever seen, but coupled with the writer being neither self-aware or smart.

Trying to be mindful to make statements about the thing rather than me and not counting the worst show of all time, The Imitiation Game, or the last Harry Potter movie.

Though tbh Starwars episode IV seems almost there.

Still it's not a bad record

[silverspawn]

Put on a random Netflix movie yesterday before bed called Sightless, and out of nowhere it was really good.

The most novel thing about it was having the image itself be an unreliable narrator. The main character is blind, so the idea is that we see what she constructs as the most probable external world. But sometimes that's wrong, and in those cases, the image just changes and e.g. one person turns into another. It's a really effective and cool way to do horror.

Is unreliable visual narration that unusual? Monogatari and 300 come to mind, but I feel like those can't surely be the only ones I've seen, even if we're not counting stuff like symbolic visuals that aren't really supposed to be there in-universe but aren't quite lying to the audience about what's happening either, which is relatively common in animation.

Probably not very novel, but was completely novel to me. I've only seen like... ~50 anime, maybe less, and that includes every Ghibli movie.

[Awaclus]

So. Girl From Nowhere is comically bad and has an average of 7.6. Pretty sure I've talked about it before. It's the most autistic thing I've ever seen, but coupled with the writer being neither self-aware or smart.

Skimming through the reviews (which I think is usually helpful in understanding why something has the rating it does), it seems like generally the audience recognizes those flaws but gives it bonus points for making an effort to comment on the injustices that young people face, and for being Thai. Very few reviews give it a 10/10 and the ones that do don't pass the Turing test for me. This seems to summarize the general sentiment pretty well:



I wouldn't give a TV series 7/10 if I thought those sentences about it, but apparently a lot of people would.

[silverspawn]

the ones that do don't pass the Turing test for me.

Lol

But I'm not buying it. I don't think the review describes the show. I dispute that it is remotely similar to black mirror and that the problem is inconsistency. This just reads to me as total fabrication. E.g., "the development is limited". There is no development. Every episode is a self-contained story, and the main girl's character is unchanging. She purposefully makes people do cruel things to her to then expose and punish them in the most humiliating way possible, involving supernatural powers when needed. That's every episode -- that I've seen, anyway. I also dispute that it's about the injustice that young people face. If you black out the word "thai" and "teenage", and "highschool", I would not connect it to the show.

[silverspawn]

My explanation (which isn't good because it couldn't predict it in advance) is more like, people like this because the plot is so in your face that everyone understands it and they enjoy it on a primal level because the bad guys get punished, then when they try to review it they imitate serious sounding reviews they've read and produce a bunch of words.

[silverspawn]

Has anyone ever talked to an automaton and gotten their problem solved?

[Dylan32]

Has anyone ever talked to an automaton and gotten their problem solved?

Once. Lost a credit card, company's automaton had the process of requesting a replacement built in. Somehow it worked flawlessly. I was shocked.

[Awaclus]

But I'm not buying it. I don't think the review describes the show. I dispute that it is remotely similar to black mirror and that the problem is inconsistency. This just reads to me as total fabrication. E.g., "the development is limited". There is no development. Every episode is a self-contained story, and the main girl's character is unchanging. She purposefully makes people do cruel things to her to then expose and punish them in the most humiliating way possible, involving supernatural powers when needed. That's every episode -- that I've seen, anyway. I also dispute that it's about the injustice that young people face. If you black out the word "thai" and "teenage", and "highschool", I would not connect it to the show.

Well, obviously soeprijo19 was able to identify that there was no development, otherwise the review would not point that out. But they wanted to like the show, so they went with the charitable explanation that the reason for this was the limitations of the school setting (which of course is bullShiT, after all the setting evidently hasn't limited the creators of many great shows that take place in schools) instead of assuming that the writer just did a bad job.

What I mean by the injustices that young people face is the cruel things that she exposes (that are being done to young people I think?), not like systemic discrimination of young people or anything. I haven't seen a single episode, for what it's worth, I'm just reading the reviews. Some of them just seem happy to be indulging in a punishing the bad guys power fantasy, but quite a lot seem to feel more complicated about it because they don't really approve of what the girl is doing, either.

[silverspawn]

The one thing that is annoying about living alone is the dirt

It is akin to the second law of thermodynamics. If left by itself, entropy always increases. Cleanliness, wherein all dirt is concentrated at a specific place; orderliness, wherein objects are arranged according to a few elegant rules; those are exceptional low entropy states. They degrade over time and must be preserved over and over again. Even our bodies get messy over time.

Life in general is but an endless struggle to aim at a narrow low entropy special state

[silverspawn]

I am also sceptical about why I should put these carpets that I've just pushed back into their respective unnatural low entropy states back into my room. What's the point of having carpets, exactly? Is it just an aesthetic thing? Because I think I prefer the look without them. And they're just going to make dust spawn more quickly

[silverspawn]

In UNSONG, the webnovel linked in my signature, the angel Uriel is "running" the earth through a ridiculously large collection of code that explicitly handles everything, like the way rivers flow or how piano playing works or the days of the week

I always find it interesting to think about the difference between this and the ultra compact universe we actually live in where everything is generated by a physics model with 30 variables or something. In the UNSONG verse, you could think about things like "what we changed the part where everything stats to become dusty", whereas in the real universe, stuff like this is always just a natural consequence of more fundamental things, and the more you understand what's going on, the more you realize that it couldn't be any other way.