Random Rant Thread

[miscmisc]

Going apeshit over a new variant when you are right in the middle of a surge of an old variant that is likely every bit as lethal as the new one.

[miscmisc]

Maybe we should've called Delta something more stereotypically ominous and racist like Congolese Mutant, so as to make a whole lot more people willing to get vaccinated.

Omicron is from southern Africa, and phonetically sounds a lot more sinister than "Delta". That's very clearly playing a big role in people's reaction.

[miscmisc]

Definitely.

Conservatism/right-wing ideologies are mostly about the resentment over the powers that have been taken away from them, and almost never about any ideal.

[K1power]

Nov 30, 2021 3:28:46 GMT 1 miscmisc said:

Maybe we should've called Delta something more stereotypically ominous and racist like Congolese Mutant, so as to make a whole lot more people willing to get vaccinated.

Omicron is from southern Africa, and phonetically sounds a lot more sinister than "Delta". That's very clearly playing a big role in people's reaction.

They should call the next one "Thanos".

[miscmisc]

That would be cool, but then, I don't know if we should play that card yet.

You know, a boss fight is always a prelude to an even tougher boss fight to come next. Perhaps Thanos can wait.

[miscmisc]

Viral mutations are basically just errors. Most "variants" simply die down because they are just weaklings, sad whoopsie mistakes by the nature. The chance of multiple error actually leading to a significant survival advantage for the virus is astronomically minuscule, very close to nil.

Yet it happens, because, no shit, there are too many fucking people getting infected every fucking day.

Do you know how many virions one infected person can produce? Billions, or even trillions.

So we are talking about literally quadrillions of viruses produced in total on this planet. Every single day. You add them up, and suddenly it's not astronomically minuscule any more.

But I'm not saying anything new here, am I.

[miscmisc]

I forgot to mention in a previous rant about The Walking Dead and long-run shows one important factor on why that kind of shows/works almost inevitably deteriorate after a certain point: The world/universe gets smaller and smaller as the story moves forward.

Major events - major enough to affect the course of the entire universe - keep happening all around the main characters. The people sometimes get separated, scattered all around the universe, and then miraculously get reunited later. Someone that our protagonist met by accident will turn out to be the lost brother of another major character. And so on and on. Every event is a device plot to rationalize the randomness of people bumping into each other, and that keeps making the universe shrink, down to a mere stage for the main characters to do their shit on. In other words, true Others keep disappearing there.

As these events keep happening, you get this strange sense of claustrophobia, the feeling that this entire fictional universe might be actually comparable to one small village, where everyone is related to everyone else not in the abstract Leninist way but in the actual, literal way.

Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is brilliant in that even though it's an unlikely story of Frodo and Sam completing a huge mission largely through sheer luck and convenient coincidences, it never lets go of the sense of the vastness of the universe where they live. If there is one major thing that Peter Jackson failed to capture in his movies, it's exactly that. His Middle Earth feels kind of like a large village. Not as small and claustrophobic as the Walking Dead universe, but still a village.

To cut the long story short, I'm saying this because I played Death Stranding for the first time. Boy, am I fucking suffocating now. What a tiny universe this video game has created. The world of Super Mario Bros feels a lot more diverse and real than this. It's about as exciting and interesting as a random person's nightmare.

It's pretty obvious that Kojima just can't deal with a vast universe. Most people can't, but he really, really, really can't. 

[miscmisc]

I don't know how on earth anyone can be even slightly optimistic about the future of the US liberal democracy.

It's been a non-stop horror show especially since the pandemic has begun, and you are incredibly delusional if you think it will go away once it's over. It's here to stay, and will only get worse.

The whole thing is just a broken polity ruled by a resentful minority.

[miscmisc]

I never hated him, but Donald was always an enormous dipshit even before he was caught in a huge ego drive. What a dipshit really.

[miscmisc]

Cool, but where is Russiagate?

They will never admit that they contributed massively to the dangerous deterioration of the US media space and society. Russiagate is less absurd than many on the graphics, but one of the most toxic of all.

[miscmisc]

This wide-spread meme is a very concise example of American parochialism.



This abstract "they" is doing a lot of work there. Needless to say, "they" certainly are, but just not in the crappy US health care system.

[miscmisc]

Again, 1k people perishing in the US, 400 in Germany, 1,200 in Russia, 500 in Poland, etc. every day, every night, deaths everywhere and ICU beds full of people in critical condition, and that's right now, ongoing, caused by Delta. Not Nu or Xi or Omicron, but Delta.

And this below is basically my non-expert stance now.

Oh, and I probably shouldn't have said "Omicron is from southern Africa" definitively in a previous rant. Of course we don't know. It's more than possible that it actually came from some immunocompromised person in Europe. It's just that most lay people out there think it is an African mutant. 

[miscmisc]

It's striking how many people seriously believe that The Walking Dead is a realistic description of a zombie-apocalyptic world.

It's a libertarian fantasy. It depicts _characters_ realistically all right, but the whole universe and social infrastructure are about as unrealistic as unrealistic can get. It doesn't even remotely resemble what the world would look like in an actual hypothetical zombie-apocalypse, and one of the biggest problems of our time is that that's somehow not immediately obvious to so many people.

I mock social science all the time, but if those social scientists have proven anything at all, it's that the libertarian notion of chaos and society is only good for a TV show.

[miscmisc]

People tend to have forgotten that this kind of super-spreading events are the primary vehicle for SARS-CoV-2 to spread widely to begin with.

I'm pretty sure that this was a very touchy feely life-as-merry-and-normal no-mask-no-ventilation fun office party, though. Delta too has been terrorizing this kind of go-wild-if-you-are-vaccinated parties particularly in Europe. 50/120 is that kind of a ratio.

[K1power]

Dec 1, 2021 14:55:29 GMT 1 miscmisc said:

I forgot to mention in a previous rant about The Walking Dead and long-run shows one important factor on why that kind of shows/works almost inevitably deteriorate after a certain point: The world/universe gets smaller and smaller as the story moves forward.

Major events - major enough to affect the course of the entire universe - keep happening all around the main characters. The people sometimes get separated, scattered all around the universe, and then miraculously get reunited later. Someone that our protagonist met by accident will turn out to be the lost brother of another major character. And so on and on. Every event is a device plot to rationalize the randomness of people bumping into each other, and that keeps making the universe shrink, down to a mere stage for the main characters to do their shit on. In other words, true Others keep disappearing there.

As these events keep happening, you get this strange sense of claustrophobia, the feeling that this entire fictional universe might be actually comparable to one small village, where everyone is related to everyone else not in the abstract Leninist way but in the actual, literal way.

Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is brilliant in that even though it's an unlikely story of Frodo and Sam completing a huge mission largely through sheer luck and convenient coincidences, it never lets go of the sense of the vastness of the universe where they live. If there is one major thing that Peter Jackson failed to capture in his movies, it's exactly that. His Middle Earth feels kind of like a large village. Not as small and claustrophobic as the Walking Dead universe, but still a village.

To cut the long story short, I'm saying this because I played Death Stranding for the first time. Boy, am I fucking suffocating now. What a tiny universe this video game has created. The world of Super Mario Bros feels a lot more diverse and real than this. It's about as exciting and interesting as a random person's nightmare.

It's pretty obvious that Kojima just can't deal with a vast universe. Most people can't, but he really, really, really can't. 

Funnily, Norman Reedus lives in both those 'villages'.

I've never played a lot of Kojima's games, but always thought of him as a rockstar in the gaming world.

Unfortunately, the reception to Death Stranding was mixed and people came to the - perhaps somewhat premature - conclusion that under Konami's restrictions we've gotten Kojima at his best. After all, limitation breeds creativity. I think recently he announced something about working on a new project and his fans hope it's going to be the full game of his legendary 'PT' demo. I think he's also trying to get movie and TV projects off the ground. Just hope he's not spreading himself too thin.

Fun trivia: A girl from my city played Quiet, the 'nude' girl in Metal Gear Solid V.