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Idle Weekend August 12, 2016: The Weekend Sky

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Idle Weekend August 12, 2016:

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The Weekend Sky
This weekend, it's a topical blend of No Man's Sky, the challenges of historically and racially conscious art, and bike anime! So, another typical episode with your weekenders-in-chief. Danielle is enamored by the dizzying scale of No Man's Sky, while Rob prefers the grit of an old favorite—Elite: Dangerous. Then, Rob brushes up on the best of Star Wars as Danielle gets an education in cycling. And anime.

Discussed: No Man's Sky, Elite: Dangerous, Mass Effect, Hamilton, Beyonce's "Formation" (music video), Dizzee Rascal's "I Don't Need a Reason" (music video), Jason Bourne, Yowamushi Pedal!, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back

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I definitely found myself agreeing with Rob's observation that works revising history to give oppressed or marginalized peoples the agency and empowerment that they were denied in truth are often used by mainstream culture to legitimize the preexisting narrative that those people weren't oppressed or marginalized.

 

I'm reminded of an episode of Doctor Who wherein the Doctor takes his companion Martha, a black woman, back to Shakespeare's time. Martha, being smart, worries aloud that she'll stand out as a black woman, but the Doctor brushes her off, saying that her concerns are overblown and people were a lot more accepting than one might think in sixteenth-century England. Now, I know the intent was playful, imagining a version of history where a white man and a black woman walking together in public as equals wouldn't arouse even the slightest comment, but it's so hard not to read it as racism and sexism not really being as bad as sources and scholars tell us, which is... eh.

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I'm reminded of an episode of Doctor Who wherein the Doctor takes his companion Martha, a black woman, back to Shakespeare's time. Martha, being smart, worries aloud that she'll stand out as a black woman, but the Doctor brushes her off, saying that her concerns are overblown and people were a lot more accepting than one might think in sixteenth-century England. 

 

Was the doctor right (in the context of the fiction)? Like, did the show actually depict Elizabethan England in the way he predicted?

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works revising history to give oppressed or marginalized peoples the agency and empowerment that they were denied in truth are often used by mainstream culture to legitimize the preexisting narrative that those people weren't oppressed or marginalized.

I haven't seen Hamilton, but I think that it is less viable to this criticism due to the fact that it directly addresses slavery. If I understand correctly Rob's criticism had less to do with Hamilton making the audience feel better about slavery, and more with it making them feel better about cherishing and enjoying narratives that are very white-male-centric.

 

On a general note, I think that this is almost always the case of the benefits of a diverse set of characters out-weighing the drawbacks, in terms of making good entertainment products that appeal to the largest audience (not in a cynical, capitalistic sense, but in a progressive, inclusive sense. Though these intersect more often than not...). 80 Days does that really well, I think, but admittedly part of its success stems from the writers being aware of the frustrations you and Rob have on the subjects, and establishing early on that it takes place in an alternate history (thus not over-riding actual events).

 

If anything, I think that this kind of reverse-white-washing is much more problematic when applied to works that depict contemporary settings, like Scandal (which I haven't watched) or Quadrilateral Cowboy, because there are clear groups of people who I can imagine feeling like their struggles in society are being ignored (as opposed to the slavery of pre-1865, for example, which no one alive today has actually lived through). Obviously that doesn't mean that depiction of slavery in certain ways or lack thereof can't be offending, but I find it harder to object to this kind of history reimagining than I do to, say, a work of entertainment that depicts police work while ignoring the subject of police brutality. Can you point to an article by a person who has objected to, say, Hamilton, for the reasons that you've described, but claimed to have been personally offended by it, rather than ambiguously saying that in theory it could be offending to some people? (Sorry, this came out way more aggressive that I've meant it to, but I'm not a savvy enough English-weaver to make it any better...)

 

Even in that case, it seems to me that simply including diverse casts is one of the main ways media can interact with social problems nowadays, and it seems that efforts by Hamilton and the likes do succeed in making entertainment better for more people, with almost no sacrifices. 

 

Also, great episode! What a great Idle <___> week.

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Was the doctor right (in the context of the fiction)? Like, did the show actually depict Elizabethan England in the way he predicted?

She was the only person of color in the episode, but the only other comment about her skin was ol' Billy Shakes finding it hot, so... kinda? It felt so much like flippant hand-waving to me, but the internet tells me that it really resonated with some people.

 

Even in that case, it seems to me that simply including diverse casts is one of the main ways media can interact with social problems nowadays, and it seems that efforts by Hamilton and the likes do succeed in making entertainment better for more people, with almost no sacrifices.

 

Yeah, I didn't mean to say that revisionist narratives that empower people of color is a Bad Thing, just that it can suck how, intentionally or not, the mainstream misconstrues such narratives that give people of color a version of history that's meaningful to them to say, instead, that there's nothing wrong with these Old White Men narratives, once the whitewash has been removed. I take it as a sign of one of the many ways that mainstream culture uses minority culture to legitimize itself and its dominant narratives.

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*EDIT*

I love this cast, it takes quite a bit to overcome my posting inertia and this show has it.   Unfortunately I also didn't stop and mention how much I appreciate your thoughtful thoughts and what not and dove right into something intense. Sorry...

*EDIT*

 

So many things in this episode...   Let's tackle language.

 

I work on computers at NASA, though I would not describe myself as a programmer. I had to do some research for this comment.

 

Fortran is used today in science at NASA among other Computer languages.  From my perspective Academia doesn't give Fortran it's due, but they cover a lot of ground.   Fortran was born in the 1950s at IBM, but has gone through many revisions with a new standard being codified rougly every decade for more than half a century,  Fortran was designed ground up to express scientific models of reality mathematically. Initially horrible at expressing itself (Hollerith) and tied to EBCIDIC (I pronounce: ebb-seh-dik),  For\tran has adopted constructions and methods from other languages as has American English (perhaps not as readily) to make it easier to scale (take advantage of faster, larger, more machines) and maintain Fortran programs.  Computer languages differ structurally and cosmetically to a purpose.  Certain concepts are easier to express in some languages, Some languages are easier to learn than others, more regular in their constructs and permissive in their expressions, others are more closely tied to their machine model or the purpose for which they were written.  Computer languages directly influence machines to produce work, but indirectly that work is meant to inform and perhaps influence other humans.

Which brings me around to Rob's comment about language shaping human brains. I do not deny the influence of language on thought,  but language is not some club of granite that bashes poor little brains into patterns of cognition.  Natural. living Human languages (esp. our common language here English) are the most fluid and transient of artifacts,  Like computer languages, human languages were created for the purpose of communicating and it should be considered normal that disparate communities have different ways to use language to enforce community norms.  But language doesn't do this in isolation, it's a tool in the kit.  The same basic language can be used to acculturate people differently. What is Life to you, and what does it mean to Choose it?

 

Lastly, I carry no brief for Cycling themed Anime, but Xeneth is a real person and not a nice lady who presumably lives on the East Coast.

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As someone who grew up very into hip-hop I kinda wish Hamilton could be for me. I really respect what it's going for, but the style of spoken word rapping is just grating to my ears, unfortunately. I do really enjoy the message and the idea of recasting history in a way that sort of highlights the commonality of human experience, though I agree with Rob in fears that such media can have the unintended effect of downplaying or de-legitimizing the really bad parts of history, sort of smoothing the rough edges.

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I remember an episode of Radio Lab that delved a little into how language changed the human brain and it was very fascinating. Apparently before language, we have a difficult time connecting multiple separate ideas together but once language is introduced we can actually understand this complex thoughts. Language seems to act as an upgrade to our brains.

 

Rob's professor's example of the hyper-masculinity of the typical "post-apocalyptic" scenario as portrayed in so much pop culture also really struck a chord. It's so ingrained one almost takes it as a given rather than a possibility. Really good stuff. Would love to do some more reading, maybe the book the teacher was recommending, if we could learn what it was.

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Also, Yowamushi Pedal building one of its early arcs around the specific mechanics of drafting is definitely par for the course with sports anime, if not anime in general. One of the things that I love the most about the medium of anime is that it's one of the only ones, short of certain types of novels and high-level games, that is willing to sit its audience down and educate them on the particulars of the highly specialized knowledge in some part of a profession in order to establish dramatic stakes that demand that knowledge. Sometimes they fail and it just becomes a random lesson on the infield fly rule or special relativity, right in the middle of your anime episode, but sometimes you get the special thrill of being an insider to this rarefied sector of human endeavor. The overwhelming majority of movies and television would never even dare that, and the scant few that do, like Primer, are categorized as niche just for trying. Meanwhile, the easiest way for me to sell Spice & Wolf, an anime about medieval finance and commerce, is to tell people that the major crisis of the first season is the characters reacting to news that the silver content of the local currency is about to change (and whether they will be enriched or ruined by that).

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A quick aside on FORTRAN: there's a lot of legacy code from decades past in academia to perform very specific tasks and calculations and that's mostly FORTRAN, but the main reason for academia (at least around the scientific computing circles I'm familiar with) to still love it is how damn fast it can be. When your calculations/simulations take days or weeks, any performance gain is major.

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Danielle's vision of what No Man's Sky could have been-- all of the extremely chill and relaxing free exploration with fewer unnecessary mechanics and more space lesbians-- is so compelling to me and what I specifically want out of games that I feel really bummed that such a game does not actually exist.

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A quick aside on FORTRAN: there's a lot of legacy code from decades past in academia to perform very specific tasks and calculations and that's mostly FORTRAN, but the main reason for academia (at least around the scientific computing circles I'm familiar with) to still love it is how damn fast it can be. When your calculations/simulations take days or weeks, any performance gain is major.

 

Well, that and it's specifically designed to represent matrix mathematics in a nice way (differently to how "conventionally fast" languages like C do), which means that it's nicer to express that kind of thing in (as well as making it easier for a compiler to make fast code from what you've written).

 

Also, it's Fortran, not FORTRAN, unless you're really talking about versions of it from 1977 or earlier ;)

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Danielle's vision of what No Man's Sky could have been-- all of the extremely chill and relaxing free exploration with fewer unnecessary mechanics and more space lesbians-- is so compelling to me and what I specifically want out of games that I feel really bummed that such a game does not actually exist.

 

Yeah, I feel that No Man's Sky either needed to be Danielle's vision of a more soft-social game, or go entirely the other way and do deep-mechanics survival. The half-way house it seems to be in doesn't help either aspect much. 

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Well, that and it's specifically designed to represent matrix mathematics in a nice way (differently to how "conventionally fast" languages like C do), which means that it's nicer to express that kind of thing in (as well as making it easier for a compiler to make fast code from what you've written).

 

Also, it's Fortran, not FORTRAN, unless you're really talking about versions of it from 1977 or earlier ;)

 

The only FORTRAN is F77. :)

 

(Writing FORTRAN instead of Fortran is more fun, but I didn't know they gave up on all caps!)

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I share Danielle's sentiment on No Man's Sky. I really enjoy blasting around between planets in floating in space. My enjoyment starts to wain whenever the collection mechanics get their hooks in me though. Running around collecting plutonium so I can refill my launch thrusters is a huge downer.

 

Once there's a third person mod (I'm playing on PC) for space flight I'll probably just leave it running and float around in space forever.

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I definitely found myself agreeing with Rob's observation that works revising history to give oppressed or marginalized peoples the agency and empowerment that they were denied in truth are often used by mainstream culture to legitimize the preexisting narrative that those people weren't oppressed or marginalized.

 

I'm reminded of an episode of Doctor Who wherein the Doctor takes his companion Martha, a black woman, back to Shakespeare's time. Martha, being smart, worries aloud that she'll stand out as a black woman, but the Doctor brushes her off, saying that her concerns are overblown and people were a lot more accepting than one might think in sixteenth-century England. Now, I know the intent was playful, imagining a version of history where a white man and a black woman walking together in public as equals wouldn't arouse even the slightest comment, but it's so hard not to read it as racism and sexism not really being as bad as sources and scholars tell us, which is... eh.

 

It is so funny. I just started watching Stranger Things (a month late, I know) and since I'm from Indiana I was looking for thoughts of other Hoosiers. I ended up on imdb's message board for the show and the top comment at the moment I looked was someone saying:

 

As far as I remember it, racial relations were far friendlier and more integrated and cooperative in 1983 than they are today. 

 

I just. I don't even. what? especially in Indiana. 

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I share Danielle's sentiment on No Man's Sky. I really enjoy blasting around between planets in floating in space. My enjoyment starts to wain whenever the collection mechanics get their hooks in me though. Running around collecting plutonium so I can refill my launch thrusters is a huge downer.

 

Once there's a third person mod (I'm playing on PC) for space flight I'll probably just leave it running and float around in space forever.

Despite

, you can't just fly into interstellar space; each solar system is an invisible cube or sphere + skybox with static planets inside (you can't even go to the sun).  All the simulation stuff they talked about was cut, but from my understanding, Space Engine and Elite: Dangerous should both be capable of what you're describing.

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If anything, I think that this kind of reverse-white-washing is much more problematic when applied to works that depict contemporary settings, like Scandal (which I haven't watched) or Quadrilateral Cowboy,

Huh? Am I missing something? What exactly is the reverse-white-washing in QC?

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Huh? Am I missing something? What exactly is the reverse-white-washing in QC?

 

Maybe he is referring to the prejudice that in the real world would prevent a cat from running a munitions dealing business.

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