nniemst

The Call of Duty games are actually popular not just in spite of their quality, but they're actually well-crafted games. However, there is merit in critical analysis of them that goes beyond "how many graphics" and "how much gameplay," but also looking at them via their quite real connections to the US military and how they basically mirror the ideology of the US military. This doesn't mean that you should treat the Call of Duty games as infohazards which will turn anyone who interacts with them into drones for the US military, but as reflections of real ideologies that are larger than the players themselves.

And like, there's a lot of art that carries ideologies that when transplanted into the real world would be morally repugnant to me, but as works of art they are worth engaging to me. Old-school D&D doesn't actually describe a real world but the fictional folks and structures used to populate it still say something about the people who made it, their priors, and what concessions they were willing to make in the fiction for the sake of gameplay.

This is something you should keep in mind when someone makes a point like "well the orcs/bandits/cultists deserve it because they did bad things in the fiction." These are in-setting justifications, ultimately come up with to frame the narrative of the game as heroic. There's not a lot of interesting ground to be covered in discussions of "how do we find an enemy in D&D player characters can kill without it morally compromising players" because the game isn't a cursed tome that'll turn you evil for engaging with it. What's more interesting is "what kind of priors went unexamined to uncritically make bandits/cultists/orcs the default enemies instead of, say, the lord's soldiers?"

And an unwillingness to think about these things doesn't make anyone morally deficient; however, in my opinion an unwillingness to entertain these ideas or an aggressive and vitriolic rejection of these lines of thought may be indicative of intellectual incuriosity and ultimately I feel it emerges from a similar place as "D&D must be woke or it'll infect me:" D&D must be protected from evil criticisms because otherwise D&D may seem morally deficient. Which is like so far besides the point.

blue in space

Fun fact: In Japan, a cultivar of yellow orchid was created in the 90s and was named "Happy Valley Sailor Moon."

— "Significant Seeds: An African Food Tradition," 2022

unfortunately, there are no footnotes or in-text citations. there's a bibliography, but any sentence in the article could be sourced from any text in the whole thing. Dr. Lawrence Backlund, come here for a second, I just want to talk!!

assuming this information is in one of the Kalm texts cited (and not e.g. a secondary source about Kalm), I have four books to track down and skim:

Okra var en växt, ſom växer vildt uti Weftindien, (det är, på Americanſta ?arna), men planterades nu har i kryddgårdar. Hos Miller uti des Gard. Diction, heter den: Ketmia indica, folio ficus, fructu pentagono recurvo eſculento, graciliori & longiori, ibid, fp. 18. Fröhuſet, hvilfet är en lång ſfida, ſfäres ſönder medan det ännu är grönt, och fofas i ſoppor , da den gör ſoppan tjo? ſom en tjo? välling, hvilfa ſlags ſoppar aſ ſomliga hålles för en de-lice. Negrene diſfa henna ganſfa högt.

Transcription above by me, not sure what all the letters are. Below is my translation:

congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!

Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?

An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.

A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.

This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.

And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!

Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.

And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.

because the meaning of the text is not just the words and sentences and syntax, but its also because so much of meaning in a text is assigned through the subtler moves of articulating how this thing is like that thing and conveying that meaning through signs and symbols (e.g. being able to parse that when wodehouse uses a reference to a character sulking like achilles in his tent, you understand the reference and what it means, but you also understand that the character comes from a social background of being acquainted with the classics enough to cite achilles sulking in his tent, which contains baked in signs about wealth and class and education versus not necessarily being able to parse why a period-specific work of art is mentioned in a text (e.g. Watteau's Triumph of Love in An Ideal Husband) and therefore what it means).