Imagine an open-source, free college course where everyone gets as much time as they need and aren’t embarrased to ask whatever questions come to their minds in the middle of the lesson.

My impression of the average student today is that they lack so much curiosity, in part because of youtube short–induced ADHD, in part because chatgpt just answers all of their homework questions for them, no effort at all, that a course like this would be functionally useless.

This is not an issue of capitalism, detestable as it is: young people are using AI to offload the mental burden of learning. Removing money incentives doesn’t fix this.

I’ve seen a video about this:
https://youtu.be/LTaQnuQY9fY?t=5m36s

So, these are sort of confusing terms, but they have a really, really long history.

The tl;dw: a first person is like the object in a sentence, they are a thing doing an action—speaking, perhaps. Who are they speaking to? Well, that would have to be a 2nd person. Very literally. We’re just counting bodies in the scene. If those two people were talking about someone else, that would be a 3rd person. From this, we can imagine a 4th and a 5th, but as an analytical framework, they’re not fundamentally different from 3rd, so we just consildate them into one category: collectively ‘them’. ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘they’.

So, in order for a game to be 2nd person, it has to treat you, the literal audience-member you, as the second person in a conversation. They have to speak to you directly by breaking the 4th wall.

Games actually do this all the time. Any time you’re asked to press the ‘A’ button, they’re speaking to ‘you’, you are the 2nd person.

So, what does a 2nd-person camera look like? There are ways we could think about this. The video I linked presents some. But altogether, it’s probably more underwhelming than you think. These aren’t really a science as much as they are somewhat mangled metaphors for specific kinds of software or design problems. I imagine, partially from experience, that when people think about 2nd-person cameras, they’re excited about discovering a new kind of physics, sort of like learning that you can in fact take the square root of -1. It feels a bit like forbidden magic. But it’s probably more like the arcade Ridge Racer taking a booth photo of you for its leader board rankings.

He said never. That’s an order.

It’s early morning for me, it’s not fair.

You could just as easily paste this link into any discussion about 4chan or Tucker Carlson, except we know how stochastic terrorism works.

I thought you were referring to Disney’s live action remakes, which are ass and way the fuck more sexist, but do have one black woman in them, so congratulations to Rob Marshall.

I live in the US. This American apathy and resentment of political power, this vaguely libertarian vote-with-your-wallet thing, is specifically what I’m criticizing. It’s a kind of political advocacy that abstains from the reigns of power. It’s also, like, a step above changing their profile picture.

I’m aware that everything is broken. But, it was less broken in the past. It’ll be more broken in the future. I look around, though, and I see so little interest in reclaiming the power we’ve lost. Nobody wants to hold the reigns. Zohran does. He’s trying something.

I worry that a lot of Americans, if not most of them, desperately want politics to go back to being something they don’t have to think about; which isn’t good—that’s not a good thing. You don’t win a game of chess by skipping your turn every time it comes up.

Okay, I’m trying not to be needlessly irate because I’m not yelling at you so much as I am lamenting the current state of political advocacy.

My problem is that you are confused. If we have enough people to do this:

If enough people are willing to say “no, I don’t want to see that show enough” then there is the possibility of change.

Then we have enough people to enact regulations. These aren’t different strategies, it’s the same strategy. You need coordinated public willpower either way. You need something tangible to actually direct the currents of the ocean.

People, today, broadly, don’t seem to believe that they can wield the government to their advantage at all. They don’t even see it as an option. They don’t have any ambition.

I’m not saying that you should spend money on a morally bankrupt company. I am saying that this won’t accomplish anything. It isn’t a solution. Certainly not if you don’t believe the regulations option is even possible.

I still have hope, you know. But, it’s dependent on people remembering the union, bar-brawl fistfights their grandpa used to get into.

I’m saying that people like boycotts more than they like actually doing anything. I think it’s a power fantasy, personally.

That said, I don’t expect anything to happen in the next 10 or 15 years given who’s currently in charge, so may as well.

the only way to defeat them is by not giving them money

Is this what it’s like to grow up on tiktok? Nobody has any ambition. It’s all just bootstrapping and personal responsibility.

It’s all arbitrary one way or another,

Exactly, yes.

The choice to fixate on it is arbitrary, though. That the math is easier when C=1 doesn’t really mean that C is 1 any more than it is 299,792,458. C is C. The 1 is convenient.

Ah, so it is arbitrarily human experience that defines these things, I see.

I was going through my saved comments again, and I want you to know that I very much appreciate you for writing this up. :)

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Because I’m halfway through it right now, and I think it’d be really funny if I started the game “for the first time” only to find that 1. there was already a save, 2. named what I name him, 3. with 12 hearts, and 4. on a Wii used only by me.

I think there does come a point where stupidity and malice are basically the same thing.

I think people just don’t like being told what to do. Like, there are a lot of behaviors you can trace back to someone just being personally aggrieved that they ought to change anything.

That said, if anyone else is reading, the em dash is a clue that you use to diagnose with—you don’t have to stop using it.

Knowing how to be abrasive is a very useful social skill, I think.

I saw a YouTube video from this guy who just liked to yap and tell stories. He was friends with a trans man, though I don’t think he knew at the time. Probably figured it out at some point, but it never changed their relationship. They were just best buds.

Well anyway, this trans man passed away, and the youtuber went to his funeral. The guy’s deadname was all over the memorial display. They’d prettied him up to look more feminine. Even clothed his body in a dress, I think. People gave eulogies about her memory, her significance, her this, her that.

The youtuber (and this was all before he was even on youtube, by the way) finally had his turn to go up and give a eulogy. He went up and said a few words about his friend, and then absolutely laid into these people for their callousness; for barely understanding who this guy, the deceased, even was; for amending his history and mourning only the parts of him they could actually stomach. And then he left. Not much point in staying in the service after that.

Being able to do things like that, though, requires some emotional strength. It’s a skill you have to practice. That youtuber wasn’t the only one there who felt that way, but he was the only one to say anything.

But do you expect different results when doing that? I think the point of that would be to get the same result every time.

Caves of Qud uses water as currency. I think it explains this by making all of its characters weirdo radiation freakazoids that can teleport and fly around and stuff.