Western animation is ethically weak lately.
This is a post that analyzes one of the most heartbreaking moments in children’s television history, and one that has stuck with me almost two decades later.
But the broader theme is that I find it interesting partially because these types of instances measure what a society considers its maturity level to be. It’s like a sensor gage on a given generation.
It’s about the death of Ace in the finale of Justice League Unlimited, which is a bigger deal than it sounds like. A child died in the final episode of a 14-year kids' series, which is unheard of.
It ended one of the biggest animated epics ever, and was the biggest gut punch I ever had as a kid watching a show vs what kids watch now. And it’s about how it relates to modern animation.
But as a preamble, I’ll first highlight the social importance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe which most readers will recognize in more recent terms. Its main story line from Iron Man in 2008 until Avengers Endgame in 2019 was an epic run, in terms of social awareness and revenue. There are movies in the universe after that, and there are more planned out to at least 2027, but that core 11-year period was the key story arc from beginning to end focusing on its original hero and its major villain.
And it wasn’t easy to copy: Warner Bros tried to do it for the DC superheroes but couldn’t build that same scope due to their shitty bureaucracy and entering it secondarily. The MCU was known for cool action, but also its frequent use of humor. It was exceptionally well-played even as it was criticized sometimes.
But many older Millennials and younger GenX’ers know that DC had a prior strong run: The DC Animated Universe, or DCAU. Marvel had good animated content back then, but it was DC that won market share in that era.
That was the golden age of DC comics animated shows. And for animation, it was *super* serious. It started with Batman the Animated Series in 1992, and ended with Justice League Unlimited in 2006, 14 years later. It included the Batman series, the Superman series, the Batman Beyond series, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited. It was a shared universe where continuity between shows mattered, and it was all under the same executive production of Bruce Timm. So, it’s sometimes called the Timmverse.
If you ask me who my favorite Batman is, I’ll say Kevin Conroy, the guy who voiced Batman in that universe. My default base version of Batman is the Bruce Timm and Kevin Conroy version. Absolutely legendary in terms of quality and quantity. Everything else relative to that is a smaller adaption from my perspective. It was generation-defining.
It’s a generation-defining set of stories. In my mid-thirties, this series still affects my aesthetics of storytelling and fiction. When I’m seventy I’ll still remember this series. For many kids at the time, this series of shows was absolutely defining. The core of western animation at the time. It was super serious, and explored all sorts of moral themes.
And notably, unlike Avatar (2005-2008) and other shows that came at similar times and later, the DCAU was a series of kids’ shows that featured almost all adults. We, as kids at the time, watched adults solve adult problems in this universe, because realistically adults solve adult problems. Not a fun-group of kids on an adventure. I liked kid-based Avatar the Last Airbender and similar kid franchises like Teen Titans, Legend of Korra, and the more recent She-Ra, but kids and teens solving world-ending issues inherently brings unbelievability. Even as a kid, I was like, “nah it’s unrealistic that people my age would solve this shit” and wanted to see adults like Batman and Hawk Girl Shayera solve adult problems. And that’s what the DCAU did for 14 years from 1992 to 2006. A show featuring mostly adults, but for teens.
But to bring this post to a point, I’ll just describe the ending of this 14-year shared universe. Because it’s what someone like Bruce Timm does when he runs all of it.
Batman Beyond, which was set in the future with a super-old Bruce Wayne and his young protégé was a well-received show from 1999 to 2001 but never had a solid climax. They instead put their focus into Justice League and Justice League Unlimited instead, which was also amazing and ran from 2001 to 2006.
So, when it came time to end Justice League Unlimited, and their overall universe, how did they do it?
The penultimate episode of Justice League Unlimited involved fighting their final external villain as would be expected. Darkseid acquired Brainiac technology, and became a god-tier threat for the climax. Superman finally dropped all of his social safeguards, admitting that he always holds back because the world feels like cardboard for him and he wants to be safe around it, but that he has to unleash it all now, and decided to absolutely fucking rekt him despite all external consequences it might cause. Even then, he also needed Lex Luthor to help take this threat out. It was a big external situation.
But because this 14-year universe was well-written, they didn’t end on just that action stuff. After that climax, they resolved it on character depth. They started their story with Batman in 1992, and they never got an actual Batman Beyond finale, and so they decided to end their 2006 Justice League series with a Batman Beyond true finale set deep in the future to finish the Batman arc as the core of the multi-series. That’s the benefit of having an executive producer that oversees all of this. Continuity and conclusion.
In that finale episode, which closes both Justice League and Batman Beyond, Bruce Wayne’s 30-ish protégé Terry McGinness is having an existential crisis while Bruce Wayne is like 90 or 100+ years old and dying, and Terry talks to Amanda Waller, who was historically a mostly well-meaning villain but is now very old. And she is like, “if you want to know who Bruce Wayne is and who your legacy is, know this story.”
And she tells the story that ends Justice League, back when Bruce’s Batman was still active. It serves as the ending for both Justice League and Batman Beyond.
There was a young psychic girl named Ace, raised by Amanda Waller’s division. She could manipulate peoples’ minds to an absurd degree, and was a major threat in an episode several seasons ago that viewers were familiar with that Batman dealt with in the middle of the Justice League show. She was a young super-villain that didn’t want to be. The Joker gained control of her, and used her to do a major attack, which Batman had to deal with as the rest of the Justice League dealt with her weaker colleagues. And he dealt with her via kindness to appeal to Ace rather than hurting her as a child. She wasn’t malevolent; she was just manipulated by the Joker. And it worked. Amazing dialogue writing.
Years later, there was the end-scene of Justice League, as recounted by Amanda Waller. Ace returned to Gotham. As a young teen girl now, she was dying. And as she died, due to her sheer power, the world around her became chaotic. Her powers were exceptional; she was almost omnipotent in like a 5-mile radius. Multiple superheroes tried to reach her, but couldn’t. Amanda Waller noted that she would have a fatal aneurysm in hours or days, and as she went through this process, it kept getting worse. When she died, she would likely take out the entire city of Gotham due to her own fear and chaos.
Amanda had a device that could target Ace’s brain and kill her, but nobody could get close enough to activate it due to Ace’s crazy powers. Batman offered to do it. Amanda Waller was like, “nobody else can get close, and to be clear this will kill her,” and Batman was like, “I know. She met me before. She might let me get close. I’ll do it.”
So, they sent Batman in. Nobody else could get close to Ace, but he alone could just walk through her defenses.
As he reached her, she was like, “They’re afraid of me, aren’t they?”
And he was likes, “Yes, they are.”
She was like, “They trained me in a lab, robbed me of my childhood. And now I’m dying, aren’t I?”
And he was like, “Yes, you are going to die. I’m sorry.”
She was like, “I read your mind as you came to me. You never meant to use Amanda’s device to kill me. That’s why I let you get close.”
And he was like, “No, of course not, Ace.” And he threw it away.
And she cried and said she was afraid of dying, and asked if he would stay with her as she did. And he said of course he would. So Batman just sat on the swings next to this child and comforted her and was there for her for the rest of the day, until she died of her brain aneurysm.
And because he calmed her down and made her peaceful, none of the devastating effects of her death happened. She didn’t die in a lethal explosion to the city as Amanda Waller feared; she died in a peaceful removal of her environmental effects thanks to Batman. And Batman carried her body out, sadly.
https://m.primal.net/LQeA.png
After 14 years of action; that’s how the entire DCAU shared universe decided to end things. With Batman’s character in terms of how he deals with a dying child. Kindness over action. A sadness from multiple parties that can't be fixed, but can be met with kindness.
Few western sub-18 shows today would touch something like that, let alone make it their moral resolution for a 14-year arc.
This is my Batman.
I think out of all Saturday morning cartoons I watched as a kid, Batman Beyond had the coolest intro song/video.
It’s the only non-anime cartoon opener that I still remember today. Whenever the intro would play after whatever lame show it came after in the lineup, I’d be like “oh heck yeah!”
https://youtu.be/WS1s3T-rnFU
It was part of the same universe. The same executive producer Bruce Timm, and continuity. Batman, Superman, Beyond, and Justice League are like one big unit with a beginning and end.
I like it all.
And this was about the quality of the song intro.
That episode was an absolute banger, and yeah it was the conclusion of Justice League Unlimited but also served as the conclusion for Batman Beyond which never otherwise got a proper conclusion. And thus by extension it closed out that entire Bruce Timm DC animated universe that ran from 1992 with Batman to 2006 with Justice League Unlimited.
I should write a note about that episode actually. The Batman/Ace seen was one of the biggest gut punches in kids animation history.
The hardest part of my random crappy sci-fi novel hobby project, is going to be the first half of the third act.
The first two acts were very well outlined ahead of time. This story idea has been bouncing around in my head for a long time, and so when it became time to write it, most of it flowed easily.
And the climax of the third act has also been pretty well figured out for just as long.
It's that late-middle part that's still kind of a black box. The first half of the third act. It's not that I have nothing planned there, but rather it's like I have three potential paths to choose from, and various combinations between those paths.
Going to have to put a lot of thought into that section to tie the whole piece together.
Yeah I’ve been documenting it here on Nostr for the past month. 75k words in. I don’t know if I’ll get it good enough to publish, but I do plan to finish a full draft.
The Tao Te Ching was libertarian like 2,500 years before libertarianism became a thing.
Chapter 75: Stephen Mitchell translation:
When taxes are too high,
people go hungry.
When the government is too intrusive,
people lose their spirit.
Act for the people's benefit.
Trust them; leave them alone.
In my ongoing sci fi story, there was one character where I wasn't sure whether they would live or die at the end. I decided it today.
I had outlined much of the plot from beginning to end with spots to fill in a while ago, but that particular outcome wasn't determined yet.
But after writing 75k words, and experiencing that character a lot, it gave me the right vibes on what to do.
https://m.primal.net/LNTL.png
I scrolled down your timeline and it has zero or a few likes per post. There are no Nostr plebs listening to you.
It’s actually kind of sad. Just come back into realistic dialogue with the rest of us rather than being a cliche bot.
If “accidentally checked notifications when non-important people comment but they’re still fresh” qualifies, then sure.
And I do tend to get provoked on repetitious thematic items. People who do the “reply guy” thing for 25+ cynical posts in a row on any medium start to look like losers. I’m usually nice for like five times and then after that I’m like, “this is either a retard or someone purposely trolling.”
I don’t want you to look like a loser, Frank. You’re here on Nostr persistently and don’t even like bitcoin. That’s fine. That’s why I haven’t muted you yet but probably will soon like I do with bots increasingly, since you’re almost as predictable as bots now. I only mute bots and pseudo-bots.
Instead, I invite you to emotionally redirect however you see fit and recalibrate as a real person as though us Nostr folks were meeting in real life.
Because I highly doubt, if we had a Nostr meetup, you’d talk to me in person as you do here. I’ve had more meetups with people here than you probably have. In the flesh. I’d talk to you nearly the same in person as I do here. And I meet so many online critics at major events that become polite pussy cats face to face. Most enemies that tend to be the weird “online only” enemies tend to be way more polite in person.
I start out with the *shocking* notion that we are all real people having a virtual conversation online. I keep underestimating how inhuman most people get when they are distanced from social impacts face to face and so forth. They become weaker versions of themselves, and thus become ignorable not-like entities amid the bots.
That’s how I view you. I think and hope in real life that you’re a stronger and broader version of the narrow cynic you present on Nostr, because nobody who bothers to be here this long is as pathetic as your persona in real life. It would be sad if that was a real view. You’re better than what you present.
And yet, my weakness is that I resist the urge to mute unimportant people because I keep hoping that they will undergo the hero’s journey or “adulthood” and start acting in virtual world similarly to how they act in real life.
Until election season is over, Twitter has reached rock-bottom to me.
I won’t say it’s unusable, since I am using it, but I have to navigate around its main thing to continue with the positive elements of the network effect that exists there.
And so many accounts are super biased on any given topic to a clearly irrational degree. I keep seeing things that seem like satire, but instead they are genuinely written to appeal to lower information people in a way that, from my perspective, is highly patronizing to them.
I find it so distasteful. The prior election year 2020 had a lot of polarizing elements obviously, but 2024 has more clearly conscious polarizing elements going on. Large influencer accounts whose motives are clear toward a broader audience with talking points geared toward child-level rhetoric and civic understanding. You can watch them as an observer speaking to their flock as though they were children.
I see a lot of personal bias on Nostr but not a lot of systemic intentional bias-fueled posts written purposely to manipulate. It’s not big enough for people to wake up and ask how they can inject the most misinformation as possible into a sentence, yet.
The gold standard that I reference as a baseline for how to write an exceptional supporting character in fiction, is Lieutenant Colonel Maes Hughes from Fullmetal Alchemist. Absolutely exceptional.
Two decades after my initial reading of him, he’s still phenomenal.
Fullmetal Alchemist, the mature manga/anime, has a world set in the early 1900s, except where alchemy is real magic, at least for the few people who dare to practice it. Alchemy is hard to do and has a high price. There’s also a massive alchemical conspiracy involved in the government and military that runs the main country of the setting.
Lieutenant Colonel Maes Hughes is not an alchemist. He’s just a kind and hard-working 30-ish year old guy that is really good and experienced and at his job in military intelligence. He’s also great with throwing knives as his main hobby.
In the early arcs of the story, Hughes befriends as a semi-mentor the younger main alchemical protagonists (Ed and Al) and is already a close friend with another military colleague major supporting senior character (Colonel Mustang, who is a flashier military officer and alchemist).
Hughes is incredibly friendly and positive, and sometimes serves as comic relief. The funny, chill guy. As all these heroes run around, he focuses on his work. And unlike all of them, he’s a family man; his wife and young daughter mean the world to him. He always wants to show everyone pictures of his 4-year old daughter; he’s just absolutely thrilled about his family.
But behind all the kindness, and correct obsession with his wife and daughter, he’s super smart. He’s a lieutenant colonel in military intelligence, after all. He’s not a genius or anything but basically he’s just highly competent professionally, socially, and ethically, and thus optimized his life well. He doesn’t pursue alchemy and so he doesn’t do all the magical things that some rare people do that can greatly exceed human capabilities in battles, but he’s great elsewhere.
In his military intelligence research, partially from talking to the protagonists, he figures out the entire main villain plot before anyone else does. Before all the protagonists and other supporting characters. He then tries to go to a private (non-surveilled) payphone to share that information with his close colleague Colonel Mustang, and is murdered in the process.
And that murder doesn’t go down smooth, since Maes isn’t a pushover. He gets attacked by a supernatural alchemical villain entity named Lust to stop him, and with his throwing knives he holds his own against her better than most humans would and manages to escape injured. And as he gets to the payphone, he is attacked by a second supernatural alchemical villain entity named Envy, who can transform into people. Envy transforms into a lower-ranking officer Hughes knows, but Hughes can tell it’s not really her from a minor detail, since he knows that officer well. So Envy transforms into Hughes’ wife. Since he adores his wife, that fucks him up even though he logically knows it’s not her. He hesitates at throwing a knife at his visual wife, and thus gets shot to death by Envy before he can relay the key information to Mustang and other heroes. He dies in the phone booth, seconds away from providing key information. He did everything right but was overwhelmed by the superior conspiracy. And yet his death left tiny clues.
The funeral scene is hardcore. Hughes’ wife is devastated, and his young daughter doesn’t even fully understand the concept of death yet. She cries and panics out loud at the funeral, wondering how her father is going to finish all his work while he’s in a box underground, which makes all the adult main and supporting characters absolutely die inside at how hard that is to hear.
Hughes gets post-humorously promoted two steps up to Brigadier General upon his death, by the key military leadership of the country who are behind the whole conspiracy. Colonel Mustang, who knows Hughes tried to contact him that night but doesn't know what about, devotes his entire focus for the rest of the story to figuring out what Hughes found and avenging his death. The protagonists (Ed and Al) are also devastated from it and keep him in mind.
The death of this supporting character sends arguably the biggest shockwave through the series in terms of emotion and plot. It's not a throwaway. It raises the stakes, gets all the main and semi-main characters dialed in, and he never gets reborn or anything like that. Hughes never comes back. He’s dead, survived by his wife and daughter, and his friends have to deal with that fact until the end of the series.
Few supporting character arcs hit harder than Maes Hughes, imo. Roughly two decades after first experiencing it, I’m still like, “damn.” That's one of those weeb generational impacts worth studying for fiction creators and appreciators.
https://youtu.be/h7QnAwJeJeghttps://youtu.be/xy9x9RMXrdc
One thing I've come to appreciate about fiction writing is that it's as much problem solving as it is creativity.
Creativity is the spark of it. You start with a story idea. Vibes.
And then there's the basics. You have to put in your hours on reading fiction, and looking up tutorials on dialogue, exposition, structure, etc. Basically, spend a thousand hours reading things you like and reviewing all the mostly-right rules so that you can selectively break them when need be.
But the majority of the time actually spent on the craft, is problem solving. And as an engineer, that appeals to me. You have a series of scenes that need to happen for the story to occur, and have to figure out how to fill in the gaps to make one lead to another properly, i.e. mostly invisibly to the reader as though they're immersed and it's totally organic and really happened. And then you realize a plot hole with one of your scenes, and have to figure out how to tweak that scene or other scenes to fix the plot hole without creating more plot holes in a butterfly effect.
It clicks all the same fun challenge sensors that my brain has when it comes to engineering design or financial analysis.
Because I’m writing about it for fun and education as I do it. This is social media.
I assume you are satire at this point. You go out of your way to be negative on any given thing. As a fictional character you would be considered one-dimensional and thus unrealistic by a test audience. Nobody is this one-dimensional without it being some intentional choice.
At around 5pm eastern I’ll be participating in a panel at the New York Stock Exchange on the topic of Bitcoin/crypto ETFs.
With Nic Carter, Eric Balchunas, and Mike Green. They’ll livestream it on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/live/9HjylxjjCW4
Back in February I gave a Broken Money book talk at Princeton.
I put more prep into that presentation than any other I've done, since I often do firesides or panels and so forth. Eight months later it's still my go-to reference if someone wants the gist of the book. It recently crossed 100k views on Youtube.
https://youtu.be/soGXgiGoMRU
During this talk, I dunked on Egypt's currency as my primary negative example of Broken Money multiple times.
And then during the Q&A, since this was Princeton, one audience member of course was like, "yeah, I was the former minister of finance in Egypt."
Imagine a movie where the main character is like, "freeze frame, rewind, how did we get here?" That was kind of my thought at the moment.
But he was cool. He ran finance for a two-year period during a benign environment. He wasn't the source of the issue, fully understood the issue of course, he asked good questions, and we talked afterward. But it was still one of my favorite "holy shit" moments in presentation history.
nostr:note17jka2z9fax49sjmqvsaghywa2z88s2dl5g2j03amanrmssgy3cysqv68dm
I spent more hours than I care to admit yesterday studying laser guns, why they mostly suck compared to normal guns, and how one might design a less-awful laser gun given 10-20 years of better tech progression.
In my book draft, some guy needs a laser rifle for a specific purpose, and the guy giving it to him is like “these are pieces of shit man for reasons x y and z” but the other guy explains why he needs it anyway. And then I had to figure out what the gun’s details realistically are.
Yeah that’s the main issue, that energy density. So for 10-20 years of tech progression I assumed better energy density. It’s not the only issue though. Lasers are a lot more fragile than normal guns. Guns get banged around all the time in the field for months and need to be incredibly robust, the electronics and optics of lasers kind of conflicts with that.
Neither. Near-term on-earth sci fi. Can’t call it “hard” per se since some characters have telekinesis. Psionic abilities have always kind of been the sci fi version of magic, although in this world they are bound by conservation of energy and other details even though the underlying mechanism itself can’t necessarily be explained in rigorous hard sense.
I thought about it and decided that bitcoin exists in the story but is like the size of gold at that point. Really big and common, but major fiat currencies still exist so far. Because the military industrial complex exists in the story, and hasn’t been de-fanged of its seigniorage yet.
I’ve had some stories bouncing around in my head for years. And my husband is delayed overseas on a construction project, so I have a lot of extra alone time to write. Just ended up being the right time of interest and ability.
Gm.
I wrote 60,000 words of (rough) fiction in the month of September. About half a novel. It’s been a really fun and creative process.
If you want to do something, just start. Starting is the hardest part for most things.
Woke up today and decided to reconnect with a very close college friend from 15 years ago. Just sent a minor note, he responded enthusiastically, and we caught up on 15 years of life. Happily to see how much he has gained in terms of profession, family, and hobbies while ultimately being the same person he was back then. Amplified.
Amazing connection. Took a total of 30 minutes back and forth.
My suggestion today is to reach out with a random act of kindness, or a distant reconnection. A reconnection might even be more for your own sake than theirs, but it often benefits both.
I met Phil briefly at a documentary filming. He was going to be interviewed after me. Before I left, I went over and was like “hey you probably don’t know me but I just wanted to say I’m a big fan of your work” and shook his hand. Dude’s a legend.
Some of my readers today noticed that I dislike modern sub-3 minute songs.
My favorite newish rock band is The Warning. It's a rock band of three Mexican women. I've been a public proponent of them for over three years now. They have special potential, and keep growing.
They do some Metallica covers including of those older and longer songs. Naturally, I love it:
https://m.primal.net/LDLr.pnghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-stoqv5W8RM&ab_channel=TheWarning
Action sequences can be rather hard to do in books, and yet there are plenty of good ones.
As a reader I tend to like the "less is more" approach most of the time. A few paragraphs of intense stuff rather than page after page of detail, unless it's something really unique.
If any of the novels you read have action sequences, what do you find draws you in about them, and what sorts of things can turn you off from them and knock you out of the flow?
Sanderson has long action sequences that I like as an exception to my normal preference. They got a bit much for me in Mistborn Era 2 but in the first Mistborn trilogy and in Stormlight I liked them a lot.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be memes.
And God saw the memes, and they were good; and God divided the memes from the darkness.
nostr:note1hmslfnw22l2t9ekcxualv5ls3pa4sdftjc3v6f9mlnqxs597zeuse0pjc6
I love those like seven minute Metallica songs where there are structural changes that happen in the song, almost like different acts of the song rather than being one act.
This is actually one of those mind blowing things.
When you look into space with a telescope, you’re seeing the way it looked when light left that area. So depending on how far out you’re looking, you’re directly seeing deeper and deeper into the past.
It’s like obvious but also 🤯
nostr:note19h2y05wau0umjeeclmhllv3cmtrw29p9zxktsg3wqk42ea7yqg7q4mckj5
My current health plan is:
-Eat real nutrient dense foods.
-Intermittent fast for 12–16 hours per day. Vibes based. And sometimes go multi-day.
-Go for long walks or bike rides in the sun daily. Touch grass and do stuff. Often you can combine this with business meetings.
-Sprint a couple times per week.
-Do cold plunges a couple times per week. Seriously, this seems easy to skip and it’s hard. But if you want to triple dopamine levels for the working day without later downsides, putting yourself in freezing water is the thing.
-Do some squats and pushups. And then deadlift your own body weight for several reps.
-Even then you’ll potentially fail. This isn’t one of those meme posts. I used to be utterly ripped in my competitive martial arts days in my late teens until my mid twenties. But then I got distracted, mainly due to a broken leg and lack of direction. Over the past several Covid years, I’ve weakened, and had trouble hiking mountains. I still have visible abs but they feel fake now. But I focus on a couple things amid my crazy work, which I have ingrained now. The first is intermittent fasting. It literally fixes all my other errors as a baseline. I can fuck up for a year and not gain weight because I only eat in 6 or 8 hour windows. Or even 10 hours. The rest of the time trains the body to burn fat. Next is I do a reasonable baseline of pushups, squats, and sprints per week. Nobody can make me choose to. It’s just my baseline. Last is I do a lot of squats and bicycling to keep my leg muscles interested, which have been mediocre. So if a new martial arts leader has a plan, I’m happy to listen.
There's only one picture of my husband and I online in any English-language context, and it's not labeled as such but rather is buried in a Twitter thread and just kind of put in there as one of many photos, on purpose as an easter egg.
We like privacy, so we don't post many pictures.
But since I already showed my left ear on Nostr (likely for the first time ever in a public picture, funnily enough), I might as well give Nostr the exclusive to my husband as well. It's technically not new, which is why I can show it, but rather I can just be more specific about it. It's a picture of us from back in 2021 at Sahl Hasheesh in Egypt that we've had quietly online for three years. As readers of Broken Money know, his name is Mohamed Badran.
Mohamed is the editor of all of my long-form content, deals with the technical backend of the website, and inspires me to be better as a person every day.
https://m.primal.net/LBGC.jpg
My trollish side wants to draw those funny lines of who is standing straight vs who is leaning in, since it favors me there.
But the funny thing is that he's like the most masculine and dominant person around, to such extent that he's super chill while doing so. He has a scar from a machete cut on his forearm. His extended family and friend group gravitates around him as their patriarch. He leans in here because pictures mean nothing to him. He has nothing to prove in pictures because he proves it in person instead. He leans because he knows leaning means nothing. That which is strong is flexible. The Laozi of leaning.
https://m.primal.net/LBHm.jpg
I can confirm it since I took it. My hair part didn’t change. That ear is actually my right ear. The hidden left ear is a Nostr exclusive, by accident.
I collaborated with Sam Callahan to analyze bitcoin’s correlation with global broad money supply.
The result was that it had higher directional correlation to money supply than other asset classes, at 83%.
We also looked at indicators for when bitcoin is more likely to deviate from liquidity. In other words, what’s usually going on in that other 17%. The answer, generally, is that the asset is coming down after major periods of extreme sentiment.
You can check out the full report here:
https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-a-global-liquidity-barometer/https://m.primal.net/LAnn.jpghttps://m.primal.net/LAnu.png
Miyazaki films are so incredibly unique.
They often focus on protagonists that don’t win through action, but rather through kindness and hard work. And many of the protagonists don’t really have much inner conflict either.
The fact that this combo is going on, and yet the films are so timeless and successful, is actually kind of crazy. They should be boring, and yet they are not.
There is a deep warmth to most of the films, even as they explore some of the saddest themes.
I’ve been putting some more thought into why villains tend to be more interesting and memorable than heroes.
Joker. Thanos. Vader. Hans Landa. Hans Gruber. Hannibal Lecter. And so forth.
I think part of it is intentional and part is unintentional.
An intentional reason is that a less dynamic hero gives the viewer or reader a simpler template in which to insert themselves, which is useful for certain types of stories, especially adventure-oriented ones. Like when we follow Luke Skywalker through the original Star Wars trilogy, in addition to following his development as his own character, the viewer is also kind of seeing the world through his eyes and thinking how cool it would be to be a jedi. Other characters with stronger personalities and screen presence are viewed more purely in external terms.
An unintentional reason is perhaps that more thought goes into villains. Creators put more conscious thought these days into making sure their villain is not tropey or one-dimensional. Like, you sprinkle a touch of good in with the bad. Or you give them good intentions for bad things they do. Something like that. People also did the same to heroes, by sprinkling in some bad with the good, and those tended to be more interesting and so anti-heroes became so common as to become overdone. But if you just want a hero, not an anti-hero, it can take more work to make them interesting and it often doesn’t get done.
Perhaps another -and super basic- reason could simply be average age. Heroes are often younger than villains. There’s less time and thus often less complexity for why they are the way they are. Like, Vader has just seen and done so much more than Luke. There are reasons for why Vader turned bad, but there aren’t really reasons for why Luke turned good. He just was a good kid raised by good adopted parents. Over time, he develops reasons to *stay* good, though, which is his character arc developing. By the third movie he’s older and thus a bit more complex of a character.
And perhaps yet another reason is instinct. Our brains are wired to respond faster and with more magnitude to threats than to good things. And so a character that embodies a threat of some type is more noticeable. And then often the character is doing things that stand out, or wearing things that stand out, or saying things that stand out, etc.
Often, it only takes one thing to make a villain interesting: just knowing why they’re the way they are. Evil is already interesting in a bad way, and so understanding why someone does evil things tends to interest us.
For example, we could pick some simplistic dark lords, which is a template that is known not to be very interesting. Sauron doesn’t really stand out to me other than visually. I don’t know anything about him, don’t know why he’s so mean, etc. It never really comes up in the trilogy, although he’s explored a bit more in Tolkien’s posthumously published worldbuilding lore.
How do we make that more interesting?
Well for example I think Brandon Sanderson does dark lords well. In his shared literary world that a lot of his books take place in, there was a god-like entity that was killed long ago, and shattered into 16 different shards, each representing a facet of its personality and power which people can obtain and become demigods. One of the shards is called Odium, which means hatred. He is described basically as God’s anger, separated from the context that would otherwise make that anger righteous. So it’s the hatred and anger of God, separated from the rest of God’s qualities. And he goes around killing the other shards to be the only one left. So with that basic setup or “why” answered, I’m like, “okay, I see what happened here,” and it pulls me in better even though the character itself is just… furiously evil with no redeeming qualities.
Anyway, part of why I’m thinking about this is because I’m thinking of more ways that creators could use to make heroes more interesting and memorable, without necessarily making them anti-heroes.
One of the things I think about a lot in terms of modern fiction is this conflict around diversity, wokeness, and so forth. Here’s a bit of a mini blog post on it.
On one hand, it’s normal that people want to see elements of themselves in fiction they consume. And so to create something that appeals to a large and diverse world, one way of doing that is to have a diverse cast of characters. Unless of course the context would be inappropriate, like Saving Private Ryan or something. In addition, fiction has always been used as a form of social critique, and thus if someone has something to say about race or gender, it’s going to come up in fiction.
On the other hand, I think diversity in fiction has a lot of reasonable pushback against it in the current era. Weak Mary Sue characters, an over-emphasis on race or gender compared to writing a good story with compelling characters, diversity quotas, and “creation by committee” where so many hands touch a peace that they dilute it down to nothing. These days most of the movies that win awards are not the movies most people want to watch.
The last three pieces of visual fiction I consumed were Godzilla Minus One, Blue Eye Samurai, and Arcane. They had very different approaches to this topic and I think all of them handled it well. Discussed without major spoilers.
Godzilla Minus One is a Japanese movie set in the 1940s, so the answer for diversify is that there isn’t any, and the topic probably didn’t even come up. Like for Saving Private Ryan. There’s diversity of personalities of course, but it’s mostly about Japanese men dealing with a monster, and then two notable female characters that are well-written in mostly non-action roles. A key theme of the movie is about life over death and the horrors of war, and so for example it explores the ethics of kamikaze pilots and the broader topic of sacrifice in a defeated Japan, which it does well.
Blue Eye Samurai has a female protagonist, disguised as a man for practical purposes as she goes about revenge. So in the current era where diversity is such a big topic, there’s a lot of ways for that to be handled poorly. But her background and why she’s out for revenge isn’t particularly gender-related. And race comes up to the extent that the show explores colonialism, technological gaps between cultures, a society closing itself off to outsiders, viewing outsiders as demons, etc. Which all happened in that period. The show has a major arc that focuses on the limitations of being a woman in 1800s Japan, and I think it’s well done. All of it is in service to a good story.
Arcane uses League of Legends lore, which has like 140 characters so that everyone who plays can find someone they like. Thus diversity is set into it at its core, and the gender and racial diversity in Arcane the show is at a higher than average level. But then they don’t talk about it. None of the conflicts are about race or gender. The setting has a lot of problems that the characters are sorting through, and race and gender just don’t happen to be among them, which I think is well-handled for the story they want to tell. The themes and conflicts they focus on instead are economic disparity, desire for sovereignty, technological progress vs risk, family bonds and their limits, the price of power, peace vs domination, etc. So by the end it feels like invisible diversity- diversity just kind of happened without it having been a big deal. And importantly, the diversity was not at the expense of white men- they were some of the best characters too, including probably my favorite character in the show.
I’m currently reading The Lost Metal, which I’m not loving for plot and pacing reasons but am finishing it for completionist reasons for the broader story universe, and once again I think the author handles diversity well. His books, set in fantastical settings, tend to have a diverse array of characters, and it’s all in service of telling a good plot with good action and so forth that appeals to tens of millions of readers across the world. As an example, his original Mistborn book has the highest per capita fans in Taiwan of all places, even though the book isn’t set in an Asian setting. When the success of Hunger Games led to a big global trend of young adult dystopian fiction for a while, it was Mistborn that caught on in Taiwan. A good piece of fiction doesn't have to be written for a particular group, to be enjoyed by that group.
So when I approach hobby-writing, that’s my focus: tell a good story with interesting characters.
Maybe it’s because I work with spreadsheets and boring finance stuff all day, but in terms of fiction I often gravitate toward more fantastical things, like fantasy and sci fi.
I figure if I’m going to read or watch fiction, instead of seeing people navigate boring real life problems, I might as well go all the way and see them try to take down a magical dark lord or something.
But in terms of boring real life movies, there are some amazing ones that hit me anyway despite those preferences. Like Michael Clayton was sooo good even though legal thrillers aren’t my thing. Hard to believe it’s approaching two decades old.
https://m.primal.net/KzOT.jpg
I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that bootstrapping network effects is hard.
When someone says Nostr is too small, or they view it only as social media, part of what they are implicitly saying is that its network effect is not sufficiently scaled to be of interest to them, which in a busy person's life is reasonably valid.
So then it depends on the builders to make a product so interesting to them that it breaks through and solves one of their problems in a way they can't ignore.
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