This month, I wrote an article about the problems with the Asexuality Identification Scale.
Also, a funny thing happened. These link roundups often include some links to games criticism articles, which I get from Critical Distance. But the RSS feed had been broken for a few months, and I only just caught up on the backlog. So I guess several of these articles will be about video games.
As in previous months, I do not have any links relating to the current political trash fire, because I guess I do not feel inspired to comment on those stories. It’s a trash fire, that’s my comment.
Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility | Som-Mai Nguyen (via) – This article thoughtfully discusses the low standards of publishers when they strive to represent the perspectives of ethnic minorities. For example, Penguin contracted with a prominent Vietnamese American writer to translate classic Vietnamese literature, even though he had no translation expertise, and was relying on a translation dictionary. The author also criticizes the trope of diaspora writers highlighting superficial aspects of their ancestral language as if they were really deep. In English, this would be analogous to marveling at the mystical connection between “big”, “beg”, “bog”, “bag”, and “bug”.
I could never muster such unwarranted confidence in speaking about my ancestral culture. Being Chinese does not inherently give me special insight into my ancestral Chinese culture! This mystical linguistic analysis of Asian languages strikes me as exoticizing, and overly idealizing. I’ve written a bit about my family history, and it’s impossible for me to idealize it. I mean, my great grandfather was a tobacco factory owner.
You Know, Game Stuff | @crushed, archived from Cohost – In 2008, Electronic Gaming Monthly decided to take a firm stance against non-games. This effort almost immediately disintegrated, as the monthly column was handed off to multiple writers with mutually incompatible visions.
a game ends when you stop playing | a weapon to surpass blaming yourself or god while knee-deep in the dead – If a game stops being enjoyable in the post-game, is it just your fault for playing it too long? What if you’re reviewing the game? In order to get a “complete” experience, must reviewers play beyond the point where a normal player would stop because it’s no longer fun?
‘An Overwhelmingly Negative And Demoralizing Force’: What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers | Luke Plunkett – Luke interviewed a bunch of video game developers about the effect of AI on their jobs. For some reason management is very enamored with the technology and its promise of improved efficiency, but the people with their boots on the ground raise concerns that fall on deaf ears.
Yeah, that was kind of my experience too, albeit in a different industry. I’m fairly “pro” AI as these things go, but business basics are still important. That is: management needs to listen to individual contributors. Don’t take vendors’ claims for granted. When AI company CEOs make bold claims about the number of jobs that will be replaced, this is obviously a sales pitch and must not be trusted. When trying something new, you must inspect the goods.
The Myth of the Alpha Male | Pop Culture Detective (video, 31 min) – This video discusses the alpha male trope as it appears in television and film. The number of clips across different genres is shocking.
The article about Vietnamese- A lot of it comes across like beginner language-learner’s enthusiasm. Starting to learn a language, you encounter a whole bunch of new concepts and vocabulary, and it’s very exciting and you see interesting connections (which have more to do with the perspective/language you come from, rather than actually being objectively significant things about the target language). And that kind of enthusiasm is good! And there is value to having an outsider perspective sometimes- like when I was teaching English, it was really surprising to me that there’s so much to say about pronunciation, which I had never really thought about before, and a lot of the other English teachers were running into grammar questions from the students that they’d never thought about before as native speakers (“I don’t know why, that’s just how we say it…”). BUT ALSO when you’re starting to learn a new language, maybe don’t take those initial exciting insights too seriously, and don’t go around telling a huge number of people, because you’re probably wrong/oversimplifying in most cases. Maybe run it by a native speaker before you write it in a book.