Why is Christian media bad?

Media that is specifically branded as Christian—such as Christian rock, or any movies that appear on PureFlix—has a reputation for being bad, to put it lightly. Why is that?

To contextualize this question, I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong with producing, consuming, or enjoying “bad” media. You could say I’m antagonistic to Christianity and Christian values, but that doesn’t necessarily imply that their media must be bad too.  And saying that Christian media is bad does not necessarily argue that Christianity itself is bad. We can imagine a possible world where atheists didn’t like Christianity but had to begrudgingly admit that Christian media was high quality. In fact, atheists do tend to say positive things about a few specific Christian works, such as Jesus Christ Superstar.

To further motivate the question, I think a lot of media geared towards queer audiences is bad. I’ve watched quite a number of LGBT movies, and not only do they get lower review scores on average, I also have a subjective experience of lower quality. I accept the lower quality, because I’m interested in the genre and representation.  But why is it bad?  Could Christian media be following similar dynamics, or is it an entirely different beast?

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Link Roundup: April 2022

Why is board gaming so white and male? I’m trying to figure that out | The Conversation – The author doesn’t answer the question in the title, but does share a bunch of statistics they’ve been collecting in their research on board gaming.  Regardless of the cause, board gamers and board game designers ought to make a conscious effort to make the hobby welcoming to demographics that may, at first, not appear to be present.  As a simple example of this, Dominion used to have predominantly male characters in its art, and reportedly this is because the game publisher hired a bunch of artists, most of whom independently decided to depict male subjects.  So the designer started specifically requesting that artists depict women, and this led to the gender ratios becoming more balanced.

The Ethics of Looking and the “Harmless” Peeping Tom | Pop Culture Detective (video, 28 min) – A serious discussion of peeping toms in film.  Usually this is depicted as a harmless action, performed by sympathetic protagonists, with the camera’s point of view chosen to simulate the audience’s participation as well.  I highly appreciate Pop Culture Detective’s ability to find lots and lots of examples in film, often in movies I’ve already seen, but in scenes I had forgotten, or were just beneath my awareness.  While the fictional depiction of peeping toms does not directly lead to people becoming peeping toms, it becomes this sort of cultural background noise where invading privacy is normalized and not taken very seriously.

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Asexuality in rightwing media

I subscribe to Google alerts on asexuality and aromanticism, mostly as a way of finding the best articles to highlight in The Asexual Agenda linkspam. Recently I found two hostile articles from alt right sources. Such articles are rare; once I compiled statistics on the all the alerts from one month, and found that 2 out of 132 articles were hostile. But I still highlight these articles to showcase conservative anti-ace “tropes”.

Knowing what this is, it’s 100% okay to skip this one. I don’t post this on The Asexual Agenda because it’s too feelsbad for a lot of people.

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Origami: Mucube

Mucube 1

Mucube, designed by me, made out of modified Sonobe units

Someone asked me if this model was based on the Ukrainian flag.  Point in fact, I made this model last year, so it wasn’t.  But let’s say it is now.

This design was inspired by Jan Misali’s video about the 48 regular polyhedra.  The mucube is a series of connected squares that infinitely tile R3. Whether this really counts as a regular polyhedron is dubious… but obviously a great target for an origami design.  I liked it so much that I made two of them.  The other is below the fold.

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Why the algorithm is so often wrong

As a data scientist, the number one question I hear from friends is “How did the algorithm get that so wrong?” People don’t know it, but that’s a data science question.

For example, Facebook apparently thinks I’m trans, so they keep on advertising HRT to me. How did they get that one wrong? Surely Facebook knows I haven’t changed pronouns in my entire time on the platform.

I really don’t know why the algorithm got it wrong in any particular case, but it’s really not remotely surprising. For my job, I build algorithms like that (not for social media specifically, but it’s the general idea), and as part of the process I directly measure how often the algorithm is wrong. Some of the algorithms I have created are wrong 99.8% of the time, and I sure put a lot of work into making that number a tiny bit lower. It’s a fantastically rare case where we can build an algorithm that’s just right all the time.

If you think about it from Facebook’s perspective, their goal probably isn’t to show ads that understand you on some personal level, but to show ads that you’ll actually click on. How many ads does the typical person see, vs the number they click on? Suppose I never click on any ads. Then the HRT ads might be a miss, but then so is every other ad that Facebook shows me, so the algorithm hasn’t actually lost much by giving it a shot.

So data science algorithms are quite frequently wrong simply as a matter of course. But why? Why can’t the algorithm see something that would be so obvious to any human reviewer?

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Link Roundup: March 2022

CGP Grey was WRONG | CGP Grey (video, 18 min) – An old video, but I really liked this discussion of errors made in the context of content creation.  It can be a lot of work to get things right, but then as soon as you hit publish some expert immediately appears to point out the glaring problem. But this dynamic scales weirdly with popularity.  When you’re obscure, it hardly matters what you say, and there aren’t always experts around to correct you; but when you’re popular you have to spend a lot of time getting it right the first time.

The Worst Double Standard in Gaming | Graythorn (video, 21 min) – This video points out that MMORPGs and life simulation games are quite similar, but the former tend to have more gamer cred.  Graythorn then analyzes the differences in the genres to infer what game elements are associated with greater “legitimacy”.

The Bisexual Gimmick | A Deep Dive into Bisexual Reality Television | verilybitchie (video, 1:30 hours) – Verity Ritchie goes through a list of reality television shows that have used bisexuality as a gimmick, from the conscientious to the sensational.  Guess which shows were most popular.  A fascinating study of the many issues in bisexual media representation.  I particularly liked the discussion of monogamy as it’s understood in reality television.  Like, they’re clearly not monogamous, but they have this fiction that it’s all monogamous because monogamy is the end goal.

Origami: Rhombus Weave

Rhombus Weave

Rhombus Weave, designed by Eric Gjerde

At this point in time, I have almost 10 years of origami photos to choose from, and though the pace of my artwork has slowed during the pandemic, I still have a large number of photos in my backlog.  (You can, of course, find them all if you find the link on my sidebar.)  This one comes from an earlier era when I didn’t care what was in the background, because the photos were only for myself, and the backgrounds added flavor.  A few of these are embarrassing, but I actually like this one because it’s the balcony view from my old apartment.

This origami tessellation comes from Eric Gjerde’s classic book, Origami Tessellations, definitely recommended if you ever want an introduction.  The pattern on the paper has horizontal lines, but the rhombuses are twisted so that the lines undulate up and down.